Reconciling behaviour

We live our lives in ways that ebb and flow with the times, and it is a true that we are born in a time, and that we must live in that time. Nostalgia and reminiscence are nice and fun, but they cannot take away from the fact that life is lived now, or it is never. This doesn't mean that we accept all of the norms of the time we are in. Rather, the way we view the world must be nuanced and interpreted under the lenses of history and experience, as well as the immediate experiences we go through. Put more plainly, we must learn from the past, understand how the past has influenced the present, and see what needs to be done to avoid continuing behaviour that wreaks havoc on lives and this Earth. But even though we've gained a lot of knowledge over the past two hundred years, we've gained very little wisdom. Wisdom stands the test of time. Much knowledge can be fashionable.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of action or behaviour - those that are fashionable and ephemeral, and those that are true and good no matter what time or place or situation you are in. ("No duh," you might say.) It is clear that many fashionable behaviours, like industrialisation (it's been too long a fashion cycle, you might say!), are those that cause ecological degradation, and those that are good no matter what time we live in, like kindness and respect, are those that seek to preserve and sustain this planet. There is a dichotomy between scales here - industrialisation is a larger scale of activity than our individual lives. Why do many of our collective behaviours directly contradict our individual beliefs? I wrote earlier that the moral fabric upon which they operate is defined through the collection of our moralities. However, in the process of the weaving of the fabric, individual moralities are averaged out, resulting in a destructiveness that was from the outset unthinkable. 

And how do we reconcile what we are doing now with what we should be doing, individually and collectively? I believe there can no reconciliation, other than appreciating the effort that some people and some organisations are making in trying to better this world. More importantly, however, there can be no reconciliation, because the way we behave just isn't sustainable. This is the crucial point; we cannot eat our cake and have it too. If we cannot agree to the sustainability of our of individual and collective lives, then there's no reason to continue behaving the way we do as individuals, and there is no way we should be allowing larger organisations to behave in ways that are against the values we preach as individuals.

We cannot wait

I do not intend this post to be in any way discouraging. Rather, I hope it lays out, to some extent, why it is that matters need to be taken into our own hands, yes, yours and mine.

I had a wonderful day today, which was spent talking with Patrick about the issues raised because of individual action and the arguments for it. One of the major questions that has come up during this past months is, Why focus on individual action? Getting organisations that have impacts much larger than my own to decrease their environmental impact by even 0.01% will dwarf anything I have been able to do over the past fifty-four weeks. I agree. That would be wonderful to do, and I encourage all of us to continue our efforts to do so. The obvious way to get such organisational change is government policy. People might think that we should focus our efforts on getting some national or regional policy passed. Yes, we should, and I encourage all of us to continue our efforts to do so. People have told me that there need to be "incentives" to change behaviour, or at least some policy that pushes people to change their behaviour. Yes, that is needed.

However, my questions in rebuttal are these - Who is going to get the government to enact policy, and what exactly is the nature of that policy? What ethical (and consequently legal and economic) foundations are those changes in behaviour going to be adopted on? Any change that stands a chance at truly addressing the nature of the problems that face us will necessarily require a fundamental rethink of our ethical structure. Furthermore, "incentives" are introduced all the time in our country, and are as quickly taken away - take for example production tax credits for renewable sources of energy. Given the magnitude of the issues that face us, "incentives" that have the potential to be taken away are in some sense a waste of time in trying to get passed, particularly how the sausage factory of the government is adept at watering policies down to be mere lip service. The changes that are required in our society need to be durable.

As I have written about previously, any durable change (here, here, here) that comes can come from nowhere but from our own lives. It is our choice. It is through the collective projection of our lives outwards that we currently allow the existence of ecologically destructive organisations and governments. Also, I highly doubt that a large fraction of people in the US will be willing to do something because the government forces them to, particularly when it comes to the environment. As Professor Andrew Hoffman said, "There’s a segment of the population that sees environmentalists as socialists, trying to control people’s lives."

It is clear to me that not everyone thinks that environmentalists are trying to control people's lives. What that means is that each one of us can be that example, to these people, at least, that shows that making the meaningful changes in our lives is not only necessary, but also doable.

On individual action

I started this project close to ten months ago now and thought it would be a project for myself, not in any selfish way, but rather a way to see how far I could go, and to see how much further I needed to go, to be a responsible citizen toward both nature and people. Such individual actions are prevalent throughout the world, and many people undertake adventures involving sacrifice out of religious belief - Catholics give up for lent, and many people in India fast once a week to understand and appreciate food. These actions aren't necessarily undertaken for the environment, although everything has an impact. Rather, these actions are for self-learning and exploration, and to understand and internalise the value of what we have. It is easy for us to get devalue what we have when we have. Real value is felt when we are deprived. At the same time, individual action and sacrifice can be undertaken to show some things are not valuable, but rather degrade the value of everything else because of their existence.

What this project has turned out to be is a commentary on how we have continuously degraded, pillaged and plundered this Earth, a home not only for us, but for fish, microbes, animals, air, water and land. Saying no to trash has meant that I am saying no to consuming objects, and saying no to the extraction of materials that has gone into making those objects, and saying no to how the lives and ecosystems those materials have been extracted from have been negatively affected. It is plain to see these things; you do not need a degree in aerospace engineering to understand ecological harm, social harm, disrespect and tyranny. Sure others will say that good is coming out of our actions, and maybe to some extent there is, somewhere, for someone. But the world we live in is unequal, and where there is a winner, there is a loser. Maybe this loser doesn't have a face, a name, or a home, to you, and maybe this loser lives several thousand miles away. But that doesn't take away from the fact that there is a loser. Governments and organisations shy away from large-scale, sweeping action, because "we don't know all there is to know about what the problem is, and what the end impacts are going to be." In response to this, I would say that I do not need to continuously try to reduce uncertainties in our understanding of negative impacts - all that matters is that there is a negative impact. Negatively affecting the life of even one ecosystem or even one individual is still a negative impact. What if the person affected was you? What if you were the one that wasn't "fortunate" enough to be born in the most powerful nation in the world?

We live in a world where other people tell us what is good for us. Advertisers, marketers and corporations convince people that they are worthless if they do not buy into the frenzy that drives a capitalist society, and an increasingly capitalist world. At the same time they stamp on the voices of those who feed the frenzy - those working in the sweatshops, and those whose homes and forests are demolished so that we can live the way we do. To take a stand against this flies in the face on everything our society is founded on - excess, greed and violence. But how can one person's actions affect the machine of extraction, consumption and degradation? How can one person's actions change the mindset of organisations, institutions, governments and countries whose foundational ethics necessarily result in ecological harm? What is the least one person can do to affect the behaviour of these entities? The ideas that now commonplace and accepted, such as democracy and civil rights were once novel and lambasted. It is the action of individuals, most unnamed, that have forged societies that accept these values. Individual activism has always affected communities of people. We live in a world today of bitter political divide, with lofty rhetoric and little action. Barriers have been erected between people that cannot even guarantee the civility of discussion. Corporations add continual weight to these barriers, because their existence depends on the maintenance of the status quo. There can be no faith put in the supposed "goodwill" of corporations and large organisations, and there is continuously declining faith in the ability of our government to do anything at all. So who is left? You, me, and our idealism.