Looking Back and Ahead

At the beginning of the semester, I knew that I was deeply interested in environmentalism, even though it didn’t seem to fit well with my other interests. I felt anxious about the general lack of interest the people around me seemed to have for environmental issues and I felt like environmentalism didn’t fit into my life as much more than a tangential interest. Before this semester, it sometimes seemed like there was nothing I could do to help the environment and I knew that there was no way to entirely avoid doing damage myself. My interest in environmentalism would be overshadowed by these feelings of helplessness and guilt and I would go through periods where I would try to ignore environmental issues altogether.

The things that I have read and discussed with my peers this semester have taught me that this emotional response (as well as a myriad of others) is perfectly normal. While this doesn’t make the emotions disappear, it reminds me that the people who make great contributions to environmentalism have likely overcome similar emotions. The next time that I feel overwhelmed by helplessness or guilt, I now have good reasons to muddle through the emotions, and not dismiss environmentalism to escape them. In fact, we read about specific examples of people that worked through debilitating emotions to bring groups of people to action. These experiences have also convinced me of the importance of collective action for affecting change.

Another, possibly more important, result of my studies this semester is a better understanding of how environmentalism coexists with the other interests in my life, mainly gained through the autonomy I have had writing this blog. Before, I could imagine the ways environmentalism related to things like computer science and feminism, but I never really studied the connections in any detail, so they still felt somewhat disjoint. Exploring environmentalism as an active part of my life instead of merely one of my many interests will also help me through the difficult emotions that caring about the environment can create. It has shaped the way that I looked at school this semester (like my feminist science studies class) as well as my future research goals as I go on to graduate school.

How I Choose Less Electricity

It’s been awhile since I talked about electricity, so you can re-read my first post here for a refresher on reasons to choose less electricity.

In an ideal world, everyone’s appliances would be the newer energy efficient models. This is a good way of saving a lot of electricity, but it isn’t feasible in many situations (including mine), so I won’t discuss that here. It is worth mentioning, nonetheless.

One of the best ways to use less electricity if you are not already paying attention to your power usage is to turn things off when you aren’t using them. This seems obvious and I do not say this to be condescending—it involves a lot more than turning off lights when you leave a room. This was something I thought I did a good job at, but once I started paying attention to my electricity usage, I noticed a few things that I was pretty careless about.

Whenever I finished using my computer, I was careful to put it to sleep and (usually) turn off the monitors, but I never bothered turning it off. Sometimes I don’t use my desktop for several days or weeks, let alone overnight, so this was a huge waste of electricity. Worse, I noticed that I had the habit of watching Netflix on television and pausing it for long periods of time to make dinner, do homework, have a conversation, etc.

Better than turning things off when you aren’t using them, you can choose to not use them in the first place. This is a much more difficult habit, I think, especially if you are trying to wean yourself off of things like air conditioning.

If you really want to minimize your electricity usage, you can also unplug appliances that use electricity when they aren’t turned on. For instance, televisions, video games, computers, and routers. Anything that doesn’t need to be on (refrigerators) and can go into standby mode or always has a light on is a good candidate. There is some debate about whether this really saves much electricity, but I figured that it wasn’t that big of an inconvenience for me to do either way.

Using electricity these ways was not difficult at all, but I still made a lot of mistakes. I often forgot to unplug my router when I went to sleep, or walked away from my computer and got distracted for several hours before remembering it was still on. I still absentmindedly pause Netflix to cook lunch or read the newspaper. But, even with all of my mistakes, I still succeeded most of the time.

I have not gotten my electricity bill yet, so I have no idea how much less electricity I used, if any. Either way, I am planning on continuing to choose to use less electricity. Unlike trying to minimize my water usage, this didn’t interfere with my life at all, so I see no reason not to continue.

More information about using less electricity can be found here.

What is “natural” and why?

This post explores 3 objects, the Mendenhall Glacier, Conveniently Natural meals, and Ginkgo trees, and how they relate to our understanding of nature, and what is “natural”.

