April 21, 2015 - 00:54
All four of these pieces focused on the problems with larger economic systems that contribute to climate change—most notably capitalism. While reading through these, the conversations we had about Terry Tempest Williams were still floating around the back of my mind, even though these new articles and essays go in a drastically different direction. While Williams talks about something deeply personal and spiritual, Kolbert, Klein, and Dreifus evaluate the economic systems at play and advocate for drastic change.
Klein especially calls for large scale change, for a reworking the values of current economics. Klein interestingly though begins her essays by focusing on the personal: the passengers on the plane who find another plane or some variation on the bystander effect where we assume that someone else will eventually fix the problem at hand. Klein has an interesting section where she discusses changes made on a personal scale, noting that “many of these lifestyle changes are indeed part of the solution, but we still have one eye tightly shut” (4). She calls out many changes that we make to our daily lives to be enviromentally 'friendly' as simply another way of placating ourselves and not really examining or addressing the ture problems. She then moves into her analysis of capitalism, but I found it telling that she chose to use possible personal and individual reactions to the issue of climate change as an introduction and hook.
The questions I'd like to explore relate to this 'personal' level. I'm interested in connecting the very different ways of approaching the issue of climate change and environmentalism that these articles and Williams propose: How effective is searching for change on a personal level—personal level being everything from finding your own connection to land a la Williams to making ‘green’ changes in your life, like recycling and driving/flying less? Does changing an entire economic or value system start with the personal? Or is, as most of these authors suggest, flipping the entire system required first? Basically, where do the actions of each individual fit into this, or do individual actions not matter until a larger change is enacted?