We don't care, and we should admit it

A rant

Everywhere I look, people are concerned about the environment. Save the trees! Reduce, reuse, recycle! Get an electric car! Fight big oil, big gas, fight coal mining, fight the blindly pro-industrial political right, fight the blindly preservationist left! Buy from those who support your environmental values!

Photo by Vincent M.A. Janssen (2019)

I get it. Environmentalism, in the broadest sense, was a factor in my decision to study ecology and apply it to earn a living. I find the world away from the centers of civilization far more interesting than human achievements.

But we're lying to ourselves. We don't care about “charismatic megafauna” like grizzly bears and bald eagles any more than we care about ugly little winged elms, the possum you passed dead on the road today, that songbird you saw and thought was pretty that one time, or even—heaven forbid—mosquitoes.

I’ve told the lie, I’ve acted like I care, and (probably) so have you. But care isn’t concern; care is action. Care is a lifestyle. And care is alien to our culture.

This isn’t true of all cultures of course, but you’re reading this. So I doubt you're that far from the first world and its increasingly homogenous cultural landscape.

We don’t care, we consume. It's our language. To “care” about the environment in our lingo, we consume from someone else who “cares.” We point to the convenient fact that most of the first world’s waste is not produced in the home but in industry, while ignoring that most of what we buy from industry is superfluous and wasteful. We worship money so much that a low price is usually of greater value to us than the autonomy of the people who made it or the moonscape created somewhere to get it to us or the landfill it will one day contribute to, and when we cannot afford a more expensive option we blame external evils (which certainly exist) to absolve ourselves of guilt for lack of effort in assuming responsibility.

In other words, it’s a cultural problem and calls for a cultural solution. To put it even more bluntly, the blame is on you and I. We can’t point to the powers that be. They may be guilty, but we are all responsible.

Someone else may be guilty, but you and I are responsible.

Sometimes I think we’d be on surer footing if we all just admitted we don’t care. I’m so unimpressed by people’s vague hand waving about how we gotta “save endangered species” or “save the forests” or whatever, without ever taking a single moment to try to understand the complexities of the thing they want to save, or, more importantly, the complexities of the reality that the most direct exploiters of our natural world are often the least able to do anything about it. To the extent that we participate in the economics of oppression (and socialism and capitalism are equally guilty here; it’s a human thing, not a system thing), we are exploiters ourselves.

The people mining cobalt in the Congo for our cell phones¹ are merely the direct exploiters, and I’m pretty sure we can’t blame them for much else. But even closer to home, we ignore reality. I'll use an example from my world as a forester: don’t tell a logger not to log when he makes less money, works harder, and exposes himself to more risk to do it than you ever will. Don’t tell a logger not to log if you wipe with what he lugged out of the woods. Don’t tell a logger not to log if he, with barely a high school education, knows more about ecology and forest succession than you do. It’s not that logging practices are without fault, or that loggers always take care of the environment, or that the industry standard doesn’t degrade the forest; it’s that you live in a glass house, and so do I.

Direct exploitation occurs on the margins of society. From there, all the way up the ladder, it's all hand-waving and finger-pointing and blaming incomplete institutions and incorrect leaders for the world's ills.

Progress doesn’t exist—not in the sense of the human condition.² We have always dominated, oppressed, exploited, and died. So if you want to make a difference, don't run to the system that does these things best and try to change it with all your hubris and ignorance and determination and some notion of the greater good; go to the margins.

Consume less, even when it hurts you. Learn about the ecology of your region; you don't have time to learn about the whole world. Instead of blaming the people with more influence, recognize your portion of blame. Instead of blaming the people who more directly participate in the destruction of what you value, recognize how you contribute to their inability to do otherwise. Turn off the news and look for someone in your community to love. Offer an alternative culture to the world. In Wendell Berry’s words, “practice resurrection.”

The orthodoxy—political, economical, cultural—says it’s a waste of time. But when we succumb to orthodoxy, we propagate their doctrine.

But [the modern economic system, specifically agribusiness] is also enforced by the very nature of Orthodoxy: one who presumes to know the truth does not look for it.

If change is to come, then, it will have to come from the outside. It will have to come from the margins. As an orthodoxy loses its standards, becomes unable to measure itself by what it ought to be, it comes to be measured by what it is not. The margins begin to close in on it, to break down the confidence that supports it, to set up standards clarified by a broadened sense of purpose and necessity, and to demonstrate better possibilities. Though it does not necessarily or always work for the better—though indeed this swing from the center to the margins and back again may be in itself a condemnation—this sort of change is a dominant theme of our tradition, whose “central” figures have often worked their way inward from the margins. It was the desert, not the temple, that gave us the prophets; the colonies, not the motherland, that gave us Adams and Jefferson…

the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He turns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before.³

I know, I know: we can’t reduce the Gospel to something material; we can’t reduce Jesus’ words on “whatever you did for the least of these” to the veiled utopianism and authoritarianism touted as liberation theology; we have to embrace the tension of gratefulness for what God’s given us with our responsibility to live on the margins and care for the poor; we can’t be so outward focused that we neglect our families or friends.

But can we at least admit the tension? Can we at least admit that care demands something of us?⁴ Can we at least admit that some amount of suffering is biblically normative for anyone trying to follow Jesus?

I know, I know: Jesus died for the Church too; none of us are perfect in this life; no human can achieve anything that amounts to more than vanity, or chasing after wind, in the long run; we can’t turn to a salvation of works over grace.

But what are we holding up as our ideal? Is it Jesus? Is it the incredible, though flawed, lives of His most devoted prophets and saints? Or is it an ideological Christianity that offers nothing to the world but the vague, helpless comfort of <insert your preferred denominational flavor here> personal salvation? Christians “have been called to make up a living, active community based on fraternity. But what do we see? Flabby, lazy, individualistic church members, committed to nothing. They sit beside each other on Sunday and proceed to ignore each other completely. They are capable of no sacrifice, they create nothing new.”⁵

I’m no better than anyone else, but I have an ideal to strive for. If you live up to yours, you need a new one.

1. There’s some fuss about Siddharth Kara’s book, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives and how it either points out the horrors of Western civilization or contributes to it, depending on what you read. I haven’t read the book or its critics, to the best of my ability—don’t plan to. But I’m sure that the people who literally do the mining aren’t most important people to blame for whatever ecological or sociological disasters they have a hand in. And whoever is most to blame won’t admit it. That leaves us in the middle to be some change.

2. Cf. Ecc 1:2-11; 3:15, 20-21; 12:8.

3. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

4. I really like what Hadden Turner has to say about this topic: What Care Demands.

5. Jacques Ellul, Jesus and Marx: From Gospel to Ideology, translated by Joyce Hanks. Pg 9 in my copy (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006).