Mendenhall Glacier

This is a picture of me and my fiance in Alaska. The extreme climate, sparse population, and popular stories like “Into the Wild” closely associate Alaska with wilderness. But what is “wilderness”, really?

William Cronon argues in “The Trouble with Wilderness” that wilderness, as we believe it, doesn’t now, and has never, existed anywhere. Many people believe that the wilderness is this untouched, uninhabited land, in need of preservation so that it may remain that way. This idea denies the existence of the people native to Alaska (as well as other places dubbed “wilderness”) as well as their, often forced, resettlement. Cronon points out that our pristine, empty wilderness is an illusion: we created it. Indeed, even this picture, taken in “remote Alaskan wilderness” is actually part of Tongass National Forest, an intensely regulated area designed to protect endangered plants and animals, and preserve the “natural” landscape. We look at this landscape and see trees, water, snow, ice, and conclude, “nature”, but if the “nature” is there because we ensure that it is, isn’t it just as much of a myth as the wilderness?

The glacier behind us is the Mendenhall Glacier. When you get closer to it, you can see that it is enormous, but it turns out that this enormous glacier is in retreat. Glacial retreat is accelerated by climate change, so it must be an unnatural process, right? As Mendenhall Glacier has retreated, ancient stumps and logs have been uncovered, revealing an ecosystem over 1,000 years old. So if we consider plants untouched and uninfluenced by modern technology and humans “natural”, this is about as natural as you can get. The Mendenhall Glacier and Tongass National Forest complicate our traditional understanding of what is classified as natural and why.

Conveniently Natural Meals

Conveniently Natural is a service that delivers “real food” to your door. You can purchase individual meals or buy meal packs that last a week. You can even subscribe to their service and get food every week. They offer discounts for meal plans and subscriptions, so it is obviously their intent that customers order a lot of meals, repeatedly.

In many ways, these meals are what people consider “natural” food. Their food is organic, made with no preservatives, free from antibiotics, hormones, artificial ingredients, and GMOs. Most of their recipes avoid added sugars or other excessive carbs.

Their meals look like this:

They come in plastic containers, and if you order a week’s worth of food you get several containers (10, to be exact). If you order for several weeks you get a lot of plastic containers. A lot of plastic containers. So, while the food is conveniently natural, this service consumes a lot of plastic; something most people would consider quite unnatural.

This is not to say that they are doing anything wrong. On the contrary, I think that this is a great service, and it says a lot about what is natural in our society. We still look at plastic and say, “that’s unnatural”, but it’s become such a ubiquitous part of our lives, whether we consider it natural or not, it is part of our environment now. This is especially apparent when a company so dedicated to serving healthy and natural food uses this much plastic.

Note: I should mention that all of these plastic containers are clearly marked for recycling. They are also marked reusable, dishwasher-safe, and microwave-safe. So, people that use this service can reuse the containers until they break, and then recycle them, making them significantly less harmful to the environment than some other food storage options.

Ginkgo Trees

Trees: natural, case closed. What a dumb example, McKenna. Yes. But what I actually want to talk about here is not the tree itself, but how it got here.

The Ginkgo tree is called a “living fossil” because it hasn’t changed much in millions of years—270 million years, in fact. Originally widespread across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the Ginkgo tree all but disappeared 3-7 million years ago, except from remote monasteries in China, where buddhist monks were cultivating them. Over time, they spread across Asia, Europe, and, eventually, to the Americas. Now, Ginkgo trees are fairly common. You have probably seen several of them. They are easily recognizable by their fan-shaped leaves, which look like this:

As a society, we often consider introducing plants to new environments an “unnatural” practice. We associate this behavior with “alien”, invasive species, ignoring the fact that many of the crops, animals, insects, etc. that we depend on are not native to the Americas, and were successfully integrated into the ecosystem. The Ginkgo tree further complicates this issue. Although introduced by humans to many ecosystems (unnatural), they originally populated regions across the planet (natural). And although millions of years passed before they were reintroduced to the ecosystems they originally inhabited (unnatural), they haven’t changed (natural), but the ecosystems have (unnatural), but they have integrated without complication (natural)… What if someone long ago identified this “foreign” species of tree as unnatural and rejected its integration into our environment? This tree is plentiful around the world now, what if it had remained the responsibility of a few monasteries to maintain the species? Would this “living fossil” still exist?

