Everything you thought about being an environmentalist is probably wrong. Buying green, avoiding red meat and flying, and trying to convert everybody else to be more green– this list of “10 ways to save the planet” won’t actually save the planet.
It’s no wonder that so many well-intentioned students in my classes get caught up in what my guest this week calls “the trinity of despair”; they don’t see the impacts of their actions, they get angry at others for not caring as much as they do, and they start to believe that only a massive crisis will change people enough, and enough people.
My guest this week Dr. Michael Maniates has written a new book about this tragic cycle, The Living-Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. He argues that getting enough people to care is a fool’s errand, and individual actions are a distraction from system change that we could all be doing instead. He suggests we should each find an aspect of the environment we love, learn how to make strategic, collective change, and amplify our efforts by changing a small part of a local system.
His message isn’t hopeless, pessimistic, or defeatist. Rather, we will all feel more joy and purpose if we liberate ourselves from the trinity of despair we’re forced into by the “green lifestyle” approach.
TRANSCRIPT:
Maniates: Wouldn't it be wonderful if our great, great, great grandchildren looked back on those of us living now and said, Wow, man, those people in the 2010s and 2020s and 2030s. Oh, man, they had their plates full of a lot of____ was coming down the pipeline, but they did what they could with the long view in mind to set us up for success.
Ray: Welcome to Climate Magic, a show where we explore the messy human side of climate politics. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, an author and a professor of environmental studies at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Many environmentally minded, good people, probably like listeners of Climate Magic, struggle to know whether their small actions are worth it. Green lifestyle choices like avoiding plastic straws or riding a bike instead of driving, we've more or less accepted that these individual consumer based approaches to saving the planet are insufficient, yet we still need to feel like we make a difference and that we have some agency in all of it. This tension between needing to feel we have some agency and knowing that we really don't matter is at the heart of a book by my guest today, Dr. Michael Maniates.
Maniates: With a capacity to be surprised by the magic in us all to deny that capacity was really denying the best things that we are as instructors.
Ray: His book is called The Living-Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. This book challenges the buy green, live lean, save the planet approach to environmentalism, arguing that individual consumption choices can distract us from better theories and actions of change, like new governance structures, collective and local resilience efforts, and other forms of environmental citizenship.
He doesn't just throw out individual action, so stay tuned for that nuance, but he really wants us to think beyond what capitalism is telling us that is our only path to a healthier planet. I want to offer a quote from Dr. Maniates' book that sets the table for our conversation today and is one of the places in the book where he gets a little bit feisty, which I really like.
Okay, so here it goes. He writes, "It's scandalous that those of us who teach about environmental ills are happy to describe complex processes of feedback, thresholds, and change when it comes to environmental systems such as climate or oceans, where small interventions and tipping points can produce significant change. But out of lack of interest or misplaced feelings of inadequacy, we generally fail to extend these same concepts to the unpacking of economic and political change and thus leave untouched the prevailing fiction that change in the social world demands overwhelming public support, mass intervention, and widespread philosophical conversion. To my mind, confronting this shortcoming is the single most important task for environmental education today."
So a little more about my guest bio, Dr. Maniates is a scholar and educator of environmental politics, sustainable consumption, and socio-technological, and socio-technical change, whose academic career spans more than four decades across multiple continents. He has edited and written a lot of books, including one with our dear Cal Poly Humboldt Professor of Politics, Dr. John Meyer, called "The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice," which is really good. I highly recommend it.
In from Abu Dhabi this morning, welcome to the show, Michael.
Maniates: Sarah, it is such a pleasure to be here. Words cannot express how happy I am to see you and be able to chat with you.
Ray: I know, it's been too long. We should have done this eons ago.
Maniates: Exactly. [LAUGHTER]
Ray: I've been reading your work for a long time, and I will admit that many of your essays have been some of the very first alarm bells for me for helping my students who really seem to need something more than what they're getting from environmental education and certainly way more than anything I was ever taught to teach them. And they're not even getting it from just any form of education, much less environmental education or climate education.
For example, in 2013 you wrote a beautiful essay, called “Teaching for Turbulence”, which, of course, I'll put in the show notes, which changed the whole game for me and really set the stage for me. And I really want to acknowledge and honor that this was a turning point in my own teaching and thinking that ends up happening with us on Climate Magic today.
In that essay, you write about the psychological pitfalls of fearmongering in environmental education, which I then came to call the "scared to care" pedagogy, which causes this existential angst in students. You talk about this urgency plus despair trap. Which you pointed out even way back then, leads to apathy and burnout. And how can we have a bunch of students in apathy and burnout if we're trying to get them to care?
So that essay made me really think about all about environmental education and what I would then come to call the hidden emotional curriculum that we need to build emotional intelligence in environmental education better. So thank you for that.
And I now teach your essay on theories of change called "15 Claims." This helps students critically observe how theories of change operate in the world, and also to help them figure out what their own theory of change is, which I also might want to call their "climate magic," to help them find their path in the big world of environmental change making. So, yeah, thank you for all of that. This gets me to my first question for you. I just wanted to honor all the--
Maniates: Oh my gosh, I'm blushing. I'm blushing. But yes, come to the question, please.
[LAUGHTER]
Ray: Yes. I mean, so fantastic. I just really wanted to trace those resumes.
Maniates: Thank you.
Ray: You got me thinking about this early on.
Maniates: That's so fabulous.
Ray: It is really oriented around these essays. Yeah, thank you. And I'll put them in the show notes for everybody else to get their hands on too. So my question for you is, what was your journey to learning that your students' emotional lives really needed to take more front and center of environmental education?
