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- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to our listeners. I am Michael Simpson. Today I'm very pleased to welcome Dr. Maniates who is joining us from Abu Dhabi to discuss his new book, the Living Green Myth, the Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. Michael, with almost five decades experience as a scholar and a sustainable consumption and environmental politics, could be described as a restless observer and optimistic participant in the struggle for an enduring environmental sustainability. He also has expertise in the design, implementation and evaluation of interdisciplinary undergraduate programs in environmental studies and sustainability. Now, Michael holds a PhD in Energy and Resources from the University of California at Berkeley. And after teaching at Allegheny and Oberlin Colleges, Michael served from 2013 until this year as professor of Social Science and the inaugural Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Yale NUS College in Singapore, among the first liberal arts colleges in Asia. Now currently he's a Senior Fellow at the Story of Stuff, an environmental organization that focuses on sustainable consumption and system transformation. He also has a number of previous publications, with the most recent as a co author of Consumption Corridor, Living a Good Life Within Sustainable Limits. Welcome, Michael.
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C
Michael, it's my pleasure to join you. Thank you so much for having me.
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B
It's great to have you here. So, let me begin for our listeners. Can you briefly summarize what you mean by Living Green?
- [02:53]
C
Living Green is an all encompassing term that could be equated with perhaps conscientious consumption to some extent. Voluntary simplicity. There are a number of different names that attend to that living green notion, but in general living green would center on a notion of a kind of set of lifestyle practices, perhaps through the consumption of what might be seen as sustainable products, or perhaps trying to consume less. Green livers are often engaged in at home production through perhaps vegetable gardens or solar collectors on the roof. In many ways and in all kinds of fashions, people who care about the environment often find themselves trying to express that care, at least in part through their day to day acts of living, of consuming, of being. And those day to day acts tend to cluster around this idea of living green.
- [03:57]
B
Okay, so can you please clarify for me your statement that between the individual advocacy efforts of the 60s and 70s which I participated and today's efforts to live green or more sustainably, seems in questions where you definitely state that such living green social transformative change is, and I quote, utter nonsense. Can you comment upon your statement?
- [04:23]
C
Sure. I think somewhere also I say that it's a con. I guess I get carried away from time to time, but wanting to make what I view to be a very important point. The utter nonsense portion of the argument centers not on living green in general, as I describe in the book, and perhaps I'll get to it later. There are lots of, in my view, splendid, fabulous reasons to adopt any, any number of green lifestyle behaviors. The utter nonsense part comes when we come to believe and believe a story, a story that is repeated to us again and again and again, that our living green behaviors will somehow magically aggregate with other living green behaviors around the state, the country, the world, to drive fundamental political and economic change. I mean, I was sort of part of that belief system back in the late 70s and early 80s when I was involved with the appropriate technology movement. And we believed in California without a doubt, that if we could just get a lot of solar collectors on everybody's individual roofs, we could bring ExxonMobil to its knees. And so this is this element of green living that the book asks the readers to really think about critically, this idea that through our individual green living behaviors that we can do the equivalent of bringing ExxonMobil to its knees. I find that to be utter nonsense. Nonsense, by the way, that has been created for us in many ways by those very folks who would want to keep us busy trying to live green rather than perhaps engaging in other kinds of activities for more enduring sustainability.
- [06:16]
B
So one might argue that lifestyle change does matter globally, especially cumulatively, and that your critique might risk undermining individual agency or hope. What is your response to such a critique?
