I recorded this article podcast-style (I even made a song) if you’d rather listen to my sweet voice. Just click the play button above. I know Earth Day is the 22nd but I am posting today because think I’m going to sit out of this year’s festivities.
As you have probably read about in countless memes and tweets, the IPCC released another damning report saying that the next few years are critical if we want to stop climate change.
This triggered an array of cynical memes and posts about how while we were all talking about Will Smith’s slap at the Oscars and sharing our TikToks, the world was literally burning. Most of the people sharing these memes have such shallow historical memories they forget that just a week ago, they too were posting, clicking, and reading about Will Smith’s slap. And therein lays the issue with environmentalism: it’s completely out of touch with itself, which is a nice way of saying it’s delusional.1
1.Empty Threats & Bad Marketing
The threats are simply not meaningful. How many IPCC reports does it take? How many headlines? We have been threatened nearly every day for decades now—clearly something isn’t working about the way this thing is being marketed.
I’ve felt for a long time that conservatives and Republicans are far better at the publicity and marketing game than their other half. Democrats are too well-meaning and earnest to be effective with marketing. While Obama named his landmark statute “The Affordable Care Act,” it was the Republican’s originally disparaging “Obamacare,” which eventually caught on.
As such, environmentalism’s first failure was calling it Climate Change. I honestly can’t think of more uninteresting term. If the Republicans wanted you to save the planet they’d probably call it TOTAL EARTH ANNHILIATION not just show us pictures of seagulls with oil on them. Instead, we get “Global Warming,” a term so dull that Dennis Miller can get on Fox News and disarm the entire argument by saying “Two degrees? That’s the Global Warming? It’s okay, I’m always a little cold anyway.”
I get the IPCC is just doing their job and that scientists must keep doing science and releasing their work and that this is an important piece of the puzzle. But, the science is also in that science does not convince people of anything. If it did, everyone would eat healthy, no one would smoke cigarettes, and we’d be healing the planet.
A good primer on this fact is in the book The Righteous Mind which discusses how there is so much political division because we all seem to think that some data or arguments are what convinces people of things when in reality it’s compassion and tolerance which opens the door for understanding, not IPCC studies, think pieces, and PowerPoint presentations.
Even former Vice President Al Gore understood that. While An Inconvenient Truth was pretty much a PowerPoint presentation, in the follow-up An Inconvenient Sequel (plug: I edited and produced the NY Times bestselling book for it), he changed his tune, and instead of all science, he featured a much more effective psychological route: money. He featured Republican mayors of Texan towns who—even though they didn’t believe in Climate Change—implemented solar farms for their cities and reaped the financial and political benefits. He appealed to selfishness rather than reason and he made it such that it doesn’t matter whether people are convinced Climate Change is real in order for them to be part of the solution.
When are journalists and activists going to realize that endless reports about how the world is ending are actually having the opposite effect on their goals? It reminds me of Facebook in late 2016 (right around the time I deleted it) as I watched well-meaning liberals with a poor understanding of marketing psychology sharing endlessly about Trump and how he was going to ruin the world. If they had stopped for a moment to realize that Trump and his followers love when liberals get outraged and that it is quite literally what feeds them, they might have instead taken a different tactic, one that didn’t focus attention on an enemy who thrives on attention. A good primer on this phenomenon is George Saunders’ essay, The Braindead Megaphone.
The sooner Climate Change marketing gets a bit more of an edge and leaves the science to scientists, the sooner we’ll see people actually helping stop this train.
That brings us to our next concern, I don’t actually think we can stop this train.
2. Human-Fixed Climate Change is a Hoax
We didn’t personally create climate change, we can’t personally fix it. There is a reason we love superhero movies; it’s great to watch one person or a small group of amazing people save the planet while everyone else just goes about their lives. In the paraphrased words of my visionary friend Edmund Zagorin while discussing AI, “any plan for the future which requires mass human behavior change is dead in the water. It simply won’t happen.”
I often write and think about the incredible gymnastics that many of my fellow citizens, friends, and family will go to in order to not think about capitalism. In another amazing show of how effective Republicans are at their jobs, in many circles, even very “progressive” ones, it’s kind of taboo to critique capitalism. Actually, it’s worse than a taboo, it’s passé, it’s cliché, it’s boring. And even in circles where critiquing capitalism and stanning AOC and Bernie is more acceptable, very little of that conversation becomes self-reflective. It’s kept at a distance as if capitalism is some external system that we are not part of. Since Capitalism is a system of control around human relations, it only makes sense that our interactions with everyone from our life partners to our dry-cleaners to the homeless guy on the corner are deeply steeped in its control and its rules. Until we question how our every decision has been prescripted for a system that does not benefit us, we will still just be part of it.
