Our buried eco-conscience
A couple of disheartening news headlines I came across recently have wedged themselves in my mind. The first was concerning a new report from the UN about our cavalier destruction of the world’s wilderness, and how it’s a crisis at least as troubling as the related one of climate change. One of the major causes is land conversion for farming. The second was a link to an article about a BBC nature documentary of said destruction in Borneo, with an orangutan attempting to fight a bulldozer (can we make him a special envoy to the UN?). I have to admit that I chickened out of viewing the clip and just read the article. While animals suffering from the encroachment of humankind is nothing new to nature films, such a dramatic tableau has never been shot, or at least has never made it past the editing room of a widely-viewed feature, and now we know why: the accompanying article noted how many British viewers were moved to tears by the scene. Credit to David Attenborough and the BBC for including it.
The destruction of our natural world is tragic, and our globalized economic system that demands it is monstrous. At the moment I’m typing on a device, a fruit of that system, whose eventual discarded remains (e-waste) are highly problematic. The Philippines are having such trouble with it that they recently threatened Canada with war unless it takes back the e-waste sold to them. Eggs in Ghana are causing birth defects due to poisons found in built-up e-waste imported from Europe. So, am I a monster? By even reading this you must be using an e-waste-contributing device as well, so are we monsters? I immediately feel defensive. I need this machine for a number of trivial functions, but also important ones that are all but necessary to live in our society. And come on — New York City puts thousands of ad-riddled TVs into taxi cabs that no one was asking for (oh great, the touch screen is broken and I can’t turn it off…), but I’m the bad guy for having a laptop?
The best answer I can work with that doesn’t overwhelm me with guilt and despair is that our system is monstrous — but we, as individuals, are not. None of us has the clearest ideas on how exactly to change this intricate system, but we know wrong from right when it’s in our faces. That rarely happens in privileged circles, but show people an orangutan fighting a bulldozer, and they know how to feel. This kind of feeling is just the surface, and I believe there’s a much deeper well of ethical obligation in people towards the world that goes (deliberately) untapped.
That orangutan’s habitat was most likely being destroyed for the sake of palm oil, which is used for myriad products ranging from cookies to makeup. The contradiction between the savagery at work and the fluff for which it’s carried out is staggering. I believe that most of us on the receiving end of global supply chains’ Oreos and Revlon lipsticks would gladly take a price hike or even go without if asked, regardless of a heart-tugging orangutan video. You’d have to be some kind of jerk not to, right?
The problem is that such measures are never asked of us in an economic system that prioritizes growth and superfluous consumption. In one rare instance, a bone-headed corporate executive in 2012 did ask, albeit unintentionally, and got a more human answer than he bargained for. When Papa John’s CEO announced in 2012 that they were grudgingly hiking the price of pizza by 11–14 cents due to the added cost of Obamacare, many were quick to tell the company off via social media, saying that they were glad to take up that cost, because again, what kind of jerk wouldn’t? That back-and-forth revealed clearly that the jig is up: despite being swept up in an in an all-encompassing tide of consumerism, Americans won’t penny-pinch away their humanity if clearly presented with the stakes. If an 11–14 cent hike on pizza for healthcare was a no-brainer, then it’s far from a foregone conclusion that people would definitely oppose taxing or banning other products for the environment, if they were asked.
We are never asked. I applaud people who are not waiting to be, boycotting unethically sourced products and the like, and that tactic has worked in other cases, most famously apartheid South Africa. But the change we need now is at a systemic level, and that responsibility is squarely in the purview of government, which is the only entity that can swiftly implement the policies we need. And so we find ourselves in a strange position, where it is incumbent on us to demand our governments require more from us through policy, and at the requisite broad scale: composting programs, urban planning that disincentivizes our beloved cars (check out Copenhagen and Amsterdam), taxes and bans on products that are most egregiously wasteful and unnecessary, treating water like it matters, and so on. With every environmental NGO and academic under the sun sounding the alarm, and images like the one-orangutan-revolt emerging daily, we’ve been presented with the stakes. There will be a price-tag for all of this, and we will likely have to change our lives in ways I couldn’t imagine in this piece — but what kind of jerks would we be if we didn’t?
