21st Century Plowshare

The Limits of Education

There are real limits to education campaigns when it comes to global warming.

There are limits to education because science and fundamentalism (any flavor of fundamentalism, including eco-fundamentalism) are like oil and water, and because our knowledge of global warming is scientific, and because the science of global warming is not intuitive. It is not common-sense to think that the real problem is an odorless, colorless gas. And while being very warm is sometimes uncomfortable, it is not intuitive to fear warmth in general.

The bottom line is that we have evolved to create a world that we are not wired, as animals, to understand at all, and this problem is not restricted to global warming. Our economy is not intuitive, and neither is its current collapse. It makes no sense to my sister in law that you don't sell all your stocks when the market falls. We are emotional creatures who have learned to adapt to a series of specific threats: immediate and knowable ones that we can act immediately upon by doing something. And we have created a complex culture that makes slow-moving invisible threats that are difficult to think about in terms of doing something.

I mean, nothing sounds more shrill than the comments on Dot Earth.

This is a cultural problem that craves cultural solutions. Scholarship is of course one angle, but there are so many times Al Gore is going to be able to give his slide lecture, and every single time he gives it there will be blowback, because the very thing that makes science a powerful intellectual tool makes it very easy to ague with.

Science has to know that it's guessing in order to be science. But art, film, literature and design don't. And yet most cultural production related to climate change leans very heavily on the science, and thinks in terms of illustrating and educating.

This is a huge wasted opportunity. Artists, gardeners, poets and screenwriters--what does climate change mean when it isn't an educational hobbyhorse? What's the larger cultural landscape of a culture that can actually grasp its new, slow-moving complex threats? How do we replace fear with intense consideration of all the parts of a puzzle? How do we become the future that we want, given the people and the present that we have?

I am reading this great two-volume set of tomes about edible forest gardening by David Jacke and Eric Toensmeier, and it's the smartest cultural production addressing the environment that I have seen to date, because it does as little education about our environmental sins as possible. There are probably a thousand pages of text here, and I've personally read about 150 of volume one at this point, and I have read maybe three or five full pages of Education About How Bad We Are. The rest is a rich, detailed vision about what our backyards can become, and how much you don't know about soil, and how interrelated everything that grows is--how the blueberry bush relies on the tree for nitrogen fixing, and the herbs below to deter pests, and so on. This book is too busy blowing your mind and enjoying its subject to educate about the problems we have wreaked on the environment. The past becomes a given and the future becomes exciting. The result is an inspiring, terror-and-wallow-free romp in which it's possible to imagine a specific future in which suburbia isn't evil, in which our backyards all knit back together to form a real, interrelated forest-type organism that sustains both the humans who tend it and the soil that supports it.

Re-imagining the suburbs as a powerful force of good?

Every creative endeavor can aspire to this kind of aggressive solution-envisioning and joy-creation.

The Goal

The problem with global warming is that the only rational solution is surprisingly totalitarian. As far as I can tell, the goal has to be 100% compliance with a whole new way of looking at energy consumption--otherwise there won't be a tipping point.

To put it another way, while it's really important that my city is doing everything it can to reduce its carbon footprint, at the same time it doesn't matter that NYC is greening up if Boise or Guangdong Province or Jakarta or Toronto isn't pulling their weight too.

What does this mean in terms of our late-modern American culture that is relentlessly obsessed with individualism and its benefits: ignorance of world affairs; individual choice; free will; the sense that government's role is to leave you alone and let you do what you want?

The Practical Impact of Environmental Abstractions

So last night I was watching this documentary, which I am happy to say is already looking dated, and there were these two moments that, you know, exemplified my why.

First, Bill McKibben had this People Are Blind moment that was at the same time totally right on and outrageously haughty. I'm paraphrasing, but he basically said that people treat the economy like it's this tender, fragile thing, but don't pay any attention to the earth that the economy sits on and depends on, and that this blindness will produce a day of reckoning. And then he said that it's important to use and enjoy the world that we are fighting to save, cut to Bill McKibben cross country skiing.

