Michael Pollan has an article in the New York Times magazine this week called “Why bother?” It’s essentially a long apology (in the old rhetorical sense) for personal action, personal virtue, in the cause of reducing our carbon emissions.
One of the last entries I wrote in my old journal before I switched over was about exactly this issue, partially a rebuttal of Thomas Friedman and partially of the assertion of a friend which was similar to the assertions Pollan mentions coming from even the august liberal media: how can my action make any difference?
Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.
His approach is a little different from the one I took (and more academically phrased), but they’re quite compatible. I talked about moral consistency, which is in line with his mention of character. We have to call on ourselves to make the change, he says, and then we have moral standing to ask other people, and other countries, to change. I said, “To have any moral standing, I have to be acting out my own ethical standards to at least a high percentage. If I’m preaching and not practicing, what I say rightly has very little weight.”
I discussed in greater depth what I called “demonstrated opportunity”, which is essentially what he’s describing here: if we change our choices, then there’s a knock-on effect in the economy because the economy is made up of our choices, and it shows that there’s an opportunity and a need for new kinds of services.
His article also called to mind a book I recently finished, called Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben. I have more to say about the book, but the point here is that McKibben outlines different personal and governmental choices people have made to move toward locality, community, and sustainability, and creates a vision of how our whole world could change by moving in that direction. But while he, like me and like Pollan, supports some of that change coming from ‘above’ (laws and governtment), he also emphasizes the necessity of personal and community choice, the need for responsibility to oneself and one’s community.
It may be old-fashioned to believe in personal virtue. But how far might we get if we are the people pointing the way?