On Thinking Clearly
How we conflate symbols with reality
Posted Jun 9, 10:48 am in business, consumerism, economics, environment, marketing, politics, semiotics, sustainability
A while back, I worked on a project for a company that had a large fleet of gas-powered vehicles. This company had a certain budget, and wanted to use this money to retire as much as they could of their current fleet, and replace the vehicles with hybrids. In their own words, the goal of the project was to “reduce [the company’s] carbon footprint.” As my colleagues and I investigated the feasibility of their proposal, we found that the company’s allocated budget could buy many more diesel vehicles than hybrid vehicles. Diesel vehicles are an established technology with widespread availability, a large number of mechanics, a high level of reliability, any many competing engine manufacturers to choose from. The same cannot be said of hybrids. As such, the company could buy and maintain 3 or 4 diesel vehicles for the price of one hybrid.1 Taking that into account, the total environmental impact after a year would be much, much lower with the diesels than with the hybrids! We happily reported these results to the company, expecting them to be excited about how massive a dent our plan would put in their carbon footprint.
They were not pleased.
It was only then that it hit me; I had naively assumed that the company’s goal really was to reduce its carbon footprint. In fact, their real purpose was to employ a flashy PR campaign that gave consumers the impression that their company was a bastion of environmental stewardship and was making big strides in upholding the tenets of corporate social responsibility (or the vague understanding of which espoused by the public) by buying impressive hybrid vehicles, the symbol of environmental consciousness! Wouldn’t the public be impressed?
The company really wanted to buy those hybrid vehicles. They wanted to look like the good guys in front of their competitors. Our proposal far surpassed their expectations, if one considers the goal that they claimed they had. But we failed miserably if one considered what their real, unstated goals were.
It is disappointing that the company felt like the best way to convey their apparent concern for the environment was to do something that carried all the signs of the environmental movement but not the weight of it. But I don’t blame the company. I blame consumers and the public in general for lazily ascribing meaning to symbols without understanding their impacts on a macro level.
Which brings me to my next point: one of the biggest social ills observable in the United States is the demand for benefit without the willingness for sacrifice. People talk strongly about the need for environmental preservation, conservation, and consciousness, but I rarely see anyone willing to incur the personal discomfort needed to effect any change. Many good people who are strident environmentalists (at least in the public sphere) don’t make any particular efforts to drive less, turn off their lights when not at home, or reduce their consumption behavior.
Many of the environmentally-directed actions of such people’s efforts can be found in the fact that they buy organic food, drive small cars, and purchase recycled toilet paper. I call these people “soy candle environmentalists.” Despite this disparaging-sounding epithet, I do not mean to judge them as bad people by any means. However, I do see them as a product of a society that has learned that the best way to demonstrate their commitment to a particular cause is through highly commoditized consumer behavior. I buy soy candles. I drive a hybrid car. I buy recycled products.
This is not to suggest that the above are empty gestures that don’t have any value in the real world. They do have value. However, they do not really address the root of our environmental problems—overconsumption— in any deep way. They are basically means of mitigating some of the damages caused by their consumption habits, and in ways that are visible to outsiders. It’s not good enough to be an environmentalist; we want to be seen as being one. And if we had to choose one or the other, most of us would probably choose the latter, because the social shame associated with being an unsophisticated, environmentally ignorant consumer is a pain that is both closer and more ego-damaging than blindly shipping off hundreds of non-recycleable styrofoam cups to some distant landfill.
A recent event I witnessed illustrated jut how fixated we are on the socially accepted symbols of environmental consciousness rather than the results of one’s actions. My friend had an old beat-up station wagon that died on him recently. There was an unused SUV in the family that was kindly passed down to him so that he’d have a vehicle again without having to go through the enormous expense of buying a new one. He and his girlfriend are both pretty staunch liberals, so naturally, he was rather sheepish and apologetic to his equally liberal friends who saw that his station wagon had been replaced by this new, “politically incorrect” vehicle. When I saw the SUV, I didn’t comment on it or pass any judgment on him, but he still expressed some level of shame about having it. I explained to him that there shouldn’t be any shame in having an SUV. It’s just that this vehicle has become a symbol of American excess; it is not necessarily the equivalent of that excess. Aside from the additional resources needed to produce the vehicle itself, it’s only as bad as its driver makes it.
