31
Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a
Bike, Save the World?
•
Michael F. Maniates*
Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?Michael F. Maniates
“But now,” says the Once-ler, “now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems
perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going
to get better. It’s not. SO . . . catch!” calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall. “It’s
a Truffula seed. It’s the last one of all! You’re in charge of the last of the Truffula
seeds. And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new Truffula. Treat it
with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from
axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.”
Dr. Seuss1
Most people are eagerly groping for some medium, some way in which they can
bridge the gap between their morals and their practices.
Saul Alinsky2
One of the most successful modern-day children’s stories is The Lorax, Dr.
Seuss’s tale of a shortsighted and voracious industrialist who clear-cuts vast
tracks of Truffula trees to produce “Thneeds” for unquenchable consumer markets.
The Lorax, who “speaks for the trees” and the many animals who make the
Truffula forest their home, politely but persistently challenges the industrialist,
a Mr. Once-ler, by pointing out again and again the terrible toll his business
practices are taking on the natural landscape. The Once-ler remains largely deaf
to the Lorax’s protestations. “I’m just meeting consumer demand,” says the
Once-ler; “if I didn’t, someone else would.” When, ªnally, the last Truffula tree
is cut and the landscape is reduced to rubble, the Once-ler—now out of business
and apparently penniless—realizes the error of his ways. Years later, holed
up in the ruins of his factory amidst a desolate landscape, he recounts his foolishness
to a passing boy and charges him with replanting the forest.
The Lorax is fabulously popular. Most of the college students with whom I
work—and not just the ones who think of themselves as environmentalists—
know it well and speak of it fondly. My children read it in school. There is a 30Global
Environmental Politics 1:3, August 2001
© 2001 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
* I thank Thomas Princen, Benjamin Slote, Richard Bowden, and Brian Hill for their helpful comments
on earlier drafts of this article.
1. Geisel 1971.
2. Alinksy 1969, 94.
minute animated version of the book, which often ªnds its way onto television.
The tale has become a beloved organizing touchstone for environmentalists. In
years past, for example, the EcoHouse on my campus has aired it as part of its
Earth Day observations, as did the local television station. A casual search
through the standard library databases reveals over 80 essays or articles in the
past decade that bear upon or draw from the book. A more determined search
of popular newspapers and magazines would no doubt reveal additional examples
of shared affection for the story.
All this for a tale that is, well, both dismal and depressing. The Once-ler is
a stereotypical rapacious businessman. He succeeds in enriching himself by laying
ruin to the landscape. The Lorax fails miserably in his efforts to challenge
the interlocking processes of industrial capitalism and consumerism that turn
his Eden into a wasteland. The animals of the story are forced to ºee to uncertain
futures. At the end of the day the Lorax’s only satisfaction is the privilege of
being able to say “I told you so,” but this—and the Once-ler’s slide into poverty—has
got to be small consolation. The conclusion sees a small boy with no
evident training in forestry or community organizing unpromisingly entrusted
with the last seed of a critical species. He’s told to “Plant a new Truffula. Treat it
with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from
axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.” His
chances of success are by no means high.
So why the amazing popularity of The Lorax? Why do so many ªnd it to be
“the environmental book for children”—and, seemingly, for grown-ups too—
“by which all others must be judged?”3 One reason is its overarching message of
environmental stewardship and faith in the restorative powers of the young. The
book recounts a foolish tragedy that can be reversed only by a new and, one
hopes, more enlightened generation. Surely another reason is the comfortable
way in which the book—which adults can easily trivialize as children’s literature—permits
us to look squarely at a set of profoundly uncomfortable dynamics
we know to be operating but ªnd difªcult to confront: consumerism, the
concentration of economic power, the mindless degradation of the environment,
the seeming inability of science (represented by the fact-spouting Lorax
himself) and objective fact to slow the damage. The systematic undermining of
environmental systems fundamental to human well-being is scary stuff, though
no more so than one’s own sense of personal impotence in the face of such destruction.
Seuss’s clever rhyming schemes and engaging illustrations, wrapped
around the 20th century tale of economic expansion and environmental degradation,
provide safe passage through a topic we know is out there but would
rather avoid.
There’s another reason, though, why the book is so loved. By ending with
the charge to plant a tree, The Lorax both echoes and ampliªes an increasingly
dominant, largely American response to the contemporary environmental crisis.
This response half-consciously understands environmental degradation as
32 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
3. Larsen 1998, 39.
the product of individual shortcomings (the Once-ler’s greed, for example), best
countered by action that is staunchly individual and typically consumer-based
(buy a tree and plant it!) It embraces the notion that knotty issues of consumption,
consumerism, power and responsibility can be resolved neatly and cleanly
through enlightened, uncoordinated consumer choice. Education is a critical ingredient
in this view—smart consumers will make choices, it’s thought, with the
larger public good in mind. Accordingly, this dominant response emphasizes
(like the Lorax himself) the need to speak politely, and individually, armed only
with facts.
For the lack of a better term, call this response the individualization of responsibility.
When responsibility for environmental problems is individualized,
there is little room to ponder institutions, the nature and exercise of political
power, or ways of collectively changing the distribution of power and inºuence
in society—to, in other words, “think institutionally.”4 Instead, the serious work
of confronting the threatening socio-environmental processes that The Lorax so
ably illuminates falls to individuals, acting alone, usually as consumers. We are
individualizing responsibility when we agonize over the “paper or plastic”
choice at the checkout counter, knowing somehow that neither is right given
larger institutions and social structures. We think aloud with the neighbor over
the back fence about whether we should buy the new Honda or Toyota hybridengine
automobile now or wait a few years until they work the kinks out, when
really what we wish for is clean, efªcient, and effective public transportation of
the sort we read about in science ªction novels when we were young—but
which we can’t vote for with our consumer dollars since, for reasons rooted
in power and politics, it’s not for sale. So we ponder the “energy stickers” on the
ultra-efªcient appliances at Sears, we diligently compost our kitchen waste,
we try to ignore the high initial cost and buy a few compact-ºuorescent
lightbulbs. We read spirited reports in the New York Times Magazine on the pros
and cons of recycling while sipping our coffee,5 study carefully the merits of this
and that environmental group so as to properly decide upon the destination of
our small annual donation, and meticulously sort our recyclables. And now an
increasing number of us are confronted by opportunistic green-power providers
who urge us to “save the planet” by buying their “green electricity”—while doing
little to actually increase the quantity of electricity generated from renewable
resources.
