What Is the Value of Individual Effort?

A friend of mine sent me this article yesterday, and it bothered me.

The gist of this article, and dozens of others like it on almost any topic, is that individual effort in environmental causes is misplaced. It doesn’t matter if we are careful shoppers, when most waste is created by industries. The money and intellectual energy we spend picking out the best XYZ for the environment would better be spent lobbying congress. The money we spend on greener household gadgets should be spent on charity. And so on.

I’m always a bit alarmed by articles like this, because individual praxis is what we have to hold on to. Lobbying Congress for better chemical standards or cleaner power is very, very abstract stuff compared to buying recycled toilet paper instead of the other kind. Unless you are a rare kind of person, pure abstraction doesn’t do much to warm your heart at night.

It’s a kind of pragmatism that easily turns in to fatalism. It doesn’t matter what I do, this logic suggests, because Dow Chemical and Exxon do all the real damage, and my ability to affect Dow or Exxon is very small indeed. Maybe that’s true. And, yet, what value to me is that truth?

Is my reusable cup or mended jeans going to change the world? Does it make a “real” difference for there to be one less cup or pair of jeans, out of billions? Maybe, maybe not.

But, it does matter what I do. It matters to me, because it is part of my ethical interaction with the world. If nothing else, it makes me feel better to make my own individual choices well. In this political moment, sometimes an easy win is the thing that keeps you from despair, and I’m thrilled to take it.

That is: one kind action is certainly better than one unkind action, whatever the net outcome for all of humanity is.

The point this article missed making, in favor of being self-aggrandizing and “provoking” is that we need to, in fact, live in a world where we do, with softness and compassion toward ourselves, both the large things and the small ones. Calling my senator (again, to leave one more voicemail) feels like a waste of my energy; skipping a plastic bag does not. The long scope of history will say which is right. In the meantime, I still do them both, as much as I can, because doing them both is the best thing to do.