Taking Responsibility for Climate Change
This year, at the end of January, two commemorative days will converge, one solemn, the other celebratory. The first, on January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On that date in 1945, Russian troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, and soon after graphic reports of the slaughter of European Jewry became world news. The second is a holiday, Tu B’Shevat, a festival that runs from sundown to sundown, January 27-28, and marks the first budding of trees in Israel – a kind of Jewish Arbor Day.
For roughly seven hours the two periods of commemorative time will overlap. The tragedy of the Shoah, the beauty of nature’s emergence in spring. Vile desecration, ritualized hope. Those seven hours are an instructive convergence, a crucible for the contemplation of humanity’s epic failure to take responsibility for the seminal destructive event of the 21st century: the calamity of climate change. Mankind’s assault on nature, nature’s defiant response.
This, in a nutshell, is the short history of climate change: humanity grudgingly learns that it’s slowly but surely altering the atmosphere and, consequently, degrading its chances for a healthy, prosperous future; humanity also knows the dramatic but achievable steps needed to stop this murder/suicide; humanity does little about it, basically dithers. One plus one equals zero.
The evidence has become irrefutable. Greenhouse gas emissions continue their inexorable climb, after discounting for the temporary slowdown in economic activity caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and temperatures continue to soar toward the two-degree Celsius increase from pre-industrial levels that scientists assert may be catastrophic. Good ole’ 2020 tied 2016 for the hottest year ever, without the benefit of the El Nino weather pattern that turbocharged the latter. Indeed, humanity is stuck in a fossil-fueled rut, with the surge in renewable energy capacity serving only to satisfy new energy demands.
Yes, the Biden climate-protection team is a vast improvement from Trump’s climate-destruction cabal. But it’s a fool’s game to wait for a broken U.S. political system, with a Senate hobbled by the filibuster, to engineer a top-down, systemic solution – especially one that is not being demanded by voters who may acknowledge the problem of human-caused climate change but put it far down on the list of issues they care about.
Instead, I believe, people need to look inward as an essential step in confronting this crisis. A revolution is required in how individuals think about their responsibility for climate change.
And to do so, we need to go back 76 years.
In the spring of 1945, World War II in Europe came to an end. That theater of the war was uniquely savage in many ways, but above all for the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi state against Jews and other minority groups at thousands of camps whose names reverberate darkly: Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbruck, Dachau.
At the Nuremberg Trials – the subject of many books and a popular movie starring Spencer Tracy – the victorious Allies prosecuted the policy makers of genocide and the judges who provided its legal protection. Justice for millions of victims was secured through the pioneering charge of Crimes against Humanity. Another set of trials began at Dachau in November, 1945. These trails, which received moderate news coverage in 1945-47 and have garnered scant attention since then, took a different tact. American prosecutors employed the legal strategy of Common Design against individuals who actually perpetrated the beatings, starvation and wholesale murder endemic to the camps of Nazi Germany.
Common Design holds that members of a destructive organization are guilty solely by virtue of lending their services to that enterprise. Under Common Design, prosecutors at Dachau were not required to prove a conspiracy agreed upon in a meeting or document. Similarly, in recognition of the chaotic conditions found by Allied troops who liberated the camps, prosecutors were not held to rigorous standards of evidence employed in a murder trial. Common Design operated by establishing the facts of the criminal enterprise and identifying those who over time shared a conscious intent to foster its operation – a damning juxtaposition.
In other words: if you worked for the monster, you’re guilty.
Joshua M. Greene’s fascinating book, Justice at Dachau, relates how American prosecutor William Denson employed Common Design at the trial held on the grounds of Dachau, the infamous camp established in 1933 as the inaugural facility in the Nazi detention universe. Denson confronted hardened Nazis who had destroyed evidence and killed most of the witnesses to their crimes, who lied freely on the witness stand and who always blamed the other guy for the atrocity in question. He was faced with human rights violations that defied standard forms of prosecution. However, over grueling months of testimony, Denson pursued a Common Design strategy that resulted in the conviction of 177 guards and personnel, including Dachau commandant Martin Weiss and doctors who carried out barbaric experiments on prisoners.
