Taking Shorter Showers Doesn't Cut It: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change

Submitted by Anna on Tue, 07/28/2009 - 14:15

July 27, 2009

Join PDA’s Stop Global Warming/Environmental Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here.

Are we taking the easy route? Dumpster diving wouldn’t have stopped Hitler, and composting wouldn’t have ended slavery.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

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