the habits we inhabit

As I round the corner onto my block, I notice a car parked under the shade of a tree across the street. It’s an unfamiliar vehicle but it’s a familiar occurrence: someone’s lunch break. The windows are usually up on the idling car and the person is usually staring at their phone. I near the car in time to see the driver roll down the window just enough to flick a cigarette out.

This annoys me.

In the ninety minutes I’ve been walking I have seen enough fireworks debris to set up my own explosive-free display. I’ve crisscrossed sidewalks to avoid what I consider militarized lawn care. And now on my block, a person litters. I have the urge to pick up her cigarette butt and knock on her window. But Rona stops me. Instead I tear a leaf from my neighbor’s redbud and scoop the butt with it. When we catch each other’s eye, I resist the urge to scrunch my face and wag my finger, like the old schoolmarm I am. Instead I turn away and keep walking. Even though it was awkward, I did the right thing for the planet. I feel righteous. 

For about two seconds.

Then I realize it doesn’t matter. I mean, what difference does it make? There are more pressing issues. Like why do we need this? And what is the externalized cost of it and who pays it?

And what’s the point of an educational system that doesn’t teach citizens to respect water? You know if it’s on the ground it ends up in our water, right?

And what kind of society creates work environments where people want to sit in their cars for an hour to eat a meal out of a paper bag or Styrofoam box? Or is that the only way some people get time to themselves?

As I enter my house holding the butt in the leaf, I wonder what the woman thought. Was she angry? Embarrassed? Did she have a gun to pull out if she was either? Did she care? What was happening in her life that made sitting in her car for lunch in a strange neighborhood the choice for today?

I think that’s the saddest part of all: I’ll never know.

The environmental movement sure taught me a lot about what harms our planet. But it overlooked the part about how deeply entrenched we all are in habits, rituals and systems that harm us. And each other.

Maybe it’s no accident the redbud leaf is shaped like a wide open heart.

lingua franca

I live between the circles of a non-intersecting Venn diagram. One circle contains environmental knowledge. The other is consumer culture.

Recently, I attended a parent meeting for the Montessori Model United Nations program my youngest is participating in. We discussed selling t-shirts to fundraise and the tri-fold displays kids take to the conference. Thousands of students from all over the world converge onto NYC with these tri-folds. When my oldest attended, we were too busy to savor the displays and after the conference, her tri-fold foam board sat in my basement for three years until I threw it away.

When my middle daughter participated, I spoke in Environmentalese about the tri-folds and t-shirts. Since the MMUN topics include slave labor, deforestation, drought, water pollution and economic inequity, we had an opportunity to make real life connections between how what we global northerners consume is intertwined with the people, issues and countries our students will research. Maybe we should bypass the tri-folds and t-shirts—products of slave labor that contribute to drought, water pollution, deforestation and economic inequity.

This year I was mute, knowing Environmentalese would fall on deaf ears, again. Of course parents are excited to see their students display their knowledge on tri-folds. Of course Clifton’s dad wants to see his artistic son’s design on a t-shirt. Of course we are super proud of the MMUN program and want to promote it through t-shirts.

The two non-intersecting circles of the Venn diagram represent two languages, two cultures, that don’t speak to each other:

Environmentalese— Here’s the environmental footprint of a t-shirt. Do you know a single t-shirt requires 700 gallons of water and crisscrosses the globe to get to you?

Consumerese—Let’s get t-shirts made for every occasion. And season. And event. And in every color. For everyone.

Like all languages, Consumerese is passed on by family and culture. In the world of Consumerese, what we want and need materialize as goods and services, as commodities. Our homes, communication, education, food, beverages, entertainment, recreation, celebrations, life events (weddings, births, deaths) and healthcare are forms of consumption, not the result of our direct personal industry. Common words you hear in Consumerese are ‘cheap’ and ‘convenient,’ because satisfying the immediate desires of the Self is primary.

Since language shapes our ideation and therefore perception and understanding of the world, Consumerese determines our relationship to our planet. For example, take the term, ‘pest control.’ Pest is a vague, elastic word for an irritant. To name other living beings sharing our ecosystem, ‘pests,’ justifies our desire to kill or ‘control’ them.

Do we know about the impact of pesticides on health, water, soil, air? Do we know how pesticides originated? Have there been long term studies on groundwater impacts? Indeed, do we know anything about where what we consume comes from or goes to? Are we aware of who and what is effected along the way? If not, why?