The Lorax is not why the individualization of responsibility dominates the
contours of contemporary American environmentalism. Several forces, described
later in this article, are to blame. They include the historical baggage of
mainstream environmentalism, the core tenets of liberalism, the dynamic ability
of capitalism to commodify dissent, and the relatively recent rise of global environmental
threats to human prosperity. Seuss’s book simply has been swept
up by these forces and adopted by them. Seuss himself would probably be surMichael
F. Maniates • 33
4. Bellah et al. 1991.
5. See, for example, John Tierney, “Recycling is Garbage,” New York Times Magazine, 30 June 1996,
24–30; 48–53.
prised by the near deiªcation of his little book; and his central character, a Lorax
who politely sought to hold a corporate CEO accountable, surely would be appalled
that his story is being used to justify individual acts of planting trees as
the primary response to the threat of global climate change.6
Mark Dowie, a journalist and sometimes historian of the American environmental
movement, writes about our “environmental imagination,” by
which he means our collective ability to imagine and pursue a variety of productive
responses (from individual action to community organization to
whole-scale institutional change) to the environmental problems before us.7
My claim in this is that an accelerating individualization of responsibility in the
United States is narrowing, in dangerous ways, our “environmental imagination”
and undermining our capacity to react effectively to environmental threats
to human well-being. Those troubled by overconsumption, consumerism and
commodiªcation should not and cannot ignore this narrowing. Confronting
the consumption problem demands, after all, the sort of institutional thinking
that the individualization of responsibility patently undermines. It calls too for
individuals to understand themselves as citizens in a participatory democracy
ªrst, working together to change broader policy and larger social institutions,
and as consumers second. By contrast, the individualization of responsibility,
because it characterizes environmental problems as the consequence of destructive
consumer choice, asks that individuals imagine themselves as consumers
ªrst and citizens second. Grappling with the consumption problem, moreover,
means engaging in conversation both broad and deep about consumerism and
frugality and ways of fostering the capacity for restraint. But when responsibility
for environmental ills is individualized, space for such conversation disappears:
the individually responsible consumer is encouraged to purchase a vast array of
“green” or “eco-friendly” products on the promise that the more such products
are purchased and consumed, the healthier the planet’s ecological processes will
become. “Living lightly on the planet” and “reducing your environmental impact”
becomes, paradoxically, a consumer-product growth industry.
Skeptics may reasonably question if the individualization of responsibility
is so omnipresent as to warrant such concern. As I argue in the next section of
this article, it is: the depoliticization of environmental degradation is in full
swing across a variety of fronts and shows little sign of abating. I continue with a
review of the forces driving this individualization; it in particular implicates the
rise of global environmental problems and the construction of an individualized
politics around them. How might these forces be countered? How can the
politics of individualization be transcended? How might our environmental
imagination be expanded? I wrestle with these questions in the ªnal section of
this article by focusing on the IPAT formula—a dominant conceptual lens
34 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
6. See for example, “Plant Trees in Dr. Seuss’s Honor,” Instructor. Primary Edition vol. 108, no. 1,
August 1998, 9.
7. Dowie 1996.
within the ªeld of environmental policy and politics, which argues that “environmental
impact” ϭ “population” x “afºuence” x “technology.”
A Dangerous Narrowing?
A few years back Peter Montague, editor of the internet-distributed Rachel’s Environmental
and Health Weekly, took the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to
task for its annual calendar, which this powerful and effective organization
widely distributes to its more than 300,00 members and many non-members
too. What drew Montague’s ire was the ªnal page of EDF’s 1996 calendar, which
details a 10-point program to “save the Earth” (EDF’s phrase): 1. Visit and help
support our national parks; 2. Recycle newspapers, glass, plastic and aluminum;
3. Conserve energy and use energy-efªcient lighting; 4. Keep tires properly
inºated to improve gas mileage and extend tire life; 5. Plant trees; 6. Organize a
Christmas tree recycling program in your community; 7. Find an alternative to
chemical pesticides for your lawn; 8. Purchase only those brands of tuna
marked “dolphin-safe;” 9. Organize a community group to clean up a local
stream, highway, park, or beach; and 10. Become a member of EDF. Montague’s
reaction was terse and pointed:
What I notice here is the complete absence of any ideas commensurate with
the size and nature of the problems faced by the world’s environment. I’m
not against recycling Christmas trees—if you MUST have one—but who can
believe that recycling Christmas trees—or supporting EDF as it works overtime
to amend and re-amend the Clean Air Act—is part of any serious effort
to “save the Earth?” I am forced to conclude once again that the mainstream
environmental movement in the U.S. has run out of ideas and has no worthy
vision.8
Shortly after reading Montague’s disturbing and, for me, surprising rejection
of 10 very sensible measures to protect the environment, I walked into an
introductory course on environmental problems that I often team-teach with
colleagues in the environmental science department. The course challenges students
to consider not only the physical cause-and-effect relationships that manifest
themselves as environmental degradation, but also to think critically about
the struggles for power and inºuence that underlie most environmental problems.
That day, near the end of a very productive semester, my colleague divided
the class of about 45 students into smaller “issue groups” (energy, water, agriculture,
etc.) and asked each group to develop a rank-order list of “responses” or
“solutions” to environmental threats speciªc to that issue. He then brought the
class back together, had each group report, and tabulated their varied “solutions.”
From this group of 45, the fourth most recommended solution to
mounting environmental degradation was to ride a bike rather than drive a car.
Number three on the list was to recycle. The second most preferred action was
Michael F. Maniates • 35
8. Montague 1996.
“plant a tree” and the top response was, again, “plant a tree” (the mechanics of
tabulating student preference across the issue groups permitted a singularly
strong preference to occupy two slots).
