Just a little thing?
I’m looking up at an advert on public transport and it says that doing our bit for the environment is easy and little, and that we shouldn’t try and do anything big. This statement strikes me as both right and wrong at the same time and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Rather than being stressed by this emotion, I have learnt to recognise that it often signals that there is something important for me to learn or understand here.
The core message of the advert is of making small manageable changes for sustainability. I definitely agree that the ecological crisis needs to be addressed in ways that each of us can actually do. If it is framed as impossible, or larger than we are, despondency very quickly sets in. Then no change is made and things continue to get worse. So the need to keep things manageable and human-scaled feels very important. Yet, I am still not comfortable.
The clue to this discomfort is in the way the small changes are framed. The advert is about changing what we buy, or being more careful who we buy from. It is definitely true that there are major problems caused by our consumption. At every stage from extraction of materials from the Earth to how we dispose of them at the end of their life, the products we consume create a trail of environmental damage. This means that it is also true that we can have an impact on the ecological crisis by being more careful about what we buy and how we use it. So again, on the face of it I cannot disagree with the message.
Digging deeper there are two issues that are driving my discomfort. One issue is that it does not encourage us to buy and use less. The company that has placed the advertisement is making it clear that you should buy from them. They are saying that the ecological choice is to buy differently, to buy from them. This may be true if compared to purchasing from a competitor. However, we would have much more impact if we were to buy less, ideally only what we really need. This would have a much bigger impact, but would obviously not lead to more custom for the advertiser. So the message is not honest in that regard, and grates with me as a result.
Photo by Dan Roizer on Unsplash
The second, deeper, issue is that all of this is playing around with symptoms. Whilst I would praise the attitude of keeping things at a manageable scale, there also needs to be an understanding of how deep the crisis is and how we got here. This will enable us to truly address the root causes and avoid repeating mistakes. Buying slightly differently will not help us understand the root cause of our crisis, and therefore won’t make a difference where it is needed most. This is why I find the advert tough to read.
Growing up in an industrialised culture, we are taught we are separate from the Earth. We are told on a daily basis, directly or indirectly, that the Earth is just a backdrop to our lives which we can exploit for our benefit. This story of our relationship to the Earth embeds itself deeply into our worldview - our model of how the world works. Our worldview is our compass for life - we do things that align with it and avoid things that don’t. So damaging the Earth either directly or indirectly is very easy if our worldview says we are separate and the Earth is just the stage for our lives.
This is why we have got ourselves into a crisis, and why we have not been able to get ourselves out of it even when the evidence has been clear. It is why, even if we do fix one problem (for example eliminating damaging ozone destroying ‘CFC’ gases), we make bigger messes elsewhere (for example plastic pollution of the seas and air). It is here, in our worldviews, that action is needed if we are really going to change our fortunes. With this understanding, the ‘one small thing’ action feels badly focussed.
In some ways, looking deeper to this level of root cause/worldview is a massive demand. Most of us don’t realise we even have a worldview. To realise this opens up the possibility that there could be others and we may not be right. Being asked to actively question our worldview has the potential to be pretty unsettling.
Yet, it is also very simple. We can each inquire into what our own worldview is. It is an action that can be taken by an individual and does not rely on others putting the right policy in place or giving us better consumption choices. It does not require specialist equipment or a minimum level of physical fitness. Anyone can do this, at any time. It is very much human-scale and doable.
However, this simple thing is not on the poster. It is not on the poster because it does not align with our usual narratives, and would not lead to greater consumption. It can make people a bit uncomfortable. Yet, asking challenging questions needs to become a core part of our approach and response to the crisis.
So I do agree with the advert that our action needs to be at a human scale. My advert would, however, not focus on fiddling around with symptoms, but ask some questions that might lead to much deeper change - change in the worldviews that drive the challenges we face.
I wonder who might advertise that change on the underground?