Personal Change Will Not Save The Environment!
Derrick Jensen has written an excellent article on why personal change does not equal political change, entitled Forget Shorter Showers.
This goes out to everyone who feels good about recycling, buys into green consumerism, drives a hybrid, or doesn't flush their toilet.
Jensen points out that "we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance."
More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans... People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.
individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government
Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.
If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses.
it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself...
The whole individualist what-you-can- do-to-save- the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.
(thanx Harjit)
This goes out to everyone who feels good about recycling, buys into green consumerism, drives a hybrid, or doesn't flush their toilet.
Jensen points out that "we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance."
More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans... People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.
individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government
Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.
If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses.
it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself...
The whole individualist what-you-can- do-to-save- the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.
(thanx Harjit)
posted by shane at 5:18 PM
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