Picture an activist, or maybe just a human being. Pretend this person is disturbed by the close cooperation of government and industry, and recognizes the harm this cooperation does to the possibilities of democracy, unions, human rights, and a healthy natural world. Perhaps this person is deeply outraged by the atrocities—against both humans and nonhumans—committed by government and industry. How might this person respond to these atrocities?
Well, literally several times a week I receive emails from people telling me things like, “After all these years, it’s time for a change: I’ve left the conspiracy crowd, I’ve left the lectures on how I’m not taking action. I’m leaving the keyboard and it’s time to do something! I’m going out tomorrow and buying a large bin to start composting.” Or, “Instead of being so negative and trying to tear down those institutions you say are so destructive, we need to make the transformation fun, and help people remember what a joy it is to dance naked around the fire tripping on the beat of drums and the thirty-day fast we’ve just come off of. And gardening! It’s fun to reduce your carbon footprint! Stop being so negative, don’t forget to meditate, and start having fun!” Or, “My anti-war activism consists of chopping wood and carrying water.” Or, “I’ve been riding bicycles since 1958, and only take what’s absolutely necessary for urban survival (12-18 squares of toilet paper a day or even utilize unused napkins people threw away), building musical instruments from dumpsters, and if I can just convince more people to live like this. . . .” Or, “If we are to become truly enlightened beings, we need to learn how to accept the death of the planet and use it as an opportunity for spiritual growth.”
All of these responses are personal. None are political. They all probably feel pretty familiar. But now let’s go back to that activist we mentioned in the first paragraph. Pretend this activist lives not right now in the United States, but rather in Germany 1937 or 1942, or in Tsarist Russia, or under apartheid South Africa, or is an abolitionist in the United States in 1830. Would we think that gardening or “having fun” or reducing one’s consumption of toilet paper would be a political act sufficient to the situation at hand? Would any sane person think dumpster diving would stop Hitler, or that meditating would end slavery or bring about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would get people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would help put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? And why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely non-political “solutions”?
Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. We’ve been taught to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. Joe Hill’s famous, “Don’t waste any time mourning, organize,” has been turned on its head to “Don’t bum anyone out with the difficult and necessary (and rewarding) work of organizing, just be pure, and don’t forget to have fun!”
An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But it wouldn’t be true to say I loved that movie. Did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and did not point to corporate power, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Further, even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall only by 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide. Further, since the movie did not go after industrial capitalism, which requires a growth economy, even this “gain” would disappear within a few years: carbon emissions have recently been increasing by more than 3 percent per year.
Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than ninety percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining ten percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing humans. Municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.
Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale put it well: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them. Take our [sic] crazy energy consumption. For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution. I mean, sure, go ahead and live a responsible environmental life; recycle, compost, ride a push-bike; but do it because it is the right, moral thing to do—not because it’s going to save the planet.”
Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Yay! You’re featured on the front page of the local paper!
Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only three percent of total waste production in the United States. When you include industry, per capita waste production in the United States is more than 26 tons per year. All that work and your share of annual waste production is still greater than fifty thousand pounds.
I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but that’s primarily because I only buy stuff I want, and I don’t really want a lot (except I’d love to buy a lot of land to protect it, which would of course be analogously ineffective in the large scale to buying individual slaves to free them, which doesn’t alter the fact that I want to do it). But I don’t pretend that me not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change. It’s not a significant threat to those in power, nor to the system itself.
So how, once again, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double-bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and you can’t withdraw. Well, at this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternate” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we haven’t even had to give up all of our empathy (only enough of it to not stop the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. And unless we’ve found a way to leave the planet—which would be an odious abrogation of responsibility anyway—we can’t leave. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary, for a number of reasons, including, but not restricted to, the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power will kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world. None of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet: any option is a better option than a dead planet.
Making this bind even tighter is the fact that we’ve been systematically trained to identify more closely with industrial capitalism than with life itself, and to care more about industrial capitalism than about life itself. To convince yourself of this, simply contrast how much routine attention is paid to the height of the stock market versus that paid to the health of the natural world, and contrast the response by the government to the collapse of the economy versus that paid to the collapse of the natural world. Here’s a tangible example: a forty-year study of songbird populations recently revealed what we all know, which is that many are collapsing, as are so many populations of so many wild beings. Bobwhites, down more than 80 percent. Whippoorwills, down 70 percent. Boreal chickadees, 60 percent. Rufous hummingbirds, almost 60 percent. And the response in public by a mainstream environmentalist (Carol Browner, former head of the EPA, former head of Audubon, and current Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change) was to tell us this is not an emergency. I can guarantee that if the stock market or GNP declined 80 percent, we would constantly hear that this is an emergency. It’s a measure of the grotesque, irredeemable, and near-complete insanity of this culture that GNP is deemed more important than life, and more to the point, it’s a measure of how much most of us have been trained to identify more with the economy than with the real world.
So because we’ve been taught to identify more closely with the industrial economy than with life itself, the continued existence of the industrial economy must never be questioned, much less threatened. Further, since we must always be disallowed from realizing that the problem is the culture, not us (just as in any abusive situation all people must always be disallowed from realizing that the problems are caused by the abuser, not the victims), many of us make the very reasonable choice to “fight back” by decreasing our involvement in the industrial economy, by “living simply so that others may simply live.” So we eat less. We drive less. We don’t own a car. We take shorter showers. We live more and more simply. We feel more and more pure. The bottom line is that we are doing what we know we can control.
Living simply is a good thing to do. Sadly, it in no way stops this culture from killing the planet. In no way is it a sufficient response to this culture’s destructiveness. In no way is it a substitute for actively and effectively resisting actions and policies that harm our (and others’) habitat. That’s why I brought up activists living in Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and so on: in those circumstances we can easily see that personal simple living would have been insufficient to bring about social change. It can be much more difficult to see that when we don’t have the perspective history brings.
Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least five other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want). The first is that it seems a form of magical thinking, in that it substitutes private personal actions that accomplish very little in the real world, and a whole lot of wishing (“But if everybody lived simply . . .” they say, to which we can respond, “If we’re going to fantasize about everybody doing something, let’s fantasize about them demolishing the oil infrastructure to slow carbon emissions”) for organized (or solo) resistance.
The second is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase, in that it consists solely of harm reduction. The world is still a worse place than had you never been born, only this time it’s not quite as bad as it would have been had you not been so pure. But humans can help the earth as well as harm it, and simple living as a political act ignores this. Obvious examples: we can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.
The third problem, and this is another big one, is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who have been given no particular power in this system except their ability to consume) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself.
The fourth problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers, such that the “political acts” of the simple living “activists” are not the acts of citizens, with all the responsibilities citizenship implies, but are explicitly the acts of consumers. The 1980s were the first decade where the corporate media used the word consumers to describe human beings more often than it used the word citizens. But by accepting this redefinition, by perceiving ourselves primarily as consumers, we reduce potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a wider range of available resistance, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.
The fifth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive; and if we want to stop this destruction; and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and at least as importantly physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead. Partly because it’s true that the world would be better off without humans who do not actively attempt to stop industrial civilization from killing the planet. Or rather, that’s not quite true. Whether or not we “attempt” to stop this culture is irrelevant. Results matter, in this case. The world would be better off without humans who do not actively and successfully stop industrial civilization from killing the planet.
The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, apartheid South Africa, antebellum United States—who did far more than live simply, far more than manifest a form of moral purity, but who actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems of oppressive power.