Three quarters of a century later, as the world repeatedly fails to counter the calamity of climate change – an event, like WW II, that is globe-spanning, relentlessly destructive and possibly genocidal –we should consider the resuscitation of Common Design.
***
Climate change is a “process crime” and generalized rebuke to human rights that accrues gradually with ramifications for generations to come. Its perpetrators are manifold, nearly ubiquitous. As such, Common Design may be the ideal tool for affixing responsibility for climate change. The use of Common Design does not equate the communal altering of our climate with the Nazi genocide, nor does it liken an oil field worker to a concentration-camp guard. But it does provide a powerful roadmap for exploring our complicity in another horrible wrong.
Remember this: the climate-changed world of today – as well as its worse version appearing tomorrow, and the even worse one the day after – is effectively permanent. To put it bluntly: if within a few years we drastically slashed emissions of greenhouse gases, it would be decades before even the rate of increase of warming would start to slow. Climate change can’t be soon undone, unless one thinks in geologic time scales or believes in Panglossian techno-fixes that suddenly appear to suck mega-tons of carbon from the air.
Philosopher Timothy Morton describes climate change as a hyperobject that’s “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” A hyperobject eludes easy reckoning. It envelopes us – like the Internet, the “whirring machinery of capitalism,” the Solar System, perhaps the Covid-19 pandemic – both obvious and mysterious at the same time. The dispersed complexity of a hyperobject challenges our notions of right and wrong, of accountability and criminality. Climate change as hyperobject emanates from our behavior, our culture, and in turn marks us. After all, nearly every person with access to transportation, a stove or an electrical hookup emits some greenhouse gases, if just in trace amounts.
Common Design, a relic of WW II, may be the old, rusty harpoon to capture and reel in the climate change hyperobject, to bring it into moral focus. We’re all guilty, yes. That asserted, we must also acknowledge that some people are much more guilty than others. To revisit the Nazi analogy that makes readers squirm: there are those who live outside the camp and know, if only in their guts, what’s happening in there. There are those who deliver lumber and beer to the back door, for they have to make a living, right? Then there are those inside the camp who carry out its deathly purpose, who make sure that it’s hard to know who, exactly, killed who – just as it’s impossible to say which coal plant produced which wild fire, heat wave, super-storm, epic flood, ice-shelf collapse, species extinction or fatal asthma attack.
Wealthy elites carry a weighty responsibility for climate change, largely by virtue of lifestyle choices. The richest ten percent of people in the world, a group that includes the American middle-class, account for more than half of CO2 emissions. The top one percent account for twice the emissions of the poorest half of humanity. Given these numbers, it’s dubious to assert that personal decisions made by high-earners are irrelevant or merely displays of virtue.
Who are these elites? You know them, they might even be you. You – conservative and liberal. You – rural, suburban and urban. You – the professional “person of means” who can afford to put solar panels on the roof of your house or your business but instead you install new kitchen cabinets or fly down to Aruba. Such people may be family members. I have two older brothers. One is a Chamber of Commerce-style republican who own three houses, all powered exclusively by fossil fuels. His cars: all gas guzzlers. The other brother is a liberal professor who talks a good game, signaling support for a carbon tax, then constantly jets around the world (pre-Covid) to attend conferences. My remark that he could purchase carbon offsets for his travel emissions was met with derision.
The elites in question may also be guilty by virtue of vocation. You’re an executive at Exxon Mobil. You’re a PR shark promoting climate denial. You’re in advertising, fueling a hyper-consumerist, fossil-fuel driven society. You’re a lobbyist for a gas pipeline that will bisect a forest and degrade migratory pathways for wildlife. You’re a reporter who covers hurricanes but never reminds viewers that their size and ferocity is fueled by climate change. You, you, you and you understand as an educated adult in the 21st century that you’re neck-deep in a product that is having an irrevocable, disastrous effect. You could be helping humanity toward a less chaotic future based on renewable energy and sustainable practices, but instead you choose not to bother.
Therefore, you’re guilty of consciously pursuing a Common Design over time to degrade the Earth’s biosphere and, consequently, the magnificent creation that depends on the stability of that biosphere: human civilization.
You are guilty.