Maniates: You know, this was a question that you gave me a heads up on, so I had a little bit of a chance to think about it, and I must confess that, gosh, it doesn't feel like there's a linear story there. What comes to mind are two or three just stark memories. You know, memory is a funny thing, right? There's some things you say to yourself, I've got to remember this. I've got to remember this, and then it passes. And there are other things that happen in your life, and for one reason or another, decades later, you can still, you know, hang on to those vividly, like in color. And I think there are a couple of instances that were- they were truly transformative for me. Um, and I think you'll appreciate this as an educator. I hope so, and others may as well. I think the first was when I was in my early 20s, pursuing a graduate degree at Cal, at Cal Berkeley, just south of you guys.
Ray: Down the road.
Maniates: Yeah, that's right. And I was a teaching associate for my former undergraduate professor. I was an undergrad at Cal as well. And on environmental ethics. And I can remember the classroom. I can remember the students. Because it's all rooted around this one instance, which is, I remember there being a student in class who was quiet and who wouldn't participate really in conversation. And, you know, I run off the I was that kind of a kid as an undergraduate, as well.
And I, you know, I made the rookie mistake, which I think is a human response, but still it's a rookie mistake of just making assumptions about this person. You know, they weren't doing the reading. They didn't really care. I was boring them. You know, I just- I had I put this person kind of slowly but surely in this kind of two dimensional cookie cutter box of just...
And, um, yeah, and that was that. And then one day around noon time, I was walking through Sprawl Plaza, which is a big plaza at Berkeley. And right at the base of Seder Gate, this individual was in an a cappella group. And I just came by and I just, you know, there's lots of stuff happening around noon time, standing there and watching the group. And they were simply amazing. I mean, I'm getting goose bumps now in tears as I sort of say this. I can just and at that point, you know, it hit me that all of us, but I'm thinking particularly in this case about students that I was trying to connect with, are complicated and nuanced and have 1,000 things going on with them.
And to respond to any of that without a sense of generosity and openness and particularly with a capacity to be surprised by and this is not to steal your thunder, but surprised by the magic in us all, you know, to deny that capacity was really denying the best things that we are as instructors. And I tell that story occasionally, not often. I guess I'm telling it now to the world of your listeners, because it feels it feels deeply personal, but it's also a profoundly affecting to me.
And that was, Whew. That was probably back in, I'm dating myself now, that was probably back in the early 80s, right? And then the second, and then I'll stop. If you flash forward to maybe 2007, 2008, I'm at Allegheny College, north of Pittsburgh, south of Erie in northwest Pennsylvania. It's a small liberal arts college. They do great, great work there. Allegheny College is a place with a lot of first generation college students and a lot of kids on pell grants on federal financial aid. So we're not talking about sort of a rich elite place, we're talking about really good students, you know, who are trying to make things happen with huge distance traveled.
I was in the environmental studies and political science departments at the time. And I began to notice around 2006 or seven, just in conversations with students, you know, it's a small place, and you get to know your students, and you have lunch with them, dinner sometime. And they began to tell me that, uh, You know, it's really too late for our generation. We're not going to be able to make much difference. It's going to happen with the little kids coming up with environmental education. And a parallel of this was, you know, what we really need is a huge crisis to move people, make things happen.
But that could end up really just messing everything up. It's just this general sense of not so much abject despair as just a sense of deep personal, you know, lack of efficacy, this shrug, this collective shrug. And this was before the real scary science of climate change and about diversity loss and ocean warming and coral bleaching, you know, really began to crank up, I mean, it was 2000. And so just in talking to folks about this and trying to just take their temperature, thank God I had the good sense not to start lecturing them about how wrong they were.
But instead, you know, going, Wow, that's not what I would have expected you to say. Tell me more about that. It just became apparent, at least from where I was sitting, that so much of their sense of despair was rooted in this notion that nothing will change unless we can get all those people who don't care about the environment to care. This kind of notion of, you know, we need to bring a lot more people on board. And of course, that wasn't happening, and maybe we'll talk about it later. I don't think it will ever happen around any kind of social movement, but they felt it so profoundly.
That folks almost needed to be converted to the Church of Gaia before anything could sort of break. And that felt so overwhelming to them that they just fell back on this notion, well, the next generation will, through some combination of education and crisis, be motivated in mass numbers to embrace the tough changes we need. And that was just staggering. It was just somehow that had happened slowly without me noticing it until finally, I noticed it. And that was another moment.
Ray: Mmm. And you started to think to yourself, I need to get philosophical and I need to get spiritual, and I need to get psychological with my environmental education training. That's what happened to me, I thought.
Maniates: Yeah.
Ray: This is beyond what environmental studies taught me to teach my students. You know, this is existential. Yeah. And what you said about the Church of Gaia being everyone needs to get converted. We have to do this in mass. There's a place in your book, and I would say, even just to take a step back, that my students still feel the way you're describing. And you probably have students who hasn't really changed. Not all of them, of course, are sort of, I don't know, different buckets that people sit in. But this is why teaching your theories of change is so useful because you can kind of get a clarity about what bucket people are in? Are they in that existential bucket, or are they in the hopeful existential bucket? Are they in the nihlisic one, or are they in the collective efficacy one? You know? So the theory of change of getting more people to care because we need to collectively build up the care and convert everyone to the Church of Gaia, what is beautiful about that, and what is maybe missing about that?
Maniates: Huh. This idea that we have to get everybody on board.
Ray: Well, it's the theory of change that you write about is education, right? And, like aggregation. Like, numbers. Just get the numbers. It's a numbers matter. So what's you know, I think a lot of people, and I think this is your audience for your book, a lot of people think we just need to get more numbers.
Maniates: Exactly.
Ray: You know, to care.
Maniates: You know, if we could get more numbers to care, I'd be totally down with that. I'm not anti caring. I'm in the education business, you know?
