A Little Commitment

(I know it’s kinda long but read till the end..)

Sometimes I feel like we make this whole environmentalism thing a bit too complicated. We read articles upon articles, figuring out the Anthropocene and trying to find the “answers” of how to deal with it. And there’s not much wrong with that, considering how enlightening I’ve found the first part of this class, but sometimes I feel that a better intellectual understanding of these issues doesn’t always tightly correspond with better environmental choices in the real world.

Let’s use myself as an example. Last week I read in McKenna’s shocking blog post: “In reality, 95% of our water usage is in food production, and not in our home. One pound of beef requires around 2,500 gallons of water. That’s about the same as one bath every day for two years.”

Shortly after that, I read Madi powerfully advocating for grass-fed beef in her blog: “I am simply bringing up the point that we have the power to choose what we eat. We don’t have to eat meat that is full of antibiotics. We choose to though, because it convenient.”

And what did I do after that? I felt rushed, went by a Chinese restaurant and got a beef dish (that was most likely corn-fed) and didn’t think much of it. I had all of the facts in front of me telling me that, if I was being honest with myself, I SHOULD be a vegetarian in the name of sustainability. But somehow I was okay with keeping this “should” in my mind’s ethical understandings and leaving it out of my real life, the life that contains all of the real habits which actually contribute to our environmental crisis. That said, I wanted to show a little commitment; today I decided to become a vegetarian. I will be a vegetarian for at least the rest of the semester, and I might periodically give a few updates on the blog.

So you might ask, how does this relate to your blog idea about “Cultivating Conversation” anyway? Well, first off, I may make life decisions which I find to be good choices but which aren’t directly related to the blog. However, lifestyle changes are often accompanied by conversations, so this actually does tie into my idea. Just today, three people at dinner looked at me side-eyed and asked “You’re a vegetarian now? Why?”

My response mentioned that although I know many people do this for ethical “I shouldn’t be eating another living thing” reasons (and those are compelling), my reasons are something different: environmental sustainability. Their eye-brows raised like there were jetpacks strapped to them (well that might be a bit extreme but, ya know, they raised). I recited the factoid about one pound of beef requiring about the same amount of water as one bath every day for two years. They were surprised, and we had a discussion about climate change. They mentioned the importance of recycling and one resident, who didn’t know where the recycling services were, seemed to commit to recycling like the other two. Whoa, I had no intention of starting a conversation about recycling and all this just happened. That taught me something valuable: the more that one’s beliefs manifest in one’s external lifestyle, the less deliberate conversations need to be (in many cases).

The conversational aspects aside, the main point of this post is not to convince you that you SHOULD become a vegetarian. The point is directed at those people, like me before this decision, who already believe that they SHOULD become a vegetarian and yet have simply not committed to acting on this belief. This logic also applies for all other places where the gap between “shoulds” and reality exists — but don’t let that overwhelm you. For example, I am not necessarily going to ride only my bike around Manhattan or wash myself with a bucket because I know that I should — these admittedly petty issues of “convenience”, when accumulated, do hold some weight when it comes to the realistic side of our day-to-day lives, after all. However, one cannot simply ignore the chasm between the “ought-to’s” and the real world, because sometimes the only difference between the two can be a realistic and perfectly reasonable level of commitment.

So I could string together some academically-informed, intellectual understanding of climate change, but almost all of actual change will come with something much less profound. It will come with commitment, which might sometimes mean a bit of inconvenience, to lessen the gap between the well-reasoned “ought-to’s” and the life you go back to after reading this.

Now I feel like breaking the fourth wall on my ending note, so here goes — many of the people reading this are in an environmentalism class. I know this might be super meta, but I think acknowledging the context of these blog posts is important. And even though the class is designed to include community outreach and all kinds of real-world interactions, a class, by its very nature, has particular limitations. It may hold plenty of valuable intellectual understandings and changes in sociological/moral imagination, but, like I mentioned in the beginning, sometimes the action-based real-world correspondence may be missing. To use my personal example once more, a class could contain reasoning to be a vegetarian, but a class does not tell someone to be a vegetarian — it is not the class’s duty, it is not within its power. In the most extreme case, a class can extrinsically motivate you to do something in the real-world if the real-world interaction is part of a graded assignment, but even then it allows you to engage with reality in the manner and location of your choosing. So, these are inherent limitations of a class. . . Or are they? What if it could be something more? What if the students in the class could close the gap between the “ought-tos” and the real-world together, with each other’s help? What if I issue an invitation (HINT HINT THESE ARE NO LONGER RHETORICAL QUESTIONS I’M LITERALLY ISSUING AN INVITATION) to anyone else in the class — anyone who thinks they SHOULD be a vegetarian but is not due to an understandable lack of commitment — to become vegetarian with me? If people would accept that invitation, then it would do more than promote very environmentally-friendly lifestyles — it might change what a class is capable of doing.

Yeah, you. Think about it.