A Right Action Supports Life; A Wrong Action Hinders Life

Rick Dubrow owns and operates A-1 Builders and Adaptations, its design division. His current activism includes: board president of Sustainable Connections, board member of RE Sources and steering committee member of Pro-Whatcom.

It’s Sunday morning, the fourth of December. I just opened up The Bellingham Herald. “A Warming Warning” is the headline. Two identical photos separated by 70 years show the 40 percent reduction in Mt. Baker’s snowpack. Yes, I could spend the next hour reading the three or four terribly depressing articles about what we’re doing to ourselves that result in this global warming. Or, instead, I could bank this time I could have spent in sustainable depression and turn this investment into positive action that sustains or restores our environment.

Simply put, sustainable depression sucks.

Since the early 1970s we’ve known what Aldo Leopold said so eloquently “…a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends to do otherwise.” Pretty simple, I’d say… a right action supports life and a wrong action degrades life. So let’s spend some time together talking about right and wrong action according to Aldo Leopold.

First let’s focus on a broader perspective. Let’s really get broad and multiply you by six billion, this being today’s world population, growing at 2.5 people per second. Why go here? Jacques Cousteau said that “…population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.”

I continue to hear people say that things are improving given that we, as a nation, have gotten our population growth under control and that the world, too, has turned the corner on its rate of human growth. I so wish this erased the problem. Instead, the UN’s latest global population projections show a stabilization of world population at perhaps nine billion, or 50 percent more people, and the U.S. remains the fastest growing developed country on the globe.

Using the Census Bureau’s medium projections, U.S. population will grow to about 394 million by the year 2050 (it’s now a hair under 300 million). That said, it is true that we’ve improved relatively speaking. Our rate of growth has decreased, but our absolute growth rate remains enormous simply because a lesser percentage of an enormous number remains enormous.

Now let’s scale down this discussion from the broad perspective of the planet or the nation, back to where I started—what action can you and I take to protect or heal “…the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community?” Again we need to discuss this word ‘enormous.’ Is our impact on the biotic community enormous or miniscule? Our impact on the biotic community must become miniscule in order to sustain life. Our actions matter. Actions that lessen our ecological footprint. Lighter steps. Lighter consumption.

“That I live every hour of every day in an environmental crisis I know from all my senses. Why then is not my first duty to reduce, so far as I can, my own consumption?” —Wendell Berry

I find no reason to argue with Wendell. My first duty is to reduce my own consumption. This path of continuous improvement in walking lighter allows me to morph the sustainable depression of learning more about what is, into actions that transform the environment into that which it must be if my children’s children’s children are to enjoy health. Continuous improvement? Seems like a lot of work. What about play time?

Listen to Edward Abbey: “Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast—a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space.

“Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.”

Of late, my own continuous improvement is focused on my buying habits. Every dollar I spend at a business creates energy that drives their business practices. I help support them. Yet how much attention do I place on understanding them? Who are they and what path are they on? Do their actions “…preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community?” (See the latest Sustainable Connections’ Membership Directory or go to http://www.sconnect.org.)

Thomas Paine said, “…a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it the superficial appearance of being right.” Isn’t this the very definition of culture? You and I grow up within a bubble, a family, a community that, of course, does not think that which it does is wrong.

I’m 54 and as a child, in my bubble, having enough was not enough. It seemed like getting more was the right path. And there was no real downside as it related to the environment. In fact, prior to the early 1970s, who ever thought about the environment and limits to growth?

Dial ahead to 2005 and I now find myself immersed within an unhealthy, stressed environment yielding so many indicators pointing to these limits to growth. Mainstream culture, meanwhile, continues to promote enormous consumption along with its superficial appearance of being right. But what appears superficially right is simply wrong, according to Aldo Leopold. Our mainstream, consumptive culture is deeply wrong.

Superficially right; deeply wrong.