Ray: Okay. Check. I hear that.
Maniates: I'm off the hook now. [laughter] But--
Ray: This guy doesn't care.
Maniates: Yeah, but, you know, my fear, you know, just looking at past moments of past social movements that have had some impact. You know, the classic one is abolition of slavery, you know? But there are others. I mean, the anti war movement, the first and second wave feminism, the environmental movement of the 70s, you know, had its problems, but at least it planted a flag and moved the ball down the field.
I mean, all of these things happened when really majorities of people just weren't paying attention. I mean, I get that, man. I think 80% of the I mean, I'm kind of making up this figure, so, you know, it may not be quite right, but it seems to me that 80% of the time, 80% of us are just kind of spacing out, you know, or thinking about our day. You know, we had an argument with our spouse. Our kid yelled at us. I don't know. We bounced a check. That's dating me, bouncing a check, you know, but something happened.
And we're thinking about it, and we're not really we're not really thinking about the big things. And so it's to hope that we're going to get everybody sort of on board seeing something in a particular way is, I think, just setting us up for a lot of cynicism, because when you think you need everybody or large super majorities on board to make things happen, and then you don't get that. What I've observed is people then they don't back up and sort of say, Well, hmm. Maybe I need to rethink my theory of change. No, instead, they say, People are stupid. They're cynical. They don't care. I hate these people. They deserve a good crisis to sort of teach them how things. But a Goldie Locks Crisis right? Not so big to wipe out the Earth, but not so small to be noticed.
It's-- And I just don't think it works. I think it's far more joyful, and psychologically sustaining to come together with people who kind of see it your way. And sure, if there are people on the margins there, try to bring them on board and to find kind of joyful ways of pushing-- pushing one's agenda, realizing that relatively small percentages of a population, when they come together with strategic persistence, have been historically quite successful in changing the foundations of society, right?
Ray: Yeah. That reminds me of the Margaret Mead or something like that. Yeah. And I think there's a recent political theory book that's out you probably have issue with. I don't know, but there's, like, that 3.5%.
Maniates: I got challenged on this. Arbitrary.
Ray: That's not point.
Maniates: Yeah. That's not your point. But I think the point is, you know, we don't need to get everybody on board. I mean, I've been doing with the book, I've been dropping in on classes, at different colleges in the US where faculty have used the book, and I just sort of get in there and answer questions. And I've had two of these recently at, you know, great small colleges. Students read the book. They're thinking about it. I mean, God, I tip my hat to them.
But in both instances, about two thirds of the way through the Q&A, somebody in a kind of, you know, half oh, God, I don't know. I don't know how to characterize the emotion. It was-- It was not happy. They asked, you know, how do I get everybody who I know, who doesn't care about climate change? How do I get them to care? And clearly, this person had tried to get them to care and perhaps became annoying and then felt rejected. And I get that we want people whom we love and who we care about and who care about us to see things our way.
And yeah, totally I get that. But as a strategy for making a difference, I just, what I've observed is that trying to pull the recalcitrant along it just turns us into people who are kind of inadvertently perpetuating the shame and blame game. I mean, it's why I titled one of the chapters in my book, why not titled-- Yeah “Why Environmentalists Don't Get Invited to Parties.”
You know, it's sort of a tongue in cheek, a tongue in cheek thing at that. So I just I wish that people, you know, who want to find ways of making a difference take the sustenance out of working in solidarity with others who see it their way and then try to get very strategic and smart about looking for interventions for change. They can sort of get the ball rolling. And there's a lot of stuff happening already of just networking with others. I just think it's more fun. And I think we know theoretically and empirically, it's more successful.
Ray: Yeah, in your book, you describe the reason why we've fetishized this particular channel of lifestyle environmentalism is the only option. And then when other people don't get on board or when we can't see the difference that we're making by not using those draws, we get this what you call the trinity of despair, right? You have this description, and I'll give you a chance to talk about it. But this kind of getting more people to care doesn't work. Changing our entire lives around to be green is really hard, and we can't see the effects of it. It needs to happen at scale to feel effective.
And so when we're only given that one theory of change, lifestyle environmentalism and getting the recalcitrant to agree with us and care, we are often disappointed, right? And so as a theory of change, disappointment, and giving up, or getting cynical, even getting misanthropic, you know, kind of hating all of humanity at large, has actually really undermining effects, is the way you describe it in your book, and I couldn't agree more. So Right? Like, this is our only theory of change. It's not going to save the planet.
Maniates: It feels that way to me. And, you know, in the book, I have a post script where I apologize for being such a jerk early in this process. And I say early in this process, I mean, you know, sort of 2004, 2005, I kind of went around and gave chats to colleges and community groups and keynoted a few things. And I was very much like, green living is a myth. And, you know, if you're recycling, you think it's going to save the world, you know, forget it, you're a moron. You know, and it was horrible. I mean, I didn't mean to be such a jerk, but of course, I was a jerk because people have invested a whole lot of their identity, I think, in many people have in this idea that, you know, I'm conscientious. I care about the planet. I mean, I tip my hat to those folks, and I want to make a difference. And I'm getting a lot of messaging that says, you know, there are 50 easy ways to save the planet. Are there are seven ways to make a difference? Are there are six things you can do to stop climate change? Are there I mean, you know, it goes on and on and on.
And so then people come into this. And then someone like me comes along and says, And I've gotten better at it. It says, Wait, there are lots of great reasons to live green, right? You might do it out of a sense of moral purpose or even mindful living. It might connect you to communities of other people who are doing this. It might support entrepreneurs who have subscribed to this notion. It just might be a way to develop some street credit to credential you. Certainly, a lot of this green living happens because of health reasons, I mean, the organic food movement, for example.
