No, I don't have a minute for the environment

It's not apathy, it's exhaustion. The planet needs builders, not whipping boys.

In Brueghel the Elder’s “The Garden of Eden” (1615), humans aren’t the main characters - the Fall is tucked away in the background

Imagine trying to lift a boulder when you can barely stand. That’s us, attempting to save the planet while drowning in daily struggles and systemic forces that eat up all of our disposable time.

I’m morbidly fascinated by the failure of the environmental movement.

You tell people the world is actually burning, and they barely flinch - like a child that’s just resigned itself to a punishment that they can’t prevent and must tolerate.

It’s not apathy, it’s exhaustion.

Catherine Shannon

captured this state of burn out and despondence perfectly in her article, “everyone is numbing out”:

“People are struggling: most people simply cannot cope without substances like marijuana, alcohol, drugs, and SSRIs. People are lonely: they have fewer friends and live far from their families. Dating seems impossible. Men and women in the prime of their lives are struggling to meet even one potential partner who shares their values and vision for a relationship. Oh, and our phones—Gen Z averages an unfathomable 9 hours of screen time per day—have ruined our attention spans to the point where we can no longer read a book, let alone sit quietly with nothing but our thoughts.”

Meanwhile, in the background, “save the world” lingers on our to-do lists and rolls over to each new day, where we guiltily confront it again each time we buy double-wrapped plastic or forget the reusable bag in our car. But we can’t save the world when we can’t save ourselves.

My Kingdom for Convenience

The sheer amount of due diligence expected of consumers - navigating vague environmental claims and logos, trying to discern truth from lies - hides messy realities behind opaque supply chains and cheerful branding with cartoon suns and trees, leaving people ready to give up and reach for the cheapest item on the shelf already.

There’s also never enough that you can do. Say you switch your bank statements to paperless and buy a reusable tote bag. There’s still your gas-powered car in the driveway. Or the plastic bottle you grabbed after forgetting your reusable one.

It’s this rotting sense of inadequacy, failure, and resentment.

There’s an unspoken agreement that we’ll all just “do our best,” but it’s hard to motivate when the strategy is clearly a losing one.

Watching your neighbor skip recycling or reading about its many flaws doesn’t help.

We’re supposed to believe that the leftover energy of individual consumers, weathering a collapsing economic system and finding no community to lean on, will collectively turn this ship around and save the world.

Not likely, especially when the strategy is just screaming at the crew.

We’re all (Digital) Nomads Again

The problem with pushing reduced consumption to cure overconsumption is that it overlooks the systemic forces that make overconsumption the path of least resistance.

It's like trying to lose weight in a world of sedentary jobs, long commutes, and processed calorie-rich foods.

How were we doing on the obesity epidemic before Ozempic?

Private ownership, societal distrust, a transient population, and a fragmented mental state have left us disconnected - from the land and from each other.

After booming out of the cradle of civilization with agriculture, we’ve become nomads again—wandering the digital desert, disconnected from the land and our roots.

“The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

It’s not a religion; it’s a relationship.

At the heart of the environmental movement lies a dangerous myth: that the planet is better off without those with opposable thumbs and electricity and that humans can’t reclaim their role as stewards of the land. This myth suggests there’s no relationship with Earth beyond exploitation and that this destructive outcome was inevitable when Edison committed the original sin.

When species extinction is the only solution, people won’t rally behind it.

That’s Marketing 101.

The environmental movement is fixated on minimizing - waste, litter, usage, consumption. Instead, it needs to focus on building.

Like any new service or product in a capitalist system, it needs to offer something people value. Something people want.

Supporters might scoff, saying the Earth already gave us AIR and a HOME, but that argument hasn’t worked. Neither did the picture of sad polar bears. Neither did blowing up pipelines. Sorry, ELF.

People want to heal but don’t know where to turn. They want to help but lack the strength, the resources, or a tenable path forward.

A population disconnected from nature and each other, plagued by anxiety and depression from too much screen time, “self-care,” and self-scrutiny, needs a cure rooted in the body and the ground, the breath and the soil. One that counters our separation from the natural world and restores awe and mystery.

Building local communities rooted in a deeper connection to the land is a good place to start.

The challenge is creating a structure that aligns incentives for participation and accountability in a climate of high distrust. Here are just a few ways it could take shape - a "Country Club" in the truest sense of the name:

1. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) in urban gardens or backyards allows communities to gather, harvest, and share meals from the food they grow.

2. Upcycling and repair classes, paired with markets and galleries, can embrace the DIY spirit. A friend used to paint over old artwork or items she’d grown tired of, giving them new life. It could also extend to refurbishing or repairing old furniture that would otherwise be discarded and replaced. This fosters creativity, reduces waste, and turns the disposable into something valuable again.

3. Nature Journaling begins with mindfulness, presence, and observation. Breathing fresh air, hearing birds chatter, seeing the beauty of nature up close - then putting pen to paper to capture what you see and feel - is powerful.

4. Seasonal Rituals - We have many personal rites of passage, but few that connect us to the Earth in modern, urban living. Learning to mark the seasons, the migrations of species, and the rhythms of the natural world may feel clumsy, but it can be deeply enriching:

“The ceremonies that persist—birthdays, weddings, funerals— focus only on ourselves, marking rites of personal transition. […]

We know how to carry out this rite for each other and we do it well. But imagine standing by the river, flooded with those same feelings as the Salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Rise in their honor, thank them for all the ways they have enriched our lives, sing to honor their hard work and accomplishments against all odds, tell them they are our hope for the future, encourage them to go off into the world to grow, and pray that they will come home. Then the feasting begins. Can we extend our bonds of celebration and support from our own species to the others who need us? - Robin Wall, Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

We don’t know what we lost

I'm obsessed with finding Dark Sky locations where you can still see the stars and the Milky Way at the right time of year. They're becoming harder to find, pushed out by urbanization and electrification.

When I do find clear skies, I marvel at how, for millennia, we saw this spectacular show every night. Now, I've spent most of my life in cities where I'm lucky to see one or two dim stars. So many people wrote about how witnessing the totality of the April 2024 eclipse was life-changing.

It makes me wonder - maybe the problem when you're staring at the ceiling, wondering what's wrong, is that you're looking at the ceiling at all.

Turn off the lights. Leave your phone behind. Go outside.

Here’s one last Robin Wall Kimmerer quote about students huddled at night, protecting salamanders crossing a highway during mating season. Now compare that to hotel chains asking you to skip fresh towels for their "green movement"—and consider how much real substance is being ignored in today's environmental movement.

“What is it that drew us to the hollow tonight? What crazy kind of species is it that leaves a warm home on a rainy night to ferry salamanders across a road? It's tempting to call it altruism, but it's not. There is nothing selfless about it. This night heaps rewards on the givers as well as the recipients. We get to be there, to witness this amazing rite, and, for an evening, to enter into relationship with other beings, as different from ourselves as we can imagine.

It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness" - estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night. For a moment as we walked this road, those barriers dissolved and we began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again.”

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Recommended Reading

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Zen and the Art of Saving the Environment by Thich Nat Hanh

An online course centered around the book above starts October 20, 2024, on mindful action for the Earth. Thank you

Laura

for the suggestion in my note!

The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial by David Lipsky

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie

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Thanks to

Justin Ross

from Square Man, Round World for editing a draft of this.

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