Forget Shorter Showers: Why personal change does not equal political change

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons...Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent...

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings...

...The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead...

http://shiftshapers.gnn.tv/blogs/32457/Derrick_Jensen_Forget_Shorter_Showers

And because there are generations of people, a lot of the folks on DU, who believe that getting angry at someone else is a sin. To express anger, to protest, to actually do anything goes against every bit of psychological training our wonderful educational and psychological systems have broadcast to us for centuries.

And God help you if anybody here suggests something more stringent than a letter to the editor.

Its all about corporate usage. We individuals can do little to stem this disaster. Doesn't mean I wont try to do my part, but in many ways, such as changing out light bulbs, its done to help the bottom line in my budget.

Nothing wrong with that stuff, except that it gives people the false impression that they are effecting change by these acts instead of attacking the issue of the economic system which by it's own logic produces these maladies.

our own folly in bringing on the devastation of climate change? I change my light bulbs to LEDs because of the carbon footprint, not to bring down dictators. But being a person who can do more than one fight at a time, I do things to curb runaway government too.

As a society we're just beginning to think in terms of conservation on a planetary scale because of climate change. It may not bring down the Hitler's just yet, but chances are pretty good that we'll learn as we go. Or not.

"I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change."

Not sure if he's right or wrong on personal change not equaling social change, I think it does eventually (with the luxury of time which we no longer have), but he's always worth reading. Thanks for posting. K & R

edit to add his closing paragraph:

"The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems."

you don't think that the destruction of the enviorment is an injustice?
you offer no resolution to any of the world;s problems ,where actions like composting, local stewardship , and proactive efforts by individuals present great hope.

"Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our
deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner
sense of justice than we do." - Wendell Berry

the OP, thanks for replying to inform.