We won’t save the Earth with a better kind of disposable
coffee cup
George Monbiot
We must challenge the corporations that urge us to live in a
throwaway society rather than seeking ‘greener’ ways of maintaining the status
quo
@GeorgeMonbiot
Thu 6 Sep 2018 06.00 BST Last modified on Thu 20 Dec 2018
21.22 GMT
Illustration by Ben Jennings
Do you believe in miracles? If so, please form an orderly
queue. Plenty of people imagine we can carry on as we are, as long as we
substitute one material for another. Last month, a request to Starbucks and
Costa to replace their plastic coffee cups with cups made from corn starch was
retweeted 60,000 times, before it was deleted.
Those who supported this call failed to ask themselves where
the corn starch would come from, how much land would be needed to grow it, or
how much food production it would displace. They overlooked the damage this
cultivation would inflict: growing corn (maize) is notorious for causing soil erosion,
and often requires heavy doses of pesticides and fertilisers.
The problem is not just plastic: it is mass disposability.
Or, to put it another way, the problem is pursuing, on the one planet known to
harbour life, a four-planet lifestyle. Regardless of what we consume, the sheer
volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth’s living systems.
Don’t get me wrong. Our greed for plastic is a major
environmental blight, and the campaigns to limit its use are well motivated and
sometimes effective. But we cannot address our environmental crisis by swapping
one overused resource for another. When I challenged that call, some people
asked me, “So what should we use instead?”
The right question is, “How should we live?” But systemic
thinking is an endangered species.
Part of the problem is the source of the plastic campaigns:
David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series. The first six episodes had strong,
coherent narratives but the seventh, which sought to explain the threats facing
the wonderful creatures the series revealed, darted from one issue to another.
We were told we could “do something” about the destruction of ocean life. We
were not told what. There was no explanation of why the problems are happening
and what forces are responsible, or how they can be engaged.
Amid the general incoherence, one contributor stated: “It
comes down, I think, to us each taking responsibility for the personal choices
in our everyday lives. That’s all any of us can be expected to do.” This
perfectly represents the mistaken belief that a better form of consumerism will
save the planet. The problems we face are structural: a political system
captured by commercial interests, and an economic system that seeks endless
growth. Of course we should try to minimise our own impacts, but we cannot
confront these forces merely by “taking responsibility” for what we consume.
Unfortunately, these are issues that the BBC in general and David Attenborough
in particular avoid. I admire Attenborough in many ways, but I am no fan of his
environmentalism. For many years, it was almost undetectable. When he did at
last speak out, he avoided challenging power – either speaking in vague terms
or focusing on problems for which powerful interests are not responsible. This
tendency may explain Blue Planet’s skirting of the obvious issues.
The most obvious is the fishing industry, which turns the
astonishing life forms the rest of the series depicted into seafood. Throughout
the oceans, this industry, driven by our appetites and protected by
governments, is causing cascading ecological collapse. Yet the only fishery the
programme featured was among the 1% that are in recovery. It was charming to
see how Norwegian herring boats seek to avoid killing orcas, but we were given
no idea of how unusual it is.
Even marine plastic is in large part a fishing issue. It
turns out that 46% of the Great Pacific garbage patch – which has come to
symbolise our throwaway society – is composed of discarded nets, and much of
the rest consists of other kinds of fishing gear. Abandoned fishing materials
tend to be far more dangerous to marine life than other forms of waste. As for
the bags and bottles contributing to the disaster, the great majority arise in
poorer nations without good disposal systems. But because this point was not made,
we look to the wrong places for solutions.
From this misdirection arise a thousand perversities. One
prominent environmentalist posted a picture of the king prawns she had bought,
celebrating the fact that she had persuaded the supermarket to put them in her
own container rather than a plastic bag, and linking this to the protection of
the seas. But buying prawns causes many times more damage to marine life than
any plastic in which they are wrapped. Prawn fishing has the highest rates of
bycatch of any fishery – scooping up vast numbers of turtles and other
threatened species. Prawn farming is just as bad, eliminating tracts of
mangrove forests, crucial nurseries for thousands of species.
We are kept remarkably ignorant of such issues. As
consumers, we are confused, bamboozled and almost powerless – and corporate
power has gone to great lengths to persuade us to see ourselves this way. The
BBC’s approach to environmental issues is highly partisan, siding with a system
that has sought to transfer responsibility for structural forces to individual
shoppers. Yet it is only as citizens taking political action that we can
promote meaningful change.
The answer to the question “How should we live?” is:
“Simply.” But living simply is highly complicated. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World, the government massacred the Simple Lifers. This is generally
unnecessary: today they can safely be marginalised, insulted and dismissed. The
ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the
plastic soup in which we swim.
One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own
consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great
tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes
and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.
As last month’s Hothouse Earth paper, which warned of the
danger of flipping the planet into a new, irreversible climatic state,
concluded: “Incremental linear changes … are not enough to stabilise the Earth
system. Widespread, rapid and fundamental transformations will likely be
required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold.”
Disposable coffee cups made from new materials are not just
a non-solution: they are a perpetuation of the problem. Defending the planet
means changing the world.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário