Why
Buying Less Is More Than
Buying Green
By George Monbiot
24 July, 2007
Monbiot.com
It
wasn’t meant to happen like this. The climate scientists told
us that our winters would become wetter and our summers drier. So I
can’t claim that these floods were caused by climate change, or
are even consistent with the models. But, like the ghost of Christmas
yet to come, they offer us a glimpse of the possible winter world we’ll
inhabit if we don’t sort ourselves out.
With rising sea levels and
more winter rain (and remember that when the trees are dormant and the
soils saturated there are fewer places for the rain to go) all it will
take is a freshwater flood to coincide with a high spring tide and we
have a formula for full-blown disaster. We have now seen how localised
floods can wipe out essential services and overwhelm emergency workers.
But this month’s events don’t even register beside some
of the predictions now circulating in learned journals(1). Our primary
political struggle must be to prevent the break-up of the Greenland
and West Antarctic ice sheets. The only question now worth asking about
climate change is how.
Dozens of new books appear
to provide an answer: we can save the world by embracing “better,
greener lifestyles”. Last week, for example, the Guardian published
an extract of the new book by Sheherazade Goldsmith, who is married
to the very rich environmentalist Zac, in which she teaches us “to
live within nature’s limits”(2). It’s easy: just make
your own bread, butter, cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles, keep a milking
cow, a few pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, gardens and
orchards. Well, what are you waiting for?
Her book also contains plenty
of useful advice, and she comes across as modest, sincere and well-informed.
But of lobbying for political change, there is not a word: you can save
the planet in your own kitchen - if you have endless time and plenty
of land. When I was reading it on the train, another passenger asked
me if he could take a look. He flicked through it for a moment then
summed up the problem in seven words. “This is for people who
don’t work.”
None of this would matter,
if the Guardian hadn’t put her photo on the masthead last week,
with the promise that she could teach us to go green. The media’s
obsession with beauty, wealth and fame blights every issue it touches,
but none more so than green politics. There is an inherent conflict
between the aspirational lifestyle journalism which makes readers feel
better about themselves and sells country kitchens and the central demand
of environmentalism: that we should consume less. “None of these
changes represents a sacrifice”, Sheherazade tells us. “Being
more conscientious isn’t about giving up things.” But it
is: if, like her, you own more than one home when others have none.
Uncomfortable as this is
for both the media and its advertisers, giving things up is an essential
component of going green. A section on ethical shopping in Goldsmith’s
book advises us to buy organic, buy seasonal, buy local, buy sustainable,
buy recycled. But it says nothing about buying less.
Green consumerism is becoming
a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy
for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets
are developing: one for unethical products and one for ethical products,
and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of
the first. I am now drowning in a tide of ecojunk. Over the past six
months, our coatpegs have become clogged with organic cotton bags, which
- filled with packets of ginseng tea and jojoba oil bath salts - are
now the obligatory gift at every environmental event. I have several
lifetimes’ supply of ballpoint pens made with recycled paper and
about half a dozen miniature solar chargers for gadgets I don’t
possess.
Last week the Telegraph told
its readers not to abandon the fight to save the planet. “There
is still hope, and the middle classes, with their composters and eco-gadgets,
will be leading the way.”(3) It made some helpful suggestions,
such as a “hydrogen-powered model racing car”, which, for
£74.99, comes with a solar panel, an electrolyser and a fuel cell(4).
God knows what rare metals and energy-intensive processes were used
to manufacture it. In the name of environmental consciousness, we have
simply created new opportunities for surplus capital.
Ethical shopping is in danger
of becoming another signifier of social status. I have met people who
have bought solar panels and mini-wind turbines before they have insulated
their lofts: partly because they love gadgets, but partly, I suspect,
because everyone can then see how conscientious (and how rich) they
are. We are often told that buying such products encourages us to think
more widely about environmental challenges, but it is just as likely
to be depoliticising. Green consumerism is another form of atomisation
- a substitute for collective action. No political challenge can be
met by shopping.
The middle classes rebrand
their lives, congratulate themselves on going green, and carry on buying
and flying as much as ever before. It is easy to picture a situation
in which the whole world religiously buys green products, and its carbon
emissions continue to soar.
It is true, as the green
consumerists argue, that most people find aspirational green living
more attractive than dour puritanism. But it can also be alienating.
I have met plenty of farm labourers and tenants who are desperate to
start a small farm of their own, but have been excluded by what they
call “horsiculture”: small parcels of agricultural land
being bought up for pony paddocks and hobby farms. In places like Surrey
and the New Forest, farmland is now fetching up to £30,000 an
acre as city bonuses are used to buy organic lifestyles(5). When the
new owners dress up as milkmaids then tell the excluded how to make
butter, they run the risk of turning environmentalism into the whim
of the elite.
Challenge the new green consumerism
and you become a prig and a party pooper, the spectre at the feast,
the ghost of Christmas yet to come. Against the shiny new world of organic
aspirations you are forced to raise drab and boringly equitable restraints:
carbon rationing, contraction and convergence, tougher building regulations,
coach lanes on motorways. No colour supplement will carry an article
about that. No rock star could live comfortably within his carbon ration.
But such measures, and the
long hard political battle required to bring them about, are, unfortunately,
required to prevent the catastrophe these floods predict, rather than
merely to play at being green. Only when they have been applied does
green consumerism become a substitute for current spending rather than
a supplement to it. They are harder to sell, not least because they
cannot be bought from mail order catalogues. Hard political choices
will have to be made, and the economic elite and its spending habits
must be challenged, rather than groomed and flattered. The multi-millionaires
who have embraced the green agenda might suddenly discover another urgent
cause.
George Monbiot has been awarded
an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex and an honorary fellowship
by Cardiff University.
© 2007 George Monbiot
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