Beyond Environmentalism
Cross-posting this from Facebook for you non-FB users out there. Been wanting to write this for a long time.
This Saturday, the 24th of September, is Moving Planet Day.
What the hell is Moving Planet Day? Is it a day for those who identify as environmentalists to sit in trees and watch the planet go about its daily routine and romanticise about what the Earth would be like without any humans on it?
Well, no. For one, you'd be hard pressed to find a tree that's completely unadulterated by the human touch. Second, an environmentalist is a human being, anyway, and if he lives by today's standards of human conduct he is by default bad for the environment, so sitting in a tree and romanticising would just be pure hypocrisy because the best thing he could do if he wanted to preserve nature would be to just die.
So back to the question. What the hell is Moving Planet Day?
This Saturday, hundreds (or thousands) of people will be converging in Boston, arriving by bike, foot, train, bus, and maybe even rowboat, to call on society and our leaders to move beyond fossil fuels. Boston's event will be one of thousands being held in 167 countries, all being organised as a part of 350.org's third annual global rally to build a movement to solve the climate crisis.
I was prompted to write this not because I thought it'd be a sweet recruitment tool for more people to get their asses to Boston (though that'd be a welcome side-effect - if you're in Providence, we're taking the 12.55pm commuter rail, and meeting at 12.15 at Faunce Arch). I am writing this late at night because, since getting back from Climate Summer, I've found it increasingly difficult to explain to friends who call me a tree hugger that hugging trees really isn't what it's about.
Yes, I like to recycle, yes, I like to squeeze as much writing as possible into one piece of paper, yes, I like to bring my own utensils to potlucks because it hurts me to throw a plastic plate into the trash (don't laugh). But how do I begin to explain that keeping things out of landfill is just the tip of the iceberg? That, sure, it used to be just about the polar bears losing their homes, but now, it's also about people in New Orleans and North Carolina losing their homes to hurricanes and people in Pakistan losing their homes to floods? How do I articulate, within two minutes over a quick dinner conversation, that this issue is an enormously moral and value-driven pursuit for me? That for someone who was never brought up to be a spiritual person, this is the closest I have ever been to developing an understanding of my place in the world?
I never used to consider myself much of a nature-lover. I liked going on hiking trips with my family, looking at grand-looking rock structures and being away from the bustle of the city we call home. But I was also one to instinctively freak out and smack a spider or a cockroach with a roll of newspaper whenever I saw one in my room, instead of catching it and letting it free as some of my closer-to-nature friends like Louisa Kellogg might. (I haven't seen a cockroach since taking my first environmental studies class, lucky me, so I don't actually know what I would do if I saw one now.) Neither was I particularly enamoured of all the rhetoric about how we need to save our endangered species or fight for animal rights.
My entry point into the movement was my friend Sharon Tan, who, amidst the madness that was Prelims 2009, made it a point to organise a screening of the film 'The Age of Stupid' in lieu of 350.org's first global day of action. I don't remember most of the movie, but it did some serious consciousness-raising for me, and I remember a particular animation at the beginning of the movie demonstrating the way we exploit one continent for its natural resources. At that time, I'd just been studying for the madness that was Prelims, which means I was becoming very familiar with Marlow's anti-colonial rhetoric in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. Seeing the parallel between the way we exploit other human beings and the way we exploit our land was a crazy epiphanic moment, the first of many that would come when I followed my friend Lan Huihui to a Buddhist temple to learn about karmic cycles, and when I read my sister's Michael Pollan recommendations, 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' and 'In Defense of Food'. Learning about the Buddhists' cyclical view of our cosmos gave me a heightened interest in learning about anything cyclical, like the carbon cycle, the cycle of cold and warm periods in earth history, and just all the cycles that govern natural processes that we have rivalled with our linear modes of production. Waste, if you think about it, is a completely man-made concept, because on an Earth where biological waste is turned into fertiliser for new plant material, waste simply doesn't exist. Reading Michael Pollan's exposé on the American food system screwing up the land and everybody's health marked the beginning of my understanding of a system in crisis, the same capitalist, linear, expoitative and utterly thoughtless system creating weirdass production lines where coltan is mined in the politically unstable Congo to be used in laptops that are 'designed for the dump' and replaced by users once every few years while their old laptops are sent as e-waste to China where kids try to pick out valuable metal scraps and get lead poisoned in the process.
