Perhaps not since Meursault's struggles to cobble together new values from the crumbled remains of the old (Albert Camus, The Stranger), have we had such an existential outpouring of Weltschmerz as we see in Stanley Fish's August 3, 2008 New York Times commentary "I Am, Therefore I Pollute" (http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/i-am-therefore-i-pollute/). The world-weary heaviness of his words testifies to the heaviness of the burden that Mr. Fish perceives himself to carry. "Forgive me, father, but I have not the will to consume the environmentally right things."
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| The burden of green consumption |
In some of the most environmentally committed persons I know – including (or especially) world-leading environmental and ecological scientists – horror replaces Mr. Fish's angst. Unlike Fish, these elite environmental cognoscenti seem to have a still-intact, even laser-focused determination to adopt "environmentally enlightened" lifestyles. Their formidable resolve is bolstered by epistemic resources well beyond that of ordinary and even most extraordinary citizens. If anyone can know what do do, it is these people. Yet with efforts that can soberly be characterized as heroic, they still find themselves among the polluters – still contributing to the growth of pollution problems, just at a rate modestly below the average. Astonishment turns to embarrassment. And then, horror. It would be sad, but no surprise if the will of these people began to flag, eventually reaching Mr. Fish's nadir. Others, not so painfully well informed and not so acutely aware of the minimal effect of their efforts, nevertheless suspect it. They live with this gnawing suspicion.
What is going on here? We try to buy biodegradable or recyclable products. We recycle the recyclable items. We try to turn off lights and appliances when not using them. We try to buy things that don't take an enormous amount of pollution to make and whose use doesn't excessively pollute, either. (See, for example, Kevin Coyle, "Environmental Literacy in America", The National environmental Education and Training Foundation, 2005, Chapter 3 (http://www.neefusa.org/pdf/ELR2005.pdf).) We know in our hearts that these are right things to do. We also know in our hearts that doing them, or really trying to do them – even en masse – is not enough.
Part of the reason has to do with the "trying to do them" part. It is hard, and it quickly comes to seem truly impossible, to fully assess the environmental impact involved in something as basic as toilet paper or napkins or diapers. Scientific analysts with Ph.D.'s have difficultly coming to a common understanding of the environmental impact of the resources used, their transportation to the factory, the energy and processes and waste produced in the manufacture, the transportation (again) to the store, the transportation (again) to your home, your use, the processes involved in your reuse, your disposal, or your recycling. When they do reach agreement, the consensus can be ephemeral – later found to be shot through with mistaken assumptions or facts. The impenetrable inscrutability of something so apparently simple as diapers torpedos any hope of making informed environmental choices for all the things that touch on and flow through the course of a normal human life.
There are well known and highly discouraging cases of highly touted "solutions" that well-meaning and conscientious environmentalists have enthusiastic embraced, only later to be served notice that the initial analysis was mistaken. Biofuel is one. Some still believe that biofuel is the only morally responsible way to run a private vehicle. There certainly are huge corporations with a huge amounts of influence that have every interest in promoting that belief. But it is mistaken, and on a very general scale for some very broadly applicable reasons. We have come to know that the incorrect view of biofuel's advantages relied on two mistakes. First was omitting the impact of biofuel plantations on the environment – including the production and use of fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides; as well as the plantations' appropriation of land and primary plant production. (See Foley, J., Monfreda, C., Ramankutty, N. and Zaks, D., "Our share of the planetary pie", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 101:31 (July 31, 2007), pp. 12585-12586 (http://www.pnas.org/content/104/31/12585.full.pdf+html).) Second was overlooking the basic thermodynamic fact that biological organisms in
general, including photosynthesizing ones, are terribly inefficient energy transducers. A leaf, that most common of photosynthesizing parts, manages to extract and store only about 5% of the incident sunlight's energy. (That figure plummets to about 0.2% for the efficiency of all photosynthesizing organisms in converting available sunlight to sugars, when taking into account the relatively small surface area of the planet that such organisms occupy.) Such small margins are easily swamped by the energy expended to produce fertilizer, seeds, herbicides, insecticides, and farm machinery; to do the farming; and for transportation. By way of comparison, photovoltaic cells with 30% efficiencies are now produced commercially, with laboratory experiments hovering around 40%. Of course, we also need to look at what kind of pollution their production involves.Trying to choose is hard when you know that you're ill-equipped to make the right call; even harder when you realize that having a Ph.D. in the subject doesn't yield much better success. But several other currents may run deeper. We surely must feel some significant malaise about the fact that our principle instrument of environmental action seems to be consumption and consumptive choices. We are urged to consume our way out of our environmental woes. Yet we know, or are at least vaguely aware, that our desire for more, bigger, cheaper, easier-to-use things (cars, refrigerators, air-conditioned houses, and food that requires industrial production, etc.) combined with the eager willingness and astonishing efficiency of companies in satisfying those desires in return for our wallets, is primarily responsible for the environmental mess in the first place. How could we not feel some bitter irony in this? At least some cognitive dissonance?