Our understanding of nature and what qualifies as “natural” is non-deterministic, and therefore problematic if we are using to evaluate our actions. We will have to critically reevaluate this concept as a measure of what is good, or right, for our environment if we want to truly be environmentally conscious. I think that we should adjust to include things that we traditionally consider “unnatural”, to better reflect what we actually find in our environment. This will allow us to take responsibility for the way we treat the “unnatural”, like indigenous populations, plastic containers, and non-native species.

 

The Trouble With Wilderness 

About the Mendenhall Glacier

About Conveniently Natural

More Information About Ginkgo Trees

This book has an interesting chapter about the problems with how we treat  alien species

Choosing to Involve a Community

I have struggled with ways to involve a community with my project. My efforts have largely (very nearly entirely) been individual. Partially, this is due to the nature of my project. My attempts to become more comfortable with using less (water, energy, etc.) by choosing to use as little as possible is entirely individual. I talk to people about environmental issues, but, otherwise, the community aspect of my project is limited to vague encouragements for others to examine their own consumption, as I have mine. Some people may do this, but it is not a very effective strategy for large-scale change. This post will explore another idea that I have had that relates to my project that would involve a much larger community.

In my feminist science studies class, we read an article about water conservation efforts in Salmon Creek, California. We were also lucky enough to have a Skype interview with the author, Dr. Woelfle-Erskine, who expanded on some of the points he made in the article. Some of the conservation efforts in Salmon Creek are individual. People know that during dry seasons, water will be less accessible, so they have gotten into the habit of taking their own measurements (of rainfall, for instance) to decide when to use less water. But they also participate in conservation efforts as a community. They discuss their measurements with their neighbors, they use all of the information they gather as a collective, to make the best possible decisions about water usage. Furthermore, people in this community believe very deeply in conserving water, enough that wasting water is a topic worthy of gossip, like a scandal. Part of the interest in water conservation in Salmon Creek is that water scarcity threatens local populations of salmon. At the same time, this is reflected in some of the residents opinions about water scarcity and the importance of water conservation. Field interviews revealed that some residents believed animals, not just humans, have a right to clean water.

The habits and opinions of these residents are not the result of well-orchestrated public service announcements, public lectures, or colorful pamphlets. These developments have arisen from the intimate relationship between resident, infrastructure, water, and environment. During our Skype interview, I asked Dr. Woelfle-Erskine how he thinks communities that are less intimately tied to their water can similarly mobilize in an effort to conserve water. This is a difficult task to accomplish, but he had some really interesting ideas. Dr. Woelfle-Erskine talked about some of the differences between Salmon Creek and more urban communities. For instance, people living in a city are a lot less likely to know where their water comes from (“the tap”) or where it goes after it is used (“down the drain”), unlike Salmon Creek, where residents know exactly where their water comes from. He said that educating people about where their water comes from (preferably by physically showing them) can be extremely helpful in this respect. Dr. Woelfle-Erskine also talked about the success that greywater (household waste water, except from toilets) recycling systems in urban settings. For instance, some suburban families that have had greywater recycling systems installed excitedly watch the system working, running outside to watch the water from their washing machine water their gardens.

These ideas made me think of other ways that I could involve groups of people in conservation from a different community: the workplace. At the end of every summer, I have an exit interview for my internship. The people I work for care a lot about creating a positive work environment as well as helping their employees pursue the things they’re passionate about. They have already made some efforts to be environmentally friendly. There are a lot of bins throughout the building for trash, recycling, and composting (with descriptions of what goes in each bin) and the on-site cafeteria uses compostable boxes for to-go food and utensils (in addition to the reusable ones). They encourage their employees to be healthy, and quite a few people bike to work. Their campus is rather large, with a lot of grass around the building, and a big garden. I think this would be a great place for other environmentally friendly programs.

