I don’t think anyone enjoys tuning their views into harsher realities, however I will attest that I am leaving this class more thoroughly educated on what the real issues standing between humanity and sustainability are. Environmental studies allowed me to take an enormous step back, and look at the big picture of climate change, instead of being absorbed in the minute details of personal solutions.
I come from a small tourist town in the Sonoma Valley of California. I have been lucky enough to grow up in a beautiful wine country setting, but I have also been lucky enough to escape this bubble and meet people who help me understand my privilege. I am not afraid to admit that I come from a white-washed, pseudo-liberal community, where charity potlucks are for show and people pride themselves on their ability to point out internet racism. In the small town of Healdsburg, the only thing bigger than the wage gap is the population of late 20-something “yuppies” who pride themselves on being able to afford organic food and attend hot-yoga in their $150 yoga pants made from recycled plastic bottles.
These people are being sustainable, Julia, why are you being so cynical? It is true, I am a cynical person, but over time one becomes sick and tired of opening Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to post after post from the privileged about how we must all be sustainable. I have said before, in agreement with Smil (2014) and Steinberg (2015) that progress comes at an institutional level. The “we” is “we must all be sustainable” agrees with that notion, but here is the problem:
If we can’t step down from our comfortable soap box, and take off the blinders, which make us truly believe that people who are not being sustainable are doing so out of choice, then that all important “we” only includes some, and the real “we”, referring to the entire planet, can go nowhere.
Here is my metaphor: think of the campaign to prevent climate change as a car chase. Humans, as you can probably guess, is running from climate change, and with modern science and technology we have a pretty good head start. Sitting in the driver’s seat are our most developed countries. In the other 3 seats, sit countries less privileged than they in some way or another. All four tires on the car go flat at the same time. Each person in the car is responsible for fixing one tire. Our overly prepared driver takes out his brand-new toolkit from where it rests next to his suitcase, portable generator, three weeks of food and water, and anything else he could ever possibly need. His tire is fixed in five minutes. Then he puts the toolkit back neatly into the car and waits for everyone else to finish. Time is of the essence (remember we are in a car chase) and the driver begins to panic that he is the only one who has repaired his tire. The others in the car don’t have access to the same means that the driver had: they are not able to fix their tires because the driver is the only one with the necessary materials to make the repairs. As time runs out, the driver becomes increasingly hysterical, but instead of offering his toolkit or his help, he looks down at the other three passengers, frustrated, wondering from his pedestal why they seem not to care whether the group escapes.
None of this is to say that I am not guilty myself. My social media is riddled with anti-factory farms videos or pictures of my hiking trips captioned “save the earth please & thank you”. In my personal life, I recycle, I eat organic, I drive my hybrid car, I help pick up trash, I major in biology to understand conservation because it feels good to me, and for these reasons I feel like I’m doing my part. Over the course of ENVS 160, what I have learned (and at times found disheartening), is that these “shiny objects” are not the things which will bring about real lasting change (Proctor 2017). In Making the Modern World, Vaclav opens his book contrasting the ‘haves’ and ‘the have-nots’, noting how vain the necessities for the haves are in comparison to the have nots (Smil 2014, X). Smil describes the massive inequity between these two worlds as,
“…the affluent minority that commands massive material flows and embodies them in long lasting structures as well as in durable and ephemeral consumer products – and the low-income majority whose material possessions amount to a small fraction of material stocks and flows in the rich world” (Smil 2014, IX-X).
How privileged we must be, that we are able to improve our carbon footprint. We have so much ‘stuff’ that even after dematerializing or giving up luxuries our quality of life is still more than livable. The ‘haves’ say they cannot live without “cars, microwave ovens, home computer, dishwashers, clothes dryers, and home air conditioning” (Smil 2014, X). Which, as it applies to our topic in this post, shows the inherent vanity of the ‘haves’. Hulme and Smil both advocate that dealing with poverty is just as, or even more, pressing than climate change. Hulme puts it this way, “People are vulnerable to climate change because they are poor, they are not poor because of climate change.” (2009, 268). When so few have so much and so many have so little we are stuck, because institutional change is not possible, our car will never have wheels, and the clock will continue to run down. In spite of this understanding, I intend to continue my personal habits, using eco-friendly shiny objects, but I also intend to keep an eye on the bigger picture. Keeping myself aware of the larger problem at hand, and understanding how poverty and imbalance of wealth correlates so closely with climate change will help me to ultimately bring this view into focus for people of my community who will probably never venture into a semester of ENVS 160 to find out for themselves.
References
Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smil, Vaclav. 2014. Making the Modern World. United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons.
Steinberg, Paul F. 2015. Who Rules The Earth. New York City: Oxford University Press.