For most of us, there is also a great existential remove from both the causes and the most terrible consequences of our environmental destruction. The causes are diffuse in space, in time, and agency – in the multitude of seemingly minuscule and insignificant individual contributions. Diffuse too are the effects – again in space, but especially in time. Descendants of ours – persons whom we don't and will never know and with whom we have no apparent relation other than as ancestors of distant progeny – will endure the full brunt of a wasted planet. We currently respiring heaps of protoplasm will not. Compounding this diffuseness of cause and effect are enormous uncertainties surrounding both. This multi-faceted remove of both cause and effect makes them hard for human beings to feel viscerally. We are the kinds of creatures whose focus beyond the relative certainties of next week and beyond the familiar spatial compass of our daily routine becomes quite fuzzy.
Mr. Fish elicits another, very important element. The mere attempt to do the things we are told might be helpful, for example to change what we buy, generates a palpable and grating friction in our psyche – even when the changes are truly trivial. We feel this friction in parting with our customary and comfortable ways of thinking and doing things. Conceivably the other, previously mentioned elements of doubt enter into this – doubt about whether we can make the right choice, doubt that even the right choice makes a difference, doubt that the differences, so distant from our experience here and now, are real. But the feeling of friction may well be an independent phenomenon worth considering on its own, however intermixed it might be with others.
Pondering the origin of this impedance, some of its independent significance emerges. It may be due partly to a blind inertia of personal attitudes, dispositions, habits, or ways of doing things. But this doesn't tell some deeper stories. One story has something to do with what we view as the primary "goods" in our lives – the things that we buy and consume, the means by which we acquire them, and the attribution and feeling of "success" that is largely defined in terms of the possession of such goods.
"What we consume are the 'goods' that are most central to our well being." To some of us, that last sentence may even appear tautological – so strange may it seem to conceive of "goods" other than "what we buy". No wonder we tend to couch our environmental problems in terms of consumer choices. These goods are so central in our life that there is no question about whether we should consume them, let alone whether they should be produced. The only question has to do with which ones to consume. This explains something about why we find ourselves stuck agonizing over which toilet paper or which car to buy. Even if these decisions may be of relatively minor consequence in getting to the root cause of environmental destruction, we perceive them to be of enormous consequence because even small adjustments in enormously important goods are inevitably perceived as enormous.
Another story has to do with those aforementioned inertial forces. The narrow channels in which our personal choices run are excavated primarily by our economic and political institutions. The goods that we embrace are largely the goods that those institutions are concerned to create, propagate, and sustain. The same institutions define the rules for, and dictate the terms of our public and private discourse. Those terms dictate a narrow focus on human interactions in the marketplace. They say nothing about the interactions most meaningful to humans and that have nothing to do with trade. Lost is any consideration of how humans interact with the environment and natural world.
Our discourse confines attention to time frames comprising small fractions of a human lifetime, which are inappropriately minuscule for any kind of rational accounting for environmental value. The logic of their use has prevailed long enough that they have influenced fundamental decisions about how to organize our society both physically and socially. What industries we have and that people depend on for employment; where we build houses (far away from our workplaces), how big they are, and their frequent siting in places that were formerly undisturbed – physical and social constructs such as these have become preconditions of subsequent discourse and further constrain it.
When we agonize over our choice of a car, it is likely that we are oblivious to these preconditions. That makes it enormously difficult to ask more unconditioned questions: What are our real needs to get from one place to another? Are there other needs or values at stake with essentially free and unrestricted travel? What about the consequences of sealing the earth's surface beneath impermeable materials that form our roadways? Or the fragmentation of habitats that make it impossible for many of our fellow creature to continue their run on the planet alongside us? If we look beyond the range of a car, what about the planetary homogenization of species that accompany us on our travels? Or the sudden effective increases – sometimes beyond a critical threshold – of populations susceptible to infectious diseases? In light of all these considerations, what amount and manner of travel makes sense and does it even make sense for all of us to have even one private vehicle, let alone the two or three or more in many individual households?
These are questions that break free from institutional constraints. That, by definition, makes them "radical". But they are not haunted by the doubts that burden the usual, suffocatingly narrow questions to which we now ordinarily confine ourselves. As a result, they have at least the potential to be as energizing as the usual questions are enervating. Energy is certainly required. Not only are the needed questions radical, but the needed responses are likely to be radical, too. They are likely to require, not just an easy shift from one product to another, but a much tougher reexamination of character, attitudes, and habitual behaviors, and how these act on our life situation and well-being taking into account "goods" beyond "the stuff we buy". Which in turn feeds back on and influences our character and attitudes.
Is it worth the expenditure of energy? Is it worth wrestling with questions that require a tough reassessment of character? An answer to these questions may come down to an answer to the question: Is it worth struggling for an expansion of value and an expansion of how people can lead good and flourishing lives by having healthy relationships with the environment? The alternative is well voiced by Mr. Fish. It is a kind of anomie and a constriction and diminution of values available to us all.
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