For my lunch walk this time I took a route that passed a certain store. On the way back, carrying my loot in a neutral bag, I heard someone calling my name behind me. I turned around and saw a friend walking her dog. In my circles, she is one of the few who shares my amazement at the ease with which others get on a plane again and again, especially young people and nature lovers who we do not understand well. Aren’t they ruining their own environment? This is how we talk to each other, we say things like: “In fact, flying is equivalent to letting huge farts in someone else’s air. Those people cover that up, then they suddenly find themselves in another country and post one show photo after another on social media. But how they got there remains undiscussed.”
This friend is also my impresario, she arranges lectures about my books, so she knows the themes that are important to me. She knows that I have been striving for sustainability for decades and try to convey that in what I do and write. On Facebook and Instagram I don’t usually talk about flying holidays, but about my thrift store finds, such as the chic second-hand ensembles I bought for my very elderly mother-in-law. This friend loves something like that.
This time she asked, I feared, where I had gone. In an attempt to delay, I replied semi-jokingly: “To the Aktiejón. I needed an oilcloth for the garden table and it costs four or five times as much elsewhere.”
She saw through me immediately. “To the Action? But that is very, very bad…”
The butter on my head gushed down in streams.
Two tenners
To be honest, I often do something that is not in line with what I pretend to be. I recently drove to the center of The Hague in our car, with my partner at the wheel. He didn’t get his driver’s license until he was forty-three, when we had enough of lugging stuff around and we also wanted to experience the freedom of our own motorized transport. We went to look for something in the National Archives. I had weighed the costs of the train and the car in advance. The car turned out to be twenty euros cheaper – for the sake of convenience I did not include the insurance and road tax. In the tunnel of the A12 I thought about the protests of Extinction Rebellion against the subsidies of the fossil industry. Through the petrol we had filled up, I was now serving that industry myself because of a meager saving of two tens of euros.
People love the front and deny the back
The metaphor of the human exhaust gas is not so crazy after all. With the winds that accompany the digestive process of one person, according to the author of The ultimate fart book (2006), philosopher and religious scholar Bart Lauvrijs, a balloon is filled every day. The digestion process of airplanes, and of a car like ours, can best be compared to this: they also only progress when they are fed with a product of organic origin, after which combustion gases appear in a place that the user cannot see or smell. People love the front and deny the back, you could almost call it a law of nature. If you don’t immediately experience the disadvantages, everything will probably not be too bad.
When parking in The Hague, the next form of hypocrisy came to light: an ING debit card. We save green, and once tried to transfer our current accounts, but we discovered a practical disadvantage halfway through and decided to stay with the bank that makes investments that we do not support.
On the way back, back in the car, I made a mental list of what else I persistently keep doing wrong. At the top were the DIY materials we use. Paint and fillers from the ‘normal’ hardware store, while in our hometown there really is a store with ecological alternatives. Plastic kitchen sponges, which secrete microplastics that can reach our brains via drinking water and food, which has been established by scientists. I did replace yellow cleaning wipes with something plant-based according to the packaging plastic-free is, but with the sponges I’m still too lazy to look for them, which reminds me of what a friend who spent years in prison once said. After observing his fellow detainees, he came to the conclusion that most of them had ended up there ‘through a wrong use of the will’.
The list I made in my mind also included Facebook and Instagram. Through social media I support the American royalty who put their own interests first, opportunistic materialists who do not think for a second about the impact of their actions. The energy consumption alone! But the disadvantages of quitting are too great for me, then I will lose my podium. Clearly a case of misuse of the will.
A limited amount of willpower
Once back home, I took a test on the Milieu Centraal website. Could I, a so-called good guy, burden the earth more than I pretend? What is the actual CO2-footprint of my household?