So I've tried so hard to honor the many reasons for green living, you know, kind of large. It can't be anything from riding a bike to eating organic foods, growing your own veggies. But what I've tried to say, that despite what we're told, these small acts of individual environmental stewardship will not magically coalesce into transformative change, despite a lot of the marketing that comes our way and despite a lot of the commodification of our anxieties to get us to buy this stuff. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, but it's just you're going to be disappointed if you think that your individual actions are going to coalesce with others. Uh, because then you have to get everybody on board, and then you find out you don't get everybody on board, and you need to get everybody on board because small acts have to get you know, magnified by massive participation. And then you become cynical when people don't buy into this.
Ray: I've experienced this in my own life, actually. I've definitely had debates with my partner about, should we compost? Should we do this? And he wants evidence that it's going to make a difference. And then I have to come up with other reasons to do it because I can't really find the evidence that makes me do it.
Maniates: There's plenty of different reasons.
Ray: Yeah, we have these I mean, this is a huge myth, I think, that people think they're getting into sustainability or environmental studies in order to figure out how to do those things without examining the underlying pros and cons of this particular theory of change, which is why I love your theories of change work, and also this book really gets at it. Aggregation theory of change is what you're referring to there. Some keywords you described in your book beautifully are norm cascades and you're pushing back on the idea that norm cascades is a theory of change, that the implicit idea that these lifestyle choices will be like an on ramp to activism or on ramp to political engagement, also a little bit of a myth. You talk about how this just scapegoats the consumer and that that is a distraction that's designed by the people who would like to commodify our environmental anxieties to make more money for themselves.
So you do a really great job of saying we should be thinking about this particular theory of change of green lifestyle behaviors, not just in a sense of you know, Oh, no, we don't really, in fact, have as much agency as we thought, but rather as this larger systemic critique of who would have us do those things? What are they having us do that stuff instead of doing real effective change elsewhere? So it's not that we should I love that you just said there are all kinds of reasons and you want to honor the reasons people would live in this way. You know, I had to read some Thich Nhat Hanh Nhat Han and be like, okay, I'm going to compost because I want to be in right relationship with death and the Earth. I mean, there's all kinds of things I do that are not in right relationship with the Earth, okay? Obviously.
But there's this kind of like, more of maybe an ontological awareness of interdependence that might be a reason to do it. But if I go into that action thinking, I want this to aggregate out to political change, I will be disappointed. I need to go into it with a perspective of, I'm doing this for some other reason, and then my political theory of change is going to be somewhere else.
Maniates: I think so.
Ray: Right. If I really want to make change, I got to go to other stuff. And so maybe I don't know if you want to speak to what those other things are? What would we have, instead of green living? Well, what should we be doing?
Maniates: I think we can--
Ray: For political change.
Maniates: I think green living can be a springboard to all kinds of fabulous sorts of things. One of the things that I write about in the book that students with whom I've recently spoke, who've read it, have really pointed out is this very first item in the last chapter where I say, Look, Just let go. Let go of the idea that you need to live a nearly perfect green life consistently in order to be an agent for change. Just, release yourself from that pressure, you know?
I mean, if you want to-- well, I mean, I don't I'm not recommending that people do dumb stuff, but, like, if you want to do something, you know, cheaper, you know, if you drive a car across town to get a hamburger and then drink a bottle of water out of-- water out of a plastic bottle, and then go home and turn your air con your heater up way too high, I'm not judging you. I just, you know, but pick something. Pick something that you're passionate about. It might be agriculture, it might be energy, it might be oceans. Pick something, and make that your daily practice. Make that the thing you really focus on. And I'm not saying it needs to only be one, but I think that the opposite of only one is we're inundated by these list of do these ten or 20 or 30 different things.
And if you're not taking all those off every day, you're somehow a bad person. At least that's how it can feel to people, right? So, my hope is that people can become can become something like a citizen expert, though I really want to put expert in quotes because I just mean we should be informing ourselves more about the issues that we care about.
These lists of green activities I think have the effect maybe not purposeful, but they surely have the effect of kind of dumbing us down, right? It's a superficial sort of thing, do this, do that, do this, do that. And we don't really come to understand why or how. I would want folks to find the issues that bring them joy, learn more about them. I know that I'm sure that you've experienced this as an educator. I have, as well. I've seen students who when they begin to learn about an issue they care about, they begin to see these kind of pressure points for change.
They begin to see the ways in which systems can be engineered or edited in order to sort of move the larger body politic in an appropriate direction. I have a line in the book, you know, where I say, Look, it's the maze, not the mouse. We don't need to be pounding on individuals and saying they have bad values and they're not sufficiently educated.
You know, that's the kind of thing we get into when we think we've got to convert large numbers of people. Instead, let's think about the maze. Let's think about how we can come together around issues we care about to slowly reshape everyday systems of living so that in the words of environmental author and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, it becomes as acting sustainably, becomes as easy as falling off a log. It becomes a natural kind of thing.
I mean, to make the point, before coming to Abu Dhabi, I lived in Singapore for ten years. So when we moved to Singapore, I was there to help start a liberal arts college. We didn't have a car. We lived in university housing, which are these 13, 14 story buildings. They're small living space. So I didn't drive. We didn't buy a whole lot of stuff because anything that you bought, I mean, we had my wife and I had this long deliberation about buying an ice cream maker. Should we buy an ice cream maker? Well, we could, but where would we put it? I mean, because the space was so limited. You know, there are a whole number of things happening in Singapore, small country, dense urban living. My carbon footprint went way down. And it wasn't because I suddenly discovered the gospel of climate change. It was because the systems were structured in a way that systematically moved me to a style of living that, you know, that was better for the planet. We need to be doing those.
