Because we’re nothing but a cross between Caligula and monkeys wearing pants.
THESE DAYS, EVERYONE’S AN ENVIRONMENTALIST. TO BE OTHERWISE IS TO RISK BECOMING A SOCIAL EXILE OR HAVING YOUR BUSINESS BOYCOTTED. OUR SOCIAL CHANNELS MAKE US ALL SEEM LIKE THE LOVE CHILDREN OF JANE GOODALL AND DAVID ATTENBOROUGH. MESSAGING CORRECT, BRANDING ON POINT.
It reminds me of the Baptist sermons of my youth in rural Alabama. The preachers would vocally declare their God-given superiority, all the while operating an underground casino, a stolen vehicle chop-shop or a moonshine distillery behind the scenes.
How does one close the blackjack table at three in the morning and show up morally cleansed to Sunday School a few hours later? The same way we drop that rib-eye into our hemp shopping bag. Or coffee pods. Or wet wipes. Or palm-oil laced lip balm.
When SUVs were first introduced, they were declared an environmental travesty. Eco-activist groups like the Earth Liberation Front have actually targeted SUV dealerships. But my generation has rationalised, and now normalised, SUVs. We sure as hell aren’t going to be like our lame parents with their dumpy-ass minivans. We want to look and feel like we’re always on an expedition, driving our Out of Africa 4X4 tanks to school pickups and yoga class. But we’re environmentalists, right?
As outdoor-loving Kiwis, we are especially fond of the environmental pterodactylin the room: helicopters. I know. Heresy. Helicopters are awesome. They give us instant access to backcountry skiing, fishing, hunting, hiking, biking, wedding photo ops and, ironically, walks on glaciers, and they’ve become such a part of our culture that we’ve collectively given them a pass. Same with jet boats, jet skis, yachts and other elective forms of motorised transportation. From space, they must see vehicles, not humans, running around like ants. But we’re environmentalists, right?
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It gets worse when the cash hits the table. The only cash value of a river or forest is if it is dammed, cut down or explored by a motorised contraption, and it’s difficult to move forward when our elected local leaders can proclaim that “rivers are man made” or that “jet engines are too hot to produce pollution”. Add convenience to those dollars, and the rationalising shifts into turbo. Suddenly, we’re touting the benefits of a jet buzzing the tower of our local pre-school (see the Wānaka and Tarras Airport proposals). But we’re environmentalists, right?
Actually, evolutionarily speaking, we’re just dimwitted troglodytes doing whatever it takes to survive — a bigger cave or a larger bank balance is always going to be better. Unfortunately, there’s a price. You can read all about it in the study ‘Good Intents, but Low Impacts’ by the University of Bern’s Dr Stephanie Moser and Silke Kleinhückelkotten of the ECOLOG Institute for social-ecological research and education.
Long story, “regression analyses revealed people’s environmental self-identity to be the main predictor of pro-environmental behaviour; however, environmental self-identity played an ambiguous role in predicting actual environmental impacts. Instead, environmental impacts were best predicted by people’s income level.” Short story, the primary determinant of a person’s ecological footprint is wealth. And the richer we are, the more damage we do.
It’s kind of like how if you’re broke, you’re less likely to defile yourself in Vegas than you are if you have $10k rattling around in your pocket. If you own a toolshed in New Zealand, odds are your net worth is above $130,000 NZD, or if your yearly income is over $56,000 NZD, you’re lucky enough to be in the wealthiest 10% of the world. The bad news, you’re also drowning in the martini glass pictured above.
Pro-environment choices are all good, but the impacts of “virtue-signalling” behaviours are minuscule in the face of the living space, meat consumption, vehicle use and the travel that is associated with money. Your carbon footprint is going to be less if you can’t afford that trip to Bali, the wave runner or that second or third home. For the rich man to enter the kingdom of environmentalism, you might have to wedge a couple of camels through the eye of that proverbial needle.
We’re environmentalists, but you can’t stand in the way of progress, and what about the GDP? Truth is, many of the basic economic principles we use to, yep, rationalise progress, are outdated. We know it’s not just about growth, or supply and demand, or more is better, or “trickle down economics”, a concept made up by an actor turned president in the early stages of dementia. But that’s a buzzkill. It’s more fun to mash on the accelerator and pretend we’re in a Mountain Dew commercial.
Oh, humans. We are a cross between Caligula and monkeys wearing pants. Left to our own devices, we will destroy ourselves and everything around us. To exist as a society, we require social norms and laws, otherwise I know I would personally be running around high on peyote and dedicating myself to violating the 10th Commandment in its entirety by coveting my neighbour’s jackass, male servant and wife.
Unfortunately, laws are written by the same primates as those who need them, so they too fall prey to a fair bit of rationalising. For starters, and I speak on some authority here, we should be cautious not to adopt the American version of “freedom”. American “freedom” is rationalising run amuck. Americans want the freedom to do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it. This is the “freedom to”. It’s a zero-sum game, and it collapses under any scrutiny.
For example, if you have the “freedom to” weave a jet boat at unlimited speeds through a children’s swimming area, the children do not have the freedom to safely swim without dodging jet boats. (I refer you to the surprisingly controversial Clutha River Safety Bylaw of 2018). Pollution is the same. If you have the freedom to pollute a river, someone else does not have the freedom to swim in a clean river downstream. This is not hypothetical — in New Zealand, there is a movement to scrap government freshwater regulations so people have the “freedom to” regulate themselves. If you have the freedom to wreck the climate, future generations will not have the freedom to be alive.
We came together as a country to fight COVID, and were willing to be temporarily inconvenienced to protect ourselves, our families and all Kiwis. We ended up in a far better position than almost any country in the world, despite what you might have read in the shallow end of the Facebook pool. We could do the same for the environment. This may mean drastic changes to policy, laws, and corporate regulations, as well as to our own behaviour. It will take more than posting David Attenborough quotes on Instagram. It will require us to be inconvenienced, maybe a little less comfortable, and we might have to forgo the newest and shiniest. Personally, I’ll be reevaluating my relationship with adultery, Mountain Dew, rib-eye and peyote. How about you?
NATHAN WEATHINGTON