I’d rather most of the country have huge SUVs that they use infrequently and for local outings than have a nation of small car owners making daily 50 mile commutes. The latter is what I saw in ridiculous quantities the Bay Area, where SUVs are reviled. In San Francisco, SUV owners are vilified, and their cars vandalized and defiled; but I have never heard about any of the people I knew who spent 2+ hours driving one-way to work in their economy-sized cars being harassed. Why? It’s much easier to latch onto the symbol than it is to latch onto someone’s actual impact. It’s much easier and more comfortable for environmentally-conscious people to simply blame the SUV for all the environmental ills than for them to question their own consumption habits; it allows for a convenient “us and them” scenario, a division that forms the backbone of all our socio-political conflicts. It’s really no different than pointing the finger at Jews or blacks or immigrants for America’s problems instead of us figuring out what our problems actually are, and what their root causes are. And it feels much better to pin the downfall of society on “them” than it is for you to be introspective and figure out how you yourself (as an individual or part of a collective) are the source of most of your problems!
In the case of the SUV, it’s as if one’s actual impact on the environment (given our choice of vehicle) is given a back seat to what our apparent attitude is, the attitude that spectators might ascribe to us if they were paying attention to all the pro-environmental symbols and signals that we cloak ourselves in, instead of examining our lifestyle as a whole. As such, there’s cachet in being seen driving the latest hybrid (no matter how much you drive), and there’s shame in driving an SUV (no matter how little you drive).
Often, these symbols, like the aforementioned soy candles mislead us into thinking that we are actually taking serious steps in curbing our own environmental footprint on this planet. Recycling is another example. This act has become the poster child for environmental advocacy, and I’ve heard otherwise intelligent people argue that we can save the world if we simply recycle our paper, plastic, and soda cans.
Not even close.
Many people do not realize the amount of resources that need to be dedicated to recycling, and think of recycling as a simple equation for saving resources. You can recycle all the paper you want, but for every sheet you use that you didn’t really need to use, you have created immense pollution, having used tremendous energy in bleaching it, pulping it, and reforming it into recycled paper. This is basically true for every type of material recycling.
In fact, the assertion that recycling is a panacea for our environmental issues is so untrue that many of those working closest with recycling efforts will quietly admit that recycling is quite possibly more damaging than it is helpful; their reluctance to broadcast this comes from the fact that they hope to keep environmental consciousness on the minds of people, and hope that increased awareness will play some role in reducing environmental impact on the earth eventually.
But there is a serious danger in promoting recycling, one that few think about: does the ever-present specter of recycling as a de facto absolver of environmental consequence enable or even encourage wasteful behavior? That is, will people be unnecessarily wasteful or use more than they might otherwise simply because they feel that the normal environmental damage that they may be causing will be offset by the fact that they are planning to recycle?
I would argue that, yes, this is a real and observable phenomenon. And it’s one that is most notable in those who are most aware of and personally conscious of environmental issues. I have personally witnessed reams of paper being unnecessarily used in the most thoughtless of ways while the standard “don’t worry, we’ll recycle it” line is tossed off in casual manners, signifying of course, that this wastage isn’t really wastage, and that the paper is not going directly back into the waste stream. Perhaps it is literally true that this paper won’t re-enter the waste stream, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no environmental cost to it. Energy-production facilities are burning coal needed to process that paper back into a usable consumer product; bleach is being pumping to the world’s water sources to render the paper white; and trucks are pumping out millions of tons of carbon dioxide getting the paper to and from the processing facility.
You can buy as many soy candles, hemp shirts, and organic fruits you can find, but don’t expect this to translate into strong environmental impacts. Sure, it’s possible that your impact is slightly smaller than it would be if you bought traditional candles (made from petroleum distillates), cotton clothing (which uses a large amount of water and pesticides), and non-organic fruits, but ultimately, these are efforts that these are minor shifts towards environmental stewardship. Real efforts in environmental stewardship come from buying less and using less, not buying into the symbols of change. But our system is so structured around commerce that it is hard for consumers and companies to understand the divergence between the symbols and the impacts those symbols are supposed to represent.
FOOTNOTE:
1. Seth Godin just posted an article that essentially says the exact same thing.