Ray: So, you didn't there was no decision fatigue in your It was structured. There was no having to change everything, or sacrifice everything, or make some big existential decision to live in a completely different way against the grain and therefore worry about social death or social ostracizing or having to find the community to feel part of. There's none of those big questions going on because it was just as easy as falling off a log. In your book, you describe and in your 15 claims essay you talk about the theory of design. I'm the theory of change of design, which is what you're hinting at here. And you talk a little bit about it in your book, you unpack a little more, which is beautiful, and I'm definitely going to use it in my classes, too, because I often provocatively ask my students, you know, should we just design the world so everybody's decisions, you know, 80%, let's say, of everyone's decisions just automatically were in the right category, like buying the M&Ms from, you know, I'm going to get M&Ms at the grocery store because it's put right there, and I'm waiting in a line with screaming children.
And, of course, the choice architecture, as the language of, you know, marketing is, choice architecture and choice editing make the decisions just easy. If I default into just being able to keep scrolling, I'll keep scrolling. But if I have to click on something, I probably won't keep scrolling, right? Like, there's some all these little micro and macro ways that the decisions that we make in our lives are either made easy for us or hard for us. It's not that we're walking around with these great will, you know, the will of-- willpower and, you know, power of decision making, homo economicus and all that, to make the right decision, and we just need to get everyone to get in the right will space, right? It's really about how the environment creates those decisions for us to make it feel like gravity to just do the right thing.
Maniates: I think so.
Ray: So I'm curious, yeah, could you share? I mean, I provocatively asked my students that because they balk at somebody else having all the control and the top downness of it all. And I'm curious, yeah I'm just curious, you know, what you would say.
Maniates: I know this notion of choice.
Ray: [inaudible] No I don't want that.
Maniates: It's notion of choice as right, what's the first item on the menu? You know, I mean, you know, the supermarket, for example, the supermarket, it looks benign, but it's got to be one of the most deeply politicized spaces that we encounter. And everything is planned out. You know, what goes on the shelves or what's at eye level, what's on the end caps, how things are organized. A friend of mine managed a major supermarket chain for a while. He said they systematically every two years, maybe a little less, we'll just reorganize, the market. I'm sure many of your listeners have walked into a supermarket and they're like, Wait, wait, where's the stuff? They reorganized?
And if you ask the manager, they'll say, Well, it's just because it's more efficient? No, they just don't want you to get into routines of knowing where the stuff is. They want you to wander around. It doesn't mean that we don't have personal autonomy, of course we do. If you've got a list and a limited amount of money, you can go in the supermarket and bam, bam, boom, boom, you'll buy stuff, but God forbid you go into the market without a list and you're hungry [laughter] [laughter] you are in deep doodoo, you know? So, about this choice editing, I mean, there's a couple of things. One is that people sort of feel that this denies kind of human agency, right? That we're just all automatons. And I hope that my supermarket example has made the point. No, no, I mean, we have agency, we have choices. But I think it's fair to say that just as human animals, you know, we're oftentimes running a bit on autopilot. I don't mean to say that in any negative way. I'm just saying it on my own experience. Um.
Ray: Well, these are also ways that our brain has to make sure to be able to live.
Maniates: Exactly, and so the architects of choice take advantage of that to have systematically juiced up consumption without a concomitant rise in human prosperity or happiness since the end of the Second World War. And so my students as well, often express discomfort with choice editing. It seems top down. It seems anti democratic. But as I say in the book, kind of sharply, I just say, you know, Come on, get with it, because the other side's doing it.
And if you just sort of throw up your hands, I mean, it's not like we live in these neutral sort of consumption architectures that just allow us free choice. So the trick here is it can't necessarily be top down. You know, I call it strategically sideways. I mean, you need to bring people, you know, from the bottom up and so, I give an example in the book where I had students who wanted to get fair trade coffee going in our little college town. And they were just dead set on doing education, and consumer information, and maybe a bit of shaming. It's kind of this idea that people have bad values and don't know the right stuff, and if we just fix that, everything would be fine.
Ray: Education sort of--.
Maniates: you know, in an uncharacteristic way because I want students to run with their projects. I said, No, we're not going to do that. There, I had something for me.
Ray: That would've been hard for me.
Maniates: [laughter] Instead, you know, we got the cafeteria, you know, in the college to just basically stock only fair trade organic coffee. And we had to cut some deals with their remuneration. And then that with that kind of success in hand, then we went down to the local grocery store, the big one, there's only really one big one in town. We talked to the manager. It took us a while to persuade the manager to sort of position the Fair Trade organic coffee up at eye level, not down on the very lowest sort of shelf, and do some end cap displays and do a few other things that we thought of together. Sales rocketed up, and I'm not saying that we saved the world, you know, I think what hopefully happened is that those students learned about the power of changing the architecture in ways that, you know, involved a lot of people, their classmates. It wasn't like there was one person with evil intentions. And they were working then through systems. But at the end of the day, Yeah, I mean, the arena of choice has changed. I quote a study in my book that was done in the UK that pointed out to all of the major environmental successes in the last ten, 15 years, and this is written in the early 90s, mid 90s, things like getting out of gasoline, fair trade coffee, more organic foods, ozone friendly refrigerants. None of this happened by a broad consumer uprising. It happened by a handful of people changing the architecture of choice. Now, if you're-- If you're arrogant and you look to change the architecture of choice in ways that is offensive, then yeah, there's going to be pushback. So you've got to be smart, and you've got to be able to justify that later if you get called out on it. But at the end of the day.
Ray: And I think we're already living in a world that's been designed that way. You know, marketers are doing that all over the place. People are making goo gobs of money off of being able to, you know, maximize our cognitive biases, and our mental distortions, and our shortcuts and our brains. I mean, this is why, you know, design theory is psychological because people know how they can get more money.
