Performative Environmentalism Won’t Reverse Climate Change | Bitch Media
▻https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/personal-will-not-save-you-environmentalism
The stakes of performative environmentalism—fixating on tiny, ultimately meaningless consumer products as the root of all evil—are escalating, and will become even more heated this decade. Individual-focused “save the earth” campaigns focus on the micro, individual actions, not the macro, global ones: Polluting components in inhalers, say, instead of the industrial pollution in communities of color that causes sky-high asthma rates or the wildfires across the West that leave thousands struggling for breath every summer and fall. In the process, they can have a penalizing effect, punching down at people who don’t have as much control over how they live and their consumer choices, and alienating them from discussions about environmental activism.
Living a “green lifestyle” is treated as an exemplary act, a critical trait to possess in a culture that values those who exhibit virtue. In the United States, a colonized nation with deep-seated Puritan ideals, virtue is woven deep into the national culture, particularly when it necessitates privation and sacrifice. Performance of that virtue is a vital element: How else will people know you’re better than them? There’s a peculiar reluctance in some circles to abandon environmental action that focuses on the personal, sometimes to the exclusion of taking on big institutions: British climate-action group Extinction Rebellion, for instance, is happy to mount its flashy blockades of public transit, but stubbornly resistant to examining the roles of colonialism and racism in the climate crisis.