Market failure ttm.
It's time for environmentalists to move beyond calling themselves environmentalists, because like my teammate Tara says, 'fuck the polar bears'. Polar bears dying is a problem. The inherent misalignment of human society's processes with natural processes is a monster that is creating a shit ton of other problems. 350.org is so named because 350 parts per million is what scientists believe to be the 'safe' level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Pre-industrial levels didn't go beyond 280 ppm for a hell of a long time, and now we're at 385 ppm. And even though 350.org's website says 'We're building a global movement to solve the climate crisis', Moving Planet's organisers know that climate change is only a symptom of a wider systemic problem. They know that the biggest issue at hand is the way we meet our energy needs, which is why Moving Planet is being framed as a day to move beyond fossil fuels. I believe that it is a moral wrong to extract in less than two centuries what has been buried in the ground for millions of years and is an incredibly important component of the climate-regulating carbon cycle. Which is why, on a September weekend, I am bringing my busy self with a paper due on Monday and two classes to catch up with to Boston to join this global movement.
Maybe my friends will call me hypocritical for sitting on a fossil fuel-burning train for an hour. (I've even gotten reprimanded for wasting electricity to send out an email about a petition. My 28th council friends will know.) But I believe in movement-building work, not because I believe it will bring us immediate solutions, but because building a movement is about shifting societal values. And values, rather than a calculation of the absolute impact of my actions, are the things that drive me to use reusable utensils and cut down on my meat consumption even though it probably doesn't make a pinprick of a difference to our landfills or our climate. Values are what have made my pursuit of environmental studies such a holistic one. They have made me dedicate myself to searching for solutions to our systemic problems, and to be unafraid of speaking my mind and posting weird things like 'POLL: is the world warming?' on my facebook status, without knowing how many responses I would get, when I used to be deathly afraid of looking stupid.
Two years ago, attending 350.org's first day of action sparked something within me. Today, bringing people to Moving Planet is a tribute to friends like Sharon, Huihui, my sister and the multitude of people I've met here who, knowingly or unknowingly, charted this course for me. As the Chinese people say, 饮水思源 (when you drink, remember the source). On Saturday, wherever you may be and whatever you may be doing, I hope you will be thinking about where your water comes from.
This Saturday, the 24th of September, is Moving Planet Day.
What the hell is Moving Planet Day? Is it a day for those who identify as environmentalists to sit in trees and watch the planet go about its daily routine and romanticise about what the Earth would be like without any humans on it?
Well, no. For one, you'd be hard pressed to find a tree that's completely unadulterated by the human touch. Second, an environmentalist is a human being, anyway, and if he lives by today's standards of human conduct he is by default bad for the environment, so sitting in a tree and romanticising would just be pure hypocrisy because the best thing he could do if he wanted to preserve nature would be to just die.
So back to the question. What the hell is Moving Planet Day?
This Saturday, hundreds (or thousands) of people will be converging in Boston, arriving by bike, foot, train, bus, and maybe even rowboat, to call on society and our leaders to move beyond fossil fuels. Boston's event will be one of thousands being held in 167 countries, all being organised as a part of 350.org's third annual global rally to build a movement to solve the climate crisis.
I was prompted to write this not because I thought it'd be a sweet recruitment tool for more people to get their asses to Boston (though that'd be a welcome side-effect - if you're in Providence, we're taking the 12.55pm commuter rail, and meeting at 12.15 at Faunce Arch). I am writing this late at night because, since getting back from Climate Summer, I've found it increasingly difficult to explain to friends who call me a tree hugger that hugging trees really isn't what it's about.
Yes, I like to recycle, yes, I like to squeeze as much writing as possible into one piece of paper, yes, I like to bring my own utensils to potlucks because it hurts me to throw a plastic plate into the trash (don't laugh). But how do I begin to explain that keeping things out of landfill is just the tip of the iceberg? That, sure, it used to be just about the polar bears losing their homes, but now, it's also about people in New Orleans and North Carolina losing their homes to hurricanes and people in Pakistan losing their homes to floods? How do I articulate, within two minutes over a quick dinner conversation, that this issue is an enormously moral and value-driven pursuit for me? That for someone who was never brought up to be a spiritual person, this is the closest I have ever been to developing an understanding of my place in the world?
