Environmental Conservation and Original Sin: A Personal Story

If we wish to change the world, I believe it is important to understand our motivation.

Are we motivated to help people by empathy for their suffering, or anxiety about their “problems”—or by a mixture of both? Does the existence of poverty make us feel bad because we see the humanity—the experiences, fears, and aspirations—of the billions of poor individuals around the world, empathize with them, and wish a better life for them? Or does “poverty” resonate with us because of the moral, intellectual, and emotional poverty of our own culture? If we advocate animal rights, is it really about the animals and their helplessness? Or are they a stand-in for the children we once were—for our own helplessness? Are we afraid of pollution or global warming because we feel true concern for our fellow organisms, or do we fear that our society is contaminated by an evil we cannot explain, as if the very air we breathe is toxic?

I care deeply about environmental conservation, but I must confess that I was not convinced to be an environmentalist by rational arguments. No accumulation of statistics, carefully crafted arguments, or scientific reports was necessary. I wasn’t brought around to conservation by news reports of a devastating oil spill or by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Conservation always just felt right. Even though I believe I have good evidence for my positions now, I didn’t originally accept those positions because of the evidence.

Could environmental conservation merely be a metaphor for an emotional need that I am acting out? If it is, then I am unlikely to be effective in helping to bring about significant, long-lasting change. My fervor will have more to do with me and my own anxiety than with the objective problems of the environment. In the end I will fail to achieve my stated goal because I didn’t know that I was really pursuing an entirely different goal all along. I will have used the environment as a tool for managing my own anxiety, and like any tool it will be the worse for wear—my intellectual abstractions and justifications notwithstanding.

When I was a kid, my dad and I used to visit the scrapyard or go dumpster-diving in search of raw materials for his building projects, with the maxim “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” I guess you could say this was my introduction to recycling. Thrift was a very appealing ideal to me, and I became rather obsessed with recycling and conserving “resources.”

The easiest place to act this obsession out was at school, where I was pretty bored anyway. At school I had access to a flow of resources that I could do my part to economize: school supplies. At the beginning of every school year, parents would eagerly buy their children exorbitant amounts of useless things insisted upon by supply lists issued by the school. Many times only the first few pages of a notebook would be used, and come May that scarcely-used notebook would be thrown away, along with reams of untouched paper, stacks of unused binders, and fistfuls of un-sharpened pencils. Next year the entire ritual would be repeated again.

I did my part to conserve supplies by using my own with extreme frugality. I only sharpened pencils when they really needed it, and I wrote in small print outside the margins on both sides of a sheet of paper. For a couple of years during elementary school I even ran a pencil “hospital,” where I would repair mine and my friends broken pencils and crayons. Conservation was something I could work on every day, but recycling came down to the last few days before summer. Most of the families in my neighborhood were pretty well-off, so it was not uncommon for the children in my classes to throw away just about everything in the bedlam that erupted at the summer jailbreak. I was the only person who ever had more school supplies at the end of the school year than at the beginning, because I collected the unused or reusable cast-offs from everyone else. By middle school my mom didn’t have to take me shopping for school supplies anymore—I had collected plenty of my own.
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As a child, when I thought that something I did might be an interruption to someone, or that it might risk causing damage to something, or that I could be using “inappropriate” amounts of resources (material, financial, or even emotional), I felt a high degree of anxiety. This anxiety had a lot more to do with the behavior of friends and authority figures—the people around me—than it ever did with “the environment.” In psychology, strong feelings about abstractions usually turn out to be based on intensely personal experiences, while the abstraction is merely an ex post facto justification and explanation for the emotion.

Strategies for managing my anxiety manifested themselves in introversion, meekness, thrift, and conservationism, among other behaviors and personality attributes. Throughout much of middle school and high school, I preferred solitary activities to engaging with other people. I would hold myself back from approaching someone I was interested in talking to for fear of “disturbing” them, and I avoided expressing disagreement with teachers or peers for fear of “annoying” them. Not all the time, but enough that it was an important aspect of how I interacted with others. This pattern was even evident in how I handled finances. For most of my life, I have saved much more of my money than I have spent, when given the opportunity; and I have refrained from buying some things I wanted for fear of “wasting money.” I have always been careful to “leave things as I found them,” occasionally to the point of compulsion, and I have felt an extreme degree of conscientious care for mine and others’ property.