I love Bill McKibben, whose writing made me an environmentalist in the first place. And yet I can safely say that this moment embodied every single problem of the ecology movement. It privileged an abstract idea over practical daily choices; shamed those of us who are not rich or ascetic enough to let an abstract idea rule our daily practical choices; induced intense fear; and then ended on this crazily upbeat note. I'm indoctrinated. I understand exactly what McKibben was trying to say with the skiing...

...but how do you trust a crisis in which it's appropriate to vacillate between total shaming doom and recreational activity?

Then Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger broke out the focus group data that eventually became The Death of Environmentalism and subsequently the book Break Through, and basically called McKibben's message a "big bummer" and totally out of touch with most people's reality. They argue that people think about the world in terms of their own practical choices and needs. Folks need jobs and security, and are never going to listen to this McKibbeney argument because all it does is induce fear and complication and guilt and does nothing to solve their problems.

I wholeheartedly agree. It does seem tone deaf, especially looking back in time from this 2009 economic reality, to divorce economic decisions from ecological ones. I'm buying their book today. It will be talked about at length here. The argument is crystal clear.

But are Nordhaus and Shellenberger making McKibben's point of view any less true? Or to ask the question differently, what is the best course of righteous action for a zealot who doesn't want to hurt the cause?

I don't care deeply about policymaking or which lightbulbs you're using--these are the most overexposed and least interesting aspects of the environmental movement from where I'm sitting. I am writing because McKibben inspired me years ago to keep looking and looking at what we are doing to the world, and this act of serious looking has caused me to see my own actions differently, and I like that relationship between what I see and what I do. I get something out of the looking itself that is intellectually rich, and that's genuinely separate from but dovetails with the practical concerns of my life. My environmentalism is intellectual and abstract, and it's profound in its abstraction. It's awe-inspiring, and I benefit from this awe, and so I honestly believe that I should share it.

At the same time, I don't want my own private intellectual gain to be the actual physical environment's loss. Part of understanding the problem in a profound way is understanding the way guilt and fear limit discourse; how easy it is to shut down when you're being talked down to; how rude it is to tell people what to think.

Delivering depth is good, but there are all these minefields, and the stakes are outrageously high. The goal moving forward seems to be to have a foot in each world, to temper one's inner McKibbin with open ears and a hearty dose of empathy for the non-zealot.

Welcome to 21st Century Plowshare

Right now 21st Century Plowshare is one person writing about the culture of environmentalism. I started this project because I believe that our environmental actions are limited by the available cultural discourse. Deciding to be an environmentalist right now is a wade into chilly, brackish water. The climate's sense of time dovetails poorly with our contemporary news cycle, and this makes for green fatigue. Discussions about impact are too-often based on consumer-choice accounting, and not only is accounting inherently boring--this "Green Lantern Model" plays into that problematic You Are What You Buy worldview that needs to change if we are really going to get anywhere or change anything. The actions a single person can take seem too small to be worthwhile, and so it's hard to really do anything. I mean, I don't know about you, but I am sure that my phone charger or something is plugged in right now. And that's making me feel like an asshole for writing about the environment, judge not lest ye be judged and all that.

And if you ask me, that's one of the things that's going to have to evolve.

I want environmentalism to be about much, much more than quantifying the most minute details of our consumption or inappropriately throwing the word green around until it becomes meaningless. We are all going to have to change how we live, make different choices, maybe even re-define the term "Individual Choice." But I don't think it follows that anyone should ditch their refrigerator, take military showers, or otherwise self-flagellate. I think that both ends of this Greenwashing-to-QuasiSurvivalist spectrum are selfish. And I think that the most powerful thing that could happen to us as a culture of people who take strong, considered action to reduce our environmental impact is nothing less than a total existential restructuring.

Individual choice induces paralysis and depression. It could be great for our sense of who we are to harness our choices to a global system. It could be possible to recognize our relationship to a larger earth-system in a strong, positive way that doesn't collapse into shame, guilt, worry and fear. Instead of hating people who drive SUVs, we could seduce them into joining us. Instead of guilt and shame, the primary weapon of the eco-movement could be something more like joy.

Email suggestions, call out bullshit, comment early and often, send pictures of what you are doing!

Let the dreaming begin!