"Green" has been popular recently. The new American, the upper middle class city-dwelling American (funny how we only ever talk about the upper middle class), is all about green. Especially the young people, the youth, "our generation," this generation which somehow thinks it is the first rebellious generation or the most important. They shop at Whole Foods and eat at restaurants that have fair-trade and locally grown food. They wear flip flops made of recycled tires. They have compact fluorescent bulbs in their outlets, and are willing to suffer through their two second charge up time for the greater good. They ride fixed-gear bikes and scooters or even a Prius. And they're saving the world, aren't they? All these little bits add up, don't they? I mean if we all switched to CF bulbs we'd take half a million cars off the road! If everyone just unplugged their cellphone chargers when they were turned off, it'd save enough electricity to power 16 million homes a year! And if one in three Americans used a reusable water bottle instead of disposable ones it'd be like taking 1 million cars off the road a year!
These are both examples from a presentation I saw at school today aimed at "cool teens like me" about global warming. It had a nice presentation animated in Adobe Flash with some cool graphs and a little character that was supposed to be you the viewer flying through these various scenarios and ideas it demonstrated. It took subtle design cues from Anime and hipster fashion. It laid out the danger of global warming, and how afraid we should really be of it, and how many people will die soon because of it, with surprising honesty (although the fullest and most startling ramifications of what it stated were neatly avoided). There was a slideshow of images of destruction, of graphs of the 10 hottest years on record happening in the past 20 years, of people drowning in the Katrina storms and in other disasters around the world that were certainly serious enough. But then came the part about what "you" can do to help. And then it strayed seriously and irresponsibly from reality, even if it was directed at us cool teens. What it did was a beautiful example of the central flaw of this new green ideology.
It said that global warming could be easily stopped by us each creating simple and easy changes in our daily lives.
This is wrong.
Global warming, firstly, cannot be stopped. People will die because of past greenhouse gas emissions. Millions of us.
But secondly, curbing greenhouse emissions so as to at least avoid our own extinction will not be easy. It will not involve anything like biking to work instead of driving or unplugging power strips or recycling your shoes. These things are very bad at saving the environment. That's a fact. All of these estimates are astronomical, even if we COULD all stop eating at McDonalds or driving to work (which of course, many Americans cannot). The math here is obvious, as the vast majority of pollution comes from China and India anyway. What these simple things are good at is eliminating guilt. And the elimination of guilt is a very easy thing to sell. To box, to advertise, and to market. And that's exactly what's happening. Nothing is being re-evaluated. Our motives, our ideas, our values, and the ways we live our lives are not changing. Green is just a new product. Like rock'n'roll was in the 50's. Like free love was in the 60's and 70's. Like human rights were in the 80's. Like punk, like hip-hop, like rap, like tattoos, like electric guitars. All of it, all the counterculture, all the "new" ways of doing things, all of the "young" people's rebellious ideas, just more products to be marketed and sold, and green is no exception.
So if we can't change the world by posting videos on YouTube and inventing yet another genre of music, what can we do? Well, if you're thinking protest politically then you're still wrong. The American government cannot exist in its current form in a world without global warming because the only way to sustain a national lifestyle anything like this is to build it on the shoulders of millions of brown-skinned slaves thousands of miles away and pollute their air instead of ours. No, traditional political protest is just that- traditional. It fits within the system as a pressure release valve so that people think the government works for them. Real political protest does get some things done, sometimes. It improved race relations in America in 1964, and, well, maybe sort of ended the Vietnam war, and did nothing about all the other wars, but still, sometimes it works sort of. Our government was designed 300 years ago and it would take a while for me to learn what they were thinking then but the bottom line is it doesn't work at all like we want it to and lobbying the government to make what are ultimately small aesthetic changes to our nation's workings is only a bit more useful than turning off our lights when we leave a room.
Now you're thinking, our government is controlling the media, forcing us to bend to their will, making the real decisions behind closed doors! We must use our second amendment rights and overthrow it VIOLENTLY!!! That would be so easy, wouldn't it? War is one of the most terrible and destructive human experiences and nobody walks out of it the same, but walking in to it, it looks pretty badass. It'll be like CoD4! And it is easy in that you don't have to think, or rethink, or reevaluate. You just have to destroy. Violent government overthrow may be physically impossible but it's mentally, spiritually, and intellectually very easy. And very ineffective. What will we have to replace our government? I'd draw on a historical example, but I can't think of one really, but I'm still pretty sure I'm right about this. The most recent semi-violent people's revolution was in Egypt, and that was overthrowing a REAL dictator, who tortured and murdered his political enemies. It was led by a bunch of YouTubing twenty-somethings with no real plan for their nation. And for this reason I predict chaos in Egypt. Overthrowing the government without something to replace it will make things worse.
So what do we do? How do we save the Earth? How do we save ourselves? Well, I think I have part of an answer, but it involves writing these long boring things called books and having these kind of big involved thoughts that can't fit in a seven minute youtube video or an already extremely long blog post. It's really pretty boring, this answer, and pretty dry and dull and complicated. I'm not sure if I can make a powerpoint on it or a cute flash animation. So you, being the modern American, probably won't be interested. In order to figure out how to say what I want to say and what it really is I'm going to have to do boring things like read long books by some stuffy old white people and also some disturbing things like investigate the world's largest landfill in Brazil and the people who work there who are treated like human trash, or research the untouchables in India who work and live in human feces in order to uphold the social structure that gives us our free tech support hotlines. I'd love to tell you but I don't exactly know yet. Feel free to email me if you want to know the answer to the actual question heading this blog post, but there's no room or time to post something that long or complicated or interesting or rewarding here.
Because the answer can't be marketed or boxed or coded in to HTML and it can never, ever be sold.