***
Growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, I don’t recall a sense of being complicit in a destructive enterprise. I learned from Life magazine and the TV mini-series Roots about our country’s repression of African-Americans, but was assured that civil right legislation had addressed those wrongs. The Vietnam War was a tragic fiasco, but also part of our larger, righteous struggle against communism. Women were doing better, gays were starting to come out, and environmental consciousness was growing. Hooray for catalytic converters cleaning up tailpipe smog. Nixon to China, Carter to Moscow! Granted, I was naïve, but there seemed a lot to feel hopeful about – a sense of gradual progress, not collective guilt.
It helped that the United States was geographically removed from world affairs, from the craziness of Europe and the Middle East. The slaughter of Jewish athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics shook my faith in human progress, but only a little, and when the 1973 OPEC oil embargo created long lines at gas stations in Connecticut, I wondered with teen umbrage what we’d done to deserve such rude treatment. All this just because we supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War?
Americans’ sacred right to a quick and cheap fill-up at a friendly Esso station was again interrupted during the oil crisis of 1979, but that could be blamed on the crazed Ayatollah. Dependence on foreign oil was the real problem, we were told. Climate change was just an academic theory, barely a news blip. For existential threats, we had inherited the Cold War and what JFK called its “nuclear Sword of Damocles.”
Then, at college in the early 1980s, a Jesuit professor made a remark that’s stuck with me. They starve for you, he said. Meaning, in terms we used then, the Third World for the First World. Meaning kids in urban ghettos, Appalachian villages and Brazilian favelas for brats like me in clean-cut suburbia. Meaning there’s only so many resources to go around and they don’t have much so you can have a lot. So go ahead, lucky one, enjoy your electric typewriter, your Stan Smith signature tennis racket, your giant jar of extra-crunchy Skippy peanut butter, your car rides to Cape Cod with their ritual, roadside pig-outs at HoJos and Dairy Queen.
For the first time I felt a small measure of remorse for being American. I felt guilty for a prosperous and exclusive status that wasn’t just privileged by geography or clever governmental system, or by virtue of winning WW II and liberating hellholes like Dachau, but which actually depended on the suffering of others in order to be maintained.
It’s the same dynamic with climate change, whose effects, although widespread, are felt hardest by the most vulnerable members of the human species. They starve, they lose their homes to flooding and fire, they die of heat stroke for you. Indeed, it requires delusional chutzpah for the USA, with by far the highest historical carbon footprint, to pretend that it’s not depending on the suffering of others.
Then there’s climate change’s ugly bonus: that group of exploited “others” includes, to a frightening degree, billions of people in future generations.
***
This isn’t an argument for climate-change tribunals. Some activists may assert that effective action on climate change won’t be taken until its primary malefactors are identified by name and held legally responsible. Put in the stocks, so to speak. Well, perhaps it will come to that someday. But in the meantime, this is an urgent argument for individuals to examine their actions in the light of Common Design.
Guilt, certainly, can corrode a person’s sense of self, but it often gets a bad rap. Feeling and then acknowledging guilt can be a healthy act, the precursor to positive behavior. We know this from the teachings of major religions. We know it from our secular laws. And we know it from our relationships with others. Regarding climate change, a 2014 study by psychologists at Bielefeld University in Germany found that “eco-guilt” can lead to “reparative behavioral intentions and actual behavior in the context of intergroup relations.” When participants were confronted with the negative results of human-caused climate change, they displayed both a guilty conscience and engaged in pro-ecological behavior.
However, let’s pause here. It’s a bad idea to forcefully tell people what they or their group should do next. The Bielefeld study authors, who as Germans know a few things about guilt and its repercussions, warn that such an approach can often result in aversive reactions – withdrawal, denial, defiance – as participants’ “moral status” is threatened. Therefore, before I ever so gently tell you what you might do, let’s go back to Dachau.
It’s mostly empty space now. One arrives at the camp through a wrought-iron gate carrying the bitter injunction “Arbeit Macht Frei.” That's German for “Work Sets You Free.” Several original buildings remain, as well as a replica of a prisoners’ barracks, but Dachau in 2021 is mostly a silent, vacant expanse marked off by huge rectangular grids where the blood-soaked, lice-ridden barracks once stood. The grids are covered in gravel; nothing, not even weeds, grows there. Work in Dachau set no one free.
