"Convivial environmentalism"

Dom Bettinelli brought to my attention last night a great piece by Bill McKibben in the current National Geographic, about the future of the environmentalism. Unfortunately it's not available online. Anyway, in the essay McKibben talks about how profoundly global warming is affecting the planet, and says that the environmental movement is not handling the crisis properly. He says we need to start thinking of our economic decisions in a new way: "We need to stop asking, Will this make the economy larger? Instead, we need to start asking, Will this pour more carbon into the atmosphere."

He writes that we need to change our sense of "identity and desire," not out of fuzzy idealism, but our of "pure pragmatism" -- that is, we cannot keep living in ways that pump so much carbon into the environment. We can make small but important changes. For example, he says, it takes enormous amounts of energy to transport fresh fruits and vegetables from wherever they're growing to parts of the country and the world where they're out of season. What if we learned to eat whatever was in season locally, and to be satisfied with that? Similarly, proposes McKibben, what would it take for us to learn to be satisfied with houses that are not big, but big enough?

It would require, I think, a movement that takes people's aspirations for good and secure and durable lives seriously. That takes those desires more seriously even than the consumer economy has taken them. We would need a kind of cultural environmentalism that asks deeper questions than we're used to answering.

How deep? Here's a data set just as interesting as the ongoing spike in planetary temperatures -- and almost as depressing. Since researchers started trying to measure such things in the years after World War II, the percentage of Americans who consider themselves "very happy" with their lives has remained steady, even though the material standard of living has nearly tripled in the same period. More stuff is not making us happier -- but we can't break out of the cycle that offers more stuff as our only real goal.

McKibben says that researchers are finding that what really makes people happy is a sense of community -- but the hyper-individualized way we live not only makes us unhappier, it pumps more carbon into the environment. McKibben writes about how his experiment to see if he could live through a Vermont winter eating only what was available locally at his farmer's market proved that not only was it feasible, but he made "dozens" of new friends by getting involved in the farmer's market. He concludes by saying that we need to be thinking of similar ways we can live better, together. He concludes:

Environmentalism has often been a somewhat grim business. (There is, after all, plenty to be grim about.) But a convivial environmentalism, one that asks us to figure out what we really want out of life, offers profound possibilities. Perhaps the most important of those possibilities is a new link with communities of faith in this country. Though they don't always live up to their ideals, churches and synagogues and mosques are among the few institutions that can posit some idea for human existence other than accumulation. ...It's precisely [the] ability of religious leaders of all stripes to see individuals as part of soemthing larger than themselves that's so important. And also their commitment to taking care of the needy, because of course there are lots of people in the world who aren't rich. If we can't help them figure out some path to dignity other than our hyper-individualism, the math of global warming will never work.

We don't need to erase individualism; it is one of the glories of the American character. But environmentalists desperately need to learn how to celebrate community, too.