Their gardens and lawns could benefit from a greywater recycling system. As a company that does a lot of software engineering, reminders to turn off computers overnight (or at the very least over the weekend) would be useful.

I am graduating this semester, so I will not be interning another summer. But, if I have another interview with HR, I will definitely mention these suggestions to them, as well as to future employers.

Link to article

Talking About Gasland

Last weekend, I watched Gasland with my mother, her husband, and my brother.

My brother is 19 years old. He is a freshman, also at K-State, and also studying computer science. He is extremely smart, especially at math, likes video games (League of Legends, especially), listening to interesting music, debating, and being sarcastic. We have a lot of things in common, but environmentalism is not one of them. When I was in high school, he often mocked me for my various efforts to be more environmentally friendly. Things have improved between us a lot since then,  but he still pokes fun at me when I try to talk about the environment (or most serious topics, for that matter).

My mom works at a bank. She took some college classes when she was younger, but never finished a degree. She is also quite smart and, unlike my brother, decently well-informed about important issues. Growing up, I really enjoyed having serious conversations with her about a variety of topics. Environmentalism is something we have always had some trouble talking about, though. I think she feels that it is disrespectful for a child to make lifestyle recommendations to a parent, so she can be very offended when I tell her that something she does is not environmentally friendly. I am hesitant to bring up environmentalism with her at all since our conversations about it did not go well, historically. I think a lot of these feelings also stem from guilt, but I am not sure.

So, given these conflicts of interest, it wasn’t exactly easy to convince them to watch the documentary to begin with. My mom repeatedly told me that she wanted to clean the kitchen instead and I had to convince my brother that watching videos on YouTube while he watched the film didn’t count as watching the film. Eventually, they reluctantly agreed to watch Gasland.

Right from the beginning, my mom was enthralled. She gasped, she shook her head in disbelief, and several times muttered, “I can’t believe this,” or, “I had no idea”. My brother was less emphatic. In fact, he fell asleep before the film was over.

Most surprising is how well my mom’s husband reacted to the documentary. They only recently married, and I don’t know him very well yet, so I wasn’t sure what he thought about environmental issues. When we began the film, he was outside working, so we were planning on watching it without him. He came inside a few times during the viewing and seemed even more interested than my mom. We paused often for him, catching him up on what he missed, and hearing his opinions on the issues being discussed. It turns out that he not only was interested in the film, he already knew a lot about the fracking process and some (but not all) of the associated risks. He seemed genuinely interested and concerned the more he watched the film. Eventually, he finished his work outside and was able to actively watch about half of the documentary with us. Even though he didn’t watch the whole thing, I noticed the next day that he had posted a Facebook status with a link to Gasland, saying, “Everyone needs to watch this”.

After the film and the next day, I talked to everyone about their reactions to the film. My mom talked about how surprised she was that people were experiencing these problems. We talked for a while about the various reasons that these people were being affected (living in remote, rural areas, some of them not having much money). She and her husband seemed perturbed by the loopholes that existed in the laws protecting the natural gas industries from the typical regulations that would protect the people and environment affected by fracking. My mom expressed a sense of helplessness and frustration. Typically when I discuss environmental issues with my mom, she seems disinterested or uncomfortable, so this type of emotional response was surprising, but really nice to see.

We talked in class about the efficacy of Gasland as a tool for informing and motivating change (as opposed to Fort McMoney, an online documentary video game). It was very well-received by my mother and her husband, so, for them, it was great. As difficult as it was to convince my mom to take 1 hour 45 minutes to watch Gasland with me, I can’t imagine that I could have gotten her to dedicate time to playing Fort McMoney which, for all of its good points, has a story that develops much more slowly than Gasland.

My brother had an interesting, and very different, perspective on Gasland. He understood, and agreed with, the message of the film. But, he thought that the way the ideas were presented was biased and a misrepresentation of reality. He thought that it would have been much more effective to show a variety of effects of fracking (positive, negative, and neutral). As much as he agreed with the message, he knew that there were plenty of people that would watch it and get stuck in the biased representation and miss (or deny) the point entirely. I was surprised how much thought he gave the film and that he participated in a serious discussion about environmentalism.