But imagination, that’s another thing… imagination can liberate. So, imagine. Imagine you’re on trial for helping to perpetrate the unprecedented generational crime of climate change. How would you plead? How would you defend yourself?
Would you trot out the well-worn excuse that everyone pollutes a little, that you’re just one person, even as you know that any powerful communal activity, such as voting or creating a culture of courtesy, is made up of seemingly trivial individual acts? Would you talk about that petition you signed, as if one less molecule of carbon was emitted because of it? How about that quaint eco-rally you took the kids to last year, the one you drove to in your SUV?
Perhaps, with a surge of addictive, righteous indignation, you’d exclaim that you’re waiting for systemic change – carbon taxes, mandatory green rules and regs from on high – even as you suspect that such a stance is at best a convenient cop-out, at worst defeatist?
Bill McKibben, climate activist and author, has opined that “individual action, at this point, isn’t going to solve the climate crisis.” He’s joined by climate scientist Michael Mann, who stated in a recent interview that a focus on “carbon purity and individual behavioral choices,” plays into the hands of fossil-fuel barons, who want to tactically shift scrutiny away from their large-scale climate crimes. Well, they’re right, and they’re wrong. Yes, the climate crisis requires systemic change, but it’s also not going to be solved without individual action. Actions speak louder than preferences voiced to pollsters. When enough people put their own skins in the game, for instance, by going solar and eating less meat, those tangible acts of commitment will send a powerful message to markets and politicians.
By our works shall we galvanize the timid.
Let’s keep imagining. Under questioning at the climate-change trial of the century, might you defiantly exclaim that a person, god dammit, has to make a living in this hardscrabble world? Would you declare this even as you know you could have put your energies and skills to other, life-giving endeavors? Perhaps you’ll claim that you didn’t know it was so bad, fake news and all. You'll say this even as you carry the sum of human knowledge on that phone in your pocket. Maybe, if you’re an academic elite, you’ll philosophize about the unknowable enormity of the climate change hyperobject. And there’s always that classic line about just following orders.
Or you can try something else. Look in the mirror and pronounce yourself guilty. Sentence yourself to participation in a virtuous form of Common Design that concretely addresses climate change, regardless of political leadership or economic incentives.
Now for the gentle suggestions. No moralizing shoulds here; just, please, think about taking action. Such as: insulate your house. Ditch the gas-powered leaf blower for a rake. Shake money from your retirement and vacation funds to acquire an electric car and put up solar panels. Purchase carbon offsets when you travel. Stop acquiring junk. Reuse stuff, fix things. Eat less meat, eat no meat. If you run a business or non-profit, commit to carbon neutrality within five years. Too soon? The Allies reconquered Europe in less time.
What’s more, stop supporting politicians who doesn’t take climate change seriously. And if you’re lucky and privileged enough to have a portfolio, purge fossil-fuel stocks from its bowels and replace them with green stocks that, surprise, outperform dirty stocks in recent years.
Most importantly, don’t work for an organization that contributes significantly to climate change. This may mean changing jobs, even careers. Good for you, what an adventure! Remember, you’re guilty and this is your sentence. Similarly, avoid using the services of organizations that contribute significantly to climate change. That shouldn’t be too hard – sustainable alternatives are everywhere these days.
While trying some of these suggestions, avoid applying climate-purity tests to your friends and family. They don’t have to be like you; they’re not unpatriotic just for driving their pickup truck to a barbecue. But at the same time don’t censure yourself from talking about your choices and your vision of the future. Shun shoulds; embrace hopeful coulds.
Finally, don’t get discouraged. Here we must note that the brilliant success of William Denson in convicting the Nazis who operated Dachau met an unhappy fate. An American general concerned with Cold War politics commuted many of the sentences. Torturers, murderers and sadists walked free; some moved to the United States. Nonetheless, Denson had sought and secured, if just for a shining moment, justice for the victims of an unfathomable crime that appeared to have no conventional legal remedy.
In the ruins of WW II, he held high the torch of Common Design. Now, with another great storm gathering, we are called to relight it – not for dealing with disaster after the fact, but to illuminate a way forward. A good time to begin this effort, on a personal level, may be the seven hours later this month when a day of mourning and a day of celebration coincide, when International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the tree-happy holiday of Tu B’Shevat link arms. During that strange convergence, we can look simultaneously to the wretched past and the budding future. We can locate responsibility where it ultimately belongs: in ourselves.