- [06:31]
C
Throughout the book, and if it isn't clear, I'll do my best to make the point now. Throughout the book, I seek to remind myself and the reader that individuals do have power. We do have agency. I mean, we have only ourselves and our commitments, our hope and our dreams, our aspirations for ourselves and for our children. That's all we have. The question comes in where is that individual agency most likely to lead to particular outcomes? I mean, we play many roles as individuals, many roles that all have the potential to have power in the world. We're parents, we're workers, we're students, we're members of institutions. Perhaps we're a member of a church community. We know our neighbors. We're also consumers. And the book asks the reader to consider what I view not just as a possibility, but as a certainty that pinning most of our hope on individual power to change the world, on our role as a consumer, that we're going to change the world through the checkout line at Walmart rather than perhaps the voting booth in our community, that's where the problem is. That's the utter nonsense. And yet it's a story that attends so frequently the distribution and the marketing of a whole array of products. Now, I should just be clear that lifestyle changes, recycling, riding a bike, planting a garden are so deeply important for our own sense of well being, our sense of ethical commitment, and our ethical journey in the world, perhaps building connections with neighbors. There are lots of really good reasons, but the living green myth that I'm getting at in the book is the one that has come to dominate the story about why we should live green. And that story that we're told is that if you and I live green in small, disaggregated ways that will somehow come together to change politics and economics. And that, I think, is not just diverting, but it actively generates a sense of cynicism and hopelessness within people as they come to discover over time that their individual green actions really aren't amounting to much in terms of transformative change. Or it may lead to to an erosion of hope and of agency, as out of our own commitments to living green, we try to get our neighbors and friends to live green as much as they can. And as a result, we become, perhaps more than a little annoying. And hence the title of one of the chapters, why Environmentalists Don't Get Invited to Parties.
- [09:28]
B
Yes, I thought that was a great title. In fact, my wife sometimes tells me to keep my mouth shut.
- [09:36]
C
My, my wife does too. And for good reason, I should say.
- [09:42]
B
So who is telling this myth that you're saying is out there?
- [09:47]
C
That's one of the, for me, that's one of the more interesting parts of the research project that led to this book is trying to figure out where this story came from that hey, you know, Michael, if, if you or your listeners want to change the world, the story says go out there to the store and buy all these sustainable products. And that's going to somehow kind of come together with the behavior of others and make things happen. This what Julie Shore has called a kind of magical aggregation which really just doesn't quite cut the mustard. You know, when you and I were growing up in the 70s, you know, I remember going to my first Earth Day when I was in sixth grade. There was a sense that green living back then, and this is not to romanticize those, those days, but green living back then meant being somehow engaged in conversation with your neighbors and some kind of, of, of politics. Not a seamy dirty politics, but just an effort working with others to try to make a difference. It might mean writing a letter to the editor or contacting your local elected official or coming together and forming a group or doing a teach in. So there was a living green narrative back in the 70s and, and, and, and, and in the 80s. But the idea that you would go out and buy products that would somehow change the politics of the landscape was just utterly, it was foreign. The products weren't out there, other than perhaps some ozone friendly products that began to emerge in the early 80s. But a lot of that, a lot of that was greenwashing. All this changes in the 1980s, some scholars point to the rise of neoliberalism, this idea of individual responsibility and individual choice driving social outcomes. Some scholars point to neoliberalism as the driving factor. But in the book, from my research, I suggest that there are three interlocking factors. One is a public concern for global environmental problems that begins to emerge in the 1980s with the ozone layer, the so called ozone hole being discovered. Tropical deforestation, the spread of international toxins, the loss of biodiversity. There's an anxiety in the land among people who care about the environment around these international issues which the domestic environmental groups weren't well equipped to deal with. They're very good at domestic issues, but this global stuff was a bit, was a bit out of left field for him. So this public anxiety, this led in many cases to increased donations to Public interest groups to green environmental groups. I'm anxious about the environment. I'm going to do something, I'm not sure what it is. Let me give some money to Sarah Club Friends of the Earth, World Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace. I was working for Friends of the Earth in San Francisco in the early 1980s with Dave Brower and a good friend working in the Sierra Club just down the street. So I could see this full hand. So the environmental groups experienced this increase, rapid increase in donations and they want to spend this money to keep these new members and keep the old legacy members involved. But the problem of course was that Ronald Reagan came along in the 1980s, usurped a variety of environmental programs and the environmental groups are really on the back heel. They couldn't really, in the 80s, as things were going sideways for them, launch a new initiative to get this new policy in place or expand that policy. They were playing defense. I mean they were lucky they could hold their own. And playing defense and saying to new members, hey, give us your money and maybe, just maybe we'll be able to retain maybe half of what we had in the 70s is probably not a good play if you're trying to keep members and recruit new ones. So the environmental groups hit on this notion of moving, of asking their members to begin to buy green and live lean for the planet. For some of those groups, many of them, it was a holding action. They didn't really believe that this behavior was going to make a difference, but it kept their members busy. For other groups, perhaps they didn't really care. And then coincident with this, finally to end the story, coincident with this, major marketing groups and corporations who had tried selling kind of this sustainable green stuff in the early 80s and it basically crashed and burned. There are a lot of false starts and some significant money was lost. They came in again in the mid to late 80s and began to really push green products in part because corporate profits because of macroeconomic effects were bottoming out. And they're trying to climb out from that and they found that could they really had a handle on the market if they joined their so called sustainable on green products to a larger story, which, gosh, it's what marketers do to sell us stuff, right? I mean for good or for ill, they link their products to a larger story of who we want to be and what could be important in life. The marketers link these green products to a larger story of buy this product and be part of a process of change. You don't have to engage in the gnarly, difficult politics of getting environmental regulation passed or keeping regs enforced. You can avoid politics altogether by just doing the right thing at the checkout stations. Checkout stand so in the early 80s we had none of this. By the end of the 1980s, we had this unplanned combination of mutual self interest among the corporate sector, environmental groups, and a public sector anxious about environmental problems and looking for agency coming together. And voila. Green living as a dominant force that's marketed to us and frames the conversation was born and we've had it more or less ever since.