I never used to consider myself much of a nature-lover. I liked going on hiking trips with my family, looking at grand-looking rock structures and being away from the bustle of the city we call home. But I was also one to instinctively freak out and smack a spider or a cockroach with a roll of newspaper whenever I saw one in my room, instead of catching it and letting it free as some of my closer-to-nature friends like Louisa Kellogg might. (I haven't seen a cockroach since taking my first environmental studies class, lucky me, so I don't actually know what I would do if I saw one now.) Neither was I particularly enamoured of all the rhetoric about how we need to save our endangered species or fight for animal rights.
My entry point into the movement was my friend Sharon Tan, who, amidst the madness that was Prelims 2009, made it a point to organise a screening of the film 'The Age of Stupid' in lieu of 350.org's first global day of action. I don't remember most of the movie, but it did some serious consciousness-raising for me, and I remember a particular animation at the beginning of the movie demonstrating the way we exploit one continent for its natural resources. At that time, I'd just been studying for the madness that was Prelims, which means I was becoming very familiar with Marlow's anti-colonial rhetoric in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. Seeing the parallel between the way we exploit other human beings and the way we exploit our land was a crazy epiphanic moment, the first of many that would come when I followed my friend Lan Huihui to a Buddhist temple to learn about karmic cycles, and when I read my sister's Michael Pollan recommendations, 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' and 'In Defense of Food'. Learning about the Buddhists' cyclical view of our cosmos gave me a heightened interest in learning about anything cyclical, like the carbon cycle, the cycle of cold and warm periods in earth history, and just all the cycles that govern natural processes that we have rivalled with our linear modes of production. Waste, if you think about it, is a completely man-made concept, because on an Earth where biological waste is turned into fertiliser for new plant material, waste simply doesn't exist. Reading Michael Pollan's exposé on the American food system screwing up the land and everybody's health marked the beginning of my understanding of a system in crisis, the same capitalist, linear, expoitative and utterly thoughtless system creating weirdass production lines where coltan is mined in the politically unstable Congo to be used in laptops that are 'designed for the dump' and replaced by users once every few years while their old laptops are sent as e-waste to China where kids try to pick out valuable metal scraps and get lead poisoned in the process.
Market failure ttm.
It's time for environmentalists to move beyond calling themselves environmentalists, because like my teammate Tara says, 'fuck the polar bears'. Polar bears dying is a problem. The inherent misalignment of human society's processes with natural processes is a monster that is creating a shit ton of other problems. 350.org is so named because 350 parts per million is what scientists believe to be the 'safe' level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Pre-industrial levels didn't go beyond 280 ppm for a hell of a long time, and now we're at 385 ppm. And even though 350.org's website says 'We're building a global movement to solve the climate crisis', Moving Planet's organisers know that climate change is only a symptom of a wider systemic problem. They know that the biggest issue at hand is the way we meet our energy needs, which is why Moving Planet is being framed as a day to move beyond fossil fuels. I believe that it is a moral wrong to extract in less than two centuries what has been buried in the ground for millions of years and is an incredibly important component of the climate-regulating carbon cycle. Which is why, on a September weekend, I am bringing my busy self with a paper due on Monday and two classes to catch up with to Boston to join this global movement.
Maybe my friends will call me hypocritical for sitting on a fossil fuel-burning train for an hour. (I've even gotten reprimanded for wasting electricity to send out an email about a petition. My 28th council friends will know.) But I believe in movement-building work, not because I believe it will bring us immediate solutions, but because building a movement is about shifting societal values. And values, rather than a calculation of the absolute impact of my actions, are the things that drive me to use reusable utensils and cut down on my meat consumption even though it probably doesn't make a pinprick of a difference to our landfills or our climate. Values are what have made my pursuit of environmental studies such a holistic one. They have made me dedicate myself to searching for solutions to our systemic problems, and to be unafraid of speaking my mind and posting weird things like 'POLL: is the world warming?' on my facebook status, without knowing how many responses I would get, when I used to be deathly afraid of looking stupid.
Two years ago, attending 350.org's first day of action sparked something within me. Today, bringing people to Moving Planet is a tribute to friends like Sharon, Huihui, my sister and the multitude of people I've met here who, knowingly or unknowingly, charted this course for me. As the Chinese people say, 饮水思源 (when you drink, remember the source). On Saturday, wherever you may be and whatever you may be doing, I hope you will be thinking about where your water comes from.