&&&
For roughly seven hours the two periods of commemorative time will overlap. The tragedy of the Shoah, the beauty of nature’s emergence in spring. Vile desecration, ritualized hope. Those seven hours are an instructive convergence, a crucible for the contemplation of humanity’s epic failure to take responsibility for the seminal destructive event of the 21st century: the calamity of climate change. Mankind’s assault on nature, nature’s defiant response.
This, in a nutshell, is the short history of climate change: humanity grudgingly learns that it’s slowly but surely altering the atmosphere and, consequently, degrading its chances for a healthy, prosperous future; humanity also knows the dramatic but achievable steps needed to stop this murder/suicide; humanity does little about it, basically dithers. One plus one equals zero.
The evidence has become irrefutable. Greenhouse gas emissions continue their inexorable climb, after discounting for the temporary slowdown in economic activity caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and temperatures continue to soar toward the two-degree Celsius increase from pre-industrial levels that scientists assert may be catastrophic. Good ole’ 2020 tied 2016 for the hottest year ever, without the benefit of the El Nino weather pattern that turbocharged the latter. Indeed, humanity is stuck in a fossil-fueled rut, with the surge in renewable energy capacity serving only to satisfy new energy demands.
Yes, the Biden climate-protection team is a vast improvement from Trump’s climate-destruction cabal. But it’s a fool’s game to wait for a broken U.S. political system, with a Senate hobbled by the filibuster, to engineer a top-down, systemic solution – especially one that is not being demanded by voters who may acknowledge the problem of human-caused climate change but put it far down on the list of issues they care about.
Instead, I believe, people need to look inward as an essential step in confronting this crisis. A revolution is required in how individuals think about their responsibility for climate change.
And to do so, we need to go back 76 years.
In the spring of 1945, World War II in Europe came to an end. That theater of the war was uniquely savage in many ways, but above all for the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi state against Jews and other minority groups at thousands of camps whose names reverberate darkly: Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbruck, Dachau.
At the Nuremberg Trials – the subject of many books and a popular movie starring Spencer Tracy – the victorious Allies prosecuted the policy makers of genocide and the judges who provided its legal protection. Justice for millions of victims was secured through the pioneering charge of Crimes against Humanity. Another set of trials began at Dachau in November, 1945. These trails, which received moderate news coverage in 1945-47 and have garnered scant attention since then, took a different tact. American prosecutors employed the legal strategy of Common Design against individuals who actually perpetrated the beatings, starvation and wholesale murder endemic to the camps of Nazi Germany.
Common Design holds that members of a destructive organization are guilty solely by virtue of lending their services to that enterprise. Under Common Design, prosecutors at Dachau were not required to prove a conspiracy agreed upon in a meeting or document. Similarly, in recognition of the chaotic conditions found by Allied troops who liberated the camps, prosecutors were not held to rigorous standards of evidence employed in a murder trial. Common Design operated by establishing the facts of the criminal enterprise and identifying those who over time shared a conscious intent to foster its operation – a damning juxtaposition.
In other words: if you worked for the monster, you’re guilty.
Joshua M. Greene’s fascinating book, Justice at Dachau, relates how American prosecutor William Denson employed Common Design at the trial held on the grounds of Dachau, the infamous camp established in 1933 as the inaugural facility in the Nazi detention universe. Denson confronted hardened Nazis who had destroyed evidence and killed most of the witnesses to their crimes, who lied freely on the witness stand and who always blamed the other guy for the atrocity in question. He was faced with human rights violations that defied standard forms of prosecution. However, over grueling months of testimony, Denson pursued a Common Design strategy that resulted in the conviction of 177 guards and personnel, including Dachau commandant Martin Weiss and doctors who carried out barbaric experiments on prisoners.
Three quarters of a century later, as the world repeatedly fails to counter the calamity of climate change – an event, like WW II, that is globe-spanning, relentlessly destructive and possibly genocidal –we should consider the resuscitation of Common Design.