- [16:01]
B
That's really interesting. So let me say I recently interviewed Dr. Lilly Shea about her recent book Corporations at Climate Crossroads. And although she focused on the voluntary efforts by corporations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, she definitely stated that the consumer in their daily purchasing practices has been a major economic disruptor of how many corporations do business and to make them more sustainable. Do you want to care to comment on this?
- [16:34]
C
Yeah, I listen to your podcast. I actually listened to your great conversation with Lily. I don't know Lily personally, but we share colleagues in common and we go to the same conference every year. So Lily, if you're listening, I'll see you in Columbus next year. And what I thought I heard Lily say wasn't that the consumers per se were going to have would have this sort of disruptive effect, but that people who are consuming green products or who are living green are perhaps prime candidates to recruit for major corporations who are looking to explore new ways of practicing true sustainability. I thought what I heard Lily say was that green living could be a marker of larger political and activist commitments that a corporation would want to draw on as it's hiring. What I also heard her say, and it's quite consistent actually with her published material, which I went back and looked looked at as well after the interview, what I also heard her say is that this green consumption can be disruptive if it's somehow channeled and organized. And that's something in the book that I really try to emphasize as well, is that this disaggregated I'll buy some green stuff, I'll live green, and maybe it'll all come together in some magical way, which is the con that I refer to. It's the utter nonsense that I refer to in the book that's quite different from what many scholars call consumer activism, which is people thinking of themselves not as consumers, I'm going to change the world at the checkout counter, but as citizens who are drawing on their consumer power in some organized way as part of a larger strategy to sort of make a difference. And so in the old days, we knew this stuff as product boycotts. And I write a bit about product boycotts in the book about boycotts that led Kimberly Clark to rethink its use of old growth force in Canada, boycotts that got Nestle to reassess its palm oil use of palm oil in Southeast Asia, a boycott on SeaWorld that ended the captivity of killer whales in SeaWorld parks. These were all organized politically and collectively. People were all on the same page. Usually it was organized by an environmental organization, many of which Lilly talks. And then consumer power was one or two or three arrows in the quiver that was used to sort of make things happen. I'm completely down with that. I think that's a wonderful approach. And in that respect I'd completely agree with Lilly.
- [19:28]
B
So don't you think that possibly critiquing individual action unintentionally discourages collective action or policy advocacy?