So you can imagine how much environmental conservation resonates with me emotionally.
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There are many ways in which having a conservation-oriented lifestyle may be good. But the question for myself is the extent to which I have internalized conservation, not as something I do, but as who I am. I do not want this “conservationist” mentality to keep me from living. Nor do I want it to inhibit me from achieving my goals. When a behavior pattern becomes dysfunctional or neurotic (as conservation seemed to have become for me), the problem lies not necessarily with the behavior itself, but with the fact that I don’t have a choice over it. I want to be able to choose conservation, and to do it for reasons that take the relevant facts about human action and the environment into account. There is no pride or virtue in having conservation be an automatic reaction to something in my past.

I am not responsible for the way the world is. I did not cause the pollution, the waste, the war, the inefficiencies, or any other of the litany of social and environmental problems we face today. To take full responsibility for the destructive acts of those who came before me is to accept a kind of Original Sin. I did not make the world. I did not break it. And I am not responsible for fixing it. I want to help fix these problems, but there is no reason that the solutions must come at the expense of my own happiness. These faults are not my burden to bear.

If I am more aware of how I am affected by my history with conservationism, and of how I act in my day-to-day activities on the premise that resources are scarce, then I will have more of a choice in the extent to which I act on that premise now and in the future. Just being aware that it is a choice is a powerful first step. As a child dozens of examples of conservation (thrift in finances, protection of the environment, and meekness and submission in relationships) were modeled for me by the adults in my life. But I do not have to follow their example forever. As an adult, I can choose.

For me, “the environment” turned out to be a metaphor for my social environment and my relationship to it. I suspect this is the case for a lot of other people as well. But as I alluded to at the beginning, we do a profound disservice if we act on the pretense that we are talking about the environment, when we are really managing our own anxiety about something that is completely unrelated to the well-being of “the planet.” Now that I understand the root of my strong feelings, I can analyze the facts about the environment more objectively. I can work to make sure that when I advocate solutions to environmental problems, I am basing my solution in objective reality, that the problem I am solving is really in the environment’s present, and not in my personal past.

Keep Your Leaves

Well it’s finally gotten cold, and that means a bunch of trees have been taking turns dumping their leaves in your yard. Now that you’ve gotten them raked into neat little piles, the question arises: “What should I do with all these leaves?” This year, instead of bagging them up and sending them off to the landfill, how about pushing them into some of the less-manicured flower beds or into an unused corner of the backyard?

This accomplishes a number of good things:

(1) You don’t have to go to the trouble of putting them into bags, and you don’t have to worry about buying those extra thick ones that are more expensive.

(2) If you live in a municipality that charges extra to collect yard debris, you won’t have to pay for that service.

(3) Energy will not be wasted transporting your leaves to the landfill (or even to a municipal composting center), nor will precious landfill space be taken up with a perfectly good resource.

(4) Yard waste causes landfills to release large quantities of methane. Fewer leaves in the landfill means fewer greenhouse gases.

(5) Your leaf mulch will protect the soil, locking in moisture and preventing erosion. This means you don’t have to buy mulch from a store or use nearly as much water on your landscaping.

(6) Leaf mulch also keeps most weeds from growing, which means you’ll have a lot less pulling and spraying to do next summer.

(6) Within a year or so, most leaves will decompose into high-quality compost/soil, providing you with a resource that you would otherwise have had to pay for.

(7) You can use your new compost as fertilizer rather than buying expensive chemicals that pollute nearby streams and destroy the microbial life upon which soil fertility depends.

If your neighbors haven’t yet figured out the benefits of keeping their own leaves, you may even be able to collect some extra ones from them!