Environmental activism in private life is meaningless

BY JULIA SIENKIEWICZ ’20

“The average American produces 4.4 pounds of trash per day,” I read on a Buzzfeed listicle. So I’ll start carrying reusable shopping bags, and save today’s dinner for tomorrow’s leftovers. I’ll buy a bamboo tooth brush, and cosmetics from companies that love the environment as much as I do. 

But none of these little tips and tricks — turning off the lights when we leave the room, biking to work or composting — help us reduce our carbon emissions quite like regulating corporations. According to Fortune, just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. With these companies releasing  tons of toxic waste each year, our effort to “just eat less meat” seems meaningless and pathetic.

Being confronted with statistics about our waste and consumption can temporarily motivate us to create change. Ironically, this change often involves consuming more in order to make subtle lifestyle shift, and an inspired individual ends up creating more waste.

Every other day, I see an article about how to reduce my carbon footprint, how to live a waste-free life and compilations of a variety of products I can buy to live environmentally “consciously.” But these articles don’t target the culprits of continued environmental destruction, corporations large and small. 

What makes these articles so toxic is the belief that individual changes can be sufficient to alter the course of an entire world. In general, we all want to believe that our small, well-intentioned actions can have a larger impact on others and on the planet. Climate change is at once so obscure and yet so overwhelming that it’s hard to take stock of all that’s going on and create a plan to solve the multitude of problems that contribute to it. 

I still continue to fall into this trap; I have modular reusable utensils and pack my own lunch in a silicone bento box to try to cut down on my plastic production. I can give a multitude of unprompted tips to what anyone can do to reduce their plastic consumption and reduce their individual carbon footprint. 

Yet, when I worked in a grocery store this past summer, I was throwing out at least two 55-gallon trash bags worth of flowers and plastic a day. I couldn’t help but wonder: does that contribute to my pounds of created waste, or does it get distributed to everyone who bought flowers? I tried to rescue a multitude of plants and flowers past their arbitrary sell by date, not wanting them to go to waste. The amount of produce alone that went from shelf to dumpster was heartbreaking. With so much waste generated from just one store, how much waste must be generated from all the grocery stores in the DC area where I worked? 

I’ve considered a switch to full veganism, after being a lifelong vegetarian. Regardless of my decision that switch would ultimately do very little. My lifestyle change will not stop the damage of the dairy industry, and my conversion of others to vegetarianism has not stopped profits in the meat industry from continuing to rise. While I may one day make the change in good faith, without larger advocacy and targeted action for causes I care about my change will be meaningless. 

With increasing corporate consolidation, a comprehensive and effective boycott seems nearly impossible. Consumers speaking with their money has become a neoliberal fallacy. The only way we will see change in our national trends of consumption is if we pressure corporations to make a change, and pressure lawmakers to enact meaningful legislation that rewards environmental consciousness.