This is exemplified most clearly, to me, in watching kids volunteer to pick up trash on the beach. While some may see enterprising young people taking the future into their hands, I see the burnt ends of an economic system that incentivized environmental torture for centuries and now is weaponizing our guilt about taking part in it. One of the largest companies on God’s once-green earth is Coca-Cola, a company that literally bottles sugar in plastic around the globe for no reason. Once their sales plummet them into non-existence and/or the executive board realizes how unhelpful their existence is and disbands voluntarily, then I will be able to say change is happening. Until then, the kids picking up their trash on beaches make me very, very, very sad.
We collectively caused Climate Changed. Wait, wait, let me qualify that: the previous few generations—you know, the ones that said people should give birth laying on their backs, marijuana and mushrooms were harmful to society, and Coca-Cola was refreshing—they caused Climate Change. We are just the burnt ends.
This idea that we should be picking up the trash on the beach and its related delusion “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” are all, to me, symptoms of being in an abusive relationship with a control system we did not construct in this lifetime. Corporations should be the ones reducing, reusing, and recycling, not us. Corporations have now started to actually pay people in far-off countries to pick up trash on the beach in order to have good marketing collateral and save face in the US. While I actually like that plan because, until they stop producing waste and just burn through all their savings paying people to clean up their damn mess, it’s an abusive cycle where they still win while the planet loses.
There is this charade that companies can somehow fix climate change by implementing these rules and taking some action to mitigate it, but the reality is until Coca-Cola ceases to exist because it clearly causes more harm than benefit, then we are just spinning our tires.
Here’s today’s affirmation: drive your gas-guzzling truck, drink your Evian from France, throw your recyclables into the landfill, because you deserve to live in a world that is harmonious by design and you don’t deserve to be routinely inconvenienced by other people’s Evil. You are not a sinner. And that brings me to my final point, environmentalism is just shrouded original sin.
3.You are not a sinner.
Environmentalism is based on original sin. While I’m enthusiastic about living in harmony with the Earth and humanity living in symbiosis with the systems that support us, it nags me that much of this thinking is based on original sin. There is nothing inherently wrong with humanity. We have not sinned, we are Earth, we are made of it, and our technology is made of it. The extinct animals will forgive us like they forgive the sharks and bears that eat them. We are certainly a pesky fungal colony on this planet, but we are not separate from it. There is nothing “unnatural” about any of it. When we talk about “saving the planet,” we are talking about saving ourselves, which is really not that interesting to me.
It should come as no surprise to you that we live in a Judeo-Christian society. This is true around the globe. Even in majority Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu countries, the systems of Christianity (even just in regards to the calendar) have become so entrenched in every culture that they are very difficult to separate from irrefutable reality. Marshall McLuhan said that “the one thing fish know nothing about is water.” We are steeped in Christian thinking, it surrounds us invisibly but is ever-present. It dictates our reasoning, our sense of self, our sense of community, our sense of death, of the future, and of every aspect of our beings. Yes, even for you atheists and “spiritual” people.
You cannot fight it, it is ingrained in you; it is a large part of what you consider “you.”
So it makes sense that at the very core of environmentalism and saving the planet is the idea of original sin.
This idea that we are broken, that we have sinned, that we are bad boys and girls, is imbued in every aspect of modern life. We are taught, in implicit and explicit ways, that only through actively proving our value—by working hard, by praying in one way or another, and, yes, by recycling our bottles—will we be able to make our way to the pearly gates. Of course, I hope you know that you don’t need to pray, you don’t need to work hard, and you don’t need to recycle in order to be a complete person.
Even then I was tempted to write “good person” but even that is steeped in religiosity with its roots in the word “god;” implying a godly person is a good person. There are no “good” people, there are no “bad” people. This sort of “rotten to the core” thinking is Christianity: it is rigid, it is inflexible, it is depressing, it is demeaning, and it is ultimately unhelpful for the kind of world and mental space I think many of us hope to inhabit. The sooner we realize Trump and Putin have the capacity to love and hurt, but are severely, severely traumatized, the sooner that better, easier, and more helpful solutions than RESIST RESIST RESIST will start coming to our collective consciousness. This idea that Evil can actually win is a cynicism based in the Bible. Evil cannot win, and neither can Good. The truth is in the balance.
