mistaken identity

Two years ago Derrick Jensen published an article in Orion Magazine called “Forget Shorter Showers.” It was my first exposure to his work, and the first time I saw someone publicly question the pyramid scheme of personal change, and to me, that was a great relief. To that point, I sure felt like a downer, being the only person in the room wondering aloud at the perceived power of cloth napkins to save whole biospheres from extinction.

So I was curious when I saw that another writer had written a critique of Jensen's arguments. Coming from a Buddhist perspective in the online journal elephant, Sunita Pillay claims that I, living in my 300-square-foot, one-room rural cabin below the poverty line, am not so different from an oil company executive, with his multimillion dollar pension and catastrophic oil spills, that we are all, after all, worthy of compassion, being made of the same star stuff, and so what he does, Mr. Big Bad Oil Executive, is inseparable from my actions, because I drive a car, and ultimately the Earth is impermanent, so our efforts are essentially meaningless, unless you mean politically or practically meaningless, in which case you're being demoralizing. 

Usually I would just let this shit go, but I consider this attitude very dangerous. This philosophy is a crystalline example of the adoption of the wrong sort of responsibility, which sprouts directly from an improper identification with the dominant culture. And I can relate, because I do it, too. We all do it. The example Derrick Jensen usually gives is of a friend asking, “Do you think we'll ever get out of Iraq?” Derrick replies, “I'm not in Iraq. I'm in Crescent City.” And the friend says, “No, you know, our troops.” And Derrick says, “I have troops?”

I've been the friend. I am still the friend, most days. But make no mistake: I am not a BP oil executive, and BP oil executives are not actively engaged in anti-capitalist resistance, just because we both happen to be carbon-based lifeforms.

I didn't choose to be born in this country. I didn't opt to be inculcated into suburban car culture. I didn't decide that the redwood forests should be decimated down to 2% of their original numbers. I didn't vote for globalization to occur, nor did I elect to become dependent on the products of that globalization. I was born into this mess, and I'm doing the best I can to see it for the mess it is, and to resist. But I didn't choose any of it, and I'm slowly learning to refuse complicity.

The culture of Lifestyle Activism would have you believe it's your fault some 12-year-old in China is building toasters so you can have your white-bread Western privilege for breakfast. Naturally, the best way to ease that aching conscience is to simply sign a few petitions or fund this initiative for fairly-traded hemp-based compostable toasters, or maybe just sit on a pillow for a while and be in the moment. I just can't believe this is the best we can do.

I'm not saying that we so-called consumers do not share a portion of the blame. Certainly we are lazy, and entitled, and vicious, and greedy, and completely lacking in foresight or historicity. But when I have to buy something, even something with a magical veneer of clean-green awesomeness, I don't feel empowered. I don't feel like a citizen. I don't even feel like just an average everyday consumer. I feel like a victim, of forces so far beyond my control, I don't even understand their language. I feel like a victim of a vulnerability forced on me without my consent, and against my ethics and judgment. 

But I'm also not saying that personal change is completely meaningless. I grew up in sprawl, in an abusive home, went to public school, and spent most of my time watching TV, lusting after technological inventions, and parroting the most misogynistic, xenophobic, anthropocentric, consumptive messages of my culture. My personal revolution is not something I would dismiss. It counts for something. Within my intimate experience it counts for everything. In the formation of a social or political revolution, individual change is the root. 

But something gets lost in the translation when we assume that, because we ourselves have changed, we are assured of the arrival of the hundredth monkey. There is no hundredth monkey, not in this situation. In this situation, it's more like the hundred-millionth monkey, and she'll probably be poisoned by E. coli before she can open her mouth. 

We need a more radical ethic than confusing compassion with inaction, interdependence with complicity, and oppression with collusion. As long as we blur the lines in this way, seeing no authentic difference between our values and theirs, our ethics and theirs, our aspiration and theirs, we'll have no choice but to play victim in the world they have created. 

If you so closely identify with a corporate CEO and see yourself, with great compassion, as not so different from him, you'll probably confuse your ethics and values with his ethics and values, and when he offers you some bullshit greenwashed "solution" like biodegradable shampoo, you'll probably confuse purchasing that shampoo with authentic action on behalf of the Earth. You're the victim. He's the victor. You are not the same.

I used to be very proud of my green cred. I didn't even use paper napkins! (Actually, I don't use napkins at all. That's what pants are for.) But none of my “actions” as a light green environmentalist, as a paragon of personal change, required a paradigm shift. None of it required that I stop identifying with this culture. Instead of buying some things I bought some other things instead, or I didn't buy things, but mostly it was about buying things, or thinking about buying or not buying things, or the things that others bought or didn't buy, the selfish bastards. All along the way, I benefited from the spoils of this war. This culture was me and I was this culture, so I accepted my share of the blame and also the “choices” the culture offered me so I could sleep at night.

