Climate Change: Individual Action Versus Collective Action !

Climate Change: Individual Action Versus Collective Action

KAKALI DAS

What can I do?

This single question has followed me like a spectre ever since I have started understanding the urgency to prevent climate change.

Often hearing about the many terrifying effects of climate change, my family, friends or people around me have begun contemplating on a simple question – “What can we as individuals do about climate change?”

Why is this our burning question about stopping climate change?

Let’s explore the cultural context that has led to our fixation on individually reducing our carbon footprints. A fixation that in many ways has prevented many of us from imagining a way to act collectively, as the chaos caused by climate change grows larger year after year so as to do the cries to action.

But the environmental action seems to have been cleaved in two distinct paths toward stopping an ultimately reversing climate change – personal action and systemic changes.

This tension takes shape most visibly in the back and forth flow of media where new sources and blogs pour out their top lists for individual cures to climate change that inevitably gets shouted down by cries for collected action as the only medicine for our climate problem. Individual action versus systemic change – this is the binary option supplied to us in our fight to save the world.

“If you can’t be an activist unless you have already somehow purged your whole life of fossil fuels, then you will have a movement of three people – which is obviously great for the fossil fuel companies. It’s an incredibly effective way to repel activists, to make people afraid to participate because they don’t want to be called a hypocrite” – Naomi Klein

Individual Action

From the beginning, the individual action is flawed because it subscribes to an ideology that continues to prolong the problem of climate change. This notion that the solution to such a massive global issue can be solved through individual lifestyle changes like buying an electric car, go vegan are culturally specific ones based in neoliberal thought.

Championed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, the hyper individualistic mentality of neoliberalism pervades our current world. The agenda of neoliberalism is, as journalist Martin Lucas writes – headlined by policies of privatisation, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals.

All of which de-emphasises the individual as a citizen able to take collective action and instead transforms them into a consumer, who as Lucas goes on to write is more prone to self-reliance than communal interdependence. It’s with this lens then that we should understand the task of individual action – because individual action is important but it is also limited. Focusing on what the individual can do frequently means that we are not asking what the collective can do.

When we talk about individual actions – it means a transformation in lifestyle for those that are financially and physically able to. There are plenty of people in countries like the U.S which has one of the highest per capita emission rates in the world, who have the luxury of embracing market-based individual solutions to climate change.

And if you are curious to what those solutions are, multiple studies have calculated what the most effective lifestyle changes are for someone wanting to reduce their carbon footprint.

According to one study by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas – foregoing a car, having fewer children or embracing a plant-based diet are some of the most effective ways an individual can slash their own carbon footprint. But these individual solutions can morally and politically wrongheaded as in the case of using eugenicist arguments to regulate someone’s reproductive future and can also be costly difficult or downright impossible especially for the marginalised people.

Not using a car is feasible for some people in certain neighbourhoods of cities with plentiful public transit but for many in the disabled community for example, a car is a necessity to get around. Or if your only option is to get to work or a 25-minute drive or a two-hour transit via public transportation that is often inaccessible, you are more than likely to choose the car.

Additionally, in countries like India where there is extreme humidity and pollution in the atmosphere – it is torturous to ride a bicycle to work drenched in sweat, more like being a deliberate host to the family of skin cancer.

So, while there are individual environmental solutions, they need to be viewed in a much broader context as a short-term harm reduction strategy rather than the cure-all to climate change. These ways of individual change are based on the idea of the individual as the consumer, not as a citizen.

There are individual actions however, that don’t rely on a consumer mind-set to enact change like, voting for candidates with strong climate change proposals and holding representatives accountable by calling them. We need to broaden our definition of personal action, beyond what we buy or use. Start by changing your light bulb, but don’t stop there.

We all too often focus on the individual market oriented solutions to the answer attaching virtue to those who compost their food scraps, and labelling those that fly on airplanes as sinner. This over emphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities – things that they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into.

We are essentially blaming the victim and by focusing on the individual, we miss the much bigger culprits to the problem of climate change – the 100 companies responsible for 71 per cent of the world’s global emissions, and the government policies that allow them to do it.

“If you can’t be an activist unless you have already somehow purged your whole life of fossil fuels, then you will have a movement of three people – which is obviously great for the fossil fuel companies. It’s an incredibly effective way to repel activists, to make people afraid to participate because they don’t want to be called a hypocrite” – Naomi Klein

In short, individual actions like not driving a car while important, are akin to throwing a bucket of water onto a burning house. It will quench some flames but it will distract you from the fact that it will take a lot more than one bucket to stop the inferno destroying your house.

Collective Action

This is where collective action comes in. Individual harm reduction strategies need to go hand-in-hand to broader societal solutions to climate change. We live in a global economy where it’s extremely hard to not use fossil fuels – a world filled with terrible choices. If we don’t work to change government policies and pressure corporations to transform, then we will just be sweeping leaves on a windy day.

With this in mind, it doesn’t matter if you drive a car to work or need to use a plastic straw, the key is to galvanize enough public pressure on governments and industries to pass legislation like the Green New Deal which would transform our economy so you don’t have to choose between the environment and making rent at the end of the month.

What does collective action look like in practice? It can be so many things – you could host a letter writing campaign urging a company to strengthen their environmental policies or canvas for strong environmental leaders. It could be holding consciousness-raising spaces for people to educate each other and connect over how climate change affects their lives.

It can mean gathering together to protest, to hold your elected official accountable or blocking the construction of emissions heavy infrastructure. It means looking at the work that has already being done and joining it. It could even mean creating art installations within the community, forcing local government and industries to be more aggressive on climate issues. The opportunities are endless.

What can we do about climate change?

We should do what we can individually, like avoid using plastic products as much as possible, recycle garbage, plant more trees – but mustn’t stop there. And avoid attaching moral superiority to those actions. The only way we can truly stop climate change is to act less as individuals and more as a collective voice to force emissions-heavy industries to move past the age of carbons and urge our elected officials to represent all our voices.

Climate action then is all about holding two truths in mind. We must work to create a better world now through personal actions while simultaneously striving for a better future together, imagining and creating the shape of a world without emissions where we don’t have to commit ‘environmental sin’ just to get to work.

According to the intergovernmental panel on climate change – full-scale societal restructuring is essential within the next 11 years if we are to keep global surface temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius. But in order to do that we’ll need scientists, mathematicians and engineers among others to help envision and create a world without emissions.

Kakali Das is the Assistant Editor, Mahabahu

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