When we asked our students—who were among the brightest and bestprepared
of the many with whom we’d worked over the years—why, after thirteen
weeks of intensive study of environmental problems, they were so reluctant
to consider as “solutions” broader changes in policy and institutions, they
shrugged. Sure, we remember studying these kinds of approaches in class, they
said, but such measures were, well, fuzzy, mysterious, messy, and “idealistic.”
Five p.m. came soon enough, and I began my walk home, a pleasant halfmile
stroll. The next day was “garbage day” and my neighbors were dutifully
placing their recyclables, carefully washed and sorted, on the curbside. I waved
hello and we chatted about the weird weather and all that talk about “global climate
change.” I made my way through my own front door to ªnd my daughters
camped out in front of the television, absorbed in a rare pre-dinner video. The
evening’s selection, a gift from a doting aunt, was from the popular “Wee Sing”
series. Entitled “Under the Sea,” the production chronicles the adventures of a
small boy and his grandmother as they interact with a variety of sea creatures on
the ocean ºoor. Dramatic tension is provided by the mysterious sickness of
Ottie, a baby otter meant to tug at the heartstrings of all but the most jaded of
viewers. The story’s climax comes when the entire cast discovers a large pile of
garbage on the coral reef, a favorite playground of Ottie, and then engages in a
group clean-up of the site while singing a song (called “The Pollution Solution”)
extolling the virtues of recycling and condemning the lazy, shortsighted
tendencies of “those humans.” My daughters were enthralled by the video: Its
message about the need to take personal responsibility for the environment resonates
clearly with all that they were then learning about the environment, in
pre-school and kindergarten respectively.
As I reºect now on these past events, I wonder if they’re getting the wrong
message, ubiquitous as it has become. Consider the following:
• Despite repeated and often highly public criticism of the “10 simple things
to save the planet” focus of its calendars, the EDF pushes forward undaunted.
Its 2000–2001 calendar again offers “10 tips to help our planet,”
which again revolve around individual consumer action: recycle, use energy-efªcient
lighting, avoid the purchase of products that come from endangered
species.
• A colleague recently received a small box in the mail with an attached
sticker that read “Environmental Solutions—Not Just Problems.” Inside
was a peat pot ªlled with soil in which was growing a pine-tree seedling,
together with a piece of paper about 2” square that said “Rather than
sensationalize the problems in our world, Environmental Science provides
your students with the tools to develop their own opinions and focus on
solutions. Keeping with this theme, you and your students can decide
36 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
where to best plant the enclosed seedling and watch it grow throughout
the year.” The seedling and associated materials was a promotion for one
of the most widely used environmental-science textbooks at the undergraduate
level.
• These days, my students argue that the best way to reverse environmental
degradation is to educate the young children now in school. When
pressed, they explain that only a sea-change in the choices individual consumers
are making will staunch the ecological bleeding we’re now facing—and
it’s too late to make much of dent in the consumer preferences
of young adults like themselves.
• The biggest environmental issue to hit our community in the last decade
has been the threatened demise, for lack of funding, of “drop off” centers
for recycled products. Primary-school students have distributed their art
work around the theme of “Save the Planet—Recycle” and letters to the editor
speak gravely of myriad assaults on the planet and the importance of
“buying green” and recycling if we’re to stop the destruction. And this is
not a phenomenon limited to small-town America; a friend visiting Harvard
University recently sent me a copy of a ºyer, posted over one of the
student copy machines, with a line drawing of planet earth and the slogan
“Recycle and Do Your Part to Save the Planet.” Recycling is a prime example
of the individualization of responsibility.
• Despite the criticism by some academics of the mega-hit 50 Simple Things
You Can Do To Save the Earth (a small book outlining 50 “easy” lifestyle
changes in service of sustainability), publications sounding the same
theme proliferate.9
• My daughters (now in ªrst and fourth grade), like so many children their
age, remain alert to environmental issues. A favorite book of the younger
one is The Berenstein Bears Don’t Pollute, which speaks to the need to recycle
and consume environmentally friendly products. The older one has
been drawn to computer games, books, and movies (e.g. Free Willy) that
pin the blame for degraded habitat, the loss of biodiversity, and the spread
of environmental toxins on Once-ler-like failings—shortsightedness and
greed, in particular—of humans in general.
In our struggle to bridge the gap between our morals and our practices, we
stay busy—but busy doing that with which we’re most familiar and comfortable:
consuming our way (we hope) to a better America and a better world.
When confronted by environmental ills—ills many confess to caring deeply
about—Americans seem capable of understanding themselves only as consumers
who must buy “environmentally sound” products (and then recycle them),
rather than as citizens who might come together and develop political muscle
sufªcient to alter institutional arrangements that drive a pervasive consumerMichael
F. Maniates • 37
9. See The Earthworks Group 1989; and Getis 1999. A dissection of this approach to social change
is provided by Hunter 1997.
ism.10
The relentless ability of contemporary capitalism to commodify dissent
and sell it back to dissenters is surely one explanation for the elevation of consumer
over citizen.11 But another factor, no doubt, is the growing suspicion of
and unfamiliarity with processes of citizen-based political action among masses
of North Americans. The interplay of State and Market after World War II has
whittled the obligations of citizenship down to the singular and highly individualized
act of voting in important elections. The increasing fragmentation and
mobility of everyday life undermines our sense of neighborhood and community,
separating us from the small arenas in which we might practice and reªne
our abilities as citizens. We build shopping malls but let community playgrounds
deteriorate and migrate to sales but ignore school-board meetings.
Modern-day advances in entertainment and communication increasingly ªnd
us sitting alone in front of a screen, making it all seem ªne. We do our political
bit in the election booth, then get back to “normal.”12
Given our deepening alienation from traditional understandings of active
citizenship, together with the growing allure of consumption-as-social-action,
it’s little wonder that at a time when our capacity to imagine an array of ways to
build a just and ecologically resilient future must expand, it is in fact narrowing.
At a moment when we should be vigorously exploring multiple paths to
sustainability, we are obsessing over the cobblestones of but one path. This collective
obsessing over an array of “green consumption” choices and opportunities
to recycle is noisy and vigorous, and thus comes to resemble the foundations
of meaningful social action. But it isn’t, not in any real and lasting way
that might alter institutional arrangements and make possible radically new
ways of living that seem required.
Environmentalism and the Flight From Politics
The individualization of responsibility for environmental ills and the piecemeal,
counterproductive actions it produces have not gone unnoticed by analysts
of contemporary environmental politics. Over a decade ago, for example,
social ecologist Murray Bookchin vigorously argued that:
It is inaccurate and unfair to coerce people into believing that they are personally
responsible for present-day ecological disasters because they consume
too much or proliferate too readily. This privatization of the environmental
crisis, like the New Age cults that focus on personal problems rather
than on social dislocations, has reduced many environmental movements to
utter ineffectiveness and threatens to diminish their credibility with the public.
If “simple living” and militant recycling are the main solutions to the environmental
crisis, the crisis will certainly continue and intensify.13
38 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
10. Coleman 1994; and Smith 1998.
11. Frank 1997; and Frank and Weiland 1997.
12. Freie 1998; Lasch 1995; Norgaard 1994; Putnam 2000; and Sandel 1996.
13. Bookchin 1989, 19–23. Emphasis in the original.
More recently, Paul Hawken, the co-founder of the environmentally conscious
Smith and Hawken garden-supply company and widely published analyst
of “eco-commerce,” confessed that:
. . . it [is] clear to me . . . that there [is] no way to “there” from here, that all
companies are essentially proscribed from becoming ecologically sound,
and that awards to institutions that had ventured to the environmental
margins only underlined the fact that commerce and sustainability were antithetical
by design, not by intention. Management is being told that if
it wakes up and genuºects, pronouncing its amendes honorable, substituting
paper for polystyrene, we will be on the path to an environmentally
sound world. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The problem isn’t
with half measures, but the illusion they foster that subtle course corrections can
guide us to the good life that will include a “conserved nature” and cozy shopping
malls.14
Bookchin and Hawken are reacting, in large measure, to the notable transformation
in how Americans understand and attack environmental problems
that occurred in the 1980s. The ‘80s was a decade in which re-energized, politically
conservative forces in the US promoted the rhetoric of returning power
and responsibility to the individual, while simultaneously curtailing the role of
government in an economy that was increasingly characterized as innately selfregulating
and efªcient. Within this context, responsibility for creating and
ªxing environmental problems was radically reassigned, from government, corporations,
and the environmentally shortsighted policies they were thought to
have together fostered, to individual consumers and their decisions in the mar-
ketplace.
This shift was altogether consistent with then US President Reagan’s doctrine
of personal responsibility, corporate initiative, and limited government.
The new conventional wisdom rejected environmental regulations that would
coerce the powerful to behave responsibly towards the environment and slap
them hard if they didn’t. It instead embraced an alternative environmental politics
of “win-win,” zero-coercion scenarios, in which a technological innovation
here or an innocuous change in policy there would, it was argued, produce real
reductions in environmental degradation and higher corporate proªts. This
“win-win” approach continues to dominate American environmental politics,
and a vast range of environmentally friendly, economically attractive technologies,
from compact ºorescent lights to ultra fuel-efªcient automobiles, are
showcased as political-economic means towards a conºict-free transition to a
future that works. These kinds of technologies make environmental sense, to be
sure, and they typically make economic sense as well, once one accounts for the
full range of costs and beneªts involved. However, they often fail to make “political
sense,” insofar as their wide diffusion would redistribute political or economic
power.
Michael F. Maniates • 39
14. Hawken 1993, xii. Emphasis added.
Of course, as cleaner and leaner (i.e. more efªcient) technologies emerged
in the 1980s as the solution to pressing environmental ills, responsibility for the
environmental crisis became increasingly individualized. The new technologies,
it was thought, would take root and ºourish only if consumers purchased them
directly or sought out products produced by them. A theory of social change
that embraced the image of consumers voting with their pocketbook soon took
root. Almost overnight, the responsibility for fundamental change in American
consumption and production landed squarely on the backs of individual consumers—not
on government (which was to be trimmed) or corporations
(which were cast as victims of government meddling, and willing servants to
consumer sovereignty).
Scholars of environmentalism, however, caution us against ªxing complete
blame for the individualization of responsibility on the Reagan years. Tendencies
towards individualization run deep in American environmentalism;
Ronald Reagan merely was adept at tapping into them. Some analysts, for instance,
note that mainstream environmentalism has technocratic, managerial
roots and thus has always been a polite movement more interested in ªnetuning
industrial society than in challenging its core tenets.15 Environmentalism’s
essential brand of social change—that which can be had by tinkering at
the margins and not hurting anyone’s feelings—makes it a movement that tends
naturally towards easy, personalized “solutions.”
Others pin the blame for the individualization of responsibility on the bureaucratic
calciªcation of mainstream, “inside the beltway” environmental
groups.16 Buffeted by backlash in the 1980s, laboring hard to fend off challenges
to existing environmental regulations in the 1990s, and unsure about how to react
to widespread voter apathy in the 2000s, mainstream environmental groups
in the US have consolidated and “hunkered down.” To survive as non-proªt organizations
without government ªnancing (as is common in other countries),
these US NGOs have had to avoid any costly confrontation with real power
while simultaneously appearing to the public as if they are vigorously attacking
environmental ills. The result: 10 easy steps to save the planet of the sort proffered
each year by the Environmental Defense Fund.
