Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Pissing in the wind: symbolic actions and the dangers of tokenism


There is some debate whether small symbolic actions are a useful "easy" first step to get people taking a little bit more responsibility for the ecological consequences of their consumption, or a distraction that serves to draw attention away from the true scale of changes called for and inoculate people against genuine repentance.

Now perhaps sometimes we need to take the steps that are currently available, while working towards those that are ultimately desirable. Perhaps for some people, learning to recycle is the start of a journey in which they awaken to the fact that there is no "away" to which we can throw things, and that all our actions take place within a finite planet on which the actions of seven billion (one billion of whom live better than ancient royalty) have serious cumulative effects.

Where there is a tension between the short term tactical victories and long term strategic goals, then it can sometimes be difficult to determine whether immediately obtainable harm minimisation ought to prevail or long term hopes. For instance, should we decriminalise the use (not production) of hard drugs and treat addiction as a medical illness in order to reduce the criminalisation of end users, or would this undermine the message that ultimately we hope for a society in which no one is addicted to dangerous substances? Alternatively, would attempting a too stringent ban on smoking tobacco lead to a long term backlash against such regulation and so undermine the short term gains in smoking it may achieve?

Where I'm currently at is that while on many topics the precise balance between tactical, currently possible steps and strategic currently impossible goals may be difficult to navigate, there are elements of the situation with regards to our ecological predicament that seem somewhat obvious (at least to me). As long as we are mainly talking about plastic bags, recycling and more efficient light bulbs, we've already lost.

The goal is not a society free of plastic bags, or one that recycles assiduously and ensures lightbulbs meet the latest standard. That is far, far too small. The goal is a society that is no longer destroying the conditions of possibility for its own existence (and the existence of the biosphere as we know it and all future human societies). Plastic bags are one relatively tiny piece of that puzzle. And so while it is right to wonder whether premature regulation of, say, plastic bags causes a backlash that is counterproductive, there are bigger fish to fry. To return to the smoking analogy, it's a little as though the entire discussion is whether it would be a good idea to raise the legal age of smoking to 18 years and one month (or some other very marginal action that might slightly alter smoking stats). Whether or not this would provoke a backlash may be a relevant consideration, but given the scale of the problem, the fact that so much energy is spent discussing what is ultimately a relatively tiny piece of the puzzle actually serves to leave the status quo intact.

Cultural change does often come in small steps under sustained and creative social pressure, but the long term goals need to be clear from the outset. We don't want to be pissing in the wind.

6 comments:

byron smith said...

Guardian: Plastic bags are a deadly distraction.

byron smith said...

Just to be clear - plastic bags kill,* recycling is (literally) a retrieval ethic and turning lights off when you don't need them (while using ones that will save money and energy) hardly needs to be "sold" at all. I'm not against these things, merely against seeing them as "bridging behaviours" that lead people into deeper engagement. Perhaps sometimes this is the case. Given the widespread apathy and paralysis on more important issues, I suspect even if it is true, it is way too slow.

*One in three albatross chicks, hatched in the middle of the Pacific 5,000 km from either the US or Japan, die from being fed too much plastic waste. Over 100 million tonnes of plastic are dumped each year and about six million tonnes finds its way into the oceans. That is something like eight million pieces of litter entering the world's waterways and oceans each day, and results in there being over 119,000 items floating on every square kilometre of ocean (many of them tiny enough to be invisible to the eye, but very tempting for fish and birds). Ocean pollution (mainly plastics) is estimated to kill more than a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles each year (plus an unknown number of fish). Due to plastic pollution and other threats, half the world's sea bird species are in decline. In some parts of the ocean, there are three to six kilogrammes of marine rubbish for every kilogramme of plankton. Globally, somewhere between one and three percent of all plastic produced is recycled.

Simon said...

Again agree 100% I first heard this line of thought from Derrick Jensen & which I now call feel good environmentalism. Combine that with techno-optimists, denialist etc then it gets even worse when we want to start talking about sharing the worlds resources. SOCIALISM!!

byron smith said...

Yes, I call this displacement tokenism, and classify it as a form of distraction (itself one of four d's that facilitate less than full engagement with our crises: denial, distraction, despair and desperation).

byron smith said...

This post was really just an excuse to post that M&W video, which I stumbled across yesterday in a discussion on a similar topic and found to be so perfect in its brevity and directness.

Simon said...

Yes I love it, just posted it on facebook.