I’ve had a lot on my mind related to climate change activism. I did what I could with the Focus the Nation effort on campus, showing McDonough and Braungart’s “Next Industrial Revolution” to a packed hall. (Thanks to Tony Viscardi for making it required viewing by his architecture students!) I’m working on a series of articles that could provide valuable lessons for small-scale growers and cooks. But what I often picture myself doing is going out on the civic-league circuit with a slide show.
Not an “inconvenient truth” big picture slide show, but a “what we can do now” slide show. I’ve been teaching history of art, architecture, and design for a while now, so I know how to do slide shows, by God.
I’m still stewing over Tom Friedman dissing the personal conservation movement. I think he underestimates the possibility for serious change in the behavior of the educated, high-consuming, top 30 or 40% income class of Americans, the very group that is most susceptible to this kind of persuasion (since they have time to read about it). I also think he overestimates the likelihood that electoral politics will produce real leadership. I think elected officials will lag somewhat behind the educated, moneyed class, mainly because they are so responsive to industry’s cries of protest against anything that might affect their short-term bottom line.
A very charming person issued a “less garbage” challenge on Gristmill the other day, and I was struck by how tentative, even apologetic, she (?) was about what she was asking. She even mentioned her household’s many electrical appliances and their desire to avoid “drastic” changes.
Why so cautious? What’s so precious about our domestic habits that they can’t be improved by substantial, meaningful change? And as important as waste reduction is, we need to keep our proportions straight: the place to put the most effort is in reducing driving, heating, hot water, coal-fired electricity, flying, air-freighted produce, and conventional meat (mainly beef) and dairy.
If you cruise around the web looking for close analysis of consumption patterns and their effects, you’ll probably come away, as I did, with the impression that the Europeans are out ahead of us by several leagues, and they’re *still* having trouble meeting Kyoto standards. It takes time to get enough people on board.
So I don’t get this business of disrespecting personal reductions. It looks like a damn fine way of converting words into practice and at the same time putting more people in a state of mind to demand some help from their elected officials.
