More of what you gain from stopping polluting and depleting
I just wrote a post Clarifying what people get when they pollute and deplete less since everyone views polluting and depleting less the way a heroin addict views using heroin less. They think it means deprivation and sacrifice. On the contrary, it bring liberation and freedom. Also health, safety, and security.
You get more.
Another person who couldn’t see his way to stopping depriving others of life, liberty, and property without due process of law was Thomas Jefferson. We know he valued life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, but he only worked to attain them for himself and his peers.
He didn’t extend those values to his slaves. Like us today, he saw freeing his slaves as deprivation, sacrifice, and risk, despite his neighbor, Robert Carter III freeing his slaves. (Or rather, like Jefferson then, we today see the act of our stopping depriving others of life, liberty, and property by stopping polluting and depleting as deprivation and sacrifice. It wasn’t for him and it won’t be for us.)
Jefferson saw that he would lose Monticello and the profit from the crops he grew (or forced his slaves to grow) on his plantation, but he didn’t see that the slave quarters would also end.
Those quarters would be replaced by a free community of people enjoying their freedom. They would also enjoy the product of their labor, motivating them to work more than as slaves. They would produce more value to the world and Jefferson himself overall as free people than as slaves.
Jefferson would benefit from his slaves’ freedom, even if it led to decreases in his net worth and the nation’s GDP. It’s not his fault that he was born into a slave culture that enabled him to deprive others of life, liberty, and process without due process of law, but he could have done more to act by his values. Then he would have learned he’d love the results in ways he didn’t imagine but could have had he tried more.
Likewise for us today, it’s not our faults that we were born into a polluting, depleting culture that enable us to deprive others of life, liberty, and process without due process of law, we we can do more to act by our values. Then we will learn that we’d love the results in ways we aren’t imagining but can if we try more.
Read my weekly newsletter
On initiative, leadership, the environment, and burpees