Confessions of a former Environmentalist prt 2

Roughly How my Conversion Took Place

The doctor adjusted his spectacles in the dimly lit room and readied his pen with a click. He spoke with an air of professional psychological disinterestedness to the burlap-clad man with the bushy unkempt beard. "Tell me now, from your earliest memory -how did you come to love the trees?"


The slumping, skinny, tofu-fed man scratched an undeodorized armpit. "Man, my earliest memory? Dude, my memory is shot, man. But okay. As near as I can tell, it all began back in...lessee...it was like, two years before woodstock...yeah, ‘92! With "Fern Gully". I mean, I was just a normal boy, right. I’d put my papers and bottles in the big blue bins like every other kid, right? But after seeing that movie, it like...blew my mind!"

"Would you describe viewing that movie as a watershed experience?"

Sitting up, the silage-smelling man spoke urgently: "Watershed? Dude, it was like Christmas on speed! Trees had feelings, and we were blind, man! We couldn’t feel what we were doing to the planet! We would torture little animals, and were totally out of touch with nature’s harmonies."
"So you felt something new that you hadn’t before?"

"Well, it was more like injecting some feelings into what I was already doing. All of a sudden, it was really really really important to recycle. I remember going to school the next day and all I could think of was the importance of telling my friends to see this movie. And it wasn’t just ‘cuz it was a good movie, but because it was important."

There was an entranced look in the hippy’s eyes as he sought to make eye contact with the psychologist. "Impoooortant, man."

Calmly raising his hand, the bespactacled professional spoke reassuringly: "Please remain seated. Excuse me for a moment." The psychologist reached over to his desk and pulled out a box of cubans. He lit one up and resumed the analysis. "Tell me more about this feeling. Why was it so important?"

The puzzled hippy scratched his head. "I guess it was guilt. And fear. And anger. I mean, all of those come out, right? Fear was probably the biggest: seeing that big smog monster was scary man, especially ‘cuz we made him, and fed him! Feeding him was the guilt part, and the fear was fear that we would destroy the world."

"I see. And was that it, the whole environmentalist thing begins and ends with a movie you saw 2 decades ago?"

"No way man, like I said, that was just the beginning of like, seeing the environment as something impooortant. After that, it just became second-nature to like, recycle and stuff. Every bottle, every piece of paper was impoooooortant. But, I found that like, no matter how much I recycled, the man wasn’t going away!"

"The man?"

"Yeah, the man!" The hippy steeled his eyes and clenched his smoke-stained fingers into noodly fists. "The corporations!"

The psychologist paused to take a liberal puff of his cigar. "Would you say that ‘the corporations’ were the primary target of your frustrations?"

"Oh, totally! And not only that, I found that other people shared my frustrations, and that I wasn’t like, all alone! I found that like, I could totally get people goin’ just by the way I could say the word. Like, I figured out that you can spit three times when you say it: ChorPoraTIon! It’s fun man, you should try it."

*puff* "No thank you. Please continue."

"So now it was like, words man, I found there was a whole string of words and ideas that fit together: corporations, colonialism, industrialisation, consumerism, inequality, exploitation, it all made sense! And you could like, string this litany together and sound smart. I mean, I was hardly passing school, but suddenly people thought I knew stuff, and I think I thought I knew stuff too. And like, my conscience was on fire! Every time I stuck a piece of paper in those blue bins, it was like, I was changing the world!"

"So it felt good to recycle?"

"Good? Oh man, it was an addiction, but like, a good one. ‘Cuz it would confirm that I was right! I was standin’ up to the man, and he was goin’ down! Him and his exploitative, colonialist, economic empire of corporate greed!"

*puff puff*

"And then I had this job at this electronics store, a few years back right? And they didn’t have any blue bins! I was confused. After all we fought for, here was the man still makin’ a mess of things. I didn’t know what to do without those blue bins...those beautiful blue bins. It made me mad, man! Every day at closing I could fill up two garbage bags with cans and bottles that were just goin’ to the landfill. The landfill, man, do you want to live in a landfill? ‘Cuz if no one stops the man, that’s where we’ll be living soon!"

*puff puff* "It sounds like you have everything figured out. What brings you in here?"

A sober mood crept over the hippy’s shoulders. "Well...I’ve got my doubts now. I mean, when you’re just a little boy, watchin’ movies about fairies and trees, and you just wanna do the right thing and save the planet, you just trust what you hear, right?"

"As it ought to be."

"But then, I took this political philosophy course right? And there I had to read abit of that bushy bearded guy...what was his name? Minx? And that Smith guy, and some economics and zero sum games..."

"You had never read these before?"

"Are you kidding man? Economics? That was the man’s stuff! You couldn’t trust it! It was tainted with exploitative free trade propaganda that keeps quiet the 99%!"

*puff puff* "Hmmm...’trust’, interesting choice of words there." The psychologist got up from his chair and slowly paced the room, listening intently as his patient continued to speak.