***
Climate change is a “process crime” and generalized rebuke to human rights that accrues gradually with ramifications for generations to come. Its perpetrators are manifold, nearly ubiquitous. As such, Common Design may be the ideal tool for affixing responsibility for climate change. The use of Common Design does not equate the communal altering of our climate with the Nazi genocide, nor does it liken an oil field worker to a concentration-camp guard. But it does provide a powerful roadmap for exploring our complicity in another horrible wrong.
Remember this: the climate-changed world of today – as well as its worse version appearing tomorrow, and the even worse one the day after – is effectively permanent. To put it bluntly: if within a few years we drastically slashed emissions of greenhouse gases, it would be decades before even the rate of increase of warming would start to slow. Climate change can’t be soon undone, unless one thinks in geologic time scales or believes in Panglossian techno-fixes that suddenly appear to suck mega-tons of carbon from the air.
Philosopher Timothy Morton describes climate change as a hyperobject that’s “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” A hyperobject eludes easy reckoning. It envelopes us – like the Internet, the “whirring machinery of capitalism,” the Solar System, perhaps the Covid-19 pandemic – both obvious and mysterious at the same time. The dispersed complexity of a hyperobject challenges our notions of right and wrong, of accountability and criminality. Climate change as hyperobject emanates from our behavior, our culture, and in turn marks us. After all, nearly every person with access to transportation, a stove or an electrical hookup emits some greenhouse gases, if just in trace amounts.
Common Design, a relic of WW II, may be the old, rusty harpoon to capture and reel in the climate change hyperobject, to bring it into moral focus. We’re all guilty, yes. That asserted, we must also acknowledge that some people are much more guilty than others. To revisit the Nazi analogy that makes readers squirm: there are those who live outside the camp and know, if only in their guts, what’s happening in there. There are those who deliver lumber and beer to the back door, for they have to make a living, right? Then there are those inside the camp who carry out its deathly purpose, who make sure that it’s hard to know who, exactly, killed who – just as it’s impossible to say which coal plant produced which wild fire, heat wave, super-storm, epic flood, ice-shelf collapse, species extinction or fatal asthma attack.
Wealthy elites carry a weighty responsibility for climate change, largely by virtue of lifestyle choices. The richest ten percent of people in the world, a group that includes the American middle-class, account for more than half of CO2 emissions. The top one percent account for twice the emissions of the poorest half of humanity. Given these numbers, it’s dubious to assert that personal decisions made by high-earners are irrelevant or merely displays of virtue.
Who are these elites? You know them, they might even be you. You – conservative and liberal. You – rural, suburban and urban. You – the professional “person of means” who can afford to put solar panels on the roof of your house or your business but instead you install new kitchen cabinets or fly down to Aruba. Such people may be family members. I have two older brothers. One is a Chamber of Commerce-style republican who own three houses, all powered exclusively by fossil fuels. His cars: all gas guzzlers. The other brother is a liberal professor who talks a good game, signaling support for a carbon tax, then constantly jets around the world (pre-Covid) to attend conferences. My remark that he could purchase carbon offsets for his travel emissions was met with derision.
The elites in question may also be guilty by virtue of vocation. You’re an executive at Exxon Mobil. You’re a PR shark promoting climate denial. You’re in advertising, fueling a hyper-consumerist, fossil-fuel driven society. You’re a lobbyist for a gas pipeline that will bisect a forest and degrade migratory pathways for wildlife. You’re a reporter who covers hurricanes but never reminds viewers that their size and ferocity is fueled by climate change. You, you, you and you understand as an educated adult in the 21st century that you’re neck-deep in a product that is having an irrevocable, disastrous effect. You could be helping humanity toward a less chaotic future based on renewable energy and sustainable practices, but instead you choose not to bother.
Therefore, you’re guilty of consciously pursuing a Common Design over time to degrade the Earth’s biosphere and, consequently, the magnificent creation that depends on the stability of that biosphere: human civilization.
You are guilty.
***
Growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, I don’t recall a sense of being complicit in a destructive enterprise. I learned from Life magazine and the TV mini-series Roots about our country’s repression of African-Americans, but was assured that civil right legislation had addressed those wrongs. The Vietnam War was a tragic fiasco, but also part of our larger, righteous struggle against communism. Women were doing better, gays were starting to come out, and environmental consciousness was growing. Hooray for catalytic converters cleaning up tailpipe smog. Nixon to China, Carter to Moscow! Granted, I was naïve, but there seemed a lot to feel hopeful about – a sense of gradual progress, not collective guilt.