Maniates: Exactly.
Ray: So I keep thinking the science is already there. Why don't we use it for environmental and sustainability purposes, more.
Maniates: I think that folks who spend a lot of time thinking about their own lifestyle choices can get into this game. They can still figure out, like, Okay, what is it? I think organic food is totally cool. Fabulous. Then study up a little bit and think about an array of choice edits at your market, elsewhere in schools or serving food in your workplace where those kinds of things that you really like about, I'm just going to use an example, like about food choices, food procurement gets worked in cemented into the system rather than having to be an intentional-- and what I'm arguing in the book, and I genuinely believe it's true, Sarah. I think that these things are actually easier to pull off than any of us would imagine. But if we're too busy sort of trying to decide between paper, plastic, or burlap bags, and we're shaming our neighbors or our friends for not behaving the correct way environmentally, we're not going to get to the point where we can look for these strategic sort of opportunities to shift the architecture. I think it can be rewarding. I think it's going to be necessarily incremental, but there's a cumulative effect, and I think it can be joyful. And, I'm not saying you shouldn't live green, but give yourself a break. You don't need to be perfect on the green front and take that psychological space and put it to good use.
Ray: Yes, I love that. I feel like what you're saying is it's actually maybe easier.
Maniates: I believe it is. No, I think it's more sustaining. You know how much--.
Ray: More sustaining--
Maniates: Psychological joy you get from going out and getting an LED at IKEA and screwing it to your ceiling. I mean, it's Yeah, maybe you feel good for a moment, but yeah. But working with others around things you care about I mean, one of my most joyful sort of times as a graduate student was when I played on a softball team, and we went 0-- 0 and 12. We lost every game badly. But it wasn't about winning. It was about being with people that you love, struggling to make something happen. I mean, I mean, of course, we want to win sometimes in the environmental front, but it's not necessarily that you have to have these massive payoffs right away. They'll come.
Ray: And also, I mean, I love that example, the joy that comes when you release this winning attachment. But I also think we really do need to redefine what we mean by winning, in environmental spaces, so that we're not trying to measure something that is just never going to happen.
Maniates: Yeah.
Ray: And you say in your book, it's sort of a gut punch in your book. You just say, you know, the changes that we need to see happen are not happening. They're not happening. You're pretty, I don't want to say hopeless in the book, but I will say that just to be sort of polemical here for the sake of getting listeners to follow along in this. But you're a little bit hopeless in the book about where we're going. And so, therefore, we have an option. When things look really bad, what are we going to do? Are we going to stay in the game, or are we going to check out and become misanthropic and cynical, and therefore maybe accelerate the problems even further? And if we really cared about this stuff, and if we really loved the planet, and if we really loved, you know, really valued what we're saying we're valuing in our care, then we wouldn't choose that path. We would choose a different path, and you're offering this alternative path.
Okay, so if you care and you want to stay engaged, one of the things we might want to do is redefine what it means to win a couple of those games, you know? Right? And that can be something you talk a lot about localism in your book, ecolocalism. You talk a lot about what you just described as, like, changing some architecture in some small way with a collective that, yeah, of course, it's not going to confront climate change at scale, but it is going to have all of these other effects. And so I just wanted to really draw together some of the things you're contributing here.
Maniates: That's so nice. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, that last chapter that you're referring to where I think I list seven things. The only sort of fist pounding on the table, sort of element of the seven is that first one. Just give yourself a break, you know, you don't need to save the world by being a perfect kind of consumer. And then the others are, I don't want to say they're a mismash, but one doesn't necessarily need to pursue all of those. Without being pessimistic that a good case can be made that on the environmental front, things are going to get worse before they get better. But that needn't be a source of pessimism and despair if we authentically, and I mean this authentically. It's just not me dropping a line here. If this is how I sort of move through my life. If we authentically believe that we were in some sense chosen, I mean, I don't want to get like, Supreme God beam, but we somehow find ourselves on the planet at a time where the things that we do now will likely have a significant effect on the ability of four or five generations down the line to pick up the pieces, knit things back together, not just knit things back together, but to build a world where the human and nonhuman world coexist in peace and prosperity, and wouldn't it be wonderful if our great, great, great grandchildren looked back on those of us living now and said, Wow, Man, those people in the 2010s and 2020s and 2030s. Oh, man, they had their plates full, a lot of _____ was coming down the pipeline, but they did what they could, when they could, with the long view in mind to set us up for success. And aren't those people wonderful?
And I don't mean that to let us off the hook, but Kim Stanley Robinson and others have argued that if we take this long view, it helps us define what we should be working on. So, for instance, recycling is great compared to throwing stuff away. But what will future generations thank us for? And they'll probably thank us for building a reusable economy, not a recycling one. Because every time you recycle something that are pollutants. Electric vehicles are great compared to internal combustion engines. But, you know, if every one of the 1.2 billion automobiles we expect on the planet in 2030 were an electric vehicle, we're still in deep, deep kimchi, you know?
So, what would cause future generations to thank us, it would be a move away from automobility were and how we can make that happen. I feel like that's a calling. I mean, I don't want to get too, evangelical, on it. But I feel that we needn't in ways that you, I think, hinted at, we needn't hold ourselves to this calculus of instant success. We need to be smart and honest and introspective. We need to we need to acknowledge, as I hope I'm being heard as acknowledging, is that individual action does matter. But it's where and how it's deployed. We have limited life energy and limited time. And I'm speaking as an older guy who's kind of amazed how quickly the years have gone by. And I think we want to be as gentle with ourselves and others and as smart as we can in terms of where we have the best leverage in ways that will yield some benefits and bring us joy, it's not bringing us joy. Forget about it. It's not sustainable. And then future generations will look back at us and say, Man, those folks are awesome.