The first test questions were about the use of gas and electricity. Then there were questions about food and drinks and buying new things. To my relief, it turned out that our footprint is low, only transport can be improved. Since we got a car, our starting point is that we no longer do anything that we experience as a sacrifice. I don’t like train travel within the Netherlands because of the cold stations. I go for win-win situations, I only do things that go hand in hand with pleasure. When I zip through France or Spain on a comfortable seat on an international high-speed train, I feel like I’m traveling in more luxury than if I were squeezed into an airplane seat.
In a twist on what that friend said to me, I suspect that each individual has a limited amount of willpower available. And then I mean willpower as Immanuel Kant roughly defined it: the power to freely make decisions that can also be beneficial to others. I think you should save that limited amount for the important issues. To avoid being tempted to buy ‘junk’, I therefore get a paper bag every week that has been filled by others with unsprayed fruit and vegetables, so that I don’t have to use my reservoir of willpower to think about what we are going to eat. With products that are needed occasionally, such as paint or tablecloth, willpower appears to be used up again.
Persevering in inaction
It is of course annoying that these kinds of considerations are necessary, that as a consumer you have to constantly find out whether something is harmful. Erich Fromm, the philosopher and psychoanalyst, wrote about it in 1976 in his book A matter of having or being. He explains that the pursuit of a ‘good’ lifestyle used to be the fulfillment of a religious or ethical requirement. That no longer applies, for the first time in history that pursuit is related to humanity’s physical chances of survival. In other words: we have to.
“The almost unbelievable fact, however, is that while lip service is being paid to the need for a change in mentality, in fact there are still hardly any serious attempts being made to avoid what has been presenting itself as a serious crisis for decades,” writes Fromm. And now it comes: “While in private life only a completely insane person would remain passive in the face of such a threat to his existence, those responsible for public affairs do virtually nothing to reverse the fatal development. And even more curious is that we, who have entrusted our fate to them, allow them to persist in this inaction.”
Did this mild humanist really write this almost fifty years ago?
Why do we use our intellectual capabilities for technological innovation, but not for fundamental social reconstruction? asks Erich Fromm. I have looked at the colophon of his book several times: did this mild humanist really write this almost fifty years ago?
What hope
Yes, change must come from ‘those responsible for public affairs’, from politics and industry. So why fuss about something like the plastic particles that come loose from my kitchen sponges? Cargo loads of plastic disappear into the sea every day, around eleven million tons per year worldwide. What does one person change about that? If you don’t want to cause damage, it is better to stop living – after which the problem of polluting funerals arises.
Again I make a mental list. Why, as an individual, continue to stubbornly try to make sustainable choices? To be a ‘good person’? In my case that is too positive a view. I do it to still have control over something, that is the essence. Things are getting really out of hand on Earth, but it won’t be my fault, something like that. Following world news has become almost unbearable, at least I can still do this in my life, this gives some hope.
If you leave it at that ‘because it doesn’t help anyway’, you are just like those who are angry when the fields turn yellow due to glyphosate weedkiller, but maintain that by buying products grown on glyphosate fields. It’s a chicken and egg story, of course. But then I’d rather be the chicken, because I can’t choose to be the egg. In psychology this is called ‘intrinsic motivation’: the reward is built into the action.
In my case, self-interest plays a role in an even more pragmatic way: I want to stay healthy, so I think it would be better to eat ecological food. There are also occasional successes. I recently went to Intratuin, where I entered with some hesitation and left excited: the garden center appears to be taking responsibility, and suddenly it was full of plants grown without poison. After individuals had been harping on it for years, the insight has sunk in and management has drawn consequences from it. And so bottom-up initiatives do have an effect on those who want to make money from us.
What I continue to find difficult is not measuring others against my moral yardstick, I struggle with that as much as with my own failures. When young family members take a plane for a trip of a few days, I will never say anything about it. But it does keep me awake at night, wondering why we as humans take so little account of the consequences of our actions.
And I keep coming back to that limited supply of willpower: if something can be done easily, we don’t do it the difficult way, that’s how we are wired. We know that the choices we make matter for the climate, but there are already too many issues that require our willpower. Adapted from Erich Fromm: interventions from above are necessary, because we simply cannot do it ourselves.
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