I fell upon this article the other day, which details nicely what steps you can take as an individual to reduce your carbon footprint and your overall ecological impact on this planet. One sentence specifically inspired me to write this post: "Individual action is ultimately the most powerful tool you’ve got, from how you treat yourself, to how you treat others, to how you treat the earth". Although full of good tips, that made me wonder: is individual action really the most powerful tool we have to save the earth?
I'm sorry to say, but 1) this is simply not true and 2) I should hope not.
Disclaimer: my objective here isn't to say that her arguments are invalid. The advices she puts forward are great - I don't agree with the fact that we should focus on this while patiently waiting for governments and businesses to be ready to shift their behaviours in a state of climate emergency. That said, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do anything either; every little counts - but every little thing you do won't change the catastrophic course we're on.
The mythical power of individual action
The number of results you get when you search "How to save the planet" in Google is baffling (I use Ecosia instead of Google - it's a search engine that plants trees for each search). Most solutions are focused on individual action: how to conserve water at home, use fewer chemicals when you clean, volunteer to help clean up areas around your home, reduce your waste, recycle etc, etc, etc.
While these ideas are all very worthwhile and I am completely backing them as I adopt most of them myself, they will not save our planet. We are focussing on the wrong foe here: we are making consumers feel guilty for a problem that is led and driven by corporations and governments' laissez-faire.
Let me be clear: taking your reusable bag to the supermarket nine times out of 10 won't stop plastic production; driving in an electric car won't stop Total or Shell to dig into the ground to extract oil; eating organic vegetables rather than conventional ones (full of pesticides and GMO) will only change mildly the course of our industrial agriculture. These actions are going to help a little bit; they support to shift the consumer demand and therefore nudge the offer. However, we have to remember that corporations nudge us and not the other way around.
Consumer vs citizen
Our debate is focussing on what we can do as individuals because we live in a system (neoliberalism and free-market capitalism) where individual action is key to economic growth through free markets, which means markets with minimum government and citizen intervention. However, climate change and other environmental issues don't quite fit into market-based solutions: we try (with the Emissions Trading Systems in the European Union for instance) and it fails, because climate change can't be fixed by what triggered it in the first place.
To provide you with some perspective, I'm sharing this baffling statistic that I learnt from the podcast Sois Sage et Parle Fort (French speakers, I highly recommend it): if the totality of French people (about 67 million people) were adopting a zero waste lifestyle it would save 583 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. That's great.
But do you know much CO2 Total (the main French oil company) produces in a year?
6. billion. tonnes.
That means that Total emits each year 12 fold what the totality of French people could save if they all changed their behaviour toward a more ecologically-responsible lifestyle. To give you another example, The Coca Cola Company produces 3 million tonnes of plastic packaging a year, which amounts to 108 billion bottles while scientists are now fairly certain there is will more plastic than fish in the ocean in 2050. Alongside this, we make people feel guilty because they don't recycle properly (which is confusing in itself, as manufacturers don't clearly put on packaging if they're recyclable or not).
I think we need to get real here for a minute.
Individual action will never get us where we need to be as fast as we need action to take place. It's also needed, but it has to remain a by-product, a complementary action alongside much bigger change that needs to happen at the global, corporation and government levels.
Climate change and other environmental issues don't quite fit into market-based solutions because climate change can't be fixed by what triggered it in the first place.
We need system change
We need to change our economies so they don't rely on extractive industries such as oil and gas.
We need to change our relationship to success (which you can read further about in my article on success here) and redefine success outside of consumerism.
We need to understand that political action is necessary, and that changes are needed at government level, to influence corporations.
We need to adjust the legal system, so polluting the earth becomes illegal.
We need to stop pretending that we can be green by not changing our lifestyles: we are going to have to step down on producing and consuming. Consuming at the same pace, even ethically made stuff, won't help.
We need radical action at the government and corporate level.
And we need to stop making individuals feel guilty for not taking their reusable bags to the supermarket.
