Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas, Winds blowing through freezing trees, strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly K Squid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschutz.
Many listeners are probably familiar with the tags found in hotel bathrooms that read Save our planet, followed by instructions about reusing and replacing towels, and concluding thank you for helping us conserve the Earth's vital resources.
Reusing towels might help conserve the hotel's financial resources, but does that make any difference for the planet? Such lifestyle environmentalists is widespread, providing a sense of doing something in a world in which collective action is so difficult.
My guest today, her doctor, professor emeritus Michael Maniates, has been pondering this matter for at least 25 years, and we're going to talk about his forthcoming book, the Living Green the Promise and Limits of lifestyle environmentalism.
Dr. Maniotes, who has just retired as professor of Social Science at Yale and US College in Singapore, is a teacher scholar of environmental studies with deep roots in undergraduate education.
His research and writing center on environmental politics and governance, with special focus on on sustainable consumption and production, transition theory and drivers of policy change.
He holds a BS in Conservation and Resource Studies and an MA and PhD in Energy and Resources, all from the.
[00:02:09] Speaker C: University of California at Berkeley.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: He joined Singapore's Yale NUS College in its inaugural year in 2013 to guide the development of environmental studies, the only explicitly interdisciplinary trans divisional program at the college.
To set the background for this interview, I'm going to play a clip from.
[00:02:30] Speaker C: Another podcast on which Dr. Manieres appeared.
[00:02:34] Speaker D: You know, for about 150 years, higher.
[00:02:35] Speaker E: Education has been in the business of enhancing human prosperity. And human prosperity has been has been, at least in contemporary thinking, reaching back that far to be linked to economic growth and in particular the increase in material throughput. The more mining, the more production, the more innovation, the more goods, the more services, the more employment. And that's just been how we have thought about prosperity for a great deal of time. And higher education set up to facilitate that in many respects, either indirectly by educating people who can become captains of industry or perhaps just minions sort of grinding away. Or perhaps more importantly, higher education is a source of innovation and of efficiencies that can lead to more and more production and consumption at lower costs, all sort of driving this this Growth in the material throughput and overall consumption.
[00:03:26] Speaker D: And I guess before I go much.
[00:03:27] Speaker E: Further, I should say, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I mean, there have been some remarkable achievements over the last 150 years. I mean, life expectancy has gone up, infant mortality gone down, waterborne illnesses have declined. I mean, all kinds of wonderful things have come from this juggernaut, really, of economic growth that we've experienced, especially after 1950. Oh, my goodness. But at least where I live in the environmental science, environmental studies field, we may have reached the end of the flat out, no questions asked, utility of that growth as we approach a whole variety of ecological limits. And so it may be time for higher education and begin thinking about ways not just of doing this kind of technological innovation, studies of how to make solar panels more effective and efficient, but also thinking about social innovation, social innovations that would make it much easier for the technologists to save the world because they wouldn't always be sort of swimming against the current of massive growth, social innovations that could help us figure out how to squeeze more happiness and human prosperity out of smaller and smaller units of material throughput and economic growth in the economy. And just to wrap up this little bit, let me just say that when you hear me say this, I'm really thinking about the over consumers of the world, the top, top 20 or 25% of the world, who it seems to me and to others of course as well, really need to be thinking about ways of radically shrinking our ecological footprint if we're going to create the ecological space for the 4 billion poor people to come up and increase sort of their consumption. And so really it's on us in the rich world to be thinking in creative ways about how we become happier, more secure and fairer with lower growth, flat growth, perhaps even negative growth in stuff that's moving through the economy.
[00:05:14] Speaker C: Dr. Michael Maniotes, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:05:18] Speaker D: Thank you. It's great to be here.
[00:05:21] Speaker C: Okay, why don't we begin with a brief summary of your forthcoming book, the Living Green Myth. What's it about? What is your argument?
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Why did you write it?
[00:05:29] Speaker D: Well, Ronnie, I got on this idea, this book, maybe 10 years ago or more, when colleagues in the classroom and myself noticed increasingly students coming to us, environmental studies students and other folks, not just students, who were worried about environmental issues with this idea that you have to get everybody on board in order to make a difference with respect to the environment, you need 100% participation or close to it. People need to believe deeply in the severity of environmental issues before you can make much progress.
And this notion got expressed in a variety of different ways.
Sometimes in class, students would say, well, we can't really do that because it's going to alienate folks. We have to get everybody on board or that strategy won't work because it's too niche. We need to get everybody on board. It just became quite puzzling where this concept came from.
