The Empty Vessel of Modern Environmentalism
Can we call what we do 'environmentalism' if it doesn't work at all?
Greta Thunberg is perhaps the most well-known and vocal environmental activist of the last decade, yet beyond her fame alone as the defining voice of 2010s environmentalism, I would argue that none better embody the impotence of current-day environmentalism than Great Thunberg simply in what she is (or at this point, maybe rather ‘was’): a child.
It tends to be inscribed into our legal systems that children are reserved a special protected status by the simple fact of being children; we understand that they do not possess the same level of agency as adults, and therefore we do not expect them to be able to participate in society to the same extent as adults. We even prohibit it by law, setting an arbitrary age by which we communally agree divides childhood and adulthood. Because we agree that children are not mature and wise enough to know what is best for themselves and for others, we also forbid them to vote in government elections (understandably so).
In the heydays of Greta Thunberg (her relevance being significantly halted by COVID 19 taking over our newsfeed for 2 straight years), she was famous for advocating in favor of the environment without ever putting forth any tangible solutions forward — after all, why should she do so when she’s just a child, and we can’t expect her to. This made Greta the perfect vessel for our politicians and leaders to capture, and endow on her their own understanding and ideology with regards to the cause of climate change and its solution. Greta’s rhetoric was always very vague, very unspecific, never truly attacking specific policies or politicians, rather denouncing a very undefined notion of the inactive and incompetent global leader. This lack of specificity made it possible for any leader she encountered and/or supported her to in a way tell themselves that “she’s talking about the others, I on the other hand by giving her my praise and attention, am not like the other passive leaders currently destroying the planet” — she became the perfect shield through which to mask environmental disinterest and inactivity and turn it into fake activism content with merely ‘empathizing’ with today’s youth.
No matter the politician’s political inclinations, they could articulate in the empty vessel of “the agency-less child” their own understanding and approach to environmentalism, which in most cases ironically became a rearticulation of the very status-quo ideology which is causing the problems that Greta is decrying. Greta was hence in short, the perfect capitalist environmental activist: acting within the confines of permitted activism, showcasing ‘lifestylic’ behavior (such as choosing sailing over the Atlantic over flying), and void of any counter-hegemonic signification; the ultimate performative, powerless activist that everyone could rally behind because by standing for nothing, she could stand for virtually anything.
The Impotence of Environmental Activism
I was 15 years old the first time I joined a climate protest. It was the COP15 protests organized in Copenhagen back in 2009 during my junior year of high school. I was at the time — like most kids at that age — rather politically unaligned, but interested in the cause of environmentalism nonetheless. The protest was at the time (if I remember correctly) one of the biggest organized protests in recent Danish history, yet it accomplished nothing of substance. Here we are 13 years later, still organizing COP gatherings every year, while climate change just keeps on getting more and more real and destructive. Today, children of a younger and younger age regularly take to the streets in the globally arranged “Fridays For Future” marches, begging politicians to “do something” so that they too can live to reach an old age on a livable planet.
“Do something!”, but what? Having parents allow their underage children to engage in political protests really sends the sort of signal that says “We couldn’t figure it out, now you try something”. Is it not the greatest sign of our political impotence that we aren’t enraged by the idea of having to tell children — who aren’t even allowed to vote — “you try saving your own ass cause we sure as hell don’t know how to”. Children should to the greatest extent possible be sheltered from the grimmer sides of our society, and be allowed to play, learn, grow and develop in peace within a safe environment. In allowing kids as young as elementary school to participate in the political process (through the framework of the educational system mind you, being yet another embodiment of our hegemonic ideology, if not the strongest one), we are essentially admitting defeat in the saddest possible way. As the famous Simpson meme goes: “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas”.
Now when I say “We’ve tried nothing”, the very notion of ‘nothing’ relates to the fact that what was essentially tried was pointless as it did not affect the course of things in any significant way. If my house catches on fire and my first instinct is to bring out a banjo and start playing folksy tunes to combat the fire, can I really claim to have ‘done something’ to stop the fire, no matter how pure my intentions may have been? Now our planet is on fire, and nothing we’re doing and have been doing has helped reverse that fact the slightest — in a way we’re all commonly playing the banjo to try and stop climate change, because we’ve been driven to ‘insanity’ by our ideological gridlock to do anything else.
