The Path of the Unarmed

Chapter 6: Use leftism to solve the environmental crisis

They were back in the woods. Disarmed had recommended that Unarmed try just sitting in the woods quietly and seeing what he could see. One's presence in the woods created ripple effects, something trackers called "concentric rings"; the birds would fly away from you, and seeing and hearing that other animals would know something was moving in the forest and have their own reactions... but if you sat in the same place for a long time, quietly, you would start to see things that you otherwise wouldn't. Unarmed had seen birds catching worms, catching insects in mid-air, and a coyote striding purposefully along the creek before the day started warming up and people started coming in with their dogs. Their concentric rings took care of the rest.

He met up with Disarmed on a park bench near a tennis court and talked while watching people play.

"I've been thinking," Unarmed said, "about plastic in the oceans. And climate change."

"What have you thought about it?" Disarmed asked me.

"I was thinking about maybe we could use drones or remote controlled boats to pick the plastic up."

"And climate change?"

"For climate change we'd have to switch to solar and wind energy, and maybe nuclear fusion and lossless storage, and reduce energy use overall to a reasonable level."

"So, will that be easy, or hard?" Disarmed asked.

"I keep reading that we use much more energy than we need in our part of the world and that the technology for renewables is there."

"I have read the same," Disarmed said. "So why do you think it hasn't happened yet?"

"Because people are lazy? Greedy?"

"That's one answer, but that isn't the leftist answer," Disarmed said. "You have half of the story right. To a leftist, environmental problems are technologically easy. Take the problem of plastic, of solid waste. We could easily design containers that were either completely compostable, that you could throw on the grass and they'd become part of the soil, or that were really beautiful and reusable that people would want to keep and use over and over again. In the past, at much lower technological levels then we have now, society did more or less that.

"The same goes for problems of agriculture. Industrial agriculture is deadly for the climate, it is a huge source of water pollution, it causes the suffering and unnecessary death of billions of animals every year – billions of chickens, hundreds of millions of pigs and cows, billions of fish. But it doesn't take much advanced technology to switch to plant foods and veganism – it's lower technology, other than maybe designing sophisticated plant milks and fake meats, perennial grains to avoid soil loss, integrated pest management and organics...

"And the list goes on. Does anyone believe we need 150,000 industrial chemicals to do jobs that were done with hundreds of chemicals? Do we need to bulldoze all the forests everywhere, whether for cash crops, ranches, or suburban developments? Most of the technological solutions involve getting what we need without being so destructive.

"You know about 50 years ago someone named Amory Lovins – not a leftist by the way - wrote that people don't need electricity, they need hot showers and cold beer. And they don't need cars, they need mobility. Technologies to deliver these things were available then. We could be much more sophisticated about them today."

"Wow, you know a lot about this," Unarmed said.

"I read!" Disarmed said.

"So then let me ask you your own question," Unarmed said. "Why hasn't it happened yet? According to you."

Disarmed said: "As I said, the first half you have right: to a leftist, environmental problems are technologically easy to solve. But they are institutionally very difficult to solve. Every environmentally destructive practice is helping someone who is already wealthy make more money. From the business perspective, why should they take on the costs of having to dispose of the containers of the products they sell? Why should they take on the tremendous infrastructural costs of switching to renewable energies? What will happen to the profits of their corporations if society stops using oil, stops eating meat and fish, learns how to live off of the metal and plastic that has already been mined, stops continually encroaching into natural areas..."

"But in that case, why haven't they already destroyed the planet?"

"Good question," Disarmed said. "In some ways it is a miracle that we have what we have left. And it is because people have fought them in various ways: they've pushed governments to make laws regulating what they can do to the environment; people who have been poisoned by polluting companies have sued them and exposed their malfeasance to others; indigenous people have held on to their lands and their practices of taking care of the earth, sometimes by actual fighting, sometimes by blockades, sometimes in courts too; people have used civil disobedience, sometimes they've chained themselves to trees to stop companies from logging."

"Wow. So you are saying we already know how to save the planet," Unarmed said.

"For a leftist, it's always the same answer: the power of the people. Whatever we have left of the planet, we have because people fought for it. If we are going to stop climate change, prevent mass extinction, and the collapse of the oceans and of our agriculture, we will need more people power to do it."

"So you don't think that science is the key to the environmental crisis?"

"On the contrary, science is fundamental. But I believe we need to change our society so that its main goal isn't enriching corporations in order to be able to use science, and use Indigenous knowledge, and everything else that we know and can discover about how to live better on the earth."

"So if I understand you, you're saying I should go vegan, use simpler chemicals, buy less stuff, recycle, try to conserve energy?"

"Sure you can do all those things, but that isn't going to solve the environmental crisis. Because a leftist understands that individuals switching to veganism or making better consumer choices is not sufficient to solve the problem."

"But if everybody did it..."

"Of course, but getting everybody to switch to veganism couldn't occur without social support. Imagine every grocery store carried nothing but incredibly delicious vegan food, and every restaurant carried nothing but every variety of delicious vegan food. Would it be harder or easier to be vegan under that circumstance?"

"Easier, obviously."

"Right. But today, even if you live in a big city like we do, it's a lot easier to eat cheap meat than it is to eat good plants. And it's easier to use single-use plastic than for you to carry around your own bottles, cups, and bags. The reason it's easier is because of the way society is designed – for the profits of a few, not to take care of the planet while getting what we need and that which brings us joy. If society were designed differently, all of our individual choices would be different because the context would be different."

"Scientifically easy, institutionally hard," Unarmed said.

"That's right," Disarmed said.