Change Who You Imagine You Are

From Adbusters #63, Jan-Feb 2006

Scientists who keep track of Arctic ice recently issued an alarming bulletin: the ice pack was melting as never before and was 20 percent smaller than the long-term average. What’s more, as it thawed and the light-reflecting white ice changed to light-absorbing blue water, the melting cycle was entering a self-reinforcing phase. One researcher noted “The feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover.”

Bigger global news than that is hard to imagine. I mean, you can seeit from outer space. Remember those posters from Apollo 7 of the blue-white orb drifting through black space? Well, it doesn’t look like that any more. There’s a lot less white and a lot more blue. We’re quickly building Earth 2.0. And it’s full of bugs. Literally.

So it seems kind of odd, in the face of all that bigness, to be thinking small. Surely the answer is a Manhattan project of some kind, unleashing all our scientific talent to figure out the powersources to replace coal and gas and oil and hence staunch the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Surely the answer is a huge international initiative – Kyoto on steroids – to somehow force governments to slow the growth of emissions. Surely both those things would help; in fact, surely they’re required.

But they’re not enough. It’s becoming clearer every day that the roots of climate change lie not just in the technological infrastructure we’ve built to exploit fossil fuels, but in the habits of mind and heart created by that infrastructure. For example: cheap gasoline allowed us to rip up the trolley lines and replace them with cars, which in turn allowed the sprawling suburbs, which in turn allowed ever bigger houses, which in turn allowed an unprecedented isolation from community. One survey of Americans found that three quarters did not really know their next door neighbors.

So how do you change that? Well, you could raise the price of gas, or rebuild the trolley line.

But as long as we’re trapped in our sense of ourselves as individuals, such changes will breed as much resentment as anything else. If we’re really going to start using the bus, we need – to borrow from earlier movements – some consciousness raising.

This is not precisely the same as the consciousness raising that birthed, say, the woman’s movement. In that case, women needed to understand and declare that they had been made victims, and that together they were powerful enough to confront that victimization. By painful contrast, there’s a sense in which we’re almost all in the victimizer class here, the beneficiaries of a life borrowed from the future and built on environmental destruction.

On the other hand, there is a nagging discontent that might blossom into something profound if only we could figure out the language to  describe it.

The dirty little secret of our individualized consumer age is that it  hasn’t made us quite as happy as it promised it would. In fact, to the degree that we can track such things, our sense of well-being has retreated almost as fast as the Arctic ice. Polling data on ‘life satisfaction’ shows it has been falling since the mid-50s; even a growing chorus of economists has begun to wonder if their constant prescription (More!) has lost its curative powers, or even turned subtly toxic. It’s not precisely clear why we find ourselves less happy, but the sociologists and psychologists seem to think it has something to do with loss of community. The same loss of community that the fossil fuel infrastructure made inevitable.

We can’t wait for a technological miracle to save us from our ills (though the engineers should by all means keep working!). A change in our sense of who we are is just as important – just as important in hard, practical terms. Take the most obvious example, the food we eat. Bought at the supermarket or drive-through, the average bite has traveled 1,500 miles before it reaches our lips. And the money we hand over for it disappears instantly back to corporate HQ. Whereas, if you join a community supported farm and pick up a produce box once a week, the total soil-plate journey is a few miles at most, and the money stays in the neighborhood.

Now, there is a real cost involved. The food is not as convenient. It  may not be exactly what you had in mind that day. There may be more  of one thing than another – two spinach meals in the same week. It  may require some more time to cook. You are, in effect, an adjunct member of the farm, which means the whole world is not your oyster. This particular field is your oyster, and depending on the latitude and the season that may mean spinach.

But when your mind starts to change a little, those costs start to become benefits. So what if the food is not as convenient? You got to see your neighbors when you picked it up – maybe you even got to go out in the fields for an hour and pick it with them. You got to remind yourself that you exist in a particular place, with particular weather, particular soil, particular beauty – you didn’t have to be a resident of the generic nowhere that flows through our various screens. You got to be a little less of an individual and a little more of a part of something larger. And you needn’t stop with food – the same analysis can apply to energy. To transportation. To entertainment. To much of the way we live.

A change in who we imagine ourselves to be sounds very woo-woo and vague. How could that help solve global warming? But getting over hyperindividualism is as crucial as getting over oil – and my guess is you can’t manage one without the other.

Bill McKibben is an environmental writer whose work appears regularly in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Harper’s.