Environmentalism and [Reluctant] Philanthropy

Giving a damn about the planet is a luxury. At a minimum, it means that you have 1) access to necessary information, and 2) the time and emotional energy to invest in a cause whose consequences are mostly abstract, unseen and unfelt in your daily life.  

If you’re starving and your children are dying of disease and malnutrition, however much logical sense it would make to act to preserve the world for future generations, you just don’t have the emotional or physical resources to. As long as your situation is so desperate that your and your family’s livelihood depends on trafficking in endangered species or slashing and burning rainforest, you will do it.

And it’s unreasonable to expect you not to.

We’re all swayed by our immediate circumstances. Starvation, I’m sure, is a compelling one. I read an article recently in which the author mentioned how Indonesian natives were astonished and [rightfully] incensed that the West cared so much about orangutans when village children were starving to death. It’s all too easy for us to be indignant about smuggling endangered species or clearcutting rainforests, but wouldn’t we do the same thing in those circumstances?

Bottom line: unless we can bring the quality of life up for these people to the point where they can afford to protect and husband their resources, we’re not going to be able to safeguard all the rainforests, snow leopards, orangutans, or marshlands by external policing.

In a way, environmentalism is bringing me closer to being a philanthropist than I thought possible. I don’t particularly like people. As a race, I think we’re woefully shortsighted, destructive, self-centered, and only about half as clever as we think we are.  Nor do I have high stakes in the future of humans on this planet; I just want to make sure we don’t drag every speck of biodiversity down with us.  I’m not a philanthropist, but I am a pragmatist. And I see that we’re not going to get anywhere with the third world until we can improve the standard of living to an acceptable minimum, limit population growth, and sell conservation as a desirable and rewarding alternative. Tricky, but worth a shot if we want to keep those rainforests.

Oh, and one more thing. Giving a damn about rainforests doesn’t excuse us from giving a damn about how our daily habits as first world citizens are destroying the planet as surely and probably more thoroughly than all the slash and burn agriculture and orangutan trophy-hunting put together. Guys? Don’t forget that we’re still the problem.

Replacing Consumerism

Recently, I did something that I’d wanted to do for a long time but always been too cheap/busy/timid/tired to: I signed up for a pottery wheel class. 

Monday night was my first class. I sat at the wheel up to my elbows in slip, clay flowing limpidly under my braced hands. You’d think that centering clay would be a gradual process, but there’s a definite click when the clay goes from a wobbly mass pushing back against your hand and when it suddenly acquiesces to the exact shape of your fingers; in this moment, clay and hand are in perfect accord.  For a tactile sensation junkie like me, it was pure magic. And even though it was late, and I’d had a long day, I had the sudden conviction that there was nothing else I would have rather been doing at that moment.

It actually pisses me off that I’ve spent so much of my life shopping when I could have been doing any of the things that make me really happy to be alive. Although I like pretty things, I don’t actually like shopping very much. After half an hour in a store, I wander around in a headachey, indecisive daze. More often than not, I talk myself out of everything in my basket — even the things I went there to get – and leave empty-handed and in a foul temper. Who am I kidding? I hate shopping. And I probably only go because it’s easier than doing something creative — and I’ve been barraged my whole life with messages that buying things will make me look and feel better.  

I think shopping could rightly be characterized as America’s favorite addiction; the figures are in The Story of Stuff, but essentially: we spend more and more of our time shopping and feel less and less happy with our lives. Not only are we decimating ecosystems and trashing the planet in the name of unconstrained consumerism, but we’re also making ourselves miserable.

It’s time to jump off this bandwagon. So I took a few minutes to come up with some activities that I know make me far happier, more contented, and more fulfilled than shopping ever will.

• Going for a walk in the woods on a bright weekday morning, sketchbook in hand. Something about clean air, trees, and no humans in sight (sorry, that’s my misanthropy speaking) sloughs off all my pent up stresses and anxieties. I breathe in sunlight, silence, sanity.
• Working with my hands. For all that I spend a lot of time up in my head, I love to draw and mold and bake. Like many people, I completely lose track of time when I’m drawing or pinching a lump of clay into a shape or shaping dough into cookies, and I think it’s the only time that the harried part of my brain gets to let go of all of its anxieties.
• Spending time with non-humans. Life feels empty without a furry companion to lounge around with. I’ve loved socializing my shy blind kitty, and she repays me by purring and flopping over for tummy rubs about fifteen times a day. Once or twice a month I go down to the local cat shelter and socialize shy kitties. I love going, but I don’t make time for it as often as I could. Every hour I spend shopping takes me away from building connections with animals that are, after all, the basis of my environmentalism.
• Spending time with the special people in my life that I genuinely love and would go far out of my way for. There aren’t many, but you know who you are. It doesn’t matter if we just hang around and read or watch hilariously bad B monster movies together. Time spent with you is time well spent.
• Reading and writing about things that interest me. My shelf of books to read is threatening to push off my bookends. Among the topics I look forward to reading about: a natural history of evil, trees, feline evolution, linguistics, and a fantasy novel here and there. If I stopped shopping – online and off – I might have the time to get through more of them (and to blog more than once a week).