Other scholars draw attention to the classical liberal underpinnings of environmentalism
that bias environmentalism towards timid calls for personal responsibility
and green consumerism.17 As Paul Wapner, a professor at American
University notes,
Liberal environmentalism is so compatible with contemporary material and
cultural currents that it implicitly supports the very things that it should be
criticizing. Its technocratic, scientistic, and even economistic character gives
credence to a society that measures the quality of life fundamentally in
40 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
15. See Dowie 1996; and Gottlieb 1995.
16. Sale 1993; and Mitchell, Mertig, and Dunlap 1992, 11–26.
17. Cahn 1995.
terms of economic growth, control over nature, and the maximization of
sheer efªciency in everything we do. By working to show that environmental
protection need not compromise these maxims, liberal environmentalism
fails to raise deeper issues that more fundamentally engage the dynamics of
environmental degradation.18
And yet mainstream environmentalism has not always advanced an individualized
consumeristic strategy for redressing environmental ills. Even during
the turn of the last century, a time of zealous rediscovery of the wonders of
efªciency and scientiªc management, “the dynamics of conservation,” observes
famed environmental historian Samuel P. Hays, “with its tension between the
centralizing tendencies of system and expertise on the one hand and the decentralization
of localism on the other . . .” fueled healthy debate over the causes of
and cures for environmental ills.19 Throughout the 20th century, in fact, mainstream
environmentalism has demonstrated an ability to foster multiple and simultaneous
interpretations on where we are and where we are heading.
But that ability has, today, clearly become impaired. Although public support
for things environmental has never been greater, it is so because the public
increasingly understands environmentalism as an individual, rational, cleanly
apolitical process that can deliver a future that works without raising voices or
mobilizing constituencies. As individual consumers and recyclers we are supplied
with ample and easy means of “doing our bit.” The result, though, is often
dissonant and sometimes bizarre: consumers wearing “save the earth” T-shirts,
for example, speak passionately against recent rises in gasoline prices when approached
by television news crews; shoppers drive all over town in their gasoline-guzzling
SUVs in search of organic lettuce or shade-grown coffee; and diligent
recyclers expend far more fossil-fuel energy on the hot water spent to
meticulously clean a tin can than is saved by its recycling.
Despite these jarring contradictions, the technocratic, sanitary and individualized
framing of environmentalism prevails, largely because it is continually
reinforced. Consider, for example, recent millennial issues of Time and
Newsweek that look to life in the future.20 They paint a picture of smart appliances,
computer-guided automobiles, clean neighborhoods, eco-friendly energy
systems, and happy citizens. How do we get to this future? Not through bold
political leadership or citizen-based debate within enabling democratic institutions—but
rather via consumer choice: informed, decentralized, apolitical, individualized.
Corporations will build a better mousetrap, consumers will buy it,
and society will be transformed for the better. A struggle-free eco-revolution
Michael F. Maniates • 41
18. Wapner 1996, 21–22. Emphasis in the original.
19. Hays 1980.
20. Time, for example, has run a ªve-part “Visions of the 21st Century” series covering the following
topics: Health and the Environment (vol. 154, no. 19, November 8, 1999); How We Will Live
(vol. 155, no. 7, February 21, 2000); Science (vol. 155, no. 14, April 10, 2000); Our World, Our
Work (vol. 155, no. 21, May 22, 2000); and Technology (vol. 155, no. 25, June 19, 2000). Each
special issue provides a large dose of technological utopianism.
awaits, one made possible by the combination of technological innovation and
consumer choice with a conscience.
The “better mousetrap theory of social change” so prevalent in these popular
news magazines was coined by Langdon Winner, a political-science professor
and expert on technological politics, who ªrst introduced the term in an essay
on the demise of the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s.21
Like
the militant recyclers and dead-serious green consumers of today, appropriate
technologists of the 1970s were the standard bearers for the individualization of
responsibility. The difference between then and now is that appropriate technology
lurked at the fringes of a 1970s American environmental politics more
worried about corporate accountability than consumer choice. Today, green
consumption, recycling and Cuisinart-social-change occupy the heart of US ecopolitics.
Both then and now, such individualization is alarming, for as Winner
notes:
The inadequacies of such ideas are obvious. Appropriate technologists were
unwilling to face squarely the facts of organized social and political power.
Fascinated by dreams of a spontaneous, grass-roots revolution, they avoided
any deep-seeking analysis of the institutions that control the direction of
technological and economic development. In this happy self-conªdence
they did not bother to devise strategies that might have helped them overcome
obvious sources of resistance. The same judgment that Marx and
Engels passed on the utopians of the nineteenth century apply just as well to
the appropriate technologists of the 1970s: they were lovely visionaries, naive
about the forces that confronted them.22
Though the inadequacies of these ideas is clear to Winner, they remain obscure
to the millions of American environmentalists who would plant a tree,
ride a bike or recycle a jar in the hope of saving the world. The newfound public
awareness of global environmental problems may be largely to blame. Shocking
images of a “hole” in the ozone layer in the late 1980s, ubiquitous video on
rainforest destruction, media coverage of global climate change and the warming
of the poles: all this and more have brought the public to a new state of
awareness and concern about the “health of the planet.” What, though, is the
public to do with this concern? Academic discussion and debate about global
environmental threats focuses on distant international negotiations, complicated
science fraught with uncertainty that seems to bedevil even the scientists,
and nasty global politics. This in no place for the “normal” citizen. Environmental
groups often encourage people to act, but recommended action on
global environmental ills is limited to making a donation, writing a letter, or—
yes—buying an environmentally friendly product. The message on all fronts
seems to be “Act . . . but don’t get in the way.” Confronted by a set of global
problems that clearly matter and seeing no clear way to attack them, it is easy to
42 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
21. Winner 1986.
22. Ibid, 79–80.
imagine the lay public gravitating to individualistic, consumer-oriented measures.
And it’s easy to understand how environmental groups would promote
such measures; they do, after all, meet the public’s need for some way to feel as
if it’s making a difference, and they sell.
Ironically, those laboring to highlight global environmental ills, in the
hope that an aroused public would organize and embark upon collective, political
action, aided and abetted this process of individualization. They paved the
way for the likes of Rainforest Crunch ice cream (“buy it and a portion of the
proceeds will go to save the rainforests”) because they were insufªciently attentive
to a fundamental social arithmetic: heightened concern about any social ill,
erupting at a time of erosion of public conªdence in political institutions and
citizen capacities to effect change, will prompt masses of people to act, but in
that one arena of their lives where they command the most power and feel the
most competent—the sphere of consumption.
