Ecological Bypassing
How we rationalize our way out of actually solving problems causing climate change
I’ve seen a fair number of articles pass by that talk about spiritual bypassing. The guy who came up with it, John Welwood, defined it as a “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” It’s a way of avoiding pain, reality, and the bigger picture.
It seems a comparable thing happens around issues to do with addressing climate change. I would suggest calling this ‘ecological bypassing.’ Let me give you a few examples.
Holistic Grazing
Talk to a meat-eating environmentalist about the role of livestock farming and the meat industry in environmental degradation and climate breakdown, chances are they’ll start talking about holistic grazing.
Holistic grazing is a rotational grazing system promoted by Allan Savory. Now I’m not here to argue whether or not holistically grazed pastures sequester more carbon than conventionally grazed ones do. They might. Nor am I here to argue whether or not, as he claims, implementing this system on desertifying land can reverse the desertification. Much more controversial. These things are aggressively debated, with both sides convinced that they have the science on their side. The thing I want to address is how the theory is used to eco-bypass, as in ‘it may be true there are a billion and a half cows on the planet, but it’s fine to eat beef because there is Holistic Grazing’.
You try to talk about the fact that 80% of Amazon deforestation is for cattle grazing. They try to shift the conversation with the claim that cows can be a climate solution. Never mind 26% of the earth’s land area is already used for grazing systems, while grass-fed ruminants constitute only 3.7% (1 / 27) of the world’s terrestrial animal protein supply. Never mind that you’d need several planets to graze all the cows alive now holistically, without space left for much of anything else. And also never mind the talker’s meat doesn’t actually come from holistic grazing.
It has never stopped astounding me when seemingly dedicated environmentalists I’ve talked to not only treat the existence of the theory as a free pass but go so far as cheering when Savory tells people they should eat more beef to help the planet as he did in his infamous TED talk. Never mind there’s no indication that the carbon sequestration can even just offset the methane the cows are burping, let alone all the CO2 involved in the processing and distribution of the meat. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite. And also never mind that the carbon sequestration levels off within decades while the cows go on belching.
Here’s the thing, even if more carbon is sequestered and even if the cows burp less methane than the ones fed with crops, you can’t have a billion and a half cows on the planet, to serve western lifestyles, without it being a massively harmful industry. This is always bypassed.
The best thing for the planet would be to massively reduce the number of cows. It would mean a lot less deforestation. It would mean a lot of space for rewilding and it would mean more food for humans because of how inefficient cows are as a food source when you compare how many resources it takes and how little you get out of it.
According to research from Oxford University published in Nature, consumption of beef in western countries must be reduced by around 90 percent to mitigate climate change. (1)
If you want to graze the remaining 10% holistically, by all means, knock yourself out, I’m all for it. Keeping the current trajectories in place, on the other hand, and just trying to switch a part of it to Holistic Grazing while listening to Savory and eating more beef, is not going to solve anything. It is such a blatant way of eco-bypassing the implications of the numbers involved, that I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Savory was being paid by the beef lobby to greenwash the industry.
If you ever get to this point, they inevitably try to turn the conversation to the harms of mono-crop agriculture, as if those are alternatives you have to choose between, as if it’s either destroying the planet with cattle farming or destroying the planet with mono-crop fossil-fuel agriculture. This while global agricultural land use would actually drop by 75% if everyone switched to a plant-based diet. All the land that’s not suitable for cultivation and all the land that’s not needed anymore could be rewilded and become nature reserves.
Personal Responsibility vs. Industry
When the fossil fuel lobby tries to shift the societal conversation away from resource extraction and fossil fuel dependency to recycling and personal responsibility, they are trying to eco-bypass accountability.
When people say personal responsibility doesn’t matter, because one person is insignificant and industry plays a much larger role, they are trying to eco-bypass the fact our lifestyles are not sustainable. The fact that the billionaire class indeed has a disproportionate impact, and the harm they do should be dealt with and prevented, doesn’t absolve anyone from anything. And the fact that they are just a natural consequence of how the system functions, doesn’t absolve them either.
Newsflash: all of it matters. The whole culture has to change. And it has to change much faster than it is currently doing. No, if industrial production doesn’t change, then, those who can afford it, making more sustainable choices in how they live their lives won’t fix anything. But even if the industries did make the radical changes that are needed, we in the West still could not continue at the same consumption rates that we have grown used to in recent decades. It’s not a choice between one and the other. Yes, devices should be made to last and should be repairable, but also, consumers should not be replacing things that aren’t broken just because a new version of the same thing comes out.
I know it’s not as easy as it sounds. I mean, yes devices can be made to last a really long time, but that’s obviously not good for business. The more units sold, the better, so you don’t want them lasting too long. Ideally just a bit longer than the competition because then ‘long lasting’ becomes a selling point, even though this is completely relative to the competition and not long at all compared to what’s technologically possible. This is a fundamental problem with how the capitalist economy operates. (And no, you can not bypass this issue by pointing out how bad the communists were.)
A capitalist economy that does not grow is an economy in crisis. People who are constantly replacing functioning devices because of minor upgrades are doing their part for the health of the economy. Buying a Tesla is good for the economy, but it is not good for the environment. Driving a Tesla might be less harmful than driving a combustion car if the electricity comes from renewables, but much better for the environment is to not buy a car at all and organize your life so you don’t need one. Even if all the cars on the road now were replaced with electric cars we’d still be screwed because of all the resources, mining operations, fossil fuels, raw materials, etc. it takes to produce so many cars and how much electricity you need to power all of them. According to this live counter, the number of cars on the road in 2021 is around 1.37 billion. How can electric cars be a climate solution if we’re running out of time and we can’t produce 1.37 billion new electric cars without that process being massively harmful? It’s not a rhetorical question. I’d like an answer.
