Finding enough together

I don’t believe a climate resilient lifestyle must be one of deprivation. I dislike emphasizing less as inherent to our response to climate change because in so many ways, changes to address climate change will make our lives better.

Unless all you value is material trappings and broadcasting your social status through those goods. I don’t fault people who think that way now since this is a standard means of signalling in our society. But we need a new way to signal success and achieve happiness besides material accumulation. We need a cultural shift around the values that lead people to want a bigger house, a bigger car.

Though I don’t write much about climate change directly, it underpins nearly everything I’m thinking and writing about.

When I’m writing about labor, I’m writing about climate change.

When I’m writing about food, I’m writing about climate change.

When I’m writing about new technology, housing, community, I’m writing about climate change.

Climate change is a crucible for societal change. Climate impacts are woven through our society — everything we do affects how much carbon we release. That means the values that influence our choices must align with what is best for the climate. To tackle climate change, we must move our mental frameworks away from scarcity and towards a new view of abundance.

We’re scared of not having enough

The very idea of less is anathema to the American psyche. We conflate our possessions and our output with our personal worth. Our major holidays revolve around acquisition and demonstrations of abundance. We’re scared of not having enough — and not being enough.

Denny points out that the stuff is the symptom, not the problem (emphasis mine):

So, let’s not just stop at the notion that our problem is too much stuff. Yes, acquisition of too much stuff is a problem but really, it’s also a symptom of a deeper cultural problem.

[…]

The problem with simple living and minimalism as commonly discussed is that they serve is a temporary balm but leave us with problems. And so we just continue in long crisis. We experience it personally as perpetual longing for the unknown thing that we think will help us feel more secure, happier, content.

Material abundance is hollow in a world ruled by loneliness and fear. As Rebecca Solnit writes, “To consider our age an age of abundance, you have to be counting sheer accumulated stuff and ignoring how it is distributed. That is, we live in an age of extreme wealth for some, and desperation for the many.”

When you’ve clawed together just enough to feel secure — for now — societal change presents a massive psychological risk. Tackling climate change is portrayed as antithetical to financial security. It’s easy to see what you will lose, and much harder to imagine a different future that doesn’t rely on those things to give you the same quality of life.

• Drive less? But then I won’t be able to get around. Fear of losing freedom.
• Take away car lanes and put in bike lanes? But then traffic will get worse. Fear of losing time.
• Build more housing in my neighborhood? But then too many kids will go to the schools and my kids won’t get a good education.* Fear of (your family) falling behind.
  

Because responding to climate change demands radical changes in our daily lives, for many these societal changes remain a greater emotional threat than the uncertain impacts of climate.

This time, not changing is not an option. This time, change is the path to safety, together and individually. To be able to respond to climate change in time, we must change our minds and address our fears. The steps we need to take on climate are simple, but the sociology of convincing people that they will not lose is fraught.

Fear of not-enoughness undermines both climate and social change

I can hardly fault people for being afraid of losing what they have in the United States, where we let people fall out of the bottom: one medical issue and your family could be on the street or drowning in debt you’ll never escape. But I can fault people for opposing supportive policies for fear they’ll fund “the undeserving” (as far as I can tell, the “polite” way for racists to say brown people). For being so scared that immigrants will “take their jobs” 🙄 that they have no problem separating children from their parents and keeping kids in prison. For dehumanizing everyone who is different.

This fear of not-enoughness underlies fascist and isolationist impulses, too. Being scared of losing what you have (including power) can be easily shifted by malicious politicians into focusing on “who will take it from you,” which drives tribalism and fear of the other. It combines with racism towards violent ends.

Fear of losing something yourself is a poor excuse to harm others… especially when the real forces for suppressed wages and lost jobs are actually poorly regulated corporations, weak labor protections, and “fiduciary duty to shareholders” that focuses on short-term returns over long-term sustainability and sees no duty to the communities they’ve exploited for cheap labor.

Holly Whitaker further spells out this connection between culture and climate (emphasis mine):

In A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber asserts that the environmental crisis is equal to the culture gap (the “culture gap”, in this context, is the distance between value and belief systems groups/ tribes/ individuals hold, like the distance between alt-right and Antifa).

