Denial like ours
When I talk about pollution and depletion, people keep telling me about their reductions. They are invariably among the greatest polluters and depleters in humanity’s existence, but they compost their food scraps, avoid meat, or some feel-good minor act.
When they talk, it sounds like they’re making a big difference. When you ask about it making a difference, if they see a path to making a difference, or if they are actually trying to avoid hurting people without their consent, they get defensive.
They act like they’re clutching their pearls: “Oh my goodness! Do you mean to tell me that my plastic cup actually ends up in the ocean? That can’t be. My pollution doesn’t actually pollute.”
They act as if ignorant of their complicity and complacency, yet thirty seconds of searching online would overcome that ignorance. In other words, they keep themselves willfully ignorant. How convenient.
I read a relevant quote in a review, written by podcast guest Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, of a book on life in Berlin during WWII. The book is Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma.
Kolbert wrote: Following the war, it would have been almost as difficult to get an honest account of Berliners’ experiences. … Few people wanted to dwell on what they’d seen, or to reckon with their role in the catastrophe. … The American journalist Martha Gellhorn, who travelled to the Rhineland shortly before V-E Day, wrote a famous dispatch that read, in part:
No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews.)
Similar sentiments appeared in Judgment at Nuremberg.
That quote from Gellhorn, pictured above, captures today’s spirit. Today we’d say
No on pollutes or depletes. No one ever did. There may be people who pollute or deplete in the next village … I didn’t pollute or deplete for six weeks, for eight weeks. We all stopped polluting and depleting. We just drive and fly everywhere, order takeout, and use artificial intelligence, nothing that pollutes or depletes.
Incidentally, Baruma wrote similarly in a New York Times piece based on this book, Historians Confirm: Tomorrow Won’t Be Better Than Today. He wrote there:
The terrorism of the Nazi state was often in plain view. If you lived in Grunewald, one of the wealthiest parts of Berlin, you could have seen Jews being marched to the railway station, from which freight trains packed with humans left for the ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe. Others would have seen neighbors dragged from their homes. In some cases, they could have heard the screams of prisoners in the forced labor camps that were spread all over the city.
And yet most people looked away, pretending to see nothing, and carried on with their lives. Why? As is so often the case under autocratic regimes, from Hitler’s Berlin to Mussolini’s Rome to Vladimir Putin’s Moscow, things go from bad to worse in stages. Today’s outrage is tomorrow’s normal. People adapt and get used to it.
He leaves out our contribution today to death far surpassing that from the Holocaust in sheer numbers. Before you complain that I shouldn’t compare today’s atrocities to WWII’s, see the plots in Why I work on sustainability leadership here and now despite other things I could do instead.
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