Why real environmental action is so hard

...and the deceptive nature of the techno-capitalistic system

Over the past decades, you may have heard of endless environmental movements: recycling, solar power, land and sea protection treaties, becoming more sustainable, and other such buzzwords. Yet, we see that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere just keeps goin' up.

Why exactly is it so hard to do anything about it? Lots of people have given reasons: Corporate greed, developing nations wanting to become as rich as America, Republicans, and even the fact that it's just the end of times. And perhaps some of those reasons are true. But I'd like to take a slightly different viewpoint, which is a bit more psychological.

Let us examine the difficulty of environmental action from a different perspective. Photo © Jason Polak

To understand it, we have to understand that although there are many different societies in the world, we are now at the point where we're all connected and immersed into a global, capitalistic-consumerist society. It is a fundamentally destructive and exceptionally violent one that condones genocide against nonhuman beings for advancement.

This leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance, or in other words, a serious amount of mental tension because fundamentally, we don't really want to be as bad as genocidal dictators and yet as a species, we are. Full stop. Individually, we were born into this system, but let's get over that and have a rational discussion, shall we?

At the same time, the global capitalistic system can be viewed as an evolutionary framework where the capabilities of rapid communication allow ideas to flourish. But these ideas are not always good ideas: often, they're just ideas that net immediate profit and promise rewards that people follow because their instincts tell them too. It's not much different than birds going after poorly-nourishing human food even though they should be eating seeds.

The consequence of this is extremely important: mechanisms and ideas have evolved within the global capitalistic system that ease the pressure on the system, that in turn results from people experiencing an immense amount of cognitive dissonance. In fact, at every turn, your ideas and efforts to do something good in this world are influenced and evaluated based solely on whether they can further global consumerism. In other words, if your ideas are not helping manipulate people to buy more shit that they don't need, then go home, no one cares.

That means that in order to fight back and actually do something, we need to evaluate carefully every means available to us and understand whether an action is truly good or whether it's just working because "capitalism wants it to work".

Take solar power. Yes, it "feels good" to us, but why does no one ever talk about the devastating mining require to make solar panels, or the fact that if we've got more ways to make energy, then we'll use even more resources to keep the economy going? Will solar just be a stopgap that allows us to burn a little less fossil fuel for now so that we can keep “the economy” going, business as usual? More cheap junk shipped right to your doorstep and more working way too hard just so you can afford that million dollar home, yes sir!

Science is another great example. Do you believe science will save you? Yes, science has given us all sorts of cool inventions. We see new products all the time, sure. But why has science not given us anything concrete to actually reduce CO2 and stop environmental destruction? Well, for one, science goes forward because of consumerism and capitalism. In fact, science has at least two functions in keeping consumerism and unsustainability alive: first, it provides and endless stream of highly educated people that are perfect cogs for furthering the advancement of destructive technology, without which we would never have created an environmental disaster.

And second, science provides a new religion to believe in: yes, science will save our souls. It provides an refuge for the layperson and scientist alike: regular ol' folk believe that science will come up with a solution to climate change and scientists can bury their head in the sand, thinking that collecting more data and learning more will somehow convince everyone to stop driving cars.

True, science does good work in understanding the environment, but sadly, we already know what to do and we just can't bring ourselves to say so: we must move away from our dependence on industrial society. People that say we can have traditional prosperity and sustainability are lying or deceived themselves.

What we can do is move our manufacturing to some developing country, protect a few hundred species, build a few local gardens, dismantle a few dams, install a solar panel, and recycle a plastic bottle. It may feel good, but that ain't sustainability. That's global capitalism, providing you with a painkiller.

There's really only one conclusion: industrial society and global capitalism has gotta go. That doesn't necessarily mean going back to being cave dwellers or forest people, but it does mean some more serious changes that involves less industrially-produced products like cars and yeah, I hate to say it, digital cameras.

In truth, I don't know what it means, but at least I have the guts to say it: we're killing the biosphere, and we've got to make some changes beyond the system. I don't know where the changes will lead, but in the deepest depths of my heart, I know it will be better than the modern industrial machine that won't stop until the earth is a wasteland.