Consumerese, as a language and as a culture, doesn’t delve into these questions unless it can turn the answers into yet more untested, unquestioned commodities. Of course those who speak Environmentalese know and try to share this knowledge but their efforts fall on deaf consumer ears. The tagline for one pesticide company, "outside is fun again," is a dominant language in my neighborhood, not 'go native' or 'food not lawns,' Environmentalese taglines.

When I worked as an environmental educator in an after school program, I taught Environmentalese: how our everyday lives intersect with ecosystems and people worldwide: how built infrastructures impact natural ones. We examined energy systems, food systems, vehicular infrastructure, air quality, trash and recycling infrastructure and more. Understanding what undergirds our modern lives should be basic knowledge, basic environmental literacy, for everyone. But everyone I know outside the environmental movement, seems content with Consumerese. Most of us, like the parents mentioned, speak Consumerese.

Don’t get me wrong.

We’ve always consumed from earth for our necessities and desires. But we’ve crossed to sheer exploitation to serve fantasies which have become normalized. From year round fresh fruit and flowers in the Midwest to massaging recliners to wristwatches that turn on ovens, Consumerese is the lingua franca. This language and its culture is driving  us and other species to extinction as well as driving ecological collapse.

Unfortunately the speakers of Environmentalese and Consumerese do not intersect meaningfully or understand each other. What we see instead is the equivalent of Environmentalese sprinkled into Consumerese as in, “here’s five things you can do to save the planet.” Or Consumerese sprinkled with Environmentalese as in, buy metal straws.

But according to scientists the world over, we are in ecological free fall. Despite the efforts of those in the Environmentalese circle, the Consumerese circle continues to grow, untouched by environmental efforts that aren't commodifiable. The circles aren't converging.

If we have any chance of saving ourselves we must create a new language to bridge the chasm between Environmentalese and Consumerese. It must be a language rooted in earth literacy. A language in which we are fluent in our understanding of ourselves as earthlings part of a global community with other earthlings. Earthlings, subject to the limitations and rules governing the natural ecosystems on which we are utterly dependent. Our earth-based language must be facile enough to widen our understanding of ourselves, others and the inexorable ways we are interdependent on our earth.

How do we create a new language, thereby shape a new earth-based cultural paradigm? How do we create a lingua franca based in ecological literacy?

Think about it. In America alone, there are 40 million families.

That means:

* 55 millions students

*  being educated in 133,000 schools

* employing  6.2 million people in the educational sector

Imagine.

We renovate the educational system.

The spine of K-12 curriculum becomes ecology-based. All subject area curriculum and extra-curricular activities emanate from that spine. School personnel--from maintenance to cafeteria workers to board members to coaches to school nurses and security guards--are also educated so they can connect their vocational habits and choices to how those draw from and impact our ecological worldwide web.

We no longer marginalize study of how we interact with the natural world by containing it in an after school club, a one-off field trip to test water quality or dump it on the science teachers to squeeze into a six week unit. So in a sense we no longer marginalize the natural world. That is the Consumerese mindset; let’s consume some green experiences for a unit.

From working in the environmental field, I saw firsthand that siloed lessons didn’t take root. For example, how useful is it to teach a group of twenty kids the ills of Styrofoam while Styrofoam is ubiquitous in schools? But imagine if the 55 million students and six million educational employees understand Styrofoam as the costly toxic that it is rather than as merely a cheap commodity via Consumerese. We would get schools back on durable trays. One person or twenty personally foregoing Styrofoam doesn't stop the production of Styrofoam--what ultimately needs to happen. But 55 million students schooled in Styrofoam can take down that industry and generate a more sensible one.

Imagine those students as adults working in the restaurant, hotel and hospital industries; anywhere we now see Styrofoam. They would be empowered to not only push manufactures to create more environmentally sensible products but they themselves will be more environmentally sensible manufacturers. This is because they would have been immersed in an earth-based language and curriculum that gave them tools, community and support to imagine and manifest a different reality.

So instead of telling people what they should or should not do as those who speak Environmentalese do, we teach the why. We follow the strands of why to include the myriad injustices embedded in extractive capitalism. We examine externalized costs and who, what, where pays them. We look at the geopolitics that enable destructive systems. We look at stories, struggles, conflicts, history and art of people worldwide impacted by Consumerese. This way, every discipline speaks into the creation of a new earth-based language.

