By Justin Mallette.
Small, individual acts of environmental consciousness ─ while worthwhile for the planet ─ are nothing compared to the massive policy change needed to solve the climate crisis, says Northwestern University’s Sarah McFarland Taylor.
“The temperature of the entire planet is shifting and then we’re saying: buy this kind of toilet paper or this kind of paper towels,” she told a UC Santa Barbara audience earlier this month. “We’re talking at a micro level for an issue that is hugely macro.”
Sarah McFarland Taylor earned her doctoral degree in Religion and American Culture from UC Santa Barbara. Photo by Justin Mallette.
Taylor is an associate professor in Northwestern’s Religious Studies department and in the university’s Program in Environmental Policy and Culture. The Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life hosted her talk, based on her new book Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue.
Taylor defined the term “ecopiety” as small, individual acts of environmental consciousness and explored their value, why people do them, and her preference for large-reaching policy changes. “Policy: It’s what’s for breakfast,” is Taylor’s motto.
An individual’s small acts to save the planet, such as recycling and driving hybrid or all-electric cars, is simply not going to cut it, according to Taylor. She cited celebrity acts of ecopiety as a distraction from the large-scale change that is necessary, saying it romanticizes acts such as the installation of solar panels and the switching the swimming pool from a chlorine-based filtration system to an ozone-based one. Governments need to take urgent action to cut carbon emissions, far beyond Jay Leno’s “recycled rainwater system to facilitate more eco-friendly car washings,” she said.
Taylor said ecopious acts are ultimately futile because so many other individual small actions of consumption ultimately cancel out the environmentally friendly acts. Taylor describes ecopiety as an individual “moral offset,” or “when being good licenses you to be bad.” There is an exchange of “consumer-piety shopping credits and green-identity credentials,” she said. She said it’s easy it is to pay off one’s carbon credit and she showed a plethora of apps that can track our carbon footprint. As with diet tracking apps, we can download these on our smartphones, tell the app what enviro-sin we’ve committed, and absolve ourselves of it by paying off our carbon credit.
Taylor said corporations must enact macro-level changes since they are the ones who pollute the most, expend the most carbon-based energy, and contribute the most to the climate crisis. She used America Recycles Day as her prime example of how the big corporations try to shift the onus for climate change action onto individual consumers in an attempt to make them feel responsible for it.
“The dire situation we find ourselves in is framed not as the responsibility of the 100 international companies, also known as the Carbon Majors, that are responsible for 71% of global emissions, or the fossil fuel industry’s 30-plus years of aggressive anti-climate lobbying,” said Taylor.
At the same time, Taylor is by no means urging the public to abandon small acts of environmental consciousness. In fact, she’s a staunch believer in the “both/and” approach. These small acts keep the climate crisis in the front of our minds, ever present in our daily lives, she said. Such constant reminder may at least motivate us to push nonstop until we get the large- reaching policy changes Taylor advocates in her book.
Justin Mallette is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication and minoring in both English and Professional Writing. He is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.