Be Honest: How Much Does A Changed Life Change the World?

A Blog by Todd Wynward
  Author of The Secrets of Leaven
 
 [The fifth in a series on Watershed Discipleship]

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons?

That’s the provocative question Derrick Jensenasked in his 2009 article “Forget Shorter Showers”[Orion magazine, June/July issue]. And four years later, it’s a question that continues to inhabit my soul.

My family and I have changed our lifestyles a lot in the last six years, living a simpler life of greater sustainability and watershed discipleship.  We live in a yurt, use a composting toilet, heat with local wood, eat locally, grow significant food, milk goats, live in community, drive a Prius, take less showers, and skimp on non-necessities. 

But Jensen’s article made me pause: how globally effective is personal lifestyle change? Is it enough to follow the words of Gandhi, and be the change I want to see in the world, hoping that change will somehow spread beyond me?

Derrick Jensen says no.

I’ve wrestled with this question before, but Jensen made me look at it again, hard.  In “Forget Shorter Showers,” he powerfully argues that personal lifestyle changes—dramatic as they may be for individuals—do almost nothing to forward the massive systemic change needed today:

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. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

 To drive his point further home, Jensen quotes Kirkpatrick Sale’s sobering conclusion that personal changes have little impact upon planetary crises:

“For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Jensen’s message is painfully clear: taking shorter showers may be something you feel led to do, but don’t pretend it’s a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. Remember, he says repeatedly: Personal change doesn’t cause social change.

Or does it?  After wrestling with Jensen’s argument, I remain convinced that personal change can cause social change, and is often the necessary catalyst that leads us to it.

Jensen states that organized political resistance is necessary to confront and dismantle corporate and industrial power.  No doubt. But Jensen doesn’t ask the real question:  what kind of organized political resistance is necessary? He seems to think there’s only one kind of organized political action, the kind that is essentially an externalized re-action: citizens opposing injustice by demanding that our government or corporations do something, putting legally-binding limits on faceless institutions already damaging our planet. This kind of external activism is designed to get our government or a corporation to improve, even as our own lifestyles may stay unchanged.  Examples of this might be demands that our government forces extractive petroleum corporations to stop fracking, or require industrial food producers to follow healthier practices.

I’m certain, with Jensen, this kind of organized political resistance is vital for social change. But, unlike Jensen, I’m certain that an equally necessary form of organized political resistance rises from a groundswell of collective lifestyle change.  We must remember that the root of politics is polis--people, not politicians or laws--and that organizing culturally-defiant, lifestyle-changing parallel societies has been the modus operandi of such transformative movement leaders as Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi, Vaclav Havel, Francis of Assisi and Jesus of Nazareth.

Joanna Macy has a term to define the massive cultural change needed today: the Great Turning. It’s already underway. Macy articulates three dimensions of the Great Turning, each mutually reinforcing and equally necessary:

Dimension #1: 'Holding actions' that slow damage to Earth and its beings.  ‘Holding actions’ encompass a great variety of pragmatic endeavors to defend healthy life on Earth: legal measures like legislation, regulations, political actions, and lawsuits; as well as direct actions such as boycotts and blockades, protesting, publicizing, organizing, whistle-blowing and civil disobedience. These holding actions seem to be the “organized political resistance” Derrick Jensen urges: immediate efforts to curtail the most damaging aspects of our industrial society. But while Jensen sees holding actions as the sole focus of what we should be doing, Macy sees them as a crucial stop-gap, providing time to do the vital work of the other two domains of the Great Turning: envisioning and implementing a life-sustaining society.

Dimension #2: Analysis of structural causes of destruction and creation of alternative institutions.We must examine the dynamics of the industrial growth society, comprehend how it’s seductive and destructive mechanisms work, and then create alternative social institutions. Bill Plotkin, in his book Nature and the Human Soul, notes that countless individuals involved in the Great Turning are already crafting new life-sustaining structures and practices in all our major cultural establishments: economies, food and energy systems, government, religion, parenting and education.

Dimension #3: Fundamental shifts in personal worldview, values and practice.  Macy asserts this dimension is the most basic, as the courageous resistance and creative new alternatives needed for the Great Turning cannot take root and flourish without deeply ingrained values and spirituality to sustain them.

The Great Turning needed today is not just about urgent political protest; it is equally about organizing a groundswell of collective lifestyle change through new worldviews, transformative practices and alternative structures.  And so, Derrick Jensen, I am here to tell you that I won’t forget shorter showers. I won’t forget composting toilets and buying less plastic.  These actions are not just personal; when organized and disciplined, they become deeply political, and can be revolutionary.

How? Derrick Jensen tells us that wasteful “corporations and industry” are the chief culprits of climate devastation, and that personal changes in consumption won’t matter. In doing so he overlooks an essential truth: a industry’s degree of success—and it’s degree of destructiveness—is utterly dependent upon millions of us buying it’s stuff.  When organized people and businesses make independent choices and stop buying, then industries stop producing, and when they stop producing, they stop polluting.

The bottom line is what Gandhi taught us all along: even in the face of Empire, you still control your choices.  He showed just how politically potent our personal lifestyle changes can be when shared, spread and organized. 

In that spirit, I’d like to introduce you to a movement of collective lifestyle change that’s kicking off next spring: the 25/75/100 Bioregional Food Covenant.  Individuals become members, wherever they live, by making this pledge: “By 2025, 75% of my food will come from within 100 miles.”  It’s one of those “fundamental shifts” that Joanna Macy calls for, a reorientation toward bioregional interdependence sorely needed in North America today.  If this interests you, stay tuned: I’ll flesh it out more fully in my next installment, “An Invitation to Re-Inhabitation.”