We all know the famous Einstein quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. This is what I mean by insanity: every year we protest in the same way, say the same things, vote the same way, act in the same way, all because we in the end think in the same way, yet are baffled when nothing changes. We are in a sense not very different than the children who protest for their future: pissed and powerless. Not because we don’t have power, but because we are incapable of exercising it, as we don’t seem to understand where exactly power lays, nor how to articulate it — once again because we are so hopelessly ideologically gridlocked into capitalism that we cannot see beyond the false choices that it offers us. The nature, shape and impact of our activism has been defined for us in advance before we even engage in activism, through the structure of meaning imposed on us by our ruling ideology.
To give certain examples, this is how we commonly engage in environmental activism:
1)We vote for parties that proclaim to have solutions to climate change, yet the vast majority of these parties remain firmly capitalist. This means that these parties will not address the environmentally destructive nature inherent to capitalism:
Growth for the sake of growth, consumerism being the most essential component of our economic system (without it the whole thing collapses) making planned obsolescence sound business practice, while treating our planet like a bottomless inventory. The faster we deplete our resources, the more growth is generated, and the more the economy thrives. This is in essence the quality of an anti-economy. ‘Economy’, its original Greek meaning referring to something closer to ‘household management’, should be focused on frugality over unfettered consumption. Would you personally handle your own finances in the same way our economy does on a macro scale? By spending every dime you have and trying to empty your cupboards as fast as possible? Of course not, that would be insanity, yet here we are doing it together on a planetary scale.
Capitalism’s inability to turn away from fossil fuels because slowing the economy down for even a day to lower emissions or facilitate the transition to green energy would (once again) make our whole economy crash.
Capitalism’s inability to divest from environmentally damaging industries such as animal agriculture because we need the jobs and the income they produce, and the lobbies protecting and advancing these industries usually are far more powerful than voters or civil society. If I think about this as a Dane, Denmark’s economy would collapse into shambles if we were to divest from all agro-animal industries— huge producers of carbon emissions — hence doing the ‘right thing’ for the planet is doing the wrong thing for our capitalist anti-economy.
Investing in green solutions only as long as doing so is ‘profitable’ meaning that we are always at the mercy of investors and markets in determining which areas of our economy will be able to become more environmentally-friendly. The state has historically often been one of the biggest drivers of innovation (think the internet for example), but our drive towards ‘fiscal responsibility’ makes large state investments into green innovation evermore difficult. One of the few government sectors engaged in permanent innovation is the military, meaning that we are often-times spending more money developing weapons to murder innocent civilians across the world, than we are saving ourselves from our own mutual extinction.
Within most current economic models, environmental costs are often left out as ‘externalities’. It gives companies a competitive advantage to leave out environmental costs, and given the competitive dynamics inherent to capitalism, and business’ obligations towards their shareholders, it is very often ‘good business practice’ to pollute. Any company striving to be carbon-neutral or non-polluting will have to internalize the costs that come with such practices, making them less competitive than other competing businesses that don’t. Market incentives hence strongly go against sound environmental practice.
The only way capitalism understands value is through commodification, meaning assigning a monetary value to a certain object. This means that if you can’t sell it, it essentially has no value. Now if we think about the most vital element we rely on, namely oxygen, its sheer abundance makes it an unsellable, uncommodifiable resource — yet we literally cannot live without it. This relates to the fact that an abundance of something, bringing its monetary value down to zero, is bad for a capitalist anti-economy. If everything we needed existed in abundance, capitalism could not exist, yet this should be the absolute ideal goal of our society: food, air, water, housing, services and leisure for everyone. Just like Nestle is already trying very hard to privatize water (i.e. blocking its access to regular people), I’m sure some capitalists are already salivating at the idea of commodifying and privatizing our precious clean air that is becoming evermore scarce. This is James Bond villain levels of evil.
