Everything wrong with Earth Week

Let me start by confronting the obvious constraints here: Earth Week and the like are not evil concepts, they generally operate out of a desire to do some good. Also, I have little time to commit to this argument. However, amidst all my facebook invitations to earth balls, and earth parties, I feel the need to expound on the few troubling aspects of this new earth friendly sentiment we're all adopting.

Relax.
I am not a raving fatalist - some religious fanatic who believes that climate change is judgment day, and is thus inevitable. Neither am I some conservative freak who treats science like a movie based on true events. I understand climate change to some degree. I am university educated, and I'm told that counts for something. However, I think that what we're doing to solve climate change is micro-managing. Micro managing rarely works in the business world, I don't expect it to work for the world-world. We are being told, by and large, that we all have to 'do our part' to solve this 'environment problem', which, although being true, puts us in a position to slight climate change, but hardly takes the problem seriously enough to stop it. Essentially, we are being duped. These commercials, funded by the government and some private corporations, put the burden squarely on the shoulders of the voters and consumers. I guess that's what we should expect. Our notion of I, informed by hundreds of years of capitalist methodology, turns us into solipsists. Our ideas on success and responsibility have morphed - I think a good analogy of these warped ideas comes from the world of sport.

Prof. Mark Kingwell, in his book Practical Judgements, discusses how capitalism and modern political theory in North America has infiltrated sport. Only a short time ago, when the media asked professional athletes about losing they were, for the most part graceful. They responded with common, rehearsed maxims like " it's not all about winning", or "I thought we played well, we've learned a lot from this loss". The climate has changed now (aha), the doctrine has shifted and losing is far less acceptable. The new maxims are "I will be better", and "losing is not an option" - we live in an era where winning is everything. Also, in the new sportworld, or at least its media face, is admittedly less team oriented. There is more emphasis on the abilities of a few key players. Quite simply, we live in a time where when Cleavland and L.A play this NBA finals (which they will), it will be Lebron v. Koby. The media will divide two whole teams by their best players - they will simplify the playing field. This is what we are doing with climate change.

The environment has been weighed down with the debris of centuries of industrial empire all over the globe. Although the consumer has been careless and wasteful, we've impacted the total environment much less than the natural resource industries, or companies that drop waste in the ocean, which has resulted in a trash island the size of Texas. We've lost the team mentality. We're being told that we, the star players, should be better and we should not accept failure, we must take responsibility for the group's mistakes and pick up the proverbial slack. Ultimately, this is laziness on the part of the public and private sector, who can, by pushing this burden on the consumer, maintain the status quot.

Why do people like these kinds of theories?

It is easier to put in place a system that, in theory, allows for individual citizens to succeed in whatever goal, with prime efficiency, and when they fail, we can say it's their fault exclusively. Large scale planning, however, insures that the system that is put in place benefits the most people, although perhaps to a lesser extent. For a problem like the entire environment though, large-scale plans have the necessary capacity to make significant gains. Consolidation and sacrifices made by those who have the greatest, most detrimental effect on the environment will make for better handling of climate change. In the face of these real attempts to stop what is virtually the end of the world, earth parties seem kind of laughable.

Peace,
from the war zone,
Jesse.