- [19:37]
C
Yeah, this has been my struggle. I mean, this book, the predecessor to this book was my 2001 essay, I'm a Medium Sized Fish in a Small Pond because of this essay. My 2001 essay called Individualization, Plant a Tree, Ride a Bike, Save the World. It came out as a chapter in a book I did with Tom Princeton called confronting consumption in 2001. And then it was published as a journal article in the first year of the journal Global Environmental Politics. And it's often used in classes. So that thing has been sitting there since 2001, and it's, it's still highly cited in red. And I've been, I was asked repeatedly to try to build on that, but that's been the tough part because that essay for the. Your listeners might be interested in it. If they can't find it, they can email me. I'd be happy to send it to them. That essay basically does the critique, but doesn't really take people anywhere. And I have struggled, Michael, I have struggled over the last 15 years to try to figure out how to honestly lodge the critique, but then springboard off of that into something that is authentically, hopefully and genuinely mobilizing. I mean, nobody needs unicorns and kittens and rainbows at this stage, right? We need authenticity. And it took me really about six years of working on this book on and off and trial running a number of things in public talks and lectures to come up with the structure that you see in the book now, which is to say, gosh darn it, Living Green is a wonderful thing. There's so many good reasons to do it. You can live green to protect your family by buying organic produce. You can live green as a part of mindful living. You can live green to connect to small entrepreneurs. Heck, you can even live green just because it's street cred for other people who live green. Do it however you want, but don't do it out of this sense of guilt, which is what the living green myth drives. Don't live green because you think that if you're not, you're somehow leading to the destruction of the planet. Instead, just find your thing and then leverage off of the joy of whatever it is that you're doing. Planning a garden, riding a bike, eating vegetarian, whatever it is, and then find ways of authentically working with others as well as expanding your own knowledge of the issue to enhance your potency, your power in the world. And that last chapter in the book was a real step function for me in trying to think about several ways in which people could springboard off of their existing sort of green living affections into something that would embrace that and build on it and honor it, but then move it forward into authentic change and genuine hope. And gosh, as I say, towards the end of the book, it took me a while to get there and there were a number of public talks where I was sort of the skunk at the picnic because, you know, I came off as a Debbie Downer. And I didn't realize early on that critiquing green living was perilous and demobilizing because so many people had internalized it as part of their identity. And that if you can't give people something to do with that, that's productive and authentic and potentially joyful and freed of this guilt that often comes with living green, if you can't give them that, you're not going to get anywhere. And I finally, after years of false starts, figured it out, I think. And that's what you see in the final chapters of the book.
- [23:27]
B
Okay, well, thanks. You talk about three faiths in your book. Can you quickly describe what the three faiths are?
- [23:36]
C
Right. Yes. And I've described three faiths, faiths in how social change happens that permeates this green living myth. The first faith is that it's a faith in the power of getting everybody on board. I mean, if we know that green living in its various forms, individually will lead to just a small impact, then in order to have a big impact, you have to get a whole lot of people on board to make it happen. And so this, this first Faith that I describe undergirding the living green myth is this faith, this belief, this commitment that change only happens by getting everybody on board. And gosh darn it, we have to do that, and we have to persevere. We have to show by example we can never stumble as living green people. And we need to persuade all of our friends to do the same. Because, again, if it's individual small actions and we need to make a big difference, you need to get everybody on board. That's the first central core faith. The footnote here to that first faith is that even if you got everybody on board to do all the simple green things, the impact, the physical impact of those behaviors would be small compared to the enormity of the environmental problems that we face. But. But we'll footnote that. We'll put a pin on that and push that aside for now. The second faith is this faith in the need for fundamental value change. It's a faith that says if we can shift people's values, then good things will happen, transformation will occur. Here again, this faith gets at this idea that we need to get large numbers of people on board. We need to have a value transformation before good things can happen. And the way that we do that through green living, again, is to model what good behavior would constitute and persuade others to do the same. Just as a footnote, in the United States, after decades of environmental education and lots of what some people would call environmental Proselytizing, only about 15 to 20% of the American public consistently identify themselves as sort of true greens, really pushing hard on green consumption. So I think that sort of shows the limit of that faith. But nevertheless, there it is. And then this third faith suggests that if you can somehow get people engaged in green living, that that will activate their citizen sensibilities and lead in many ways to a shift in overall kind of norms and behav. And so Annie Leonard, the founder of Story of Stuff and the former director of Greenpeace usa, was fond of saying that this faith, which she doesn't agree with, but this faith says that if you can get somebody to screw in a light bulb today, they'll be primed to screw in a congressman tomorrow, right? Small acts of green living activate citizen sensibilities. It's an alluring faith, especially for those of us who are trying to figure out how to get more people involved politically in the environmental game. But what we know, and I wish it were true, if it were true, life would be much different. But what we know empirically from a variety of Empirical studies, social science studies, psychology, economics, large scale and micro and macro studies, is that people who already have existing environmental commitments are engaged as citizens may also be engaged in green living. But people who are coming into the game doing green living, there's very little evidence that that activates by itself a larger sort of citizen sensibility. And in fact, there's good evidence to suggest that these small acts of living green, at least for many people, may actually dampen an inclination to then be engaged as citizens in larger struggles. The idea is that, hey, I've bought my, my fair trade organic coffee in my recyclable cup and I've taken it home and drank it and recycled it and I've got my feet up on my sustainably sourced ottoman and I'm done for the day. I don't need to do anything else. So these are these faiths, these faiths that if we can somehow get everybody on board, if we can shift everybody's values, if we can get people engaged, that will lead to citizen activation and spread in norms. These faiths are what drive this living green myth. They're often reproduced and repeated out there in the world, and I just find them to be incredibly pernicious because they remove us from really where the action is. I mean, I mourn, I don't mean to be hyperbolic. I mourn the efficacy of those among the students with whom I work who believe in this green living myth because they come to subscribe to an utterly bankrupt theory of social change that says you have to get everybody on board in order to make anything happen. And hey, you never get everybody on board. And social change usually happens when small groups of people, relatively small percentages of the population, come together to make things happen and move things forward. So as I say in the book, I don't think there are five guys in a room plotting to marginalize those of us who care about the environment. But if there were, this is exactly the set of myths and the story they'd come up with.