Soon after, my mom was talking about flat Coca-Cola being good for upset stomachs and my brother shouted from across the room, “Coca-Cola?! They’re big money! STOP FRACKING!” So, you know. He might not save the environment, but at least he has a new catchphrase.

Choosing Less Electricity: First Reaction

So far, trying to use less electricity is so much easier than my attempt to use less water that I’m actually feeling more disappointed in myself for not doing this sooner than I am feeling good for doing well. Part of this is due to the ease of measurement. When I tried to use less water, I quantified my efforts by measuring my water as I used it. This was fairly inconvenient when I did certain things like wash dishes. Electricity, on the other hand, is handily measured for me by Westar when I am billed each month. So I will not only have an idea of how much electricity I use when I am trying to use less, I will also know how it compares to my previous month’s usage.

This activity is also something of a psychological experiment. It will be interesting to see if I am actually doing as well at using less electricity as I feel that I am. Because I measured my water as I used it, I knew the entire time what activities I needed to cut back on more. I can speculate about how well I’m doing, but I won’t know until the end. It’s possible that the act of measuring as I went helped me more than inconvenienced me.

Choose Less Electricity, Choose Less Energy

“Remember to take all things in moderation (even World of Warcraft!)”
World of Warcraft, In-Game Tip

There are many reasons to reduce your electricity consumption. Electricity may come from many sources, but most of these are fossil fuels. In 2014, 67% of the electricity generated in the United States was from fossil fuels^[1]. You can see a more detailed breakdown of the energy sources below.

As we know by now, burning fossil fuels releases gases into the atmosphere that contribute to climate change. So, use less electricity, burn fewer fossil fuels, release fewer gases, and contribute less to climate change. This is a very important reason to reduce your electricity usage, but in this post I am going to focus more heavily on another reasons to reduce electricity usage: supply and demand.

We consume a lot of energy here in America. And it’s not just that we consume a lot of energy, and a lot more than we used to, per person. Below, you will find a chart of the electricity usage in the United States, per capita, over several decades^[2]. Clearly we are using a lot more electricity than we used to. But why is this such a problem?

Recently in my environmental anthropology class, we have been talking about how politics, capitalism, and social factors have worked together to ensure the success of fossil fuel industries, and create a system dependent on this success.

From Timothy Mitchell’s “Carbon Democracy”^[3], we learn that this began with coal in the 1800’s. Coal was a promising opportunity for humanity. In Great Britain, for example, by the 1890’s, coal was providing so much energy that obtaining the same amount of energy from burning wood would have required forests eight times the country’s area. Coal brought people together in cities because they didn’t need to live next to a forest anymore for energy. As populations became more concentrated in cities, coal brought many new industrial and manufacturing opportunities, and the newly freed land provided opportunities to expand agriculture. Coal initiated our dependence on fossil fuels.

Society had become so dependent on fossil fuels, in fact, that coal miners were given a unique source of power. If coal miners (or rail workers, for that matter) went on strike for better working conditions, improved pay, or greater job security, they were likely quite effective because the demand for coal was so high, they would do just about anything for it. This demand was so great, strikes even turned violent, like in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914.

Mitchell goes on to explain how our desire for oil was even greater than for coal. The United State’s demand for oil was so great that it justified covert CIA operations involving assassinations and organized coups to secure our access to oil in the Middle East. To keep oil prices and demand high, manufacturers began shifting their attention to options requiring more energy, pushing our society to be even more dependent on fossil fuels.

This well-orchestrated series of events seems inescapable. As much as fossil fuels have benefited humanity, most of us would probably agree that it doesn’t justify assassinating people that threatened our control of the oil economy. But it is our choice to provide the demand for the fossil fuels.