Ray: It is. I'm hearing you say stuff about it's an adrienne maree brown philosophy that I attributed to. She talks about going deep instead of broad. And so the kind of green lifestyle is like a broad, I'll just try to do all these things and try to be pure, and it's going to take me all my time and brainpower, and it's kind of dumbing down the deep analysis. And you're saying, find a niche, find your climate magic, find your path, find your you're the thing that you love and get expert at it, get good at it, be a good citizen about it, and find the leverage points of change in community to do something local and small to change the architecture for others so that you don't really have to get others to change their minds. You know, you actually just have to change the system a little bit here and there to magnify your impact.
And to think differently, maybe in a much broader time horizon, which I think about seven generations, and that kind of Iroquois perspective, or just a broader temporality of where we measure our winning, you know, so I'm hearing all of these things.
I do want to say that if you're just joining us, I'm speaking with Dr. Michael Maniates, author of a new book called The Living Green Myth.
So, Michael, you have this beautiful chart, this one visual in your book about the Trinity of Despair, and you've hinted at it a little bit, but can you just unpack this? I'll give one quote here that kind of sets us up in your book, you write, Anyone who believes that large chunks of the population must be converted to the cause before real change can happen, is setting themselves up for despair. So, if green living is your theory of change, you're likely to fall into this trinity of despair. Listeners are probably thinking, that's me, that's me. Yes, I feel despair. Is this my diagnosis? [laughter] So you can you explain the diagnosis and help us with the medicine?
Maniates: Well, there's lots of reasons these days to feel despair. I mean, I'm living in Abu Dhabi, but I'm still feeling the pain of what well, I'm feeling the pain of recent decisions to go to war, of course, but feeling the larger pain as an American sort of seeing all of the challenges that we face as Americans. But I think that particular--
Ray: We are implicated subjects, aren't we? We are implicated subjects.
Maniates: But I think in particular kind of despair I was sort of reaching for that trinity of despair notion, and if people want to see the little diagram, they can just find me on the web and I've got a little thing on my website they can see. It really was I describe it as initially heuristic, which I guess is a fancy word for saying it just kind of a general model that just for me trying to make sense of what I was seeing. And it was this general model I came up with trying to explain how it was that my students, who were who came in so bright and optimistic and can do as 18 year olds, and then I meet as 20 or 21-years-old, and it's completely different. Like, how did they get there?
So it was this trinity of despair, it's not prescriptive. I'm not saying it's the only way to see it, but it's just my way of trying to make sense. Really, it just begins with this idea that if you assume that people are kind of like these Econ 101 rational actors, right? I mean, they have pets. They're kind to their children, but they don't want to be inconvenienced, right?
And this is something you hear an awful lot. People need convenience. I mean, we know that people actually love challenging stuff, and they love coloring outside the lines, but somehow in the environmental field, we say it's not going to work if it's not convenient. So if you bind to that notion, and it's all around us, then that's the apex of this triangle, this trinity. And then you're led, of course, to then embrace these small, simple, typically cost effective ways of saving the planet, you know, more efficient light bulbs that are going to be good for the environment, and save you money. And, you know, the list goes on, and on, and on, and on. And so then you begin to push all of these small things. And we can see that that historically has been the case.
But of course, if you are hanging your hat on changing the world by getting everyone to do the small things that are going to be convenient and easy for them, then you-- cheap. You need this incredible mass participation. And you never get that. You do not get that. You do not get people mass participating, I'm mangling the language now, on almost anything, at least spontaneously. They might do it after everything is set in place and that becomes the only way to do things. But if you expect that that's the way change happens, by getting everybody to do the cheap, easy, convenient stuff, then you get really bummed out when you see that that hasn't really happened.
And, so what do you do?
You just try harder. You get better signs on your recycling bins. You get more posters telling people why they need to do what they need to do. And, of course, that just annoys people. And--.
Ray: And you can go on social media.
Maniates: Yeah. Yeah, it's becoming even worse for social media.
Ray: You market the hell out of it. Yeah.
Maniates: So it's demoralizing. I see it in my students. Long ago at Allegheny College, I was working with a group of students who were very fired up about food waste. They put table tents on the tables and big posters telling people what they needed to do. It was actually less about food waste and more about just dumping your food in the food bin and your recycles and recyclable bin in your pin. And of course, that's a system that's so brittle and fragile, and they were becoming really, very upset that people weren't really paying attention.
And it did a number of education stunts that just annoyed people even more. They were very earnest. And I guess here's another moment that I remember, and it gives me goose bumps and makes me tear up, as I remember saying to them, you know, you know rather than just haranguing everybody, because people are just sort of spacing out. I mean, you know, it's hard to remember, do this all the time. Why don't we just pay somebody in the dish room and then people just put the trays, and that person can do the sorting in the back?
And they thought that was not a very good idea because we needed to get everybody to realize what the right thing to do was. And so I think that's where you get this trinity of despair. You just feel it's a conversion ideology. Big change happens by bringing everybody together on the small stuff. And you don't get everybody together. And even if you did, if you do the math, And you got everybody to do all of these small little things we're told we're supposed to do, the cumulative impact would be incommensurate by a wide margin, incommensurate to the level of the challenge that we face. So we need to be thinking differently.
I think that there must be, and I recall seeing some of this environmental education literature some 10, 15 years ago when I was digging through it, I'd have to go back and look, is that there are opportunities to activate even third graders, to activate their citizen sensibility. So, you know, perhaps there are ways to help get third and fourth graders, sit them down, you know, as we have often done in our college classrooms, and say, what should we be doing as a school in order to help save the planet? And let's make a list. And then how could we make changes in how the school is-- in how the school is structured or run to make those changes happen?