Carbon Offsetting
In the old days, you could buy an indulgence from the clergy that would reduce or remove temporal punishment for your sins, so you could be a sinner and still have a way into heaven if you had the money. The amount of sin in the world obviously didn’t decrease and you could also keep sinning. You just decreased the guilt you were feeling. You were covered.
I read in an article by Patrick Belmont — and I agree — that Carbon Offsetting is kind of like an old-school indulgence. With carbon offsetting you can grow your business and pollute more and still present as green as long as you buy enough credits.
I read another article, this one about a CO2 sucking plant in Iceland. It can capture 4000 tons of carbon dioxide per year and turn it into stone underground. Cool. Awesome. One thing though is that this is not simply a project that aims to prevent climate change. It’s not a project funded by grants or crowdfunding or anything like that. It has to pay for itself. It’s a business. So in essence they’re like the local clergy here selling indulgences. They sell credits so other companies can keep polluting, or pollute even more, just with a cleaner conscience. I mean I get it, we live in a capitalist society. Climate change can be profitable too. The problem is that we aren’t solving anything here. If we want a future, we need efforts like this that suck carbon out of the air, but we also need to stop the emissions so it actually achieves something instead of this just being a way to ecologically bypass condemnation and a way to keep doing the same damage.
Sure companies can use a system that allows them the time to gradually convert their operations to zero-emission ones, but how often is this how it’s actually used, and how often is this idea just used for cover? Using it in this way might be good for business, but it’s also a solid example of eco-bypassing.
‘Don’t worry, we donated money to a company that plants trees.’ Ok, but the CO2 is going up now, adding to the problem, and we’re running out of time. We can’t really sit here watching trees grow and wait a couple of decades before the drawdown of CO2 amounts to anything, all the while adding more and more CO2, followed by more tree planting, and so on. You’re never offsetting anything because you’re always decades behind, while the compounding is now and we don’t have decades. And what if those trees don’t survive? What soil conditions are they planted in? How much chance do they have to thrive? I mean I’m all for planting trees. The more the better. But not to eco-bypass the harm that is being done now. We need to plant trees, preferably as part of complex ecosystems instead of monocultures, AND we need to stop emitting. Not pretend we can use one to keep going with the other as if they cancel each other out and thus bypass the criticism and bypass the demand for real solutions.
I was part of establishing an ecosystem restoration camp in the southeast of Spain. We were using techniques from approaches such as permaculture and regenerative agriculture to bring nature back to life on five hectares of severely degraded and desertified farmland. By doing this, gradually the land can then once again start sequestering carbon. Do enough of these projects and expand them as much as possible, and you’ll be helping to prevent climate change. That’s what the organization is trying to do. It’s inspiring stuff to be part of.
Being there though, you start thinking of the carbon emissions you’re responsible for by flying there to do this work. We talked about this as a group. Volunteers want to do something to help prevent climate change, so they fly out there to help restore this little patch of land. How many people flew there in the year and a half I was there? I couldn’t tell you. The board of the organization flew there several times just to have meetings. All together that amounts to quite a lot of CO2 I would think. When we brought this up with the founder of the whole thing, the person who had come up with the idea, he told us without hesitation we didn’t have to worry about that, because with the work we were doing we were offsetting that. End of conversation. But we were like, really? You’re gonna act like this little patch of land that now has some cover crops and some small trees and stuff can offset that much? I was surprised because it didn’t make sense. I didn’t understand he was bypassing the issue and I ended up wondering what the point of all of it was if we were emitting way more than we were sequestering.
Maybe he had cognitive dissonance to deal with, considering how much flying he did to spread the idea of ecosystem restoration. I mean, ecosystem restoration is very necessary, but it only makes sense, as far as helping prevent climate change goes, as long as it leads to a net negative amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and not just at some speculative point in the far future. That means it has to be done by locals, not by savior types who want to leave their comfort to fly halfway across the world, by so doing immediately doing more harm than good. As far as I understand that’s also the direction the organization later took as it was growing into itself.
If you feel called to do something, you might want to find out what you can do in your local area. I know it’s less exciting and you maybe don’t get to feel like a savior who has traveled far to make a difference, but perhaps that makes the sacrifice more real. Otherwise, you can always hitchhike or take the bus I suppose. And no, helping out doesn’t give you carbon credits. The only thing we get is that we’re helping to build a chance of actually having a future on this planet.
In Conclusion
I would say that too often if you look at the actual numbers involved, proposed solutions are really not much more than rhetoric and rationalizations that allow us to bypass the issues, clever ideas that give the impression that we’re shouldering responsibility while in fact, it’s mostly smoke and mirrors.
It’s very human to think in terms of balancing things out. That’s why the kinds of argumentation I’ve grouped here as ecological bypassing come to us so naturally without us questioning it. We tend to think that when we choose the less harmful out of two options we’ve done a positive thing that gives us credit. All too often though the less harmful option is still pretty darn harmful, and too much so if we actually do want a livable future on this planet. Much better is to choose neither, if you can, and find alternative solutions.
