Feeling Guilty Doesn’t Help Us Live Greener Lives
It’s only making us feel unworthy.
To be a modern environmentalist is to be a good hypocrite. Most all of our daily routines are ecologically destructive to some degree: driving to work, buying eggs from Aldi, wearing blue jeans, drinking almond milk, flying to visit family. We care about the natural world. Really, we do. But we also need to get gas.
To be a modern environmentalist is to make a home out of guilt. In fact, feeling guilty has been carefully built into the message accompanying discussions around issues like climate change. “Don’t you know how harmful our behavior is?” “Isn’t this terrible?” “Look what people [individuals] are doing!”
I recently watched another Netflix documentary on CAFO’s — those hellish, midwestern cattle factories. By the end of it, I felt like a powerless idiot whose part of a sinister, anti-life society. I rarely even eat beef. But what does it matter if others still do? Maybe that’s the point of the film. But it’s a point that has already been hammered in to our heads (most of them, anyways), and one that we digest from a dozen other media outlets.
We get it. Things outside are really, really f**ked. And all of us are responsible to some degree.
But the narrative of Homo sapiens is ruining everything just isn’t serving us anymore. Instead of motivating people to make greener decisions, which environmental guilt is designed to do, too much of it keeps us isolated, powerless, and shameful. It’s actively preventing us from forming meaningful connections.
And connection is what we need the most right now. In a pandemic of loneliness and meaningless, letting go of some guilt frees up space for relationship, and for healing.
Two Types of Guilt
According to 20th century psychologist, Don Carveth, there are two types of guilt: reparative guilt, and persecutory guilt.
Reparative guilt is useful. You do something bad, feel guilty, then try to make up for it. This type of guilt is situational, action-driven, and urges us to to repair a relationship (hence the name). It’s a key technique the human body employs for staying connected to our groups. If you never feel bad for something you do, odds are you’re a sociopath.
Persecutory guilt, on the other hand, is “a form of self-inflicted punishment that results from a harsh and vindictive conscience.” Some psychologists call it toxic or free-floating guilt. It isn’t tied to any one situation. Rather it just kind of hovers around, intensifying when a mistake may or may not even be made.
Carver says that persecutory guilt typically interweaves with chronic shame, depression, and self-depreciative narcissism. Instead of playing a vital role in maintaining relationships, it actively isolates.
Most of the guilt we feel for the environment is of this kind.
For example, some people feel bad for buying produce from Walmart. After all, their vegetables are usually grown in monocrop mega-farms that actively contribute to soil erosion and water toxification. But they’re cheap.
What can they do? They cannot afford to buy all their food from farmer’s markets. Doing so would require not only radical lifestyle choices, but the reshaping of our whole economic system in order for us all to participate.
By they, I mean we. And by we, I mean me and other half-employed, broke post-graduates with a social science degree.
This vague sense of shame doesn’t help us learn more about our food or try to alter our diets. It just adds to the pile of things our society — largely corporations— have messed up, which adds to the pile of guilt we already carry.+
Reparative Guilt doesn’t actually repair
In the way that feeling lonely urges you to reach out to people, feeling reparative guilt urges you to repair a relationship. But neither emotion actually does the heavy lifting. Reparative guilt just lets you know that you should be repairing things. It’s a good bump out the door, but it doesn’t get us walking.
In terms of food, we might feel obliged to grow some of our own produce or get in contact with a local farm (if we can), and focus on cutting food waste. But guilt alone cannot sustain relationships. So, a lot of diets fail. Tomato plants die. We stop walking on our lunch breaks not only because it’s difficult to form a habit, but because we relied primarily on guilt and flash inspiration to do so.
Guilt is a useful emotion. It urges us to make amends to a relationship after behaving poorly. But too much of it calcifies in our identities, our feeling of how we worthy and good we are as humans, creating relationships founded solely on guilt.
The fact is that nobody ever fell in love because they felt bad for falling out of it.
While not all of us need to become Wordsworthian eco-sexuals to fall in love with our home, we do need to get connected with. Learning to let go of free-floating environmental guilt frees up space for much needed connection.
Thank you for reading.
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