It helped that the United States was geographically removed from world affairs, from the craziness of Europe and the Middle East. The slaughter of Jewish athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics shook my faith in human progress, but only a little, and when the 1973 OPEC oil embargo created long lines at gas stations in Connecticut, I wondered with teen umbrage what we’d done to deserve such rude treatment. All this just because we supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War?
Americans’ sacred right to a quick and cheap fill-up at a friendly Esso station was again interrupted during the oil crisis of 1979, but that could be blamed on the crazed Ayatollah. Dependence on foreign oil was the real problem, we were told. Climate change was just an academic theory, barely a news blip. For existential threats, we had inherited the Cold War and what JFK called its “nuclear Sword of Damocles.”
Then, at college in the early 1980s, a Jesuit professor made a remark that’s stuck with me. They starve for you, he said. Meaning, in terms we used then, the Third World for the First World. Meaning kids in urban ghettos, Appalachian villages and Brazilian favelas for brats like me in clean-cut suburbia. Meaning there’s only so many resources to go around and they don’t have much so you can have a lot. So go ahead, lucky one, enjoy your electric typewriter, your Stan Smith signature tennis racket, your giant jar of extra-crunchy Skippy peanut butter, your car rides to Cape Cod with their ritual, roadside pig-outs at HoJos and Dairy Queen.
For the first time I felt a small measure of remorse for being American. I felt guilty for a prosperous and exclusive status that wasn’t just privileged by geography or clever governmental system, or by virtue of winning WW II and liberating hellholes like Dachau, but which actually depended on the suffering of others in order to be maintained.
It’s the same dynamic with climate change, whose effects, although widespread, are felt hardest by the most vulnerable members of the human species. They starve, they lose their homes to flooding and fire, they die of heat stroke for you. Indeed, it requires delusional chutzpah for the USA, with by far the highest historical carbon footprint, to pretend that it’s not depending on the suffering of others.
Then there’s climate change’s ugly bonus: that group of exploited “others” includes, to a frightening degree, billions of people in future generations.
***
This isn’t an argument for climate-change tribunals. Some activists may assert that effective action on climate change won’t be taken until its primary malefactors are identified by name and held legally responsible. Put in the stocks, so to speak. Well, perhaps it will come to that someday. But in the meantime, this is an urgent argument for individuals to examine their actions in the light of Common Design.
Guilt, certainly, can corrode a person’s sense of self, but it often gets a bad rap. Feeling and then acknowledging guilt can be a healthy act, the precursor to positive behavior. We know this from the teachings of major religions. We know it from our secular laws. And we know it from our relationships with others. Regarding climate change, a 2014 study by psychologists at Bielefeld University in Germany found that “eco-guilt” can lead to “reparative behavioral intentions and actual behavior in the context of intergroup relations.” When participants were confronted with the negative results of human-caused climate change, they displayed both a guilty conscience and engaged in pro-ecological behavior.
However, let’s pause here. It’s a bad idea to forcefully tell people what they or their group should do next. The Bielefeld study authors, who as Germans know a few things about guilt and its repercussions, warn that such an approach can often result in aversive reactions – withdrawal, denial, defiance – as participants’ “moral status” is threatened. Therefore, before I ever so gently tell you what you might do, let’s go back to Dachau.
It’s mostly empty space now. One arrives at the camp through a wrought-iron gate carrying the bitter injunction “Arbeit Macht Frei.” That's German for “Work Sets You Free.” Several original buildings remain, as well as a replica of a prisoners’ barracks, but Dachau in 2021 is mostly a silent, vacant expanse marked off by huge rectangular grids where the blood-soaked, lice-ridden barracks once stood. The grids are covered in gravel; nothing, not even weeds, grows there. Work in Dachau set no one free.
But imagination, that’s another thing… imagination can liberate. So, imagine. Imagine you’re on trial for helping to perpetrate the unprecedented generational crime of climate change. How would you plead? How would you defend yourself?