- [29:50]
B
So if the three faiths are insufficient, then what is sufficient?
- [29:58]
C
I think for each of these faiths, the counter argument is what's important. So as I've already said, I'll just quickly repeat, just for continuity, this faith in having to get everybody on board needs to be replaced by a faith in the power of small committed groups of people working strategically, often in their own communities, through trial and error experimentals of to try to move the ball downfield on a variety of environmental issues. When we come together as neighbors, as citizens, as co participants in trying to make something better, we stand a much better chance of making an impact than if we imagine that we have to get everybody on board to do that. Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor who just had this most illuminating interview with Paul Krugman on Krugman substack. She's the author, author of Civil what Everybody Needs to Know. She was reflecting on the all Kings Day 2 and other acts of civil unrest, not just in the US but elsewhere. And she points us, as do many scholars, to a beautiful set of. Well, from my perspective, just a wonderful set of scholarly work that shows that when you come together with others in small groups or large, to just try to work forward, to try to gropingly find a solution to the problems that ail us, that by working in common for the common good, that's incredibly liberating. It's wonderfully activating. It produces what political scientists sometimes call solidarity sort of benefits. You don't always get to the solution right away, but it's the working together that can be animating and embolding and sort of wonderful in many respects. And so getting off of this idea that you change the world by screwing in a light bulb and hoping others do the same, well, that's a Most of this living green stuff is completely solitary. It happens in the privacy of your own home. It removes us from the joys and admittedly, as I say, the frustrations. We've all been in meetings and worked on projects where we want to pull our hair out, but overall, the joys and the connections of working in common for the common good good. And this idea that we need to shift everybody's values ignores, in my view, and I try to make the argument cogently in the book, it ignores the reality that most of us have already within us a set of environmental values or values for compassion or values for change. It's not that we as environmentalists need to be pounding on people to transform their values or educate them. We need to think about creating ways in which those values that we deem important are pulled out or expressed. And then finally, with this third myth of citizen activation and norm shift, I think too often that those who are living green believe that if they can emulate a green behavior, that that behavior will then be copied by others. And what we know about norm shifts and citizen activation is that your demonstration of a new norm isn't happening in a vacuum. If your demonstration of a new norm is challenging an existing norm, those who benefit from the existing norm will push back. And so this idea that If I go to the store and back before we had in many places a ban on shopping bags, I'd go to the store with my own cloth bag. And that somehow would send a signal to us others to follow. Not that that didn't really take off until there was citizen political action to make that happen. But where the norm shift can really take off, as I describe in the book, is if we as green living aficionados, as people who worry about the environment, if we push on the institutions of which we are a part to try to live green. So faculty and students pushed on on college and university campuses to go low carbon or carbon neutral. That set in motion an expectation among universities that they all needed to do that. And that led to a big shift or workers within particular corporations. Going back to Lily's point and some of her scholarship. If workers and managers in corporations can shift the culture in a corporation, that can happen. That outsized effect then not just in what that corporation does, but then in setting a new corporate norm. So we have power to shift values, we have power to shift norms. But it's not nagging on each other and looking down our noses. It's thinking about how to shift the values and the practices of the institutions that we work and engage with. You're a guy who just wants to look nice. The kind of nice where you might get a nice compliment on the niceness of your nice new algebraic fit. Good thing Men's Wearhouse has everything from polos to jeans and yes suits. Plus a team to help you find the perfect fit to make sure you look nice nice. Love the way you look. Men's Wearhouse.
