Are you still eating McDonalds? Drinking Coke? Wearing Nikes?
Do you still wait in line at Starbucks? Drive alone to work? Use plastic bags?

We’ve hit upon a frank new mode of rhetoric amid this mounting ecological crisis. It is no longer acceptable to claim that installing solar panels on our roofs, riding our bikes to work, diligently recycling, or shopping locally are strong enough measures to stop it. It is dishonest to suggest that living in an ethical, green, and conscious fashion is sufficient to stave off extinction. It is an offence to think it adequate, with an attitude of self-flagellation, to play our part, to mind our individual responsibilities, to do our good deeds — and then to sleep soundly, with an untouched conscience.

We can’t afford to kid ourselves any longer. Without sweeping systemic change, we will plunge ourselves into an abyss the depths of which humanity has never before witnessed. No matter how much do-gooding. No matter how much habit-smashing. No matter how much private system-resisting.We now recognize the necessity, not of correcting, not of fixing — but of dismantling this malfunctioning machine. We must take to task the guilty parties who have been the primary authors of this crisis — the chief exploiters of our collective trust — the principal defilers of this, our only Earth. And we must insist that they pay penance.

Governments must do everything in their power to ward off this existential threat, or risk being sacked. Corporations must be reigned in and admonished, or else risk being broken up at our hands. We are the People, and we have been vested with the power to choose what is right for our own democracy. The power of approval rests nowhere if not, ultimately, in our very hands.

And yet, though the culpability for wrecking and wreaking havoc upon our climate sits in large part with powers more formidable than any single one of us, and though we are impelled to judge their wrongdoing, we cannot preside over that judgement without first checking our own hypocrisy. Who are we who insist that corporate oil atone for its sins, if we ourselves are not first weaned of our petroleum addiction? Who are we who demand that plastic cease to be produced, if we sip from our single-use straws as if it were nothing? Who are we who strike and march for justice, if we duck out of the crowd for a quick cheeseburger — and then throw away the handfuls of wrapping as if this weren’t unnaturally dishonest?

There is no excuse, at this point in time, for bad habits or for wrong thinking. We have known for many years the evils of corporate manufacture and industry. We have seen for decades the destructive effects of a disposable consumer culture. So how, then, can we fight in good faith what we are complicit in upholding?

There is but one tool, one sentiment, one word to combat this deceit, this duplicity, this double-dealing: shame.

Shame on those who ignore the injustice of corporate greed! Shame on those who cast a blind eye on the immorality of Big Oil! Shame on those who neglect to account for their abetting of the climate crisis while pretending to battle the very same!

After all this time, and with all the evidence, are you still an unwitting stooge for climate-corroding interests?

Shame!

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