So, here’s the master plan. The next time I feel the urge to go shopping, I’m going to reference this list and choose something off it instead. If we can make our own lives happier and help the planet at the same time, it sounds like a major win-win to me.

Want to join me in replacing consumerism? Come up with your own list!

Environmental Epiphanies

Were you swayed by a slow trickle of devastating facts and figures? Or can you trace your environmentalism to one major turning point? Although I grew up hearing about the three Rs and my parents were thrifty enough to make us tear paper napkins in half at dinner, I wasn’t particularly concerned until one incident in my last year at UC Santa Cruz.

UCSC is one of the more flamboyantly liberal universities in California, set in the redwoods at the foot of the Pacific Ocean. I had been leaning further to the left for a few years, but when I got to Santa Cruz, where it was trendy to be obnoxiously vegan, to ‘show love for Iraq,’ and to attend pot-filled student rallies, I did what any habitual misfit would do: I went the other way. In quiet rebellion against the militant treehuggers on campus, I didn’t go vegetarian, as I’d always intended to do once I left home. I didn’t shop at the student co-op.  I sneered at overzealous idealism.

Anyway. I was taking an astronomy class on man’s exploration of the solar system. The topic that day was Venus. In a darkened lecture hall, my professor, in his cute Australian accent,  explained that Venus and Earth had started off as virtual twins. Venus was a litle too close to the sun. The extra heat evaporated what might have been water oceans and turned them into thick clouds that created a strong greenhouse effect. Venus is now a ball of superheated, dense, poisonous gases over a rocky surface.

I walked out of that lecture hall, blinking in the bright sunshine. It was a characteristically beautiful day: on the horizon, clear blue skies with fluffy white clouds flowed seamlessly into the blue gray of the Pacific Ocean. I watched clouds glide silently across the sky the entire bus ride home and realized, for the first time, how extraordinarily, improbably, against-all-odds lucky we  and everything else on Earth were to be here at all. I thought of Venus’s desolate, pocked surface and sulfuric acid rains and was amazed at the deep blue of the sky and harmless water vapor clouds that I had taken for granted every year of my life before then. For the first time ever, I felt truly grateful to be alive.

That day was when it all started. It took another few years for me to go totally vegetarian, the support of a boyfriend and now spouse who had made this journey a few years earlier, and the death of my best friend to open up the emotional space that I needed to really, truly give a damn about the Earth. Even on my most pessimistic days in which I am convinced we’re screwed, there’s still something about seeing blue skies and cottony clouds that makes me feel astonished and humbled to be a steward of this planet that beat the odds.

So, it’s your turn now. What was your environmental epiphany?

On Earth Day: Think, Don’t Do

I’ve noticed that a lot of people have provided lists of things to do (or not do) on Earth Day this year. Since there are almost an infinite number of things you could do (today and any other day) to benefit the environment, I’m going to propose something a little different: This year, for Earth Day, think. Think before you act, think before you consume, think about the fact that each of your actions has an impact on the Earth. Whether it’s positive or negative is totally up to you.

So, really, it’s about consciousness. Before you buy something, consider the raw materials that were extracted from the Earth, the impact their extraction had on natural habitats and animals, the human cost of the conditions under which the final product was produced, the resources it used to get to you, its effect on your own body, and finally, its fate after you have finished with it. The lack of transparency in the supply chain makes it harder, but not impossible, to be a conscious consumer. Always, the cost goes far beyond the sticker price.

Let’s take chocolate, for example. $1 will net you a pretty good sized Kit-Kat bar. You may think you’re buying chocolate, but you’re actually supporting a chain of events that has involved deforestation, child labor, orangutan endangerment, unsustainable agriculture, and  non-renewable, pollutant energy. For an end product that is neither good for your body nor even tastes that good? I don’t think so.

The same consciousness can be applied to evaluating almost all of our actions, from the length of the showers we take, to how many kids we have, to whether we buy organic or not, and to how much stuff we buy at all. Think about your actions enough, and you’ll consistently make more sustainable, humane, environmental choices. The problem is that we — and that certainly includes me — don’t like to take the time, don’t want to change our comfortable lifestyles, don’t want to think on these terms. It’s so much easier to buy something labeled ‘eco-friendly’ than to really think about what we’re doing.

Earth Day would be an ideal time to start thinking. If you need a reminder, watch The Story of Stuff again. Who knows? It might just be the start of the kind of thinking that we all need to start doing if we want to stick around on this planet for a while longer.