- [35:17]
A
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- [35:45]
B
Experian okay, so let me go back to your point that you know change occurring at the community level. I'm sure you read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone the Collapse and Revival of American Community. And and basically he says there is a decline of civic engagement and community participation in the US through right now is before Internet. But he would say Internet suburbanization generational change, time pressures are cited as causes that he has. And so there seems to be a counterforce to what you want with the loss of civic engagement. Do you have anything to add to that?
- [36:28]
C
Thank you for raising Robert Putman such a great question. I mentioned Putman in the book, and I actually provide a citation to a web link to a New York Times interview that he gave maybe about a year ago, and also a little documentary that he's made. Michael, you capture Putman's argument exactly right. And I think he would be the first to say that we swim against the current. Now, in terms of the civic engagement, my hope in the book is twofold. The first hope to kind of capture it in an image is for us, for those of us who are thinking about environmental issues, who are trying to lead a ethical life at a time when the fabric of the biosphere is being shredded. My hope is that we come to realize that the problem is the maze, not the mouse. That the problem is not with individual shortcomings, bad values, or inattentiveness. Though of course we need to hold people accountable when appropriate. But it's rather with these larger sorts of structures that tend to steer people in particular directions or that can make living sustainably very difficult. As Paul Hawken has said in his book the Ecology of Commerce, that it's not a management problem of managing people, it's a design problem need to be creating systems and ways of living that makes living sustainability as easy as falling off a log. And so my first hope in response to your question is that people sort of understand, just conceptually, that we shouldn't be focusing on individuals and trying to get everybody to live green and to shift their values and to sort of get everybody on board so we can get this massive cumulative impact. But to begin thinking more joyfully and strategically and opportunistically about where the cracks in the wall are, about where to invoke Buckminster Fuller, where the trim tabs are the levers, where small sort of efforts will then lead to big change. But of course, that requires coming back to your question, some appetite, or at least willingness or risk taking to swim against the grain. No, you don't swim against the grain. To swim against the current, to cut against the grain and to get ourselves off the screen and in conversation with our neighbors and friends about how to move forward. And this book then, is a plea. It is meant to be an inspiration. It's meant to be, to some extent, a self help guidebook that says if you care enough about the environment and your lifestyle to meticulously recycle or to buy only organic, or to bike, to work or walk, even when it might be inconvenient or cold or raining. If you have these kinds of commitments, because, you know, ethically it's important, gosh, let's just think about small ways in which you could begin to leverage off of those commitments or springboard off of those commitments. I should say to begin to engage with others around ecolocal projects or other kinds of projects that are happening locally but are globally networked for potential maximum effect. This is a call this book to a renewed citizenship of the sort that we saw in the first Earth day in the 70s and early 80s, a renewed citizenship that was trampled by this more recent notion of living green that focuses on our abilities only as consumers. So I have faith, Michael. I have faith that people care enough about the environment now perhaps more than ever, given that we can see happening around the planet. And the major marketers advised by people like Bain & Co. And Deloitte & McKinsey, I mean, these consulting firms are quite transparent in what they're advising. There are major marketers out there that are saying, look, people are more and more concerned about the environment. This is an opportunity to turn them into green consumers and to sell them on the living green myth that if they buy green, that that's going to change the world. I think the commitment is there. I think the concern is there. We just need together to be in conversation so that we can find ways of taking our commitments to the planet and to whatever we do as living green practitioners and just notching up just a little bit to find ways of connecting with others. And if we do, I think the evidence, the social science evidence is clear that more often than not that engagement with others will be sufficiently rewarding psychologically and socially that at least a good chunk of folks who take it the extra step will be sustained and move forward to make a real difference. Thank you.
- [41:30]
B
Now, this question may be coming out of left field, and I apologize.
- [41:34]
C
Okay. That's okay. I'm a huge baseball fan, so you bring it. Okay.
- [41:38]
B
You might know that I've spent decades working in the developing south with disenfranchised populations, and it's obvious that there's a major inequity in both wealth and opportunity for a significant portion of the world's population. In fact, the Pew foundation estimated about 85% of the world's population lives below what the US considers as its poverty line. And these are people just trying to survive day to day. And one might posit that the effort to bring them up to an acceptable quality of life will require a significant increase in additional consumption of the Earth's resources, exacerbating the global challenges you mention in the book. So in this context, would you agree the concept of living green is just a first world discussion?