His colleagues and myself began to trace that through.
It became at least a apparent to me, or began to get the hunch that part of the problem was this story that I call in the book, the transformation Story around living green. And this transformation story essentially says that if you and I do the small things, you know, if we recycle, if we ride a bike, we plant a garden, maybe buy some energy efficient appliances, you know, it's a big tent, this living green. But if we do some of that, that these small, individual, uncoordinated acts will inspire others to do the same as others then are inspired to do the same, we'll begin to see this spread of a growing environmental norm to the point where at some point that the aggregation of all of these small actions, all of these small actions will come together and lead to the tsunami of social change that we all know we need in order to get to a world that works. And this notion, this transformation story of the small things sort of inspiring others and then adding up spontaneously into something, into something large. This almost magical aggregation is what I see more and more in product messaging, in ads, in conversations about how we might do our bit to save the world. And at the end of the day, I find it profoundly unnerving and actually destructive because that transformation story attached to green living tends to spread this theory or this notion of social change that we can't make much progress until we get everybody on board. And gosh, you know, you never get everybody on board around a social issue. You don't.
Most social change that we see out there in the world historically and now have come with small groups of people sort of organizing together two steps forward, one step back to try to make a difference. But this other notion that we can't really make much happen until we get everybody on board, I have seen as being profoundly destructive. It sets students that I work with and others up with this false theory of social change that's going to lead only to disappointment. I say in the book that I don't think that there are five guys in a room conspiring to weaken or to defang the environmental movement, but if there were they would spread this transformation story of living green in the way that it spread to get people to think in very unproductive and self destructive ways about how social change works. And so I lay out those arguments, I give some history around how this particular interpretation of green living sort of emerges, this idea that you and I should live green because that's the way that we can make a political or social or economic difference in the world. I show where that comes from. I show how major marketing, think tanks and institutions are promoting that view in order to fatten their bottom line.
I've discovered recently how current anxiety as it's growing with the Trump administration around environmental issues is being taken advantage of to push this story even further.
And I worry about deeply that left unchallenged this idea that we are at our best as agents of social change when we think small and act in uncoordinated ways by voting with our dollar at the checkout stand, that that view of social change, I think threatens to rob us of the power we so desperately need individually and collectively to make a difference.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: Well, we'll come back to it later, but it seems to me that it's this, you mentioned the voting with your dollars idea, right? That the market has become sort of the realm in which you act as an agent because politics just seems to be so obstructive, you know, and, and difficult to, to engage in. But, but let's go back, let's go back. You know, how did, how did you get into this? You've been do writing and teaching about this issue, I think actually since the turn of the millennium when you co edited Confronting Consumption.
But I get a sense that that was already, you know, you'd already developed some of this in previous years in graduate school and during the 90s.
So maybe you can, you know, give us a little bit of background to your getting to this particular point in this particular book.
[00:11:10] Speaker D: Back at the beginning of the millennium. That seems like a long time ago.
[00:11:14] Speaker C: Present at the creation.
[00:11:15] Speaker D: Yeah, yes, exactly.
You know, as I think back to my own, my own, I don't growth on this. You know, I remember when I was a, when I was a young assistant professor in the late 80s and early 90s. And you know, this was before you could, you could go to the store and buy any kind of product that was labeled green or earth saving. I mean, the only exception might have been kind of ozone saving spray cans because we have the ozone layer issue back there in the mid-80s. And I kid you not, I was the toilet paper king on my Campus in the late 80s and early 90s.
I'd go out and I would buy, I'd have cases of paper made of toilet paper made from recycled paper delivered to my house. A big, you know, a big kind of truck would pull up and dump a thousand rolls or more. Well, not dump, they'd bring boxes and I'd throw them in my basement. And it just felt to me that what I needed to do was to sp, get people to buy these roll of toilet paper from me. This would be a way of jump starting recycling that, that would somehow inspire the paper pulp and wood industry to look for more recycled paper that they could then use to turn into toilet paper. And maybe that would all kind of kick start. So I had this transformation story in my head and I'd say in around the mid-90s or so, you didn't have to rely on me in order to get your toilet paper made from recycled materials. But I, I, I, I, I, I did a little bit of digging and I should have done some digging before. And I was just so captured by this transformation story that I, I did some digging and I realized that the very people who were selling me this recycled, this toilet paper made of recycled paper were the, the very, were the very companies, the large tree growing, deforestation, paper pulp smashing companies, that they were responsible for all the environmental damage that I was teaching my students about. And in that moment I began to ask a set of questions that I should have been asking well prior to that, which was what the hell is going on here? I mean, to what extent is this just something to keep folks like me busy trying to change the world one small purchase at a time, when really behind the curtain in the back rooms, that the people who were pushing forward this notion of you can save the world by buying green were actually using it as a smokescreen for a whole variety of nefarious activities. And that really set me on my way for a while. I was very much enamored with, deeply invested in this transformation story. Just buy green, do your small thing. It'll inspire others, it'll spread spontaneously, there'll be magical aggregation, there'll be a norm cascade and boom, we'll be where we need to be.