In other words: Any large-scale, intractable issue of our time is not unsolvable because of a lack of emergent solutions or technology, but because we cannot overcome our differences or get over ourselves enough to work across discordant beliefs and values.

In still other words, he means: The climate disaster is equal to our intolerance.

Fighting climate means changing society

In classic American fashion, we like to buy our way out of problems. Our fear of change makes false solutions, like electric cars, appealing. Substituting a greener version of what we already have is familiar and requires less change — but doesn’t solve the underlying issues.

Making new products produces a ton of carbon (embodied carbon), it’s just hidden from consumers as a pre-purchase externality. Swapping driving a gas car to driving EVs still prioritizes cars over humans in our communities, encourages low-density sprawl that eats up natural landscapes and fragments habitat, and supports a lifestyle of buying massive houses in the countryside while commuting to the city.

We can’t Stuff our way out of this one: we need transformations of our society and our spaces.

Becoming people of place

Spencer Scott writes that under capitalism, most of us are “people of a market” rather than “people of place:”

Most people do not use their place-based identity as the prism they bend all decisions through, and most people do not integrate into the places they inhabit.

In our individualist society, we fool ourselves into thinking that we’ll be the smart ones, that we’ll escape the impacts of climate change, but we all live in the same global house*.

Our environment and society set the baseline for our health — and climate change is unhealthy for humans. We are interconnected, more part of our communities and the places we live than we want to admit.

While our society has big disparities in wealth and health, in the end, there’s nowhere for even the rich to escape to, as Bill McKibben calls out. They might be able to hide in their bunkers from war, but if climate change prevents them from successfully growing food crops or the high humidity means sweat cannot cool their bodies, they’ll be just as fucked as a poor person. We’re all in this together.

Rooting ourselves in place makes the costs of local change more worthwhile because we know we’ll benefit from them. Scott quotes economist Elinor Ostrom as explaining that people committed to a place “expect to share a future.” By admitting that there is nowhere to escape to, that the problems must be faced — whether here or elsewhere — we find the courage to fight for change in our communities. We make the effort to change systems that need changing, both for our own benefit and for others.

Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad lay out a new way for people to think of themselves. Today, they write, we think of ourselves as consumers: “our role as individuals is to pursue our own self-interest, on the basis that will aggregate to the best outcomes for society. We define ourselves through competition.” But we’ve changed our story before, and we can do it again.

Before industrialization, we lived by the “subject story.” Now, we could follow the “citizen story” where we all co-create our futures. Under this new story, leaders “don’t pretend to know exactly what the future looks like. They do reassure us that we will best build it by working together.” Instead of pronouncing solutions from on high, leaders create opportunities for collectively identifying them. We can work together to co-design our communities and society, all taking some measure of responsibility for shaping our own futures.

We need to make “enough” happen for everyone

While the tactics for reducing carbon emissions may be clear, the politics of enabling those changes to happen are rooted in doing what we must as society to reduce the American people’s (justified) fear of not having enough — by making sure they’ll have enough.

That looks like balancing economic inequality, bolstering worker rights, growing a culture of solidarity, enforcing anti-trust law, better regulating the financial industry, and building stronger safety nets — things that might not look like fighting climate change on their face, but in the end, are all tools to make our society more secure for more people.

Grounded by a feeling of safety, we can redefine success away from material goods. Rebecca Solnit reframes prosperity:

But there’s another way to count wealth and abundance – as hope for the future, safety and public confidence, emotional wellbeing, love and friendship and strong social networks, meaningful work and purposeful lives, equality and justice and inclusion.

Scientists researching what brings happiness through a life say it’s just these things: relationships. Community. Belonging.

When we’re part of a community, we feel comfortable sharing instead of having our own. When we sense abundance instead of scarcity, we can be in collaboration instead of competition. The changes we must make in our lives and communities to respond to climate change will earn us more happiness than the material goods ever did.

If that’s what less looks like, sign me up.

 

 

See also: Changing people’s mindsets on climate action