Top notch es
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Why Bother?
By MICHAEL POLLAN
NY Times magazine
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Why bother? That really is the big question
facing us as individuals hoping to do something
about climate change, and it's not an easy one to
answer. I don't know about you, but for me the
most upsetting moment in "An Inconvenient Truth"
came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of
me, constructing an utterly convincing case that
the very survival of life on earth as we know it
is threatened by climate change. No, the really
dark moment came during the closing credits, when
we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs.
That's when it got really depressing. The immense
disproportion between the magnitude of the
problem Gore had described and the puniness of
what he was asking us to do about it was enough
to sink your heart.
But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only
problem lurking behind the "why bother" question.
Let's say I do bother, big time. I turn my life
upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big
garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need
the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the
clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard,
trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off
the beef, go completely local. I could
theoretically do all that, but what would be the
point when I know full well that halfway around
the world there lives my evil twin, some
carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or
Chongqing who has just bought his first car
(Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in
1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I
forswear and who's positively itching to replace
every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer
to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for
all my trouble?
A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest,
somewhat sheepishly. But what good is that when
virtue itself is quickly becoming a term of
derision? And not just on the editorial pages of
The Wall Street Journal or on the lips of the
vice president, who famously dismissed energy
conservation as a "sign of personal virtue." No,
even in the pages of The New York Times and The
New Yorker, it seems the epithet "virtuous," when
applied to an act of personal environmental
responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell
me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a
quality that for most of history has generally
been deemed, well, a virtue - became a mark of
liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing
the right thing by the environment - buying the
hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set
you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.
And even if in the face of this derision I decide
I am going to bother, there arises the whole
vexed question of getting it right. Is eating
local or walking to work really going to reduce
my carbon footprint? According to one analysis,
if walking to work increases your appetite and
you consume more meat or milk as a result,
walking might actually emit more carbon than
driving. A handful of studies have recently
suggested that in certain cases under certain
conditions, produce from places as far away as
New Zealand might account for less carbon than
comparable domestic products. True, at least one
of these studies was co-written by a
representative of agribusiness interests in
(surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make
you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint
of food is really this complicated, and I've got
to consider not only "food miles" but also
whether the food came by ship or truck and how
lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe
on second thought I'll just buy the imported
chops at Costco, at least until the experts get
their footprints sorted out.
There are so many stories we can tell ourselves
to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most
insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do,
it will be too little too late. Climate change is
upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of
schedule. Scientists' projections that seemed
dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly
optimistic: the warming and the melting is
occurring much faster than the models predicted.
Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to
boost the rate of change exponentially, as the
shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic
absorbs more sunlight and warming soils
everywhere become more biologically active,
causing them to release their vast stores of
carbon into the air. Have you looked into the
eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look
really scared.
So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?
I do.
Whatever we can do as individuals to change the
way we live at this suddenly very late date does
seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's
hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent
New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he
says: "Personal choices, no matter how virtuous
[N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws
and money." So it will. Yet it is no less
accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money
cannot do enough, either; that it will also take
profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because
the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a
crisis of lifestyle - of character, even. The Big
Problem is nothing more or less than the sum
total of countless little everyday choices, most
of them made by us (consumer spending represents
70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest
of them made in the name of our needs and desires
and preferences.
For us to wait for legislation or technology to
solve the problem of how we're living our lives
suggests we're not really serious about changing
- something our politicians cannot fail to
notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed,
to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money
and grand schemes, to save us from our
predicament represents precisely the sort of
thinking - passive, delegated, dependent for
solutions on specialists - that helped get us
into this mess in the first place. It's hard to
believe that the same sort of thinking could now
get us out of it.
Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky
farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis
of precisely this mentality. He argued that the
environmental crisis of the 1970s - an era
innocent of climate change; what we would give to
have back that environmental crisis! - was at its
heart a crisis of character and would have to be
addressed first at that level: at home, as it
were. He was impatient with people who wrote
checks to environmental organizations while
thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their
everyday lives - the 1970s equivalent of people
buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes
and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until
we healed the "split between what we think and
what we do." For Berry, the "why bother" question
came down to a moral imperative: "Once our
personal connection to what is wrong becomes
clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as
before, recognizing our dishonesty and living
with it the best we can, or we can begin the
effort to change the way we think and live."
go to link for rest of article
--
Elan Shapiro
Sustainable Tompkins Community Partnership Coordinator
Sustainable Living Associates, Principal
Frog's Way B&B
211 Rachel Carson Way
Ithaca, NY 14850
607-275-0249 607-592-8402 Cell
"We must be the change we want to see in the world"
Mohandas Gandhi
_______________________________________________
For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please
visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/
RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for:
[email protected]
http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins
free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