It's a story that's out there ad nauseam and it is patently untrue. Took me a while to figure that out though.
[00:14:20] Speaker C: Well, just reflecting on that. Of course, in a system like ours, where money is made by selling things and creating demand and identifying places where you can get ahead of the curve and make, make Extra money until the practice becomes more widespread or there's more competition.
Right. There's an incentive to try and sell those kinds of things.
In retrospect, of course, it's not so surprising that the toilet paper story doesn't quite bear out and you had to wipe the slate clean, so to speak.
I had to put that in there.
[00:15:05] Speaker D: So well played.
[00:15:07] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, in a sense this is sort of like Gladwell and others tipping point, right? That you the. The notion that if enough, enough people do something, eventually everyone will adopt the practice.
[00:15:21] Speaker D: Very much. So now you know it. There are tipping points out there. I mean, Gladwell and others will tell you that, that any number of theories of social change, you know, coming from social movement theory, coming from innovation theory, coming from communications theory, that you can get a tipping point. But it usually comes when smaller groups of people are sort of working together to shift the story, to change the rules, to stop the bads and build the goods collectively. So tipping points do occur. The danger with this living green transformation story that I described, and again that we've seen a whole variety of ads. I was just down at my local IKEA here in Abu Dhabi of all places, just the other day and there's a large banner saying, you know, buy this energy efficient light bulb and you can be part of the change. And you know, I'm thinking, what kind of change are they talking about? Well, they're asking me to imagine that I'm going to buy this light bulb. Everyone else is going to buy this light bulb. This is going to spread. And then when you get vast majorities of people on board, because you have to have vast majorities because each individual change at the consumption level for you and for me is small. So to make a big impact, you've got to get large chunks of people on board.
That story tells you the tipping point comes only after you get super majorities. And that's the debilitating message that is so insidious.
[00:16:50] Speaker C: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host Ronnie Lipchitz, and my guest today is Dr. Michael Maniates, who has just written a book called the Living Green Myth, which is coming out in August. And we've been talking about the notion that if enough people vote with their dollars and buy notionally green products, that eventually everybody will, there'll be a kind of a mass movement and the world will be more environmentally friendly as a result.
So you talk throughout the book, well at least in the beginning, about various theories of social transformation that lead to some kind of significant Change you've just mentioned. Right. Lifestyle environmentalism, the individual choices that we make in the market don't really add up to anything. They basically foster consumption of particular goods. I suppose without thinking about this, the, the, the sort of, the structures in back of all of that. Right. And then you just mentioned small groups.
So what, what exactly does that entail? That idea of people working together in small groups and, and then that adding up to something. And there was one other example that occurred to me and that is water bottles. So maybe you can talk about first about the small group theory and then we go back to this example of.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: This case of water bottles.
[00:18:17] Speaker D: Sure. I mean, could I maybe before I do that, before we get too far into this, I wouldn't want your, your listeners to think for a moment as we move down this path that I think that there's, there's no place for living green.
As I try to unpack in the book, there are lots of great reasons to sort of practice this kind of lifestyle environmentalism.
Some people do it, some people do it around this notion of inverted quarantine, you know, protecting themselves from some of the dangers of the outside world, or people who buy organic foods, for example, to keep their kids from ingesting potentially unhealthy levels of pesticides. Now that's an example. I think if people are living green for that reason, I think that's completely, that's completely great. Other people live green because it's just a way to be a more ethical person. And this is something I tackle in the book as well, is that ethical living doesn't always have to be utilitarian. It can just be the right thing to do.
You know, if, if you come across an elderly neighbor on the corner, I mean, you walk them across the street, it's the right thing to do, but just don't think it's going to fix the pension crisis. You know, there's a disconnect there. There are other reasons to live green as well that talk about in the book building community, for example, or kind of establishing connections with others who find this to be important.
