Does individual action add up to climate impact?
How we’re all fighting the same issue, separately
Climate change, beyond its tangible impacts, has an equally deep effect on the human psyche, both individually and collectively. In a way, it has caused us to re-evaluate our relationship to the world around us, and how we might leverage our existence to meet needs other than our own.
In response to the threat it represents, many of us have taken on the responsibility of changing various aspects of our daily lives; whether it’s buying “green” products, or recycling our paper grocery bags. Some of us spend a lot of time differentiating between what’s “good” and “bad” for the environment — unfortunately, the climate doesn’t look back at us and differentiate these individual activities in the same way. It’s a thoroughly unbiased issue, in that it doesn’t differentiate between nationality, race or gender.
Climate change also doesn’t differentiate between those who recycle and those who don’t.
We’ve been institutionalized to treat climate change as if it’s an issue we can tackle head on as individuals, through the sheer might of our devotion and attention. We hope we are the gatekeepers through which the effects of climate change must pass, and dammit, we can hold that gate.
This is just not so.
As a nation, we Americans have moved mountains in regard to our opinions and beliefs about climate change. This transition — from a historically shared agenda and a sense of collective responsibility, to today’s heated and contentious debate over the very legitimacy of its very premises — is both unsustainable and counterintuitive to improving our overall quality of life (and that of Mother Earth).
The delusion that individuals hold the power to halt years of climate change in its tracks is really a tool devised by post-WWII neoliberalism. While we spend hours deciding whether our slightly grease-stained paper plate is able to be recycled, major fossil fuel corporations are spewing mass amounts of GHG into our atmosphere. In this scenario, we’re both empowered to feel that we can leave our mark on the world, whether we’re reducing our carbon footprint or earning mass amounts of capital through oil extraction. Whatever the behavior, the mentality behind it, is the same.
This is why we have so much trouble existing outside of this headspace; in this world, facilitated by neoliberal policies, we have been institutionalized into believing we have power, or perhaps more importantly, being made to feel that our individual expression of it is enough.
It’s not.
Climate change seems even more abstract and distant than nature itself. Its implications are not always readily available and/or visible to us, and I’d argue that this disconnect was the outcome of purposeful effort in the interest of corporate power, with implications of both environmental degradation, and perhaps more monumentally, misplaced (and disillusioned) personal empowerment.
Sure, every little bit helps, and by no means am I encouraging nobody bother recycling anymore (actually, composting is the way to go). Rather, I would argue we reorient how we understand this issue — we cannot tackle this monster by the virtuoso of our individual devotion, and by telling ourselves that we can, we are sorely missing the point.
What stops us from being truly empowered, collectively?
Neoliberalism, brought into ideological light by Thatcher and Reagan post-WWII, was initially enacted to help restore Europe after the devastating effects of the war — a drastic shift in policy resulted, with heightened privatization, deregulation and trade liberalization. Beyond decimating Global South economies, polluting our ecosystems and destabilizing international political relations, this governing ideology has psychologically changed how we understand both our place in the world, and the amount of power that we have, individually, to enact change. With this shift in political ideology, we have become to associate collective action with a lack of autonomy, resulting in a resistance to owing any responsibility to anybody (or anything) but ourselves.
Unfortunately for our planet, this detachment has led to a lack of common ground on action because conversations defer to personal action as an alternative to collective policy change; as if the former holds even a semblance of the same impact.
How can we come to reorient our individual attitudes toward climate change?
It’s no easy question, especially when these attitudes have become embedded into international policy and diplomacy. In other pieces, I’ve written about the common mentality coming from the Global North — essentially, the North advocates for the South emitting greenhouse gases in order to justify the further exploitation of the Southern resources. Within this framework, the North insists that the South need not cut back on their GHG emissions in order to allow for their own development; however, this “development” is really only furthering the degradation of an already fragile South.
It’s a matter of us coming together internationally — instead of coming apart — to tackle the big players orchestrating the degradation of our environment, under the common guises of “profit” and “development.” Instead of retreating to our separate corners to organize our recycling, let’s work together to tackle the corporate power fueling climate change, and above all else, talk to each other.
The climate won’t listen to us if we keep talking to ourselves.
