The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice

3. Sacrifice in an Age of Comfort

3 Sacrifice in an Age of Comfort Paul Wapner The modern dogma is comfort at any cost. —Aldo Leopold Give me convenience, or give me death. —Dead Kennedys Environmentalism has long preached sacrifice. Since its inception, it has counseled a type of restraint that requires foregoing certain immediate pleasures for the higher goal of ecological well-being. Environmentalism tells us, for instance, to reduce our ecological footprint, restrict the depth of our interventions into the natural world, and generally hold ourselves back from living out all our materialist desires in the interest of environmental protection. Environmentalism advocates such sacrifice for both individuals and collectivities. Individually, we can do our part by minimizing the amount of resources we use and waste we produce; collectively , we can implement policies that privilege environmental concerns over other specialized interests. In both cases, doing so is not a matter of course, but rather, requires making choices about our lives—choices that call for giving up certain practices, forms of production, technological trajectories, monetary gains, or comforts in the interest of ecological protection. These days, a growing wing of the environmental movement is rejecting a politics of sacrifice. Emerging out of the developed world, this wing is arguing that though sacrifice may have made sense in the past, it is increasingly anachronistic. The route to ecological well-being is no longer through austerity in the form of a preservationist or conservationist ethic, but rather, through abundance. Economic growth, 34 Paul Wapner technological innovation, and material prosperity in general, far from being the cause of environmental harm, are its solutions. Indeed, the route to environmental well-being is through embracing, rather than sacrificing, our material desires. Furthermore, environmental protection need not involve policy trade-offs. Environmental policies can create jobs, promote justice, enhance security, and be part of a comprehensive approach to social well-being. Advocates advance a postsacrifice orientation for at least two reasons. First, they point out that a message of sacrifice goes against the grain of our consumerist culture and thus, as more people throughout the world join the middle class and begin to taste the fruits of affluence, its resonance will increasingly diminish. Many of us are the beneficiaries of the post–World War II economic boom. Economic growth has become a staple of our individual and collective experience. To the degree that sacrifice calls for rejecting material prosperity, it is out of sync with the momentum of contemporary society and its values. Sacrifice is a hard sell in prosperous consumer societies. Second, sacrifice is inappropriate these days for the sensibility it conveys. Sacrifice is part of the old-time “doom and gloom” environmentalism that seeks to motivate people through fear, rather than hope. It suggests that people must restrict, stop, prevent, constrain, or otherwise limit their impact on the earth, or else. Critics of sacrifice see such warnings as paralyzing people, rather than inspiring them toward effective environmental action. Sacrifice sounds like a desperate, misanthropic strategy that will win few subscribers. As such, it represents an unlikely route to genuine environmental protection. The new breed of environmentalists suggest that we can best address environmental challenges not by forfeiting our material desires and engaging in collective trade-offs, but rather, by satisfying such yearnings and engaging the political process in more intelligent ways. The new environmentalists call for unleashing humanity’s innovative spirit and looking at environmental problems as technological, economic, or policy challenges that require simply better design, engineering, market adjustment , or reformist public policy. Environmentalism, in other words, is not a matter of cutting back; rather, with some adjustment, it is simply another route to having it all. If done right, we can continue to consume resources, produce waste, and procreate as much as we would like; we simply have to be smarter about doing so—an approach that calls Sacrifice in an Age of Comfort 35 for, among other things, using resources more efficiently. Indeed, those voicing this orientation are making clear that environmentalism should not be about giving things up in the face of danger, but rather, about embracing new and more expansive ways of living in the face of untold opportunity. The new environmentalism is a movement of promise: a promise of greater freedom, economic growth, and the continual expression of humanity. In this chapter, I criticize the new environmentalism. I do so with some hesitation. Those forging a positive, have-it-all environmentalism offer much...