"Oh man, trust, that’s just it, trust man. I mean, once I started seeing things from another person’s point of view, that maybe the man isn’t who I thought he was, that maybe there’s another man out there whose out there tellin’ people lies about the trees! So who do I trust? At first I was taught that I couldn’t trust the man, but then it turns out, it was another man who was tellin’ me not to trust the man, so now I don’t know who the real man is anymore, and I think the worst of the two might be the one who chained my conscience so tightly to those little blue bins..."

*PUFF* "Well, our time’s up for today. I think we’ve made some significant progress." With that, he opened the blinds in the dimly-lit office.

Confessions of a Former Environmentalist

After a long hiatus involving a move and a new job, I think I can finally squeak some spare time out to do some more blogging. I’ve been meaning to hack out some thoughts on environmentalism for awhile now, so here goes: my eco-confessions.
Hold it! I feel the need for a lengthy preface, so let me first chat about a more general topic first: worldview.

Worldview is something of an obsession of mine. I’m regularly distracted from my immediate surroundings by mental excursions into idea-land. Therein, I’m fascinated by ponderings about "How would I look at the world differently if I thought ___ idea was true?" In fact, these mental excursions are hazardous: many thanks to those who refuse to talk to me about these things while I’m driving, as I’ve had more than a few near misses on the road.



Ideas are consummingly important, and I think rightly so. Worldview is something we all have and need as human beings. Recently I finished reading a book on the natural history of human beings, and I found this one quote from the author (Ian Tattersall) extremely informative and enlightening:

"As far as we can tell from the archaeological record, the difference in cognitive capacity between Homo Sapiens and even its closest extinct relative is a huge one. And it is not just a difference of degree. It is a difference in kind. It is probably fair to say that even such evidently complex beings as chimpanzees do not in essence do much more than react fairly directly to stimuli that they receive from the outside world...Human beings, on the other hand, are symbolic creatures. Inside their heads they break down the outside world into a mass of mental symbols, then recombine those symbols to re-create that world. What they subsequently react to is often the mental construct, rather than the primary experiences themselves."

That mass of symbols is one’s worldview. A worldview is something we as humans can’t not have, it’s how our brains function, we need one in order to interact meaningfully with the world around us. I wanted to draw attention to this, because it greatly helps me understand why changing one’s opinion about something is such a frustrating and painful process. It also explains why it’s so difficult to convince another person to change their mind. It’s actually a really tall order to ask someone to change their worldview, because, depending what you’re arguing for, you’re expecting another person to re-arrange their head full of symbols that they’re using to live by.

Moreover, the act of changing one’s symbolic system in any major way is an excruciatingly painful and confusing experience. As I experience it, my mental world is a self-consciously Christian one: these concepts are crucial in my day-to-day working world, because the world as I know it is governed by God, and every decision and thought is accountable to the Lord Jesus Christ. There are things going on around me that I can’t see, for God created both a physical realm, and a spiritual one. I interact with both those worlds, and make decisions based on the assumption that these symbols are accurate. If you were to take my symbols away, I actually could not interact with the world in a way that was meaningful to me. I am used to seeing the world through a certain lens, and if that were taken away, I really couldn’t do anything. If I were to be persuaded that a major part of my worldview was false, I would be very confused about what I ought to do, what my moral obligations are, for these all depend on the world around me being ordered and coherent. If you change one concept that is obviously inconsistent with other symbols, I could be seriously thrown into confusion.

Another example I like to use to describe this re-symbolizing of the world that we humans practice is by comparing our mental worlds to a living room full of furniture. We are like a person who owns a room, and acquires furniture and appliances that enable him to live comfortably in that room. Changing your basic beliefs is like re-arranging your room. We move around our mental furniture. Now most of the time, we’re always in the process of re-arranging things. I think most ideas come to us like handy appliances: when we come across an idea that helps us understand things, it’s like we just acquired a new blender, and happily add this new appliance (knowledge) to our mental living space.

Now, sometimes new ideas are imposed upon us. We thought we were all comfy, but suddenly someone comes in and kicks over the centerpiece of your room, or smashes a table or a major appliance like your fridge. This causes great discomfort and anxiety: the room that you were used to is no longer liveable or comfortable, and it takes a lot of work to re-arrange your room in the light of the loss of your refrigerator.

Now I write all this as a preface to a bunch of posts about the environment because the experience of "converting" away from environmentalism was very much like being violently thrown out of a favorite lazyboy chair. Not only was my room disrupted, but I could not simply set my living room upright and resume sitting in it: the chair was trashed and no good; I couldn’t sit in it even if I wanted to, but the rubble still cluttered my mental living space. I suddenly had no place to sit, and the room was almost too messy to move around in. The busted chair didn’t just disappear, it left a mess.

The importance of this worldview preface is actually to apologize. I’ve had a few years to fix up my room, and now that it’s a little cleaner, I can see in retrospect what I was going through at the time. When you can’t sit down, you get tired, frustrated, and grumpy. Changing my long-held views on the environment was positively exasperating, and I wish I had dealt with the process better than getting angry. My sincere apologies to those who had the unpleasant experience of talking (or writing) to me about the topic of the environment while I was in the business of cleaning up my headspace due to the unexpected destruction of the environmentalist chair I had sat in since childhood.