So my, my concern and quote quarrel isn't with the larger practice of living green. There's a long history of that with a voluntary simplicity movement and with strains of every major religion. But it's been this recent phenomena that really picked up in the mid-80s through a constellation of kind of weird and unexpected forces that came together to generate this one particular view that you and I are powerful, really much more as consumers than as citizens. And that by making right purchases or behavior changes, we're going to move the needle. So I just want to get that out because sometimes when I talk about this, if I go too far down this one interpretation of Living Green.
Living Green is aggregative political and social change. It really begins to annoy people who are deeply invested in Living Green for these other really fabulous reasons.
So to come to your question, I think the most difficult thing for us to imagine in these days, perhaps much more difficult than around the first earth day in 1970, was what it means to come together in groups to sort of struggle for the change we want.
And you know, I offer some insights and some tips and tricks towards the end of the book about how to make that happen.
I am very clear in the book, and I hope right now that this is not a set of recipes for how to come together and make a difference. Instead, what I counsel in the book is for people to become expert in one or more environmental issues to the extent that they can be, because Living Green is really a kind of a scattershot, almost dumbing down approach to these issues, is to learn as much as one can and through a variety of mechanisms, keep one's eye open for rewarding opportunities, to join with others in pushing for change around issues.
Living Green issues perhaps that they care about.
And I think we see again and again when people in their communities kind of, you know, you got to be persistent, you've got to believe that you're close to a transition point.
But there are abundant examples when people do come together in their communities and build relationships, work hard, focus on an issue that matters, that the needle can get moved, often at the local level. But often these local initiatives then combine in unexpected ways and scale at the state or national level to drive real change.
In a nutshell, I think that's the answer to your question.
And I hang my hat on the long observation that small groups of people working to figure out where the pressure points for change are and then doing their best to push them are far more effective than some green mass of consumers who hope that their purchases will drive some sort of change.
[00:22:40] Speaker C: Yeah, I mentioned the water bottle. Now, I know that when we were in graduate school in the 1980s, nobody carried water bottles as far as I can recall. You know, it was just not something you did today.
You know, everyone does, I won't say everyone, but a lot of, you know, many, many people do.
And there you have a very small change in terms of practices.
But, you know, it's very unclear, I think, how that happened. Now Is that a case of, you know, of individual, you know, of lifestyle, environmentalism, individual change propagating over 40 years or.
And I don't know if you've thought about this. Is there something else going. Did something else happen there? I mean, I don't want to state the number of water bottles that people are carrying.
[00:23:35] Speaker D: So when. By water bottles, you mean these, these reusable sort of bottles?
[00:23:39] Speaker C: Reusable, not plastic water bottles?
[00:23:44] Speaker D: No, I actually try to tackle that in the book when I, When I, When I think aloud with the reader about, about the role of sort of individual action. And, and there's no doubt about it, we have seen something of a sea change in terms of people using reusable bottles in their workplace, when they leave the house, in schools, universities.
And in many ways, sort of the disposable plastic bottle, you know, has become in a lot of venues, verboten. You know, it's just not the thing to do any longer.
There's a bit of a history around, around there that I try to unpack. The long and the short of it is that, you know, a group of activists in the US And Europe, loosely coordinated, really began to go after the plastic bottle industry. I mean, one example might be just not far from where you live. Ronnie would be in Berkeley, California, and the organization, the Story of Stuff, you know, it developed this little video and campaign called the Story of Bottled Water and collaborated with other environmental groups to.
To promote the ban of bottled. Of bottled water in disposable plastics, to promote a ban of that in selected universities and receptive corporations around the country. And so these were individual, these were activist groups sort of using the leverage that they had and the connections they had to begin to promote a negative norm. Vilification of the. Of disposable bottles. And then that created a space for these reusable bottles. And as that began to take off, you did begin to see, I guess, a norm shift, right? A spontaneous norm shift. But what I suggest in the book is that the real norm shift is really interesting wasn't in individuals seeing other individuals use these water bottles, but it was a norm shift among institutions.
