Eye on the Prize: Anger, Action, and the Climate Crisis
I recently started getting familiar with environmentalism and zero waste and doing more to help slow the oncoming storm of climate change. I’ve seen the facts, and the facts scare me. I’m so afraid of what will inevitably happen to my children and their children and the children after them. My generation is the last stop on this slow, tumultuous ride towards the self-destruction that we have been accelerating since the Industrial Revolution.
There has been grief. There have been tears. I’ve watched documentaries showing how quickly severe weather has worsened in the past decades. I’ve read articles about how the insect population has declined. I’ve heard heartbreaking stories about climate refugees, like people from the Maldives, which have been sinking slowly but tragically due to the rising of waters from our poor, melting ice caps. This realization is a crushing realization for anyone to have: that a global catastrophe is already in the works, and it makes one feel so, so powerless in combating it.
Then, my grief turned to self-improvement. I started researching and researching zero waste. I spent hours looking at alternatives to plastic. I watched videos on how to apply a shampoo bar. I bought a menstrual cup. I started using the single use plastics that I already owned sparingly and planned on buying bamboo toothbrushes and reusable washcloths and eco-friendly, plastic-free beauty products once I ran out of the plastic stuff. I researched compost bins, and I grew to be so excited for when I would be able to buy some adorable red wigglers that would eat up all my leftovers.
When I did the research, I started bringing up ways the people around me could waste less, and to my dismay, no one seemed too interested. I got lukewarm replies at best, and when brought up purchasing reusable zip-locks, or shopping with mason jars in the bulk section, or not using single use straws and styrofoam plates, it was like I was attacking them.
My grief turned to self-improvement turned to anger. How dare they not be as concerned about it as I was! We are living in a climate emergency, and they seemed too worried about convenience than the fact that if we were to look on our world in one hundred years, this planet would be almost unrecognizable. A response to that was well, we won’t be around to see it, like the lives of our descendants meant nothing at all.
I became so angry. A lot of these solutions are cost-efficient, like reducing consumption in the first place and then reusing things we already have, and it would only take a little more time out of our day to stop thousands of wasteful products from falling into a landfill.
After I cooled down from the time my sister used a gallon sized, single use zip-lock for a piece of leftover chicken parmesan smaller than the palm of my hand, I reflected upon my anger. I felt that it was righteous. And, to an extent, I was valid in my anger. This is a situation in which families like mine have the power to exercise small-scale change, and when we choose to ignore the problem and say things like I won’t be around when it happens or it’s too inconvenient for me, we stagnate change and sweep the crisis under the rug. We must look at this terrible, terrifying future, and we must acknowledge the fact that for most places on this globe, it is not the future. The climate emergency is now. We are living in it. People are suffering, and to ignore it is to refuse solidarity with our fellow human being because we cannot see it.
But at the same time, we must look at the root causes of the crisis. We must dig deeper and ask why it is our sole task to deal with it. For the working class, especially the working class of our parents’ generation, we have to acknowledge that they lived in a world of growing convenience bolstered by the booming bubble of capitalism that is still straining against us to this day. We are a people that are told that convenience will allow us to increase our productivity. Our productivity creates more capital, most of which we will never see a dime. The system of exploitation that we struggle under convinces us that productivity makes us worthy of our humanity, and that our humanity can be measured by the amount of money we can scrounge up into the billionaire’s bulging pockets. The more we produce, the more they say we should buy. Buy more single use plastics, so we can produce more single use plastics, says the capitalist, and you will be happier. That old dress is out of style, says the capitalist, you should buy another dress so that you will be happier. Money is happiness. The bourgeois class convinces us in the ninety-nine percent that we, too, might someday become one of them. Buy the right things and buy them often, and you can rise to the upper echelons of society.
Of course, this is not true. In our current struggle, the ruling class will never allow us to break into the ranks of the bourgeoisie. But they convince us that consumption and the commodification of our bodies and our lives might do this for us, someday. How, then, does the class struggle relate to climate change?
The class struggle, I would argue, directly profits from the creation and the propagation of the current crisis. If we think we might just make it into the one percent one day, then we consume more and more. We live in excess thinking we will find happiness, and so we buy from a few men who own more than we could ever dream of. We buy single-use plastics and eat at styrofoam-packaged fast food restaurants because we are told that if we buy more conveniently, then we can maximize our labor, thus making more money, thus one day rising to the enigma of the bourgeois class. If they can convince us that we might escape an inevitable exploitation through consumption (one that, mind you, they themselves are propagating!), then they can profit off us buying as much as possible within our lives.
Returning to my anger, I realize now that I should not lash out at my fellow members of the working class. That anger, based in hopelessness, goes nowhere and places the blame for the crisis on a group of people who has been exploited by the same system as me. No, the whole of our anger should not go towards our friends working alongside us. We should work to educate ourselves first, and then use our knowledge to reduce our wastefulness during this crisis. When we find ways to reduce our consumption in our own lives, we can make small waves of change within our own communities. That, in itself, is pro-environment and anti-capitalist praxis.
Then, we should turn our anger on the exploiting class. We must hold accountable those profiting off this crisis, and we have to use our anger to organize for real, intersectional environmental change. Direct action against polluting corporations that will never change but for mass outcry is crucial if we want a better life for those who inhabit this place after we are gone.
We are in the middle of a climate emergency. Landfills are piling up, people are forced to flee their destroyed homes, and climate deniers pollute our governments. We have to take personal responsibility and act to reduce our everyday waste, but we must never lose sight of who the real enemy is.