Environmentally Blind

I found the imagery of “living in a bubble” that Mary employed in her post to be very interesting and revealing. As both individuals and as members of an affluent society, it is easy for us be blinded to the realities of climate change. As individuals it is often difficult for us to think in terms of an entire climate system and connect our lifestyles and choices to broad ecological and climate issues. As members of an affluent society it is hard for us to accept that it might be the very conveniences which define our lives might be part of a systemic problem. Further it is most likely that those who are less affluent will bear the brunt of the negative effects of climate change.

            The “going green” manuals that Maniates critiques in his article play into this “blindness” by telling people what they want to hear.  The assumption that going green should be convenient and cost effective for the consumer tends to reinforce our bias toward a narrow individualist viewpoint that ignores systemic problems. For instance in recent years there has been a proliferation of “green” consumer products, such as paper towels that advertise themselves as being green because they are made with more renewable or recycled material. While these items are certainly “better” for the environment, they are still part of an unsustainable consumer culture which produces an astronomical amount of waste. If people are convinced that these products are “green” then their conception of environmentalism is necessarily narrowed. In this way the “its easy being green” books that Maniates  critiques and the green branded consumer products that share their ideology might not just be wrong-headed, but actually detrimental in that they breed complacency and make us “blind.”

            That being said systemic changes, while necessary, are hard to achieve. Our current political system in a stalemate and unlikely to produce effective climate change legislation and consumerism remains very entrenched. There is a point to be made that focusing on greening our own lives on a local or community level is useful because we have the most control over them. However, greening our own lives shouldn’t be “easy” as these books proclaim. It might involve organizing our communities, our families to collectively lower our impacts, conserves and reduce our waste through reuse or mitigation.