No—an individual using less electricity at home will not sufficiently decrease the demand for fossil fuels to effect any change. But if enough of us consider at what our leaders have done for fossil fuels, the violence and the manipulation, against citizens of other countries and Americans alike, if enough of us decide that we will not continue contributing to that system and prioritize reducing our fossil fuel consumption, we may, eventually, sufficiently change our demand enough that it is not in their interest any longer to go to such extreme measures for these non-renewable energies.

There is one simple rule that will help us achieve this goal, a rule that our society is especially guilty of forgetting: “take all things in moderation”.

[1] Energy Information Administration – FAQ
[2] Google Public Data Explorer – Electricity Consumption Per Capita
[3] Timothy Mitchell – “Carbon Democracy”

Choosing to Be More Critical

This week in my environmental anthropology class we are watching Gasland, a documentary about the people and places affected by natural gas industry practices, in particular, fracking. This documentary is available on Netflix and, while it is not a very feel-good film, I highly recommend it. A lot of information stood out to me, but what seemed especially interesting to me is that the fluid used for fracking (aptly named “fracking fluid”) contains many dangerous carcinogens and other toxic chemicals. And, worse, fracking is exempted from many important law protecting the environment, including the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act, so the people responsible for shooting these chemicals into our soil are not responsible for making sure that they are safe for our environment.

Also this week, I read an article for my feminist science studies class about breast cancer in which the author, S. Lochlann Jain, talks about the “pinkwashing” of breast cancer awareness campaigns. Similar to greenwashing in the environmental movement, pinkwashing describes the tendency of companies to “cover up their production of carcinogens” by slapping pink ribbons on their products and making a show of donating some portion (however small) of their profits to breast cancer organizations. She urges people to be more critical of these breast cancer awareness campaigns (ask yourself, “Is this benefiting the company more than the disease?”), but also points out another way pinkwashing occurs.

This idea goes further—Jain suggests that breast cancer awareness campaigns are pinkwashed not only because they mislead people into believing that the companies that are responsible for releasing carcinogens actually care about curing cancer, they also misrepresent the devastation that cancer wreaks on the people affected. These events are often optimistic, bright, and, of course, dripping with pink decorations, with “not one mention of illness or suffering or death [to] sull[y] the experience”. They focus on “a possible, vague, and presently unknown cure rather than disease”. They “pinkwash the experience of the disease” so that only the positive emotions are emphasized, “diffusing other kinds of emotion, rendering them illegitimate, or worse, making them into something illegible”.

Jain argues that people need to abandon this “pinkwashed” perception of breast cancer. Instead of attending pink events and test-driving a BMW because they donate a dollar every mile you drive (an event that Jain mentions repeatedly throughout her article), she suggests that we approach cancer like HIV/AIDS eventually was. HIV/AIDS went from being “a disease that no one seems to notice” to being “public and angry… taken on as a collective enterprise by people with social power”. Jain recalls Audre Lorde wondering, “what would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended upon Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?”

We have read many articles arguing that large social movements and mass collective activism is the best, most effective, way to take action on climate change. Jain seems to be arguing the same thing for fighting cancer (or at least its known causes). Fighting the industries responsible for incorporating carcinogens into our everyday lives is a tricky business. It’s not like people were purposefully denying the pollutants that cars release when they were first invented, they weren’t looking for them at all. But we can’t play the ignorance card any more. For a practice that involves pumping known carcinogens into the ground to gain popularity with all that we now know about cancer is nothing short of irresponsible. It is not an accident, it is not a bad habit we are inheriting, it is something we know is dangerous and we are choosing to do more.

When we watched this documentary in class, I felt enraged. How can people intentionally create so much harm and put so much at risk for money? And I wondered, when this is affecting so many people’s health, when this type of clear injustice is taking place, why are we (as a country) not all taking collective action?

I thought about my own reasons for not trying to organize something myself. For me, and I think for many other people, it comes down to not feeling directly affected by the problem. Much like people can feel like climate change is a distant issue, if you are not being directly impacted by fracking, you may think that is a distant issue, too. But if we really examine the implications of fracking, I think that we can see that it directly affects more of us than we thought.