2)We buy ‘green(er) products’ by ‘voting with our dollars’, essentially admitting that the way out of the damages caused by consumerism is… more consumerism! Disregarding the fact that said practice tends to be reserved for the sections of society that can afford to pay a higher price for a commodity endowed with the surplus-enjoyment of getting to feel better about one’s consumerist habits by buying into the ideology of green-washing, it takes the burden away from more powerful institutions (like the state or corporations) to readdress their practices to become environmentally conscious and instead puts it on the consumer — the very same impotent, ideologically gridlocked subject (reduced to the status of mere ‘consumer’ as if we were nothing but worms) who needs to navigate between his/her own immediate survival in a constantly unstable and precarious neoliberal capitalist economy, and his/her ‘moral duty’ to not only buy the ‘right products’, but also to know better — to be aware of what commodity is ‘correct’ to buy, and which one is ‘wrong’. Companies attempt to ‘aid’ us with this confusion by putting small labels on produce informing us that they are ‘good’, but shouldn’t this process be reversed? Instead of the fair-trade logo for example, I’d much rather see all non-Fairtrade products having to print on a logo informing us that this company exploits workers in the third world — maybe a small icon image of a stickman capitalist wearing a top hat peeing on a stickman child. In the end it doesn’t matter as there is essentially no ethical consumption under capitalism to begin with (surplus-value always being extracted from the workers that make the commodities we buy).
3)We protest in ways that are permitted by the state, which in a way is quite ironic. If the thing we supposedly protest against allows us to protest against it, then how are we really protesting? In a sense, nothing is as politically pacifying as a permitted protest: it gives the general population the ability to go outside, yell at the clouds or a building for an afternoon, and then go home and enjoy the good feeling that came with having once again taken on our duty to stand up to climate injustice. But as the material reality shows, things don’t change after protests — or if they do, they don’t change close to enough to combat climate change in any significant way. If the state would crack-down on climate protesters, it might be truer to itself, since it never had any intentions to change in the first place and would thus be revealing its true colors to the world. But since the protests come from ‘inside’ the state’s very own ideological framework, it has nothing to fear and hence allows it to happen. Climate protests as we have seen them unfold in the last few decades are never counter-hegemonic, because we the general population are incapable of even thinking from a place that is outside our hegemonic ideology. As Zizek says it: “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.” In protests, we feel powerful because we lack the language/means to articulate our own powerlessness, our political impotence. And then we are surprised and disappointed when time after time, nothing changes.
4) We ‘spread awareness’. This is essentially an extension of protesting, and hence meets the very same pitfalls that protesting does. Our discourse surrounding environmentalism and how to tackle climate change reflects the very same ideological gridlock that makes our protests useless. Children in the last few years have maybe been the biggest spreaders of climate awareness, because it is the only tool in their power. Yet as we know, spreading awareness only gets us so far, and isn’t an actual solution to our predicament. What is the most radical idea that has come out of US politics in the last decade to tackle climate change? The “Green New Deal”. The most radical solution to combat climate change partially accepted in our discourse is essentially nothing more than rehashing the policies of Truman and Keynes from almost a century ago — policies that were rather easily overturned by more powerful business interests and the synergies of globalization — both qualities inherent to capitalism. Anything less radical than the Green New Deal is simply advocating for specific policies that — as the data shows — are not doing close to enough to combat climate change.
The problem is never framed in a systemic manner, even when slogans like “system change, not climate change” are proclaimed. “System change” in modern political discourse very rarely relates to “let’s abolish capitalism”, rather (quite ironically and paradoxically) tends to refer to “let’s change the system within the system”. There is another quote often associated with both Zizek and Frederic Jameson that says “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and this reality is represented nowhere better than within our climate discourse. We talk about human-caused extinction all the time, we come up with new terms like the “Anthropocene” to categorize the deep impact that humanity has on the planet, but we never discuss the possibility of a post-capitalist, post-consumerist, post-scarcity society. Whether you watch political debates on TV, read opinion pieces by experts of varying kinds online or in newspapers, or are actively engaged in climate conscious communities, the framework of acceptable discourse (also known as the ‘Overton Window’) on climate issues does not permit for the type of discussions or ideas that would be necessary for us to truly tackle climate change.
Don’t Act, Think.
People like myself who oftentimes attempt to broaden the range of the Overton window when it comes to how we approach climate change are often dismissed as non-credible, useless and/or utopian. “We need action now, we don’t have time to wait for capitalism to fall”. To this end, I would once again refer to Zizek when he claims the opposite to be true: we don’t have time to act, we need to start thinking. As I’ve talked about here, when we act without first questioning the premise from which we act, our actions are already powerless; it is practice without theory. Do we really have time to repeat the same practices over and over again, while “expecting different results”? The very concept of ‘environmentalist activism’ needs to be redefined, rearticulated, for said activism to be impactful, and that cannot be done when we’re too busy hitting our heads against the wall. We protest yet have no aim. We yell yet have no ideas nor solutions thus our words ring empty. We consume differently yet know deep down that it doesn’t really make a difference in the big picture. We keep on voting every few years yet know that no politician or party is truly capable of tackling the problem at hand. It’s all wishful thinking; it’s all part of the prevailing ideology.
This is why I claim that environmentalism today is an empty vessel. It is a concept that is yet to be defined in a way so that it is true to its purpose: saving mankind from its own extinction, while also preserving our fragile ecosystems. It is a signifier that anyone with enough descriptive power can co-opt and give it its own preferred meaning. Right now, being in the hands of the segment of society with the strongest descriptive power — our societal elites (businesses, politicians, media, etc.) — environmentalism does not mean anything, because it is incapable of achieving its very goal; incapable of redeeming itself through praxis. It is in a sense, a child like Greta Thunberg, waiting to grow up and become politically potent.
Climate change is an abstract concept for many, because it is something that is yet to be realized in actuality. We see its effects in certain corners of the world albeit more and more vividly, but for the majority of people on Earth, it is still a problem for “future us” to deal with, hence we think that we can still define its solution in present terms. But what happens once our inability to tackle climate change will become ever-more evident? What will happen once we’ll be forced to change radically and rapidly to avoid extinction? Well at that point, which ideas happen to bee ‘in the air’ (ie. part of the discourse) will be the ones that will be considered and materialized in praxis. I have no doubt that ideologies such as eco-fascism will be gaining momentum as a proposed solution to fight climate change while not changing our economic system at all (hence why the ‘problem of overpopulation’ is already very strongly ingrained especially within right-wing circles — the ‘overpopulation question’ will soon become the new ‘Jewish question’ for fascists to embrace). Hence what we need in order to combat the rise of eco-fascism (ie. the climate-driven bourgeois anti-revolution materialized) are different ideas that need to gain potency — and fast! If we don’t have that, capitalism’s ultimate proposed solution to climate catastrophe will most likely entail some degree of genociding and population control (which ironically won’t help one bit with the underlying problem).
Giving Environmentalism Meaning
Greta Thunberg is 19 years old today. In a few months, she’ll be 20. As she is no longer a child, and as her generation matures into adulthood and are endowed with political agency, it is clear that they will have to take on political positions of their own. They can no longer remain empty vessels upon which our prevailing ideology can set its own meaning; they will have to create their own meaning and their own solutions. One can only hope that they will articulate environmentalism in a way that diverges with the paradoxical ‘non-environmentalist environmentalism’ of their parents, grandparents, leaders and idols. Should Greta Thunberg ever articulate strong anti-capitalist positions as our solution to climate change, I have no doubt in my mind that she will be condemned to irrelevancy by our media, leaders and politicians in a matter of moments. She — and the rest of her generation — is useful for people like Obama and Macron only insofar as they can be utilized as poster children for capitalist ‘environmentalism’. Should they radicalize and start embracing and promoting different ideas, they will have to face the sharper edge of our system — the one that isn’t kind to true dissidence. The one that will do whatever it takes to upkeep the prevailing system and power structure.
It’s a very fine line between ‘climate activist’ and ‘climate terrorist’, and that line is drawn by our system into our discourse and ideology. It’s only a matter of perspective, of who is ‘terrorizing’ who, how and to what end. But in the end, aren’t the people dooming our entire species and planet to our inevitable end because they refuse to give up their position of power the real terrorists? Maybe it’s time we frame environmentalism in such a fashion: a movement against the eco-terrorism of the status quo. Once you frame environmentalism in such a way, the antagonism reveals itself clearly, and how we approach our activism can start to change. But it all starts with stopping believing that those who are maintaining and profiting from the system that is creating climate change will be our allies in fighting it — and that the system which breeds and allows for such positions of power to be held and maintained is somehow just. It starts with freeing ourselves from the grip that capitalist ideology has on us, and by extent the way we conceptualize our ability to combat climate change altogether. It starts with thinking before acting, realizing that the enemy is the system itself, and hence coming up with an alternative to it.
“To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller