It is Oh so convenient to conflate personal and social change. We do it
so much these days that I have been searching for a hard-hitting way to
explain why this is dead wrong. This piece by Derrick Jensen does the job
right.
Karl North
Northland Sheep Dairy, Freetown, New York USA
www.geocities.com/northsheep/
"Pueblo que canta no morira" - Cuban saying
"They only call it class warfare when we fight back" - Anon.
Forget Shorter Showers
Why personal change does not equal political change
by Derrick Jensen
Published in the July/August 2009 issue of Orion magazine
WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or
that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour
workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten
people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would
have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil
Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many
people retreat into these entirely personal solutions?
Part of the problem is that weve been victims of a campaign of
systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have
taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment)
for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise
consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the
solutions presented had to do with personal consumptionchanging light
bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as muchand had nothing to do with
shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy
that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States
did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by
only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced
by at least 75 percent worldwide.
Or lets talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of
water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from
lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the
disconnect? Because I take showers, Im responsible for drawing down
aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is
used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split
between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans.
Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human
beings. People (both human people and fish people) arent dying because
the world is running out of water. Theyre dying because the water is
being stolen.
Or lets talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: For the past
15 years the story has been the same every year: individual
consumptionresidential, by private car, and so onis never more than
about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial,
industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot
military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would
have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric
pollution.
Or lets talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production
(basically everything thats put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about
1,660 pounds. Lets say youre a die-hard simple-living activist, and you
reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags
shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes.
Youre not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just
residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses,
you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and
convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share
of it. Uh, Ive got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3
percent of total waste production in the United States.
I want to be clear. Im not saying we shouldnt live simply. I live
reasonably simply myself, but I dont pretend that not buying much (or
not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or
that its deeply revolutionary. Its not. Personal change doesnt equal
social change.
So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to
accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that
were in a double bind. A double bind is where youre given multiple
options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal
is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize
that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we
shouldnt pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from
this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at
every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every
other so-called green technology). So if we choose option oneif we
avidly participate in the industrial economywe may in the short term
think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of success in
this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy,
our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization
is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the
alternative option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but
still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may
in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didnt
even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not
stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial
civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still
loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial
economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not
restricted to the fact that wed lose some of the luxuries (like
electricity) to which weve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in
power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to
exploit the worldnone of which alters the fact that its a better option
than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.
Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to
stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other
problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to
living simply because thats what you want to do). The first is that its
predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their
landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm
reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as
harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious
invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted
toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy
the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.
The second problemand this is another big oneis that it incorrectly
assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who
are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power
in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: The
whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a
myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we cant solve
them.
The third problem is that it accepts capitalisms redefinition of us from
citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our
potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens
have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including
voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting,
organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes
destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the
right to alter or abolish it.
The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living
as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy
is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are
unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual,
moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within
an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to
believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.
The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples
of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentionedNazi
Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United Stateswho did far more than
manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices
that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered
that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive
power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take
down those systems.
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