For instance, releasing carcinogens carelessly is an attitude that affects us all. As Jain argues, we need to remember how devastating cancer is to the people affected by it. When companies carelessly throw carcinogens into the ground (and water and air), we should all make sure they know we are not going to accept that type of disregard for our health.

I think if we were all more critical of issues that don’t seem to affect us, we might realize that we are more affected than we thought, and feel more motivated to take action.

By the way, I am planning on watching this documentary with my family sometime soon. I will talk about their responses in the next week or two.

Documentary referenced (on Netflix): Gasland
Article referenced:  S. Lochlann Jain, “Cancer Butch”

Choosing to Talk and Listen

This is a continuation of my last post, beginning with a description of the people I worked with and the conversations we had, and ending the playlist we built together to describe my feelings about climate change.

Person #1 – my fiance and best friend. We are both interested in environmentalism and, while his feelings about it can vary, I know that he often feels similar to me about the issue. While we listened to “Moving On”, I asked him what he felt about climate change at that particular moment.

Him: I feel a lot of different things at a lot of different times…Right now, listening to this music, I feel acceptance. I hope the world finds some equilibrium after we’re gone, and that there is still a decent amount of biodiversity.
Me: Have you given up, then? You sound like you’ve just given up.
Him: I don’t know. It’s not about giving up. I think in terms of probability, and I think we will probably make the world uninhabitable for us. I think we should try, but I don’t have faith that it will work. Just because you don’t think something will work doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Plenty of climate scientists think both that it is already too late, and that we still need to do what we can, just in case there’s a chance.

He doesn’t believe the population we have right now is sustainable. Even if it does work out, we will have to part with a huge chunk of our population. My fiance talks matter-of-factly about difficult topics like this a lot. When I told him about the guilt I experience for my role in climate change, he compared it to the guilt a parent might feel about losing a child. “If you lose a child, you may be able to move past the survivor’s guilt eventually. But if it is your fault, you will probably never escape the guilt.”

Person #2 – my fiance’s mother. As I mentioned in a previous post, I knew already that she was interested in environmentalism, but she also works in a field that profits from coal and fracking, so I figured she would have interesting ideas to contribute.

We talked about what she thinks is preventing people from taking action on climate change. She thinks that everyone is selfish, and that increased self-awareness would help. She suggested having more open conversations in public spaces (e.g. Facebook) so people have reason to think about the effects their choices have. She expressed frustration with “Trump-like” people and “people who buy bigger cars because gas prices are low”—two topics common to many conversations between the three of us.

She also believes people feel overwhelmed by climate change. She thinks that people don’t feel like they can stop it. We talked about the idea that climate change is different from any other social movement because it necessitates both a massive collective effort and a profound economic overhaul^[1]. This idea especially resonated with her. She mentioned that “Coal and fracking are tied to job retention at my work, so I feel ambivalent about their success.”

The last thing that she said before we began listening to music was, “I continue to use plastic plates and cups at work, and every time I do it—every time—” she sighed, “I think, I shouldn’t do this.” Our conversation revealed that both my fiance and her mother sympathize with my negative feelings about climate change—the guilt, anger, and despondance. I also learned that talking about climate change is very easy with the right people, and especially when it is accompanied by a fun activity, like building a playlist.

Johnny Cash – Hurt
My fiance suggested this song because, to him, it describes the realizations that occur once we realize we are destroying our environment. Everything we know and enjoy is fleeting and not that important anyway and, in the end, we look back and wish we had just done things differently.

Harry Chapin – Cat’s in the Cradle
This song speaks to the feelings of guilt that we can experience both when we think about our participation in damaging the environment as well as if we pass on the cultural norms that make this participation possible.

Temple of the Dog – Hunger Strike
We liked this song because it is about choosing to go without instead of playing into a harmful system (“Blood is on the table / The mouths are all choking / But I’m goin’ hungry”).

Green Day – American Idiot
This rather angry song is a series of critiques about Americans, reflecting the anger that I sometimes feel about people not trying to fight climate change (as well as the desire to not be them).