But I never have been an oil executive. I am not a slumlord in India. I am not scooping mountaintops in Appalachia. Why does this even need clarification?

In her article Sunita Pillay implies that radical ecologists are giving us the easy way out by absolving us, the little people, of ultimate responsibility. After all, our “choices” at the cash register maneuver the Magical Hand of the Market, and if the Magical Hand doesn't move, it's our fault. But this misses the point. Instead of picking apart personal habits and tinkering around the edges, this philosophy demands a greater load of responsibility. I'm not accountable for manufacturing emissions because I use a toaster (especially one that isn't Green Star certified or some shit). I'm responsible for manufacturing emissions because I hold this civilization as primary, and inevitable, and ideal. The darker underbelly of this sentiment is the one that holds this civilization as vastly more important than life on Earth.

The material world is primary. Maybe there's a spirit world, maybe there's an afterlife, maybe karma planted us in this body within these invisible dividing lines -- we can't know for sure, but this Earth is seriously fucking real. I can't believe I even need to explain this. The soil is real, and if we let them destroy it we die, all living things die. The water is real, the air is real. Sure, they're impermanent, and eventually the Earth will be swallowed by the sun, but in the meantime my children are real living beings. The bears and coyotes and mossy madrones are my kin. I'm somebody's ancestor. And what could I say to them if they are starving because there's no topsoil? Am I to say, "Sorry, all of us organic lifeforms are the same, and since the GDP was more important than having fish in the ocean, I just went with it"? Am I to say, "Sorry, my ideology was such that bicycling to my job creates a radical ripple effect, whatever happened to that goddamned hundredth monkey"?

How much time are we supposed to waste on the personal revolution? And what is left for us when it's done? According to Sunita Pillay, we can only hope that celebrities and public shaming can stop the train of industrial civilization:

Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian can actually do something with their fame rather than acting like vapid, dolled-up adolescents and publicly eschew plastic to their fans. “Plastic and Styrofoam are, like, not cool, guys,” or something of that nature. We can use Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point as a guide on how to spread the idea that plastic and Styrofoam are bad news. Then, hopefully in a not-too-distant future, if you’re walking around with a plastic bag, you feel a shadow of shame looming over you.

If you truly believe, against all contrary evidence, that people just aren't adequately informed that Styrofoam is "bad news," then maybe it seems appropriate to encourage a celebrity to use her fame (body) for a good cause. But education isn't the problem. Pillay says that "we don’t assume we can smoke in line at the bank or in our airplane seat anymore" and this is evidence that "that paradigm already shifted!" There was no paradigm shift. People didn't stop smoking because they had to take it outside. Smoking rates haven't changed in five years, and the previously declining rate is attributed to health prevention programs paid for by tobacco taxation -- which is to say, inconveniencing the corporations, not smokers.

Pillay says,

"My heart feels compelled not to use plastic because I see how it is destroying the natural world. There is a direct connection between my choice to use a plastic cup and all the plastic pollution out there in the world, and sometimes my small radius is all I can focus on. I cannot take in the entire ugly picture all the time, and it’s not for a lack of effort. There are so many ugly environmental pictures to choose from.

"So excuse me, Mr. Jensen, if I retreat into my entirely personal solutions. Because while your notion of targeting the industrial giants is spot-on, so is bringing my own glass to-go container to a restaurant (which I haven’t actually done yet, but I think it’s a great idea)."

I'm sympathetic to Pillay's reluctance to confront the devastation of the natural world. I find it impossible to live with the totality of that burden myself, and so I have my own methods of retreating: into Transition culture, into aspirations of self-sufficiency, into communion with the last remaining wilderness. But I cannot realistically retreat into the "great idea," "which I haven't actually done yet," of glass to-go containers. I refuse to be a fool for beautifying the edges of a wasteland. I bring glass to-go containers for an entirely different purpose: my personal ethic of rejecting disposability. It has nothing to do, in any real sense, with saving the planet. It doesn't require a paradigm shift, and it doesn't require that I disrupt my identification with this culture, which is the real work of the personal revolution.

Pillay contends that "it was individual actions that collectively led to the abolition of slavery" and we can stop the destruction of the planet by individual action as well. But this isn't entirely true. Slavery didn't end because individual slave-owners decided to stop keeping slaves. It ended because abolitionists organized and confronted the power structure through direct action, ranging from boycotts to sit-ins to violent struggle. What would have happened if abolitionists had waited for slave-owners to "experience a paradigm shift" because the hundredth monkey finally decided to stop observing Black people as property?

One comment on Pillay's article reads, "I would suggest that until I change, my world will remain the same." I've changed. The world (for it is not only mine) has remained the same. What now?