For a new earth-based paradigm requires the aperture of all subject matters. We need everything in our educational toolbox to respond to our ecological collapse and craft new systems. That isn’t the job of science, one tool, alone. Science can’t determine if its progeny is worthwhile, ethical, sustainable, detrimental, or just. Science after all, gave us Styrofoam, massaging recliners and pest control.

But history, art, music, economics, government, physical education, language arts, psychology, philosophy, religion must together shape the new earth-based language we desperately need to create holistic, integrated paradigms that take into account the needs and rights of all living beings.

Learning a language is transformative. We don’t know how various subject areas will evolve as they reorient themselves to be earth-based. We don’t know how we as a culture will evolve from Consumerese to earth-based. We don't know yet what industries will fall and rise as a result of deep, full spectrum inquiry. 

What I do know is Environmentalese and Consumerese are communicating insufficiently for the dramatic task at hand. Just this morning, I read yet another article about individual actions to stop climate change with the same tired solutions-drive less, eat less meat-that are statistically ineffectual.

Again this is Environmentalese sprinkled into Consumerese without context, without a depth of understanding or push for the systems change necessary to actually move the needle on ecological collapse. It is akin to me feeling good about myself when I say Gracias to a Spanish speaker. That doesn’t make me fluent in Spanish. Personal environmentally piety within earth destroying systems is tokenism.

We are dangerously beyond that.

We have put our lives and the lives of our children at stake with our Consumerese and environmental illiteracy. As we can see from erratic, dramatic weather events, species extinction, drought, flooding, fires, our earth is speaking quite clearly. It is our ethical imperative to create an earth-based language to respond. We need the paradigm shift that comes when one is fluent in another language. 

Think about it.

School is the one place where thousands of people gather consistently en masse during their formative years for nearly two decades. Imagine students K-12 absorbing an earth-based ethos in every subject matter and grow up to be the farmers, doctors, investors, bankers, builders, cafeteria workers, educators, artists, athletes, beauticians, homemakers, lawyers, city employees, politicians, voters, and who knows what else, of the future. We must empower a generation to use their imagination, empathy, ingenuity to transform ideation and therefore orientation toward and relationship with our only habitat. 

An earth-based language, an ecological literacy, must become our lingua franca. Otherwise the chasm between Environmentalese and Consumerese will consume more earthlings.

where are the environmentalists

I feel dejected.

I recently attended a high school football game. Now, I would rather a root canal than be wedged on metal bleachers between fans with painted faces and noisemakers attending something I care nothing about.

Since I have two high schoolers, I endured the ONE HOUR first quarter and the unnecessary three that followed (67-0 score). The game was way east of my city’s racial and economic dividing line in a new stadium gifted by a professional baller to one of the struggling schools in our district. The mom next to me spoke aloud in footballese, a language foreign to me. 

But that’s not why I’m dejected.

Saturday after the game, there was a much hyped local climate summit where political and environmental notables gathered to discuss how to address climate change. This was around the time of the global climate strike where millions left school and work to march in the streets.

Cued by the football mom next to me, I cheered or groaned. But I was thinking about the two climate events and wondered about the other spectators. Were any of them environmentalists? Were the environmentalists home making posters for rallies? Were they at workshops hand pollinating milkweed? Do environmentalists come to high school football games? Would they drive through McDonald’s or Sonic after because it’ll be 9 pm and there is no time or energy to prepare an organic fair trade seasonal and regional sustainably sourced meal at home?

The environmentalists I know don’t seem to have anything in common with the families here. They speak Environmentalese and inhabit a planet that constellates around Bill Nye, Paul Hawken, Greta Thunberg, Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein. A planet far, far from this zip code.

This is why I am dejected.

Environmentalists of the Global North (EGN) ignore families. The EGN have two strategies: one, pressure elected officials, banks and corporations to divest from fossil fuels and to cultivate infrastructural changes; two, convince individuals of ‘pro-environment’ behavior like recycle, turn off lights or water when not in use. But between the individual and the politicians-banks-corporations, there are families.

