Stop Trying to Save the Planet by Telling Other People to Change their Behavior
The most counterproductive way to confront our climate emergency is to tell people how to change their behavior. This is applying the wrong part of the brain to the wrong part of the problem. Instead, change the systems in which human behavior operates.
Maybe it’s because I just experienced a “once-in-a-millennium” heat dome over the Pacific Northwest first-hand, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to politely express my growing aversion to behavior-modification-as-a-climate strategy. The term “raising awareness” just about makes me want to scream.
I see many good-hearted, earnest people talking about confronting climate change by convincing other people to change their habits and become just as enlightened as they imagine themselves to be. I’ve begun to regard them much the way I regarded certain virtuous souls who approached me with clipboards at the Evergreen State College — with an urge to run in the opposite direction.
I want the very same thing these compassionate activists want — an inhabitable, biodiverse planet and a definitive end to the fossil fuel industry. I just disagree on how to achieve it. And I have begun to fear they’re doing more harm than good by coming across as hypocritical do-gooders whose MO is to make you feel horrible about how you live your life. I recognize that I’m setting up a bit of a straw man argument here, but I have specific activists in mind and I don’t want to shame anyone or put anyone on the spot.
We seem to have been conditioned by social media into thinking that solutions to our problems involve gathering as many people as possible to our point of view, of ratcheting up our roster of likes and followers. Getting a lot of people to agree with you actually isn’t the same as fixing problems systemically. That requires innovation and channeling existing patterns of human behavior into better systems, not convincing people to abandon behaviors that are the result of literally billions of years of natural selection.
Consider one of the biggest systemic wins ever for our planet, the banning of clorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as accelerants in aerosol products in the 1980s. The most alarming environmental threat of that decade was the hole in the ozone layer caused by CFCs. Everyone agreed this was a problem because scientists told us it was. Imagine that!
In 1987, the United Nations successfully pushed forward the Montreal Protocol, a treaty signed by 197 nations, which banned the use of CFCs. What would have happened if CFCs hadn’t been banned? A group of scientists produced a report in 2009 to answer that very question. In short, some very bad things.
You know what environmental activists didn’t do in 1987 to confront the threat of CFCs? Ask people to change their hairstyles. Why? Because such an attempt would have been futile. Remember, in 1987, a whole lotta people looked like this:
Changing peoples’ habits by raising their awareness is as useless as trying to close the hole in the ozone layer by asking metalheads to stop defying gravity with their mullets. I suspect that the real reason our crisis is often framed this way is because we yearn to feel morally superior by telling other people how they should live.
Meanwhile, crops in the eastern part of Washington state shrivel and over a hundred people fall dead of heat exhaustion in British Columbia.
It’s time to stop trying to change human behavior and start harnessing it to transform technologies and industries. It’s one thing to wag one’s finger on Facebook and harp on people to use less plastic. It’s quite another to actually launch an innovative reusable container startup like my friend Beth Massa. Or take my brother, David, who is inspiring countless people to clean up their neighborhoods not by lecturing them, but by leading by example.
I’m more inspired by those who are actively changing things than by those who explain how other people should change. Show me what you’re doing differently before you tell me what I should be doing differently. It’s a subtle but powerful distinction, and one that could have a profound impact on human survival on earth.