The prevailing tactic for dealing with Evils like Climate Change is the least Taoist thing I have ever seen. It is so clear to me that you do not resist evil, you do not fight evil, you accept it, and you move effortlessly to disempower it. The dynamic between Good and Evil probably feels irrefutable to you because you see it in movies and books and on the tongues of politicians and religious leaders every day, but you need to remember it is just a lame fucking holdover from tactical warfare brought to you by Christianity and Greek Mythology.
War is not the answer in the physical realm, nor is it the answer in the metaphysical and spiritual realm. In the words of my great sage and partner Marley, “the mystics of all the great religions agree with one another, it’s everyone else that disagrees.” If you start to trust the general harmony of the world—on the whole, and in contrast to the small sliver of the world you see and contemplate—then you will see that there is no controlling the outcomes.
If we change the Earth’s climate into our own oblivion, there is nothing “bad” about that. Some species will survive, some will die—including us—new ones will evolve, and the world will go on without us. The only reason this could be considered a bad thing is if you think humans are special but also bad, you deserve to live forever, but you have also sinned and you deserve to be punished.
Climate Change is not a punishment, it’s just the way things are going. I understand this might feel nihilist to you, or like I am saying we should just give up on the Earth, but I’m not saying that.
That place in you which is perhaps saying I’m wrong—“We must fight fight fight! Don’t give up!”—is also the place where the cycle of Capitalist and Christian ideology restarts. It’s where the snake eats the tail, it’s where the cycle of violence continues.
Once you realize you don’t need to strive to be a good person, you don’t need to fight evil, and you don’t need to save the planet, you’ll find that your energy is suddenly spent actually being a person in harmony with their surroundings, with yourself, and your goals, rather than fighting a far off and invisible demon.
In Closing
I think all of these incisive things above, yet I still recycle, I still compost, I still drive an electric car powered by solar, I dutifully set aside my batteries and styrofoam to deliver to the recycling plant, and I still conserve water. I take these things seriously, but not because I believe I’m saving the planet. It simply feels more in harmony with the land. But there are falsehoods here I have to accept.
When I meet someone who drives a gas car, drinks bottled water, throws away all their compostables and recyclables, I don’t meet them with animosity (or I try not to), because I’m not attached to the outcome my actions have on the future of the planet (or I try not to be). They are not going to ruin the planet and I am not going to save the planet. The data is in: electric cars are going to ruin the planet and more than half of our recyclables end up in landfills.
Don’t you see? The cycle is egotistical, never-ending, and self-fulfilling. Like a mentally ill or otherwise abusive family member or friend, the more you fight, the more it wins. The favorite refrain of activists around the world: “Be the change you want to see in the world,” does not mean change everyone around you and change every part of yourself and your actions by force— it is much more passive than that. “Be” is the operative word—it’s not “make the change you want to see in the world.”
Environmental harmony is not going to come by you all feeling guilty and depressed about the state of the environment. It’s going to come by you loving the environment deeply, that includes loving yourself, loving the landfills, and loving the way things unfold.
So another Climate Change report came out that time is running out, so what? Have a good day and set your intentions on a cleaner Earth. That’s honestly the most you can do.
As usual, I end every post with a picture of my breakfast and a picture of my son:
As usual, when I’m finished writing my posts and I re-read them, I’m forced to face my privilege. While climate change does affect me, it doesn’t threaten me in the way it does many others. To those people, a lot of what here might seem crass or insensitive. They might incorrectly characterize me as not caring about the planet or environment. This isn’t true. My arguments in this post (and mostly all of my posts) are generally intended for a similarly white or white-passing and privileged audience, not because they deserve my attention, but because they deserve my critique. It is their systems that got us here and their systems that must be dismantled. I believe the only way forward in achieving harmony with the Earth is to divest not only from polluting companies and industries but also from white-run non-profits as well as white-centric ways of thinking around climate change. I believe funds, attention, and energy must be diverted to only indigenous people and their endeavors and philosophies. This is already happening in my part of the globe. Natives in every part of the world uniformly and necessarily have a deeper, more thoughtful, and more sustainable (psychologically and physically) connection with the land than the colonizers. While we shouldn’t hand them the bag and say “fix our problem,” we should look to them as superiors on the matter. All scientific, political, and infrastructural projects should come second only to their direction.
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