Universities began to compare themselves to one another. And if you were a campus that hadn't sort of banned or restricted plastic water bottles, you were suddenly on the outs. And probably your students and faculty were reminding you of that. But it was easier to make the case on those campuses as a student or a faculty member, because you could point to other universities who had sort of done that. You know, the same with, with major Businesses as well. So the water bottles that we see now, the reusable water bottles that we see, I think are definitely a product of people kind of getting on board and, and seeing other people doing that and making it happen. But the genesis of that was not some set of spontaneous acts by individual consumers wanting to somehow be done with disposable plastic. That was organized and promoted by, by, by ordinary folks, really, but who are trying to think street strategically and tactically. And we're working at the level of institutions to get blanket rules passed and then selling the heck out of that to other institutions later. Of course, here we are now in 2025, and unfortunately, the, the reusable water bottle has become this sort of consumption status symbol. I'm thinking here the Stanley Cup. Is that what it's called? I think the Stanley cup, right. Yeah, yeah. Where, you know, I mean, I mean, how many, how many of these disposable water bottles do we have in our house now? Or, you know, how many will people purchase? And so at some point, trying to solve these problems just through individual acts of consumption can get away from you. But having said that, it's a really good thing that we're putting a stake through the heart of this, of, of water being served in disposable plastics and, and everyone having a reusable bottle and using it is, is, is, is much better than the prior situation.
[00:27:23] Speaker C: That sort of, it sort of fits into that model, though, that I, that I mentioned earlier, right. Is that companies start to identify certain kinds of trends, right. And get in on, on the trend by manufacturing, you know, plastic and metal water bottles and then upscaling them. Right. It becomes that sort of notion of, of upscaling them. And so again, you know, the commodification of a particular practice, Right, Whatever, it's, whatever, it's genesis. It's also interesting as that you mentioned, which I hadn't really thought about universities being the locus of this collective action, because it's much easier to do that, to motivate groups of students who are living together and spending a lot of time together and then hoping that that will spread outside of the campuses. I'm wondering whether the administration's war on universities is going to sort of undermine that particular model. But we don't have to speculate really about that.
Okay, you're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschutz. My guest today is Dr. Michael Maniates, who is about to publish a book, the Living Green Myth, which will come out from Wiley in this, this coming August. And we've been talking about how, I suppose not exactly movements, but how groups of people start to organize to try and motivate changes in certain aspects of production and consumption. I think, you know, we have to think about production as well when we're talking about this. Although people don't generally make water bottles. Right. So they're sort of in the arena of having to decide which one to buy and then, you know, falling, falling prey, I guess, to, to different kinds. Right. And looking at status, kinds of issues.
There are other ways. I mean, we talked a little bit about the other benefits, I suppose, individual and collective, of going green.
And you made this distinction between what I sort of think of as self interest and ethics. Right. That parents are concerned about their children not ingesting toxic chemicals.
Right. And that's very much a kind of a self interested argument.
Whereas you then made the distinction with, with sort of an ethical approach because it's the right thing to do. Of course, we say, well, if it's both ethical and you know, self interested, that's, that's, that's even better. Right? Because then we don't have to, we don't have to parse this. But that ethical point, you know, I think is, is quite interesting because taken to, to the end point, you might start doing things that are not necessarily in your self interest. And we do live in a society which prioritizes high individualism and self interest.
There's not exactly a question here, but. Right, right, right. How do you motivate people to act ethically?
[00:30:42] Speaker D: Well, I.
[00:30:44] Speaker C: Can you?
[00:30:45] Speaker D: Yeah, I, I think that that's probably.
It's, it's a great question, you know, but it's tricky, isn't it? Because just trying to get your arms wrapped around what ethical living is.
Is, is, is a, is, is, is a real bear. And then this whole social science body of, of. Of the.
Is pretty gnarly as well. I think for my purposes and in thinking about moving forward on this quest of finding our own sort of comfort zone and domains of power is we try to just do best in the world as we understand it. I think my concern is that we should never underestimate the ability of marketers and producers and advertisers to commodify our descent, to commodify our anxieties. And I think this is what we saw in the 1980s as people became concerned about the ozone hole and tropical deforestation, global environmental issues that our domestic environmental groups at the time were ill equipped to address.
Marketers came in and saw A profit opportunity there to begin to try to tap into our anxieties and to tell us that we could assuage our concerns and be actors in the real world by going green.
And amazingly, and I know this because I was working for a major environmental group at the time, amazingly, major environmental groups got on this bandwagon of saying, look, you want to make a difference, you can, you can do the little things and that will come together into something large. Now. Now, to give the major environmental groups a break, they were facing some pretty major membership losses and cutbacks in the, in, in the wake of the early middays of the Reagan administration. And so they had to do whatever they could to sort of keep existing members and enticing new members to support them all while they were losing major legislative battles to, to the Republican, to the Republican presidency and Congress at that point.
