A Collection of Individuals

On production, consumption, and where to intervene in environmental problems

Broadly speaking, we understand how to at least start physically mitigating environmental crises (e.g., replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, stop deforestation, use agroecological farming methods that require fewer inputs, etc.), but not how to enact these changes socially and politically, especially on the necessary scale and timeline. Despite the fact that these problems are human-created, most people as individuals cannot do much about them because the problems are driven by systems and structures in which we have little power or agency. 

Institutional environmentalism has for a long time emphasized ostensibly sustainable personal consumption choices as the solution to our various ecological problems. This has occurred alongside, and in conjunction with, corporate PR campaigns that put the onus for pollution on consumers rather than producers. In recent years, climate and environmental justice movements have pushed the primacy of political change into the mainstream, emphasizing the need for collective action rather than individual action and the responsibility of powerful actors. 

There are two reasons to determine responsibility for environmental harm and degradation: to determine who should pay restitution (e.g., ecological debt for historical exploitation or paying for remediation of polluted environments) and to stop similar harm and degradation from happening in the future. Responsibility is sometimes easy to determine from a broad perspective, but restitution is often difficult to actually enact because of diffusion of responsibility within corporate or state organizations and existing legal and political structures—capitalism would collapse if corporations had to pay for all of their negative externalities—and because restoration is often very hard if not impossible. Damage is often permanent, like death or extinction, and trying to do the already difficult task of cleaning up pollution while it is still being mass produced is a losing battle. This is why prevention is of the utmost importance.

Preventing environmental harm and degradation requires intervening at the point of production because it is upstream from consumption and it is where the power lies. Under capitalism, profit is what dictates production. Corporations induce demand and create markets for products that they can sell profitably, regardless of whether or not the products are socially beneficial or useful; the social and ecological costs flow downwards to wherever there is insufficient power to stop them. Because of the vast complexity of global supply chains, corporate executives often do not even know precisely where the cheap commodities used to create their products come from. This is a feature, not a bug—plausible deniability for human rights abuses and ecological devastation.

When we buy something, unless it is made-to-order it has already been produced and its composite materials extracted. The fact that we bought it has some relationship to future production, but it is not necessarily direct or proportional. This does not indicate that consumption choices are meaningless, particularly for the wealthy (e.g., private jets); less pollution is better than more and these choices can better prepare us for the more egalitarian society we seek to build—it is harder to give up treats that require the exploitation of others when you are addicted to them. But consumption is not a vehicle for transformative change.

Capitalism is totalizing; everyone must participate in it, and the structure of our society dictates both the choices available to us and their ease. Most of us have no choice whether the energy we use comes from renewable energy or fossil fuels, and avoiding car usage is onerous and dangerous if our city is designed to accommodate cars rather than public transit, walking, or biking. Not to mention the physical and structural issues around recycling and waste management for the end of a product’s lifecycle, which is a responsibility that corporations mostly put on consumers and governments.

Thus, creating more just and sustainable consumption (in form and amount) requires changing production and the physical and social structures of our society with significantly stronger regulations and removing the profit motive where possible via forms of community or public ownership. Actually enacting this type of systemic change requires a mass movement of people demanding and fighting for it via interlocking and mutually reinforcing tactics like electoral campaigns, labor organizing, tenant organizing, mutual aid, and political education.

Our task is to think of ourselves as part of a collective humanity and shared political project rather than discrete individual consumers, which is how we are trained from birth here in the US. The structure of society not only dictates our available choices, but who we are and what we believe. If we are fortunate enough to learn this, as individuals we can choose to act collectively, persuading others in the process, to change these structures—this is the individual-structure dialectic. Building a transformative mass movement requires many people making many individual choices—over and over again—to think and act collectively to defy the status quo. 

We have a duty to ourselves and to each other to act in solidarity and form organized working class political power. It is easy to unconsciously shirk this responsibility—it is hard work and we risk failure—but we have to push past the individualism we are taught and consciously choose to build together. We have a world to win.