The hypocrisy of environmentalists
Making peace with imperfection.
As Kermit the Frog once said, it’s not easy being green.
Being an environmentalist means calling out carbon-heavy lifestyles at odds with a livable Planet. But environmentalists also live within the same carbon-heavy economic and social structures as everyone else. So they’re constantly compromising their values just to exist.
Case in point: Environmentalists promote the virtues of public transit, whether it be Amtrak or (in my case) Washington, D.C.’s rail and bus system.
But those of us in the United States can often only get places by car. And that means, despite all moral objections, owning cars or calling Ubers.
The problem here is that environmentalists can be unfairly criticized — or hard on themselves — when making these compromises: At best, they’re failures; at worst, they’re hypocrites. And if environmentalists cannot live the carbon-free lifestyle they preach, why should anyone else?
That question highlights a couple of problems with how we talk about environmentalism, or climate action in general. Being an environmentalist means advocating for a livable planet, but such a goal is impossible through individual action alone.
Not only do we need to eat more plants, take more trains, avoid plastic, and reduce food waste.
We also need our government to slash emissions through massive investments in renewable energy, EV charging infrastructure, public transit systems, etc.
Without these investments on the macro scale, environmentalists will always face half solutions, like plugging an electric car into a grid powered by fossil fuels.
But there’s another issue at play: We often frame individual environmental actions as all or nothing.
Take how we define diets: We have popular labels for meat-free (vegetarian) or animal-free (vegan) diets, yet no such label for simply limiting consumption of animal products (okay, the term “reducetarian” does exist, but who uses that?).
This all-or-nothing framing makes little sense within the context of climate change. The world’s international climate goal is to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That doesn’t mean 1.5 degrees or bust.
1.6 degrees is better than 1.7 degrees, which is better than 1.8 degrees, etc.
Just as eating two burgers a week is better than eating three, or taking one Uber ride is better than taking two.
When environmentalists pressure themselves to be perfect, they quickly burn out, as
wrote recently in her Substack Finding Sanity (emphasis added):We’re often rushing around to ‘Save The Earth’ and ‘Be Sustainable,’ yet none of us are quite so sure what this entails… In my brain, this urgency (and confusion!) translates into crippling levels of anxiety and constant internal struggles. I need to buy land immediately, live completely self-sufficiently, I need to grow all of my own food, cook entirely from scratch, buy exclusively ethical, organic, and plastic-free, sew all my own clothes, build a strong, dedicated, and caring local community right now, ditch all my tech, save my family, save my friends, spiral, spiral, spiral.
And more burnout means fewer people advocating for a greener future.
The takeaway here, which I’ve written about before, is that everything we do creates greenhouse gas emissions, which trap heat, warm the Planet, and cause climate change. We can manage emissions (and this newsletter is a running dialogue about that), but we can never eliminate them.
Should we attempt to rid all emissions from our lives, we’d need to retreat completely from society — a Henry David Thoureau–like existence off the grid and into the forest (admirable, but Thoureau never had student loans).
Such an existence is not only unrealistic but also counterproductive. If being carbon-free means pitching a tent in the backwoods, people will dismiss environmentalists as Luddites, giving them another reason to politicize, and therefore resist, climate action.
Nobody is perfect. But regardless of our human flaws, solving climate change will take less finger-pointing and more collaboration. And striving for perfection, or calling environmentalists hypocrites, distracts us from the very real climate solutions we need right now.
As the saying goes, perfect is the enemy of good — or, in this case, a livable Planet.
Hehe thanks for including my quote! I've been reading "Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change" recently and its been super insightful into why we are so BAD at all of this. Honestly I don't blame us when we live in a world (in the western world at least) where its almost IMPOSSIBLE to exist without harming the planet. But the less and less harm we do the easier it becomes :)