- [42:31]
C
Oh man, such a lovely question. I too, you might, you, you might know from looking at my materials, I too have spent a fair amount of time in the global South. I was, was a Fulbright and Smithsonian scholar in India in the 80s and early 90s, kind of running around the countryside looking at cook stoves and gober gas. So I, I, and, and being, being in the villages at a time when maybe when, when white young men from the US weren't typically in South Asian villages. So I, I, I really hear what you have to say. A couple of thoughts. One is that this idea of living green as, as a conscious, well, living green within the li with what I'm calling the living green myth that, that you should, you should buy these products and often high margin, high profit products in order to save the world.
- [43:30]
B
Really.
- [43:31]
C
Took root in the global north, but is exploding now in the global South. So these aforementioned consulting groups and the marketers and distributors that they're advising are positively salivating at the what close to 400 million Indian middle class or the growing number of consumers in places like China. And so from an empirical standpoint, asking who is being sold this myth that if they pay a bit more for green products, the world will be saved. That's becoming increasingly a southern phenomena. But to your point, however, there are a large number of folks in the so called developing south that are not sitting in third world so called third world cities with a decent income. They're trying to make ends meet out in the countryside. And I think one of my epiphany moments around this whole issue was when I was working in India in the 80s with folks who were living on the margins and they were living green in every possible way, weren't they? I'm sure you've seen this as well, right? They were practicing regenerative agriculture to the best of their ability. They knew the environment well. They were certainly reusers, they were minimalists. And yet that behavior wasn't producing a whole lot of positive environmental outcomes. And I, you know, that was really a moment for me early in this journey to say, you know, individual behavior, while important to look at is probably, it's probably not the whole story. We need to be looking at the structures within which people are living. So the living green myth potentially of special interest to Europeans and North Americans. But I spent 10 years in Singapore expecting not to see that myth in play because the state has such a strong hand in terms of directing renewable sustainable initiatives. That living green myth was alive and well in Singapore in ways that sort of amazed me in my travels with middle class in Africa, in China and other parts of Southeast Asia. It's alive and well. Well, so I think it's probably becoming much more now than a so called first world, developing world phenomena.
- [46:06]
B
Well, thank you for that. I was afraid that this is going to be too far.
- [46:10]
C
No, no, not at all. I think that one of the staggering things that I learned in this book is the extent to which there are explicit plans in place to take the concerns among about the environment among emerging consumers in the so called developing world and turning them into subscribers to the green living myth that their primary way for them to make their country better would be to buy better stuff. And in my view, that's a real problem.
- [46:48]
B
Okay, so is there any final thought you'd like to share with our listeners?
- [46:54]
C
So many final thoughts come to mind that I would, I would do violence. I would do violence to your question of a final thought or two. I would say that the struggle that I've, that I've, that I've had over the years with this argument is that people who are living green and who are committed to that can hear me as saying that their actions don't matter or that I'm somehow smarter than they are, or that I'm judging them. And I would hope that if any of your listeners had a little bit of that feeling as we've moved through our questions today, that they would have a look at the book or they drop me an email or perhaps they'd listen again to some of our conversation. I feel that often these are treacherous waters. Talking about green living as being utter nonsense when it's linked to an everybody on board equals social change kind of calculus. Living green can be a source of inspiration and energy and even faith in our shared future in ways that I describe in the book. But the theory of social change that attends it, that the aggregation of small changes equals big impact and thus we need to nag everybody to live green. I think that's what I'm pushing up against. So I am pro living green for a whole lot of reasons. I'm looking for ways that we can springboard off of our lifestyle commitments to capture the real power that we have as individuals. I am anti this idea of small disaggregated good consumer choices will lead to the change that we need. I fear that it's a distraction that's been constructed for us to fatten the profit margins of corporations who, in their defense, are beholden to stockholders who are looking for the highest possible return every quarter.
- [48:58]
B
Okay. The book is the Living Green the Promises and Limits of Lifestyle, Environmentalism, published by Polity Press. Well, thank you, Michael.
- [49:09]
C
Thank you, Michael.