Environmental activist sacrifice

Sometimes, people get anxious when confronted by the Total Green Future message: they perceive it to be too extreme or counterproductive. Various ideological and strategic reasons are given to explain this anxiety, such as a belief in democratic principals, or a gently-does-it approach to win over public support. Such reasons are certainly worth exploring, and we could spend many hours discussing their merits. However, there is a more fundamental reason for this anxiety, and that is the fear of confronting the sacrifices that are necessary to build a Total Green Future, both in terms of establishing it and maintaining it.

Let’s look first at the sacrifices necessary to establish a Total Green Future. We recently discussed the question, How Do We Define “Rebellion” in the Age of Extinction? There we saw the example of Extinction Rebellion activists who were found guilty of causing public disturbances. Their punishments were six- or nine-month conditional discharges and being ordered to pay £85 costs. This is a nominal punishment for a nominal rebellion. We saw also the example of “online activism” or “slacktivism,” whose value was shown to be at best contestable, and possibly even counterproductive.

If we draw a line between online activism and Extinction Rebellion protests, we create a spectrum that comprises the vast majority of what people perceive to be environmental “activism.” Does this activism require any sacrifice from its participants? For online activism, the answer is a resounding “no.” The word “sacrifice” has indeed been used in the context of Extinction Rebellion, such as those who are “sacrificing their careers” to be activists. However, losing a job or being ordered to pay £85 costs seems a rather modest sacrifice in the context of course-correcting the environmental crisis.

Sacrifice is only sacrifice if it hurts: that’s why it’s a sacrifice. In the context of the online-activism-to-Extinction-Rebellion spectrum, sacrifice is almost totally absent. The same can be said for the practical lifestyle changes people make to “protect” the environment. It is not a sacrifice to recycle, turn the lights off when you leave the room, use public transport more frequently, reduce your meat consumption, go on fewer city breaks by air, or any number of other modest attempts to reduce your impact on the environment. Are such actions worthy? Certainly. But they are not sacrifices.

If you want to engage in environmental activism that has a genuine chance of creating a proportionate response to the environmental crisis, it is going to involve sacrifice, and it is going to hurt. In the context of environmental activism, sacrifice looks like risking your freedom or even your life. Such sacrifices are probably going to be illegal, require the use of physical force, and blood may be spilled. It is reasonable to make an analogy with the kind of sacrifices required to shut down an aggressive enemy during war time: if you do not make sacrifices to shut down the enemy, you will be destroyed.

And once we have made such sacrifices and won the establishment of a Total Green Future, there is another wave of sacrifices required to maintain it. Until such time that we invent a way of generating genuinely clean and limitless energy (which may never come), a Total Green Future is going to require profound reduction in energy usage and all the things it enables. You’re probably not going to be driving around in a Tesla in a Total Green Future. You won’t be going on foreign holidays any more. You won’t be updating your phone or computer. You won’t be buying cheap new clothes or eating fruit flown in from overseas. This is all going to be a big sacrifice, and it’s going to hurt.

However, this sacrifice will course-correct the environmental crisis. You will probably see the benefits of this sacrifice within your lifetime: for example, a recent study shows that we can restore the oceans to their former glory in just 30 years. Future generations will look back upon our sacrifices in the same way that we look back upon those who fought for our freedom in World War II: regular men and women who stepped up and demonstrated their heroic potential.

Today we have a stark choice about the legacy that we leave. First, we can continue to offer low-value resistance to the world-destroyers: at best, this will result in us being considered as collaborators in the destruction by future generations, and at worst there will be no future generations. Second, we can make the necessary sacrifices, course-correct the environmental crisis, and go down in history as heroes. It’s not such a difficult choice, is it?