Environmentalism as 21st Century Morality
The Case for Environmentalism as the Ethical Value Set of the Millennial Generation
Environmentalism is more than just an academic discipline, a public policy arena, or a career path. It’s an ethos, a morality, a belief system, a value set, an ethical compass pervading every fabric of life, guiding all sorts of behavior. It’s more than a means of making a living — it drives how you go about living, what makes it meaningful, what excites and frustrates you, and what values you consider paramount. It is near impossible to come from a day of environmental work and put your subject matter aside — to carry on with your recreational life business-as-usual — like a doctor, lawyer, teacher or scientist might. Like a religion, environmentalism comes to mind throughout the day for its adherents, arising organically as an answer to ethical queries.
Every discipline was created as a response to the great uncertainty humans face when interacting with the world.
We crave order in the form of categorical certainty — universal laws of nature from the natural sciences, and guiding forces of human behavior from the humanities. Religion is no exception. Through religion, we arrive at moral codes — frameworks for how to act when the answer isn’t clear. The past half-century in American culture has been characterized by widespread secularization, and what some scholars describe as a “decline in morality” — a loss of moral compasses writ large.
This view, as I will argue, is incorrect and outdated. Millennials do not belong to a generation lacking in morality — rather, we have ushered in a new era of strong, secular adherence to ethical value sets, which may differ from those of previous generations.
One might, for example, live from a human rights protection standpoint: fighting against war, senseless gun violence, or inhumane treatment of immigrants, refugees, and minorities. On that view — and on many others — there is