If you believe living more sustainably makes your life worse but you want sustainability, you’ll help your cause by shutting up (until you practice).
I’ve been remarking lately that every message I’ve heard on our environmental problems says that acting more sustainably means making my life worse for little chance of gain. I ask people if they know of counterexamples. If you do, please tell me, because no one has so far.
Context
Even ardent environmentalists suggest living more sustainably means giving up things I value for the possible benefit of someone else somewhere else at some other time, though it might not help. Also, some genius might fix the problem without me, superseding anything I did. In fact, someone has to supersede anything I or any individual could do in order to solve our problems fully, making my actions irrelevant.
The rational response to a definite loss here and now for a possible benefit that might never happen and that would have to be superseded anyway is to keep doing what I’ve been doing and to feel hopeless. And to consider the speaker as ridiculous. Yet I hear it from every environmentalist, scientist, educator, and everyone else with any claim to expertise.
Luckily it’s wrong, but people act on beliefs and are prone to believe people who call themselves experts. Can you name me anyone with a prominent voice on sustainability who is trying to live sustainably? I can’t. So all of them still believe the unquestioned cultural beliefs that living more sustainably worsens life and society.
Result #1
I pointed out in Environmentalism, Coercion, and Authoritarianism that
If you think living more sustainably makes people’s lives worse, you have to become a better dictator.
If you think living more sustainably improves people’s lives, you learn to become a better marketer, entrepreneur, or leader.
Result #2
People who believe living more sustainably makes your life worse discourage people from acting.
If you are one of those people and you want to reach sustainability, you’d do better to shut your mouth than keep spouting your erroneous beliefs about sustainability. Humanity reaching sustainability requires everyone alive to live sustainably. If you’re promoting everyone continuing living as they do, which means unsustainably, while technologies clean up all our messes, you’re contributing to the problem.
If you think making cars electric, power supplies solar or nuclear, and flying hydrogen-powered, you’re implying no cars, no polluting power sources, and no flying make life worse. If you have no practical, hands-on experience trying to live sustainably, you don’t know what you’re talking about. No, recycling and avoiding straws don’t count.
Drop your environmental impact (not just carbon, all impact) over 90 percent. When you realize it improves life, then talk about sustainability. In the meantime, stop implying that continuing to live as we do is better and that other people inventing things will make your polluting, depleting activity sustainably.
When you see this graph shows increasing liberation, freedom, loving your neighbor as yourself, helping the less fortunate, and other wonderful results, not giving things up, then spread the word.
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