Of course, the public has had some help working through this particular
arithmetic. A privatization and individualization of responsibility for environmental
problems shifts blame from State elites and powerful producer groups
to more amorphous culprits like “human nature” or “all of us.” State elites and
the core corporations upon which they depend to drive economic growth stand
to beneªt from spreading the blame and cranking the rotary of consumption.23
And crank they will. One example of this dynamic, though not one rooted per
se in global ecology, is found in a reading of the history of efforts in the United
States in the 1970s to implement a nationwide system of beverage and food
container reuse, a policy that would have located the responsibility for resolving
the “solid waste crisis” on the container industry. The container industry spent
tens of millions of dollars to defeat key “bottle bill” referendums in California
and Colorado, and then vigorously advanced recycling—not reuse—as a more
practical alternative. Recycling, by stressing the individual’s act of disposal, not
producer’s acts of packaging, processing and distributing, ªxes primary responsibility
upon individuals and local governments. It gives life to a “Wee Sing” diagnosis
of environmental ills that places human laziness and ignorance centerstage.
The bottling industry was successful in holding out its “solution” as the
most practical and realistic, and the State went along.24
The same dynamic is now at work in mainstream discussions about global
environmental ills. Chatterjee and Finger, seasoned observers of global environmental
politics, highlight the rise of a “New Age Environmentalism” that ªxes
responsibility upon all of us equally and, in the process, cloaks important dimensions
of power and culpability.25 They point, for example, to international
Michael F. Maniates • 43
23. See, for example, Reich 1991.
24. From 1997 interviews by the author with individuals who worked as “bottle bill” activists in
Colorado and California during the late 1970s and early 1980s (Ross Pumfrey and William
Shireman, who led the California initiative process at different times; and Terrence Bensel, an
activist in Colorado). Fairlie 1992 provides a similar account for the United Kingdom.
25. Chatterjee and Finger 1994.
meetings like the 1992 Earth Summit that cultivate a power-obscuring language
of “all of us needing to work together to solve global problems.” In the same
vein, academics like Esteva and Prakash lament how the slogan “think globally,
act locally” has been shaped by global environmentalism to support a consumer-driven,
privatized response to transboundary environmental ills: in practice,
thinking globally and acting locally means feeling bad and guilty about faroff
and mega-environmental destruction, and then traveling down to the corner
store to ªnd a “green” product whose purchase will somehow empower somebody,
somewhere, to do good.26 Mainstream conversations about global
sustainability advance the “international conference” as the most meaningful
venue for global environmental problem-solving. It is here that those interests
best able to organize at the international level—States and transnational corporations—hold
the advantage in the battle to shape the conversation of
sustainability and craft the rules of the game. And it is precisely these actors who
beneªt by moving mass publics toward private, individual, well-intentioned
consumer choice as the vehicle for achieving “sustainability.”
It’s more than coincidental that as our collective perception of environmental
problems has become more global, our prevailing way of framing environmental
problem-solving has become more individualized. In the end, individualizing
responsibility does not work—you can’t plant a tree to save the
world—and as citizens and consumers slowly come to discover this fact their
cynicism about social change will only grow: “you mean after ªfteen years of
washing out these crummy jars and recycling them, environmental problems
are still getting worse—geesh, what’s the use?” Individualization, by implying
that any action beyond the private and the consumptive is irrelevant, insulates
people from the empowering experiences and political lessons of collective struggle
for social change and reinforces corrosive myths about the difªculties of
public life.27 By legitimating notions of consumer sovereignty and a self-balancing
and autonomous market, it also diverts attention from political arenas that
matter. In this way, individualization is both a symptom and a source of waning
citizen capacities to participate meaningfully in processes of social change. If
consumption, in all its complexity, is to be confronted, the forces that systematically
individualize responsibility for environmental degradation must be chal-
lenged.
IPAT, and Beyond
But how? One approach would focus on undermining the dominant frameworks
of thinking and talking that make the individualization of responsibility
appear so natural and “common sense.” Among other things, this means taking
on “IPAT.”
44 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
26. Esteva and Prakash 1994, 162–163.
27. See Lappé and DuBois 1994 for a discussion of the “ten myths of power” that dominate US
public life.
At ªrst glance it would seem that advocates of a consumption angle on environmental
degradation should naturally embrace IPAT (impact ϭ population
x afºuence x technology). The “formula” argues, after all, that one cannot make
sense of, much less tackle, environmental problems unless one takes into account
all three of the proximate causes of environmental degradation. Population
growth, resource-intensive and highly polluting technologies, and afºuence
(that is, levels of consumption) together conspire to undermine critical ecological
processes upon which human well-being depends. Focusing on one or two
of these three factors, IPAT tells us, will ultimately disappoint.
IPAT is a powerful conceptual framework, and those who would argue the
importance of including consumption in the environmental-degradation equation
have not been reluctant to invoke it. They note, correctly so, that the “A” in
IPAT has for too long been neglected in environmental debates and policy action.28
However, although IPAT provides intellectual justiªcation for positioning
consumption center-stage, it also comes with an underlying set of assumptions—assumptions
that reinforce an ineffectual Loraxian ºight from politics.
A closer look at IPAT shows that the formula distributes widely all culpability
for the environmental crisis (akin to the earlier mentioned “New Age Environmentalism”).
Population size, consumption levels, and technology choice
are all to blame. Responsibility for environmental degradation nicely splits,
moreover, between the so-called developed and developing world: if only the
developing world could get its population under control and the developed
world could tame its overconsumption and each could adopt green technologies,
then all would be well. Such a formulation is, on its face, eminently reasonable,
which explains why IPAT stands as such a tempting platform from which
advocates of a consumption perspective might press their case.
In practice, however, IPAT ampliªes and privileges an “everything is connected
to everything else” biophysical, ecosystem-management understanding
of environmental problems, one that obscures the exercise of power while systematically
disempowering citizen actors. When everything is connected to
everything else, knowing how or when or even why to intervene becomes
difªcult; such “system complexity” seems to overwhelm any possibility of
planned, coordinated, effective intervention.29 Additionally, there is not much
room in IPAT’s calculus for questions of agency, institutions, political power, or
collective action. Donella Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth, the 1972
study that drew the world’s attention to the social and environmental threats
posed by exponential growth, had long advocated IPAT. But the more her work
incorporated the human dimension, including issues of domination and distribution,
the more she questioned the formulation. After a 1995 conference on
global environmental policy, she had a revelation:
I didn’t realize how politically correct [IPAT] had become, until a few
months ago when I watched a panel of ªve women challenge it and enrage
Michael F. Maniates • 45
28. Kates 2000, 10–19; and Holdren 2000, 4–5.
29. Costanza and Cornwell 1992, 12–20, 42.
an auditorium full of environmentalists, including me. IPAT is a bloodless,
misleading, cop-out explanation for the world’s ills, they said. It points the
ªnger of blame at all the wrong places. It leads one to hold poor women responsible
for population growth without asking who is putting what pressures
on those women to cause them to have so many babies. It lays a guilt
trip on Western consumers, while ignoring the forces that whip up their desire
for ever more consumption. It implies that the people of the East, who
were oppressed by totalitarian leaders for generations, now somehow have
to clean up those leaders’ messes. 30
And then, in ways that echo Langdon Winner’s assessment of the better
mousetrap theory of social change, Meadows concludes that while IPAT may be
hard to dispute in physical terms, it is “politically naive” because it ignores economic
and political power, factors that are not easily measured with numbers.31
One need go no further that the 1998 Human Development Report to witness
the corrosive effect of such political naiveté, especially with respect to the
consumption problem. The report marks the ªrst time a major institutional actor
in the struggle for global environmental sustainability has made consumption
a top policy priority. A glance at the summary language on the report’s back
cover is encouraging: “These consumption trends,” it reads, “are undermining
the prospects for human development. Human Development Report 1998 reviews
the challenges that all people and countries face—to forge consumption patterns
that are more environmentally friendly, more socially equitable, that meet
basic needs for all and that protect consumer health and safety.” The report begins
promisingly enough, with a stirring foreword by Gus Speth, a former director
of the US Council on Environmental Quality and, later, of The World Resources
Institute, on the need to look consumption squarely in the face:
When consumption erodes renewable resources, pollutes the local and
global environment, panders to manufactured needs for conspicuous display
and detracts from the legitimate needs of life in modern society, there is
justiªable cause for concern. [Yet] those who call for changes in consumption,
for environmental or other reasons, are often seen as hair-shirt ascetics
wishing to impose an austere way of life on billions who must pay for the
waste of generations of big consumers. Advocates of strict consumption limits
are also confronted with the dilemma that for more than one billion of
the world’s poor people increased consumption is a vital necessity and a vital
right—a right to freedom from poverty and want. And there is the ethical
issue of choice: how can consumption choices be made on behalf of others
and not be seen as a restriction on their freedom to choose? 32
But then the tone changes. Having introduced ideas of “consumption limits”
and “manufactured needs,” Speth dispenses with them. It is better to reºect
upon the patterns of consumption, he says—that is, the mix of products made in
46 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
30. Meadows 1995, 1.
31. Ibid, 8.
32. United Nations Development Programme 1998.
environmentally destructive ways compared to those that are manufactured in
environmentally “sustainable” ways—than on absolute levels of consumption itself.
For those troubled by consumption, he argues, the best mix of policies are
those that expand the economic production of the poor and maintain it for the
rich while reducing overall environmental impact through the dissemination of
environmentally benign technologies. One solves the consumption problem, in
other words, by getting rich consumers and poor alike to demand eco-technolo-
gies.
Remarkably, after promising to help forge “consumption patterns that are
more environmentally friendly,” it takes the Human Development Report just ªve
paragraphs to establish its disdain for any discussion of overall limits to consumption,
paths to more fulªlling, lower-consuming lifestyles, or the insidious
dynamics of consumerism and manufactured needs. Indeed, the critical importance
of challenging consumerism, which Speth alludes to in his forward, is
never again broached in the remaining 228 pages of the document.
The Human Development Report can be a splendid resource for those wrestling
with the complexities of international economic development. I criticize it
to show how inquiry into consumption quickly bumps up against tough issues:
consumerism, “manufactured needs,” limits, global inequity, the specter of coercion,
competing and sometimes conºicting understandings of human happiness.
Dealing with these topics demands a practiced capacity to talk about
power, privilege, prosperity, and larger possibilities. IPAT, despite it usefulness,
at best fails to foster this ability; at worst, it actively undermines it. When accomplished
anthropologist Clifford Geertz remarked that we are still “far more
comfortable talking about technology than talking about power,”33 he likely
had conceptual frameworks like IPAT squarely in mind.
Proponents of a consumption angle on environmental degradation must
cultivate alternatives to IPAT and conventional development models that focus
on, rather than divert attention from, politically charged elements of commercial
relations. Formulas like IPAT are handy in that they focus attention on key
elements of a problem. In that spirit, then, I propose a variation: “IWAC,” which
is environmental Impact ϭ quality of Work X meaningful consumption Alternatives
X political Creativity. If ideas have power, and if acronyms package ideas,
then alternative formulations like IWAC could prove useful in shaking the environmentally-inclined
out of their slumber of individualization. And this could
only be good for those who worry about consumption.
Take “work” for example. IPAT systematically ignores work while IWAC
embraces it. As The Atlantic Monthly senior editor Jack Beatty notes, “radical talk”
about work—questions about job security, worker satisfaction, downsizing,
overtime, and corporate responsibility—is coming back strong into public discourse.34
People who might otherwise imagine themselves as apolitical care
about the state of work, and they do talk about it. IWAC taps into this concern,
Michael F. Maniates • 47
33. Geertz 1989, 238.
34. Beatty 1996, 20.
linking it to larger concerns about environmental degradation by suggesting
that consumeristic impulses are linked to the routinization of work and, more
generally, to the degree of worker powerlessness within the workplace. The more
powerless one feels at work, the more one is inclined to assert power as a consumer.
The “W” in IWAC provides a conceptual space for asking difªcult questions
about consumption and afºuence. It holds out the possibility of going beyond
a critique of the “cultivation of needs” by advertisers to ask about social
forces (like the deadening quality of the workplace) that make citizens so susceptible
to this “cultivation.”35 Tying together two issues that matter to mass
publics—the nature of work and the quality of the environment—via something
like IWAC could help revitalize public debate and challenge the political
timidity of mainstream environmentalism.
Likewise, the “A” in IWAC, “alternatives,” expands IPAT’s “T” in new directions
by suggesting that the public’s failure to embrace sustainable technologies
has more to do with institutional structures that restrict the aggressive development
and wide dissemination of sustainable technologies than with errant consumer
choice. The marketplace, for instance, presents us with red cars and blue
ones, and calls this consumer choice, when what sustainability truly demands is
a choice between automobiles and mass transit systems that enjoy a level of government
support and subsidy that is presently showered upon the automotive
industry.36 With “alternatives,” spirited conversation can coalesce around questions
like: Do consumers confront real, or merely cosmetic choice? Is absence of
choice the consequence of an autonomous and distant set of market mechanisms?
Or is the self-interested exercise of political and economic power at
work? And how would one begin to ªnd out? In raising these uncomfortable
questions, IWAC focuses attention on claims that the direction and pace of technological
development is far from autonomous and is almost always political.37
Breaking down the widely held belief (which is reinforced by IPAT) that technical
choice is “neutral” and “autonomous” could open the ºoodgates to full and
vigorous debate over the nature and design of technological choice. Once the
veil of neutrality is lifted, rich local discourse can, and sometimes does, follow.38
And then there is the issue of public imagination and collective creativity,
represented by the “C” in IWAC. “Imagination” is not a word one often sees in
reºections on environmental politics; it lies among such terms as love, caring,
kindness, and meaning that raise eyebrows when introduced into political discourse
and policy analysis.39 This despite the work of scholars like political scientist
Karen Litªn that readily shows how ideas, images, categories, phrases and
examples structure our collective imagination about what is proper and what is
48 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
35. Bookchin 1980; Gorz 1980; Princen 1997; Rifkin 1995; Schor 1999; Schor et al. 2000; and
Durning 1992.
36. Roodman 1996.
37. Galbraith 1985; Noble 1986; and Winner 1977.
38. Sclove, Scammell and Holland 1998; and Winner 1995.
39. Wapner 1996, 21–24, 76.
possible. Ideas and images, in other words, and those who package and broker
them, wield considerable power.40 Susan Grifªn, an environmental philosopher,
argues the same point from a different disciplinary vantage point when
she writes that:
Like artistic and literary movements, social movements are driven by imagination.
. . . Every important social movement reconªgures the world in the
imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory
shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way
of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future . . . Let us begin to
imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share,
and the many futures in our hands.41
Grifªn is no new-age spiritualist. She is closer to rough-and-tumble neighborhood
activist Saul Alinsky than ecopsychologists like Roszak, Gomes, and
Kanner.42 She is concerned with the political implications of our collective sense
of limited possibility and daunting complexity. She dismissed claims so prevalent
in the environmental movement that a “healed mind” and “individual ecological
living” will spawn an ecological revolution. Her argument, like Litªn’s,
bears restating: ideas and the images that convey them have power; and though
subtle, such can and is exercised to channel ideas into separate tracks labeled
“realistic” and “idealistic.” Once labeled, what is taken to be impossible or impractical—“idealistic,”
in other words—can no longer serve as a staging ground
for struggle.
Conclusion
IWAC is more illustrative than prescriptive. It draws into sharp relief the fact that
prevailing conceptualizations of the “environmental crisis” drive us towards an
individualization of responsibility that legitimizes existing dynamics of consumption
and production. The recent globalization of environmental problems—dominated
by natural-science diagnoses of global environmental threats
that ignore critical elements of power and institutions—accelerates this individualization,
which has deep roots in American political culture. To the extent
that common-place language and handy conceptual frameworks have power, in
that they shape our view of the world and tag some policy measures as proper
and others as far-fetched, IWAC stands as an example of how one might go
about propagating an alternative understanding of why we have environmental
ills, and what we ought to be doing about them.
A proverbial fork in the road looms large for those who would seek to cement
consumption into the environmental agenda. One path of easy walking
leads to a future where “consumption” in its environmentally undesirable
Michael F. Maniates • 49
40. Litªn 1994.
41. Grifªn 1996, 61–67.
42. Alinsky 1969; and Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner 1995.
forms—“overconsumption,” “commodiªcation,” and “consumerism”—has
found a place in environmental debates. Environmental groups will work hard
to “educate” the citizenry about the need to buy green and consume less and, by
accident or design, the pronounced asymmetry of responsibility for and power
over environmental problems will remain obscure. Consumption, ironically,
could continue to expand as the privatization of the environmental crisis encourages
upwardly spiraling consumption, so long as this consumption is
“green.”43 This is the path of business-as-usual.
The other road, a rocky one, winds towards a future where environmentally
concerned citizens come to understand, by virtue of spirited debate and animated
conversation, the “consumption problem.” They would see that their individual
consumption choices are environmentally important, but that their
control over these choices is constrained, shaped, and framed by institutions
and political forces that can be remade only through collective citizen action, as
opposed to individual consumer behavior. This future world will not be easy to
reach. Getting there means challenging the dominant view—the production,
technological, efªciency-oriented perspective that infuses contemporary
deªnitions of progress—and requires linking explorations of consumption
to politically charged issues that challenge the political imagination. Walking
this path means becoming attentive to the underlying forces that narrow our
understanding of the possible.
To many, alas, an environmentalism of “plant a tree, save the world” appears
to be apolitical and non-confrontational, and thus ripe for success. Such
an approach is anything but, insofar as it works to constrain our imagination
about what is possible and what is worth working towards. It is time for those
who hope for renewed and rich discussion about “the consumption problem”
to come to grips with this narrowing of the collective imagination and the growing
individualization of responsibility that drives it, and to grapple intently
with ways of reversing the tide.
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52 • Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?