So we get to this point where our anxieties are deeply commodified and we're tapped, major marketers tap into that in order to sell us stuff that's really a con or a fraud. I mean, it makes your skin crawl. It made my skin crawl a bit when I really got into the research about what major marketing firms like Deloitte and McKinsey were, McKinsey Company were sort of plotting out here. I mean, they've identified different groups of individuals who are concerned about the environment. Some who are already doing this living green lifestyle in the hopes that that will come together to make a difference. Others who are suspicious they might be living green for other reasons, but not in order to sort of affect political or social change. And there are plans afoot, well developed plans afoot to sort of take those, that latter group of environmental leaning folks and just turn them into green consumers.
So I think I'm less concerned about framing or understanding sort of what ethical behavior might be. I proceed from the assumption that most of us at the end of the day are worried about environmental issues. It comes out in different ways.
And then I am concerned that in the wake of this growing anxiety and concerned that too much of that interest and worry is going to be funneled into these narrow channels leading to these cul de sacs of irrelevance where we, where we guilt trip one another to live green thinking that's going to make a difference, when in fact there are other things sort of we need to be doing. And I come to seven items towards the end of the book and we can march through those quickly if you think you would find that helpful.
[00:34:54] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, let's, let's hold off on that for, for a few minutes because I do, sure, I do want to come back to that. But I know in, in the, in your previous, in the book that you co edited, Confronting Consumption, right. There was a sort of an underlying notion that the problem is, is consumption, that we're, you know, not the, of the, of the basic necessities, but of, of excess.
And that still remains, in many ways, that still remains the crux of the problem. At least in the United States.
We're using vastly more than our fair share of materials, let's call it that. I don't want to use the term, strictly speaking, resources of materials and then getting rid of it, getting rid of these things before they ever wear out or break down.
And that kind, you know, and that's underpins in many ways the economic and social system in which we live.
[00:35:53] Speaker D: So of course, without a doubt, without a doubt.
[00:35:55] Speaker C: I mean, is there, is that and, and you know, and in a way sort of backing off of consumption, which would have presumably some of the major economic, I mean, the tariffs for all of their faults, if they reduce consumption, as I noted in a previous show, will have also impacts on things like carbon emissions. Right. The greatest reduction that we've seen was during the Great Recession. But structurally we're still faced with this system in which consumption is prioritized.
So here's the, you know, here's the big question.
Is there something that can be done about that?
[00:36:33] Speaker D: Of course, of course. I mean, there are, you know, as I'm sure many of your list, many of your listeners are aware of the two kind of overlapping movements and body of scholarly thinking around de growth and also post growth.
More and more of the degrowth people are shifting to this notion of post growth that essentially says that we're already headed, we're already headed to a low growth sort of future for a whole variety of reasons. A demographic transition, getting to net population decline globally around 2050, what's called secular stagnation, the difficulty of maintaining high rates of growth as your economy grows larger and larger, and lots of other forces.
So, you know, we're moving globally to a situation that perhaps Japan or the UK finds itself in today, which is sort of slow growth, aging populations, reduced demand for products, and there are some real openings there. I mean, I don't want to romanticize the difficulties of moving from a high growth political economy that depends on more and more moving through the system to something that is perhaps slower and less aggressive in terms of low growth or no growth, net growth. You know, there still be growth in some things like bicycles and wind machines and negative growth and other things like SUVs, for example.
So I think there are real opportunities there, but there can be real difficulties as well making that transition.
There's a real potential as we try to move from a high consumption world to a high prosperity world, when we're squeezing more and more prosperity out of each unit of production and spreading that more equally doesn't have to be utterly equally, but more equally.
There will be struggles, there'll be fights, there'll be really interesting conversations that I think should probably unite us across some party lines.
But getting there, getting there means at least beginning to put the training wheels back on of an engaged citizenship.
And that in my view, depends on a whole lot of things.
And one of those things is realizing that we are not going to make much of a dent in these problems by understanding ourselves as consumers.
So I argue in the book, and it is a for real assumption on my part. So it just wasn't sort of rhetorical, sort of hand waving. I, I believe from my six plus decades on the planet and you know, having worked for environmental groups and been engaged in higher education for 40 years and started a couple NGOs, etc. Etc. You know, I believe that there are, there are a massive number of opportunities out there for regular folks to come together, find a crack in the wall and begin to make a difference. I think the problem, it's not the difficulty of coming together with some friends and saying, okay, what the hell are we going to do about this? Let's try this or that.