As a parent of three children, I am under pressure from school, my kids’ activities and my kids to consume: uniforms, shoes, bags for every sport, activity, hobby; yet more clothes and shoes for every dance, recital, performance; travel for out of town events; sell crap to fund the aforementioned; packaged goods for class parties, teams, events, holidays. These consumerist demands are typical for most families. 

However, I have spent almost a decade working in the environmental field as well as researching and writing about environmental issues so I too speak Environmentalese.  I know the deadly ramifications of a typical American family’s consumption. Since no one speaks Environmentalese in kid-centric arenas, I code switch and follow along. But it is also why I snarl at gymnastics meets and school events.

I am in pain.

When I bring up my struggle with the EGN, I am ignored. Or I am given futile advice and encouragement: shop at thrift stores (check), share what you know with your kids (check) and someday they’ll appreciate you (TBD).

The last time I felt this fractured between reality and expectation was after the birth of my first child. I had no idea what I was doing and felt alone in my postpartum bewilderment. It strikes me that the EGN strategies come from the same patriarchal paradigm that fosters the isolation and abandonment experienced by new mothers. 

Patriarchy only sees and talks to those in power. It makes sense from a strategic point of view to focus on who you recognize as powerful: elected officials, banks and corporations. Historically speaking, families with children, particularly mothers with children, are politically, socially and economically insignificant. And given the racist roots of the EGN, forget about brown or black families, especially those in the zip code of that new football stadium. Since families with children are not power players, we are unseen. This is where the EGN gets it wrong. 

There are close to 40 million families with children under 18 in the US. Why doesn't the EGN directly address us about climate change?

Imagine.

Millions of US families preoccupied with their children’s activities, which often determine household budgets determining what they eat, where they shop, what they buy and drive. Families unwittingly exacerbating climate change, species extinction and habitat degradation because of the material expectations and aspirations of the global north. Families whose money is invested in destructive corporations and banks because of the jobs they need to support themselves.  

The EGN, a movement claiming concern for our children’s future, largely ignores families with children because it is focused instead on 500,000 elected officials and the handful of corporations driving capitalism. You know who’s empowering that handful of corporations more than investors and politicians? 

Millions of families buying their products.

Patriarchy has conditioned us to petition, pressure, cajole leaders to give us what we want, to do right by us. We have been further conditioned to seek heroes to lead and inspire us in our ‘fight’ against those in power. Enter the aforementioned champions of EGN. But historically speaking, those in power are interested in maintaining power and change only when it serves them. Power serves itself.

Another piece of patriarchy: preoccupy the masses with untenable aspirations so we focus on solitary efforts rather than solidarity to dismantle the power structure that created the mess in the first place. Consider the individual choices promoted by EGN. If the average American generates the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions as 583 people in Burundi, reusable bags, recycling, turning off water and lights is patronizing bullshit. We feel empowered and good about ourselves doing these things, but those actions don’t really address our planetary crises. 

I remember my two-year-old ‘helping’ me cook. Besides making a mess (like global northerners offloading recycling to other countries), she’s not actually cooking. But she feels good about herself while I maintain control and do the real work. It seems the EGN have the same infantilizing strategy: give us some pointless shit to do while the real work is happening with the power players elsewhere, far from our kitchens. 

For almost a decade I preached the gospel of the EGN to friends and family. I bought into the myth of individual choice and political action because I too am suffering from patriarchy. If I could just teach everyone Environmentalese, do all the right things, persuade everyone else to do all the right things and we petition in the right way the right people, inspired and led by our heroes, we can save ourselves.

As a new mom, I learned quickly that seeking help, understanding and knowledge from other moms was more useful than seeking support from the dads. We moms provided each other with resources as well as physical, emotional and practical community because we were in the trenches together in a way the dads simply weren’t and didn’t have to be.

The same could be said for the EGN. They simply aren’t in the trenches navigating the constant consumerist expectations experienced by the average American family. They can opt out by their individual actions in a way that, as mom, I simply cannot. Goodness knows, I've spent a decade trying.

When I was at the football game, wondering if any parents in the bleachers were suffering eco-anxiety like I am, I felt angry at the EGN. I am surrounded by mainly black and brown families in one of the poorest zip codes of our city. The EGN know this is the most vulnerable population to climate disruption. Will they be left behind when an unnatural disaster strikes, consistent with what’s happened in other communities of color? Are those who speak Environmentalese in meaningful dialogue with this community?

This is why I’m dejected.