Now this is a tough pair of divergent conclusions to retain within one’s mind simultaneously! Superficially right; deeply wrong. Our mind works on cruise control in an attempt to resolve this anxiety, this cognitive dissonance. But how?

There appear to be at least two paths with which to resolve one’s cognitive dissonance. The first is to rationalize. Tell oneself “rational-lies” (rationalize). Let me share an analogy using our local growth debate.

Although the strong majority of our citizens demands constraints on the current rate of growth, we find our local politicians saying that “the Growth Management Act makes us do this.” This mantra for avoiding that which the majority so desires gives it the superficial appearance of being right—growth is inevitable; we can’t control it; the Growth Management Act makes us do this.

How often do we, as individuals, duck behind ‘our mainstream paradigm makes me do it’ in order to resolve our own anxiety? No, not in these same words, but through “rational-lies” fed to us through effective advertising. Broadly stated, isn’t ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ a manifestation of this mainstream paradigm pressure?

The second path to resolve cognitive dissonance is to use it as a change agent. If you embrace Leopold’s definition of right action, then the next time you consume anything, your action can be right (help life) or wrong (hinder life). The next time you eat something you can support your health or hinder it; the next time you buy something to eat you can support a company that embraces sustainable business practices or you can support a company with the largest advertising insert in The Bellingham Herald.

Continuous improvement. Actions in alignment with nature. Actions that nibble away at the cognitive dissonance we must each resolve if we are to align what feels superficially right with what feels deeply right. Actions that lead us toward a consumptive culture that says “enough is plenty.”

I grew up when the advertising industry was driven to create an immense market for new products. World War II had just ended. Our nation was incredibly efficient at producing weapons, not consumer goods. What was our economy to do? We needed to morph weapon producers into more civilized jobs. So marketing became the science of turning citizens into consumers. Our nation set out on a path to vaporize one’s recognition of attaining ‘enough.’ A worthy citizen became a consumer who settled for what they had but were constantly barraged with advertising about the next model they should buy.

And it has worked, superficially speaking! The average size of the garage in today’s new home is about the average size of the entire new home built when I was born. In fact, if everyone in the world consumed like the average U.S. citizen, we would need at least four more planet Earths. (Source: Purchasing Power, World Watch Paper 166; 2003.)

The consumptive paradigm says two things:

•buy, buy, buy

•your income is finite so maximize the quantity of things you can buy by minimizing the cost of every thing you buy.

Leopold’s paradigm might read:

•think, think, think

•buy what you need and no more

•buy that which protects life

•buy from those who protect life

•yes, your income is finite but this does not give you the right to hinder life.

Here’s the rub: buying things that support life and buying from businesses that embrace sustainable business practices usually costs more than supporting the lowest price. We know all too well that low prices are arrived at through strategies such as weak environmental regulations, weak compliance with existing environmental regulations, low wages, poor employee benefits poor working conditions, etc. Low prices tend to hinder life, don’t they?

Ouch! Damn cognitive dissonance…finite income; pay higher prices. What?! Can’t keep up with the Joneses walking down this path! That’s right, says Leopold. Such a path hinders life. So lighten your footsteps. Focus on ‘enough.’ And if you buy fewer things, each of which costs more, then your finite income still gets you enough—in fact, it gets you plenty!

Know that our minds are wired to avoid cognitive dissonance. Know anyone who prefers anxiety? We try to move away from anxiety. And buying the latest and greatest stuff at the lowest available price can be the trap that says ‘our mainstream paradigm makes me do it.’ “Rational-lies” are so easy to embrace because they feel so rational.

Yet here I suggest you embrace such dissonance? As E.B. White said, “I awake each morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan my day.”

Planning your day includes making decisions such as reading about global warming versus doing something about it. If you know enough to embrace the fact that global warming is alive and well and taking the natural fabric of life apart, then choose action. Know that your cognitive dissonance will not simply vaporize. Know, instead, that your every action will support the health of your, and everyone else’s, next inhalation. §