So I'm totally off the top of my head. I got to think about this. But let's just say the kids came together and said, Electricity consumption is bad. We need to shut off the lights. And then you can get kids talking about, well, should we just educate people about the lights? But that's kind of hard to remember, or should we talk to the principal about how much it costs to get motion sensors? Now, I'm not looking for a cheap techno fix here, and I know that turning off the lights isn't going to sort of save the world. But you see just that kind of conversation about are we trying to, like, you know, educate everybody and shift their values, assuming that they have bad values and they're uneducated, which is what gets us in trouble in the first place, or should we think about where there are sort of structural changes? Is it the maze or the mouse? Let's think about the maze.
And I got to think that there are opportunities, even at the third and the fourth grade level, to sort of do that. Let's see where we can activate people's sense of collective agency I mean, hey, the third graders are already doing collective agency. They're out on the playground trying to figure out who's going to get the ball? How are they going to structure stuff up? How do they get the teacher to not call them? I mean, we are creative creatures who have evolved to work collectively to solve problems, right? And, you know, if there was a unit on social justice or on slavery or, you know, anything else in third or fourth grade, there wouldn't be a set of songs talking about how we individually need to treat each other. I mean, the teachers would figure out a way for third graders to at least begin to get into history and the structure. But there's something about the environment. Right?
There's something about the environment, you know, maybe it's because, you know, we-- we're seen as complicit in the environmental problem set because of our consumption choices. But, you know, those are largely structured for us. I'm not saying we don't have responsibility, but I think we have responsibility as citizens to be working on these issues, as opposed to responsibilities as consumers to try to change the world at the checkout line. And this is the great-- this is the great chunk of wool that's been pulled over our eyes. And I just think it's been we've been socialized in many ways to think about this from a very young age. To think like this from a very young age.
Ray: Yeah. Amen with everything you're saying, I absolutely love it. You've got a couple of things sparking up in my mind, too, as we sort of come to an end here to our conversation. You said, these kids are already doing citizenship behavior. And interestingly enough, because they're collective beings and they're on the playground figuring it out and they're brainstorming. And then we bring them into a classroom and we want them to sit still and not talk to their friends and blah, blah, blah.
And it's so interesting how-- how the sort of like discipline and punish, to use a kind of Foucault term that sort of turning individual brilliance in a classroom into cognizant of wheel of capitalism, which is really what education often is for. And I'm not bashing on educators. They are trying, most of them that I know are trying very hard to fight against that inside the system, you know? It's so interesting that my kid will always tell me, I hate going to school for learning, but I'll go to school for my friends. And then they get to college into my classrooms, and I'm actually trying to do the opposite. I'm like, can you please talk to each other for the first half hour of class?
And then we'll sit in our individual chairs, and maybe I'll offer some information, but, like, creating the collective energy of them talking to each other and building relationship and finding, you know, mirroring each other and thinking about brainstorming problems together and finding out, Oh, I'm not the only one who suffers in this way, you suffer too. And can we ask questions about this or that or the other and sort of, like, mimic some sort of mutual aid mycelium growing in the classroom? It's funny now, I'm trying to make my college classrooms be like my sixth grader’s experience where they like to go to school for the people. You know, it's like, come for the people. Come for the people. Don't come for the learning, you know? So it's funny how that has had what you're describing.
Maniates: That's so good.
Ray: Because of studying about social atrophy and social infrastructure. I also wanted to just one other little spark that I wanted to bring up too, is that we've talked a little bit about but haven't really dived deep into, how this trinity of despair kind of ends people feeling like, bring on the crisis. And you hinted it earlier in your students in the 2000 was sort of like, I can't do anything. Individual action in mass is not going to do anything. So let's just bring on the crisis, right? Like, this is part of your beautiful teaching for turbulence essay, and I often find that my students do feel this way still, that only a big crisis is going to bring about what we need, because we saw this also in the pandemic.
I think a little pandemic-- the pandemic bolstered that theory of change in people's minds, the salience of that theory of change, and I still push against it. I disagree with it, and I agree with you that that's not a good place to go. And in large part, I'm thinking, too, about the cynicism of the kind of fascist moment that we're living in. You know, I don't know if you're familiar with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's beautiful essay called “End times fascism.” But this idea that only radical, terrible, destructive change is going to get people to get to the right moral place is exactly what the far right is bringing on too, you know, if you believe Klein and Taylor.
So anyway, I just sort of, you know, I really want to just underline that this, you know, bring about massive crisis to bring about the change that comes out of the cynicism and despair is super dangerous. And I love that you are really doing everything you can to entice people out of that. So yeah.
Maniates: Great point. Thank you.
Ray: To say, good for that, too. We don't want to just do it for the environment's sake. We also don't want to do that because this is also what we're seeing happen in dominant politics, right?
Maniates: Yes, without a doubt. Without a doubt.
Ray: Yeah. Thank you so much, Michael.
Maniates: Thank you, Sarah.
♪♪
Ray: You just heard my conversation about the ecological pros and cons of individual action with Dr. Michael Maniates, author of a new book just out called The Living Green Myth.
You can find show notes and listen to this and other episodes of Climate Magic on khsu.org. Follow Climate Magic on Instagram and LinkedIn and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
Thanks to Cal Poly Humboldt’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Abigail Smithson for editing Climate Magic. Special thanks to Mike Dronkers and KHSU for sustaining the magic infrastructure, Tibora Girczyc-Blum for creating Climate Magic’s social media content, and Cal Poly Humboldt’s accessibility office for producing such excellent transcripts.
