Do you “hope” that everyone will see the light and start living more sustainably to save the environment? If so, you may be doing more harm than good.
So say an environmental scientist and an environmental ethicist in a provocative essay in the March 2009 issue of the international journal, The Ecologist. John Vucetich, assistant professor of animal ecology at Michigan Technological University, and Michael Nelson, associate professor of environmental ethics at Michigan State University, challenge the widespread belief that hope can motivate people to solve overwhelming social and environmental problems.
“Is hope a placebo, a distraction, merely sowing the seeds of disillusionment?” they ask, in an opinion piece titled “Abandon Hope.” The authors, co-founders and directors of the Conservation Ethics Group, an of environmental ethics consultancy, examine the proper role of hope in environmentalism. They suggest that hope’s alternative is not hopelessness or despair, but rather the inherent virtue of “doing the right thing.”
For decades, say Vucetich and Nelson, we have been hammered by the ceaseless thunder of messages predicting imminent environmental cataclysm: global climate change, air and water pollution, destruction of wildlife habitat, holes in the ozone. The response of environmentalists?from Al Gore to Jane Goodall?to this persistent message of hopelessness has focused on the need to remain hopeful.
But hope may actually be counter-productive, Vucetich and Nelson suggest. “I have little reason to live sustainably if the only reason to do so is to hope for a sustainable future, because every other message I receive suggests that disaster is guaranteed,” they explain.
People are hearing radically contradictory messages:
- Scientists present evidence that profound environmental disaster is imminent.
- It is urgent to live up to an extremely high standard of sustainable living.
- The reason to live sustainably is that doing so gives hope for averting disaster.
- Yet disaster is inevitable.
“Given a predisposition to mistrust authorities, such contradictions justifiably elicit mistrust,” say Vucetich and Nelson.
If hope for averting environmental disaster is not the right reason to live sustainably, what is? The scholars say we must provide people with reasons to live sustainably that are rational and effective, based on virtues rather than consequences. That means equating sustainable living not with hope for a better future, but with basic virtues such as sharing and caring, virtues that we recognize as good in themselves and fundamentally the right way to live in the present, they explain.
One advantage to such an approach is that it can motivate even people who do not believe that we are on the brink of environmental disaster, Vucetich and Nelson point out. It also clarifies the connection between environmental and social problems, a connection many people fail to grasp.
“Instead of hope, we need to provide young people with reasons to live sustainably that are rational and effective,” they say. “We need to lift up examples of sustainable living motivated by virtue more than by a dubious belief that such actions will avert environmental disaster.”
Vucetich and Nelson did not point out “the connection between environmental and social problems,” a connection that “many people fail to grasp.” So, blame me! Would someone be kind enough to make this connection for me? Sincerely, I have failed to grasp it myself. What is this connection?
This notion was voiced 3 years ago in Orion magazine by leading US green thinker Derrick Jensen:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/170/
Sparked a lot of dialogue at that time.
Jack Mormon
In reply to the above I’d have to first ask which social problem? Once you pick one that’s specific enough the connections become pretty easy to grasp when you think about it. “Poverty” is not specific enough, but “rising poverty in Bangladesh” for example is (and is connected to deforestation in Tibet, as well as already rising sea levels). When you also realize that basically everything about modern civilization is negatively impacting the environment, you’ll see that /every/ social problem is connected in some way or another to the way our unsustainable lifestyle and economy impacts the environment.
But right now all our social problems are about to get much, much worse as we’re entering the greatest depression of the modern age, and the connection will become obvious to everybody. It will be the greatest depression precisely because of the connection… the way our free market capitalist economy works (or worked) requires investment based on the belief in a better future (i.e. growth, more profit, higher valuations in the future). Since in the “good times” of the 90s companies were valued upward of 20 times their annual earnings, to invest in such a company and expect to make a profit you have to believe that it will do better than this year for at least the next 20 years. Sure, /you/ can sell your stock next year, but collectively we have to have that belief for the system to be anything more than a ponzi scheme where the last sucker to buy in gets stuck with the bill. This has worked for most of modern times largely because of the belief that improving technology will forever bring greater efficiencies and will be able to overcome any resource exhaustion.
Now given the severity of the environmental problems (nut just damage to nature, but including resource exhaustion, water shortage, etc) can anyone really continue to hold onto that belief? If people stop believing that 20 years from everything will be better than today, the economy cannot recover, and if they start believing that 20 years from now there will be great disasters and shortages, the economy can only continue worsen until it results in the complete collapse of our economic system and thereby probably our entire civilization.
Note that it is all based on belief, not on present realities. Maybe a few years from now someone will invent working cold fusion and solve most of our energy and emissions problems in one fell stroke. But until that moment the only thing that matters for the economy is whether people believe that that will happen.
One final point… people have known about environmental problems for some time, so why didn’t the economy collapse before? Simple, it’s the ~20 year time horizon, which is fairly deeply ingrained in the economy today. Not just the 20x earnings valuation, but also long-term bonds and other forms of financial discounting. Until recently the more obviously severe consequences of environmental degradation and global warming seemed to be too far in the future, but today is almost 2010, and 2030 is not looking so good.
:j.botz