Individual "sins" and collective action

Whether you recycle plastic really doesn't matter.

Posted by David Roberts at 4:18 PM on 25 Apr 2005

I've been mulling over this "environmental confessions" business. I get that it's fun and light-hearted and I shouldn't take it too seriously. Horrible me, sometimes I don't recycle the kenaf-paper my peasant-collective-raised free-range hand-fed weekly-massaged organic beef comes in! Ha ha, I feel better.

But if there's one thing my two readers expect, it's dry, ponderous posts on subjects of soul-crushing weight, so who am I to deny them?

My thoughts on the matter are captured by this excellent comment from reader greenmark. Read the whole thing, but here's the main bit:

So, while you are spending an hour agonizing whether or not you should by the chlorine free office paper, the 100% post-consumer content paper, the kenaf-based, hemp-based, or whatever based paper, consider instead spending that hour instead meeting with the store manager to ask why the store doesn't offer more green products; or, working with your office manager to institute a greener procurement policy at work; or, working with your city council member to adopt a greener purchasing policy for the city. Or, setting up a meeting with your state representative to discuss a sustainable forestry initiative in your state.

Exactly.

A humane, sustainable human society is not an individual undertaking. It cannot succeed solely through individual willpower. Already our culture works to atomize us, to make us feel like islands of consumer desire whose sole function is to accumulate as much as possible. It discourages us from thinking of ourselves as involved in communities that impose obligations and responsibilities. But if it is to mean anything substantial, a new ethic of sustainability must be collective. It's going to be about community, about our mutual bonds and mutual care.

Whether or not you recycle your plastic makes not one tiny iota of difference in the grand scheme of things -- really, it doesn't. If our society's survival rests on individuals' ability to refrain from easily-available ecological sins, we are screwed. It's the infrastructure that matters: the laws, the economic relationships, the physical structures we inhabit. To use some righteous hippie language, it's the system that's gotta change, maaan. We have to establish a system in which it's easy and natural for people to live sustainably.

Carl Pope takes up this same theme on his blog:

This, I realize, is the most insidious fruit of the corporate counterattack on environmental ethics. A responsibility that should be a matter of taking care of our common communities and our common resources is instead something we have been led to believe we can fulfill in the "privacy" of our own houses.

No. We can't. Do the right thing -- I would never discourage it -- but your little slip-ups are not "sins." You are not responsible for our ecological situation; that's a collective responsibility. What matters is that we, as a culture, make things more thoughtfully, distribute them more thoughtfully, and consume them more thoughtfully.

For story: Individual "sins" and collective action
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Supply the penance

Dave,

The SINS send-up was a fun and productive exercise. Thank you for it. It illustrated the difficulty of living green, and it also showed -yes it did- just how loosely we greenies hold our own values.

Why was this not the lesson?

Greenmark made the same point in an expansive, contrarian and kill-joy sort of way, but you and Carl seem to have taken the argument a flawed step further and have marginalized the whole idea of personal responsibility. This is typical of Carl, who's happier beating the commons with a stick than looking within for change, but I expected better from Grist.

Rather than letting us off the hook by telling us personal responsibility doesn't really matter, a wiser, more considered (and more interesting) approach would be for Grist to use SINS as baseline to measure its readership, and to use SINS as clarion call for us all to go deeper greener.

It's not too late. Supply the penance.

by Caleb Ewing at 8:55 PM on 25 Apr 2005

I am not alone then...

I tend to agree with your other reader. I did not partake in the sins discussion, fearing I would be labled a party pooper. If I had, it would have looked something like this:

Are the ideas of sustainable living and recycling no more than guilt assuaging self deceptions doing little to preserve biodiversity, and worse yet, are they diverting resources from solutions that would have far greater impact?

For example, to put residential paper recycling into perspective; I consume one 8-inch diameter x 42-foot long tree per year for my "household" paper uses. In other words, I consume in my "household" enough paper to consume one tree that is about the size of a small telephone pole per year. By recycling, I can reduce the diameter of that tree by 1.5 inches to 6.5 inches in diameter. Now, this is conservative because a lot of paper pulp comes from small trees, branches, and scrap wood, the parts that are not useful to the lumber mill that are sent to the paper mill.

Where did I get those numbers? From a spreadsheet I just made. I weighed the paper in our recycle bin and that in our trashcan (a family of four, two adults, two teens) and extrapolated that we use 700 lbs. per year "in our house." I used a ratio of 2.75lbs. wood to manufacture one lb. paper, density of wood =33.087 lbs./cu-ft, and simply calculated a tree volume.

To recap:

I can reduce the diameter of the tree I used for paper "in my home" from 8 inches to 6.5 inches by recycling.
I can save 3, 7, 10, 20 trees "per year" by preventing just one unwanted pregnancy in my lifetime (over half of US pregnancies are unplanned) by giving to a women's reproductive rights organization (you pick how many trees a year you want to believe are used by an American or whoever for all purposes, not just paper).
I can save about 10,000 trees a year by giving an annual $500 donation to a conservation organization that could use that money to preserve roughly 20 acres of rainforest.

The deforestation occurring in the tropical rain forests is mainly due to population pressure. In the world's under-developed nations, more than 90 percent of the deforestation occurs because of the demand for increased agricultural land and/or firewood. Over half of the wood harvested in the world is used for fuel, mostly for cooking and domestic heating. Very little wood for paper pulp comes from rainforests. When you recycle your paper, you are using fewer trees from a tree farm, not preserving an intact ecosystem in a rainforest somewhere.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 9:11 PM on 25 Apr 2005

collective effort

If more people realized the importance of eating low on the food chain (stopping eating animals), then eating out would be a lot nicer for us vegetarians. In the city where I work there are exactly zero vegetarian restaurants. The hardest thing about being vegetarian is that there are so few of us.

As a vegetarian, compared to my previous diet, I save about 400,000 gallons of water & an acre of trees per year. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone did that?

by Pandu at 9:14 AM on 27 Apr 2005

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