The problem isn't sort of the actual act of coming together and just trying to be innovative and strategic. It's just thinking that that's possible and it's just being attentive enough to begin to look for these opportunities, to be able to seize them. I think that we are blinded often to where there are all kinds of opportunities to come together with friends or neighbors or existing eco, local indust. Initiatives to begin to make a difference to citizens. I think we're blinded to those in part because the shiny object of green consumption and lifestyle change has been dangled, has been dangled in front of us.
I think it is no accident that lifestyle environmentalism, you know, it can be buying green or can be trying to live green, but lifestyle environmentalism that aims to make a social political difference is almost always solitary. You know, you're at the market, buying something on your own, you grab an energy efficiency appliance, you put it back in your house. I Mean, these are all good things to do. Don't, don't get me wrong, they're not going to make much of a material difference because, because if you're a little more energy efficient, so the money you save is going to go back into the economy and just juice things up. But these things are essentially solitary acts and we don't, you know, we don't get the, the, the challenge and the excitement and the learning and often the frustration. I'll be the first to admit that that comes with working with others on a problem that matters. We don't get any of that, what some political scientists call solidarity effects, which is seen as a good thing. We don't get any of that by just understanding ourselves as a consumer. I think that's fundamentally disempowering. I, I don't believe there are five guys in a room conspiring to, to, to, to defang us. But there just might be, or at least, at the very least, I think the people who would not want us to be as active as we might be are happy and about the current state of things.
[00:41:22] Speaker C: Well, I mean, that's how capitalism works, right?
Modern capitalism.
And anyway, we don't have to get, I don't want to get into a whole. A whole.
[00:41:31] Speaker D: That's the next book. That's the, that's the next book.
[00:41:35] Speaker C: I want to say before we take our next break that, you know, these interesting conversations have been going on since the 70s, as you and I know from, you know, from our reading back in the 70s. Right.
And they're still going on. And, and it's unclear that anything new is, is coming out. But, you know, that's, that's arguable.
You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz, your host. My guest today is Dr. Michael Maniates, who is author of soon to be published A Living Green Myth. And we are engaged in a, I guess in a conversation about social change and, you know, the notion of individual living green individually and somehow trying to motivate, not collective action so much, but, but groups of people to act. I, I did want to just refer back to, you know, your comment about the 1980s. Of course, that was when we saw the rise of neoliberalism and the emphasis on sort of high individualism. Right. It was Margaret Thatcher's claim that there's no such thing as society.
There's only, as I recall, the individual and the family and everything sort of got oriented not only towards greater individualism, but greater identification of things produced by individuals that might be sold back to the individuals. I'm thinking here of our personal data. Right.
And intellectual property, that the commodification frontier, this was a new commodification frontier at the time and again, it sort of fostered this individualism. But you know, again, that's a topic for another day and I don't want to sound too preachy. You mentioned the seven living green springboards of difference making in your book and maybe you can talk to us about that. You know, what those are and why you think those can be more effective than just lifestyle environmentalism.
[00:43:43] Speaker D: Yeah, well, you know, much of my work around this book and as an educator has been trying to find, discover what it is that, that what it is that people are passionate about with respect to the environment.
Michael Harrington, the long ago head of the Democratic Socialist of America, said that you need to go where people are and then bring them where you want them to be.
Saul Alinsky, organizer in the 40s and 50s and you know, real influence on others, argued long and hard that regular people are, are, are, are struggling every day with the gap between their morals and their practices.
And so, you know, my sense, perhaps it's an article of faith, but it's where I start, is that, you know, people who are at one level or another kind of doing the green living thing, and actually most of us are, it appears at one level or another, it's unproductive simply to tell them that if they're doing it for political or economic change, that they're being conned.
And so what I try to do at the end of the book is to speak to those people, is to speak to folks who are already doing a bit of green living and suggesting how they could build on the passions that inform those choices. Are they gardening? Are they biking, are they trying to purchase green products? Are they working with their neighbors or something? It doesn't matter. But can one identify that and then build off of that in ways that could lead to more rewarding outcomes for the environment and greater fulfillment for the individual?
And gosh, there's no time to go through them all in any kind of detail.
But really what I suggest to folks is that we need to be thinking about the process of social change as we might be thinking about a footballer, as we'd call them in Europe or here in the Middle East. Soccer in the American parlance, as a football player. We don't give a football player, a soccer player, a list of ways in which to score a goal. We train that person to, to work with others, to look for Opportunities that open up on the field to move the ball and take advantage of the situation. And so that's really my philosophy here.
It's not a recipe or a to do list. It's, it's, it's, it's. What I'm suggesting are a set of practices that open up one's capacity to see opportunities for change and be a bit less intimidated or put off by, by working or reaching out, working with others or reaching out to others to try to make that change so quickly. The seven I know we're short of time is first, one just needs to let go of this notion that my green choice or your green choice is going to make any difference sort of politically or economically on the environment. It turns out these individual actions, even if everybody did all of them on the plate, would amount to a very small impact on the overall environmental sort of, sort of agenda. So just give yourself, give yourself permission just to do what you want, ride a bike, plant a tree, whatever. But don't feel like you have to hold yourself or others accountable to that having sort of huge change.
I suggest that people ought to become expert on an environmental issue. I mean, not, you know, not university PhD but make a point of reading up, gather resources, I give some ideas because I think as you become expert on an issue, you began to see opportunities and possibilities for change.
I encourage folks, if it's possible, to sort of experience ecolocal initiatives in their own community. Pitch in, observe, give it a try. It's just thinking about working collectively with others.
I return to the water bottle example that you called out a bit ago, suggesting that we ought to be thinking organizationally about how to spread these changes. Not pounding on each other individually to use less, but to pound on the organizations we're in, our businesses, our local communities, our schools, our universities, to change some of the rul rules like no more plastic water bottles. Change some of the rules that can then propagate outwards as these different organizations compare themselves to one another.
The fifth of seven items is I, I suggest that there might be some advantages here to thinking about voluntary simplicity or slowing things down a bit in one's life where that's possible. And to work for changes in, in. In the allocation of work and in an income in order to provide a bit more time and space to be reflecting on what it might be to be an active, engaged citizen in these crazy, crazy times.
The penultimate suggestion is one should take the long view. The dirty little secret here is that you or I are not going to save the world. Not in our lifetime. We're old, Ronnie. But even if we were young, not in our lifetime. This is a multi generational project that we've been invited to participate in. And I argue that that is a blessing. That is a huge thing. What can we do now that will make our great, great, great, great, great grandchildren who are going to be picking up the pieces, what can we do now that will make them look back and go, man, those folks in the early part of the 21st century were awesome. Against all odds, they got the ball rolling thinking about things differently. And that way, I think, opens up possibilities for change. And the last point I make is we got to have fun. I mean, I remember as an undergraduate in the 70s, having a lot of fun.
You know, I mean, we were stupid, we were dumb, we sang songs, we drank a little bit too much beer perhaps. We did skits, we cracked jokes. I'm thinking about Miles Horton, the founder of Highlander Institute, in his great video interview with Bill Moyers called Ventures of a Radical Hillbilly, describing about how the Civil Rights act activists in the 50s and early 60s had fun. You know, we got to start having some fun. We need some playground politics here. This can't just be deadly serious shaming and blaming around trying to get people to go green. That is not going to be sustaining in any significant way. So people are curious about that. They can have a look at the book. I'll probably have a summary of those seven items up on my website. But what I try to do at the end is to say, hey, if you're living green in any way, this is just how you expand upon that and you leverage on that to perhaps go beyond being the pawn of major marketing firms and producers and consumers who would want to use our affections for the environment against us.
[00:50:21] Speaker C: Well, that's great. Is there anything else you want to add to this at this point?
[00:50:25] Speaker D: Well, you know, perhaps when the book comes out, if you're interested, get the ebook version. Hey, fewer resources or go to your library.
[00:50:34] Speaker C: Okay. Well, thank you, Dr. Professor Michael Maniates, for being my guest on Sustainability now. And I think we're all looking forward to seeing your book in print and as electrons.
[00:50:46] Speaker D: Thank you so much, Ronnie. It's a delight to join you and continued good luck in this really important project that you're engaged in.
[00:50:52] Speaker C: Thanks.
[00:50:54] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Dr. Michael Maniates, whose new book, the Living Green the Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism, will be published by Wiley this coming August.
If you'd like to listen to previous shows. You can find them at ksquid.org sustainabilitynow and Spotify, YouTube and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make KSQUID your community radio station and keep it going.
And so, until next every other Sunday, sustainability now.
[00:51:37] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out.
Temperate zones and tropic climbs and n Through currents and thriving seas, Winds blowing to breathing trees, strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