Would you trot out the well-worn excuse that everyone pollutes a little, that you’re just one person, even as you know that any powerful communal activity, such as voting or creating a culture of courtesy, is made up of seemingly trivial individual acts? Would you talk about that petition you signed, as if one less molecule of carbon was emitted because of it? How about that quaint eco-rally you took the kids to last year, the one you drove to in your SUV?
Perhaps, with a surge of addictive, righteous indignation, you’d exclaim that you’re waiting for systemic change – carbon taxes, mandatory green rules and regs from on high – even as you suspect that such a stance is at best a convenient cop-out, at worst defeatist?
Bill McKibben, climate activist and author, has opined that “individual action, at this point, isn’t going to solve the climate crisis.” He’s joined by climate scientist Michael Mann, who stated in a recent interview that a focus on “carbon purity and individual behavioral choices,” plays into the hands of fossil-fuel barons, who want to tactically shift scrutiny away from their large-scale climate crimes. Well, they’re right, and they’re wrong. Yes, the climate crisis requires systemic change, but it’s also not going to be solved without individual action. Actions speak louder than preferences voiced to pollsters. When enough people put their own skins in the game, for instance, by going solar and eating less meat, those tangible acts of commitment will send a powerful message to markets and politicians.
By our works shall we galvanize the timid.
Let’s keep imagining. Under questioning at the climate-change trial of the century, might you defiantly exclaim that a person, god dammit, has to make a living in this hardscrabble world? Would you declare this even as you know you could have put your energies and skills to other, life-giving endeavors? Perhaps you’ll claim that you didn’t know it was so bad, fake news and all. You'll say this even as you carry the sum of human knowledge on that phone in your pocket. Maybe, if you’re an academic elite, you’ll philosophize about the unknowable enormity of the climate change hyperobject. And there’s always that classic line about just following orders.
Or you can try something else. Look in the mirror and pronounce yourself guilty. Sentence yourself to participation in a virtuous form of Common Design that concretely addresses climate change, regardless of political leadership or economic incentives.
Now for the gentle suggestions. No moralizing shoulds here; just, please, think about taking action. Such as: insulate your house. Ditch the gas-powered leaf blower for a rake. Shake money from your retirement and vacation funds to acquire an electric car and put up solar panels. Purchase carbon offsets when you travel. Stop acquiring junk. Reuse stuff, fix things. Eat less meat, eat no meat. If you run a business or non-profit, commit to carbon neutrality within five years. Too soon? The Allies reconquered Europe in less time.
What’s more, stop supporting politicians who doesn’t take climate change seriously. And if you’re lucky and privileged enough to have a portfolio, purge fossil-fuel stocks from its bowels and replace them with green stocks that, surprise, outperform dirty stocks in recent years.
Most importantly, don’t work for an organization that contributes significantly to climate change. This may mean changing jobs, even careers. Good for you, what an adventure! Remember, you’re guilty and this is your sentence. Similarly, avoid using the services of organizations that contribute significantly to climate change. That shouldn’t be too hard – sustainable alternatives are everywhere these days.
While trying some of these suggestions, avoid applying climate-purity tests to your friends and family. They don’t have to be like you; they’re not unpatriotic just for driving their pickup truck to a barbecue. But at the same time don’t censure yourself from talking about your choices and your vision of the future. Shun shoulds; embrace hopeful coulds.
Finally, don’t get discouraged. Here we must note that the brilliant success of William Denson in convicting the Nazis who operated Dachau met an unhappy fate. An American general concerned with Cold War politics commuted many of the sentences. Torturers, murderers and sadists walked free; some moved to the United States. Nonetheless, Denson had sought and secured, if just for a shining moment, justice for the victims of an unfathomable crime that appeared to have no conventional legal remedy.
In the ruins of WW II, he held high the torch of Common Design. Now, with another great storm gathering, we are called to relight it – not for dealing with disaster after the fact, but to illuminate a way forward. A good time to begin this effort, on a personal level, may be the seven hours later this month when a day of mourning and a day of celebration coincide, when International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the tree-happy holiday of Tu B’Shevat link arms. During that strange convergence, we can look simultaneously to the wretched past and the budding future. We can locate responsibility where it ultimately belongs: in ourselves.
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