Shaggy – Wasn’t Me
We initially thought of including this song as a joke, but realized that it actually is an accurate representation of the way that people deny human involvement in climate change despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

Smashing Pumpkins – Bullet With Butterfly Wings
This song represents the realization that feeling angry at people you wish would behave differently doesn’t help change anything (Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage).

Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah
This song reminds me of feeling apathetic and despondent after becoming jaded about something you once believed in—”all I’ve ever learned from love / Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya / … / It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah”.

Ingrid Michaelson – Be OK
Eventually, I get sick of feeling bad and I decide to put climate change out of my mind altogether (at least for a time) because “I just want to be okay”.

Glen Hansard – Lies
As my fiance’s mother noted, one of the best ways that we can work on climate change is openly talking about it. In order to do that, we need to “figure out what’s stopping us / From breathing easy, and talking straight”.

The Flaming Lips – Do You Realize??
Something else that would help us take action on climate change is approaching it with hope and positivity. Similarly, this song mentions very serious topics (e.g. “everyone you know someday will die”) from a place of acceptance, positivity, and hope.

Michael Giacchino – Moving On
This instrumental song was suggested by my fiance. It plays at the very end of the series finale of Lost and its tone matches the peaceful matter-of-fact way that he has accepted the idea that humanity will be significantly reduced to exist sustainably.

Sigur Rós – Takk + Glósóli
Also suggested by my fiance, these two songs remind him think of rebirth, and the idea that we can adjust, both socially and economically, to be more environmentally friendly.

 

[1] Naomi Klein – “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate”

My Emotions and Climate Change

This post depends a lot on a basic understanding of climate change and the threats it poses to our planet and its inhabitants. Below is a quick video from Bill Nye (the Science Guy), if you want more background information.

I go through cycles of caring and not caring about the environment.

Usually what sparks the caring phase is exposure to climate change facts. Personally, I don’t find it challenging to think about the devastation that could occur in the future or on the other side of the planet. I don’t think about it as a far-off problem that I (or my children or grandchildren) can consider later, when I think about the effects of climate change—I simply want to help. I also realize that many people have a hard time thinking about climate change for the same reason I am motivated.

However, as important as our proximity to climate change is, this overlooks what may be a more important detail: humans are the largest driving force behind increased greenhouse gas emission. Our role in the changing climate is integral to the Anthropocene—humans changing Earth’s global geology. This is the part that I struggle with most. Climate change is not for me to fix alone. Curbing climate change significantly will take a global effort.

When I feel motivated to fight climate change, I think about the massive devastation that it causes now to disadvantaged people (e.g., women, people of color, and the poor), and to everyone in the future. Margaret Klein explores emotions people experience thinking about climate change (namely anger, guilt, fear, grief, and apathy), arguing that experiencing these emotions may inhibit action^[1]. I agree. While I generally feel motivated to fight climate change, I also feel guilt about my contribution, as well as anger toward people (including myself) who don’t care enough.

Roy Scranton explains that the Anthropocene poses a challenge to our very way of life^[2]. To fight climate change, we all have to be willing to change our collective lifestyle. But this seems like a frustrating, losing battle. People make selfish decisions, even when they know the consequences, and I am just as much at fault as everyone else.

I still feel motivated to make better, footprint reducing, choices and encourage others to do the same, until, eventually, I rationalize that my efforts are useless. No matter how hard I try, I cannot convince everyone to change, or even to try. I then feel apathetic and despondent until I put climate change out of my mind. Like Kari Norgaard observed in her studies of climate change response in Norway^[3], I eventually choose to put environmental issues out of my mind for a time to protect my feelings and behave as expected. Being angry at everyone for not participating in what I also sometimes feel is hopeless is not socially appropriate.

This cycle (caring → guilt → anger → apathy) is the story that my playlist tells. At the end, I also explore how people like me can escape this cycle. In my next post, I will introduce the playlist itself as well as the people who helped me build it.

[1] Margaret Klein – “Are Our Emotions Preventing Us From Taking Action on Climate Change?”

[2] Roy Scranton – “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene”

[3] Kari Norgaard – “Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life”