| I’m sorry you have encountered environmentalists who made you feel that. For what it’s worth most environmentalists I know live very normal lives and are trying to make changes at the systemic level rather than blaming individuals. The way I see it, a lot of environmental damage is a consequence of people trying to find a decent position within a system that doesn’t really consider environmental impacts. You want a spacious house so that requires living out of the city and there are poor public transport links so a family has two cars because anything less is a massive inconvenience. That’s perfectly reasonable. But the situation we live in doesn’t just ‘exist’ but is formed by humans and can be changed so that you can still make your decisions but without such the same environmental impact and maybe a better quality of life. In my opinion, the key is that our patterns of consumption aren’t really based around what we want but what is made available to us, which we then rationalise post-hoc. For example, people don’t produce lots of plastic waste because they inherently want to, they do it because the places they buy from find it cheaper to wrap stuff in loads of plastic than use alternatives (precisely because the environmental cost isn’t included in the cost of the plastic). There isn’t really a feasible alternative for lots of people. I disagree with the ‘we should all take our hemp bags to the local organic farmer market’ argument some environmentalists make - I think we need systemic change that makes it easier for people to consume less. People complain about environmentalists ‘telling them what to do’ about eg paper straws but they don’t see that a business is doing the same when they only provide plastic straws because they’re cheaper for the business (because they can offload the environmental costs on to wider society). There’s no ‘neutral’ option. However, historically resource consumption has been linked with power. Whoever consumes the most land in the village is the most powerful, and so on. That complicated things a lot and (in my opinion) feeds into the “screw you i’m going to pollute if I want to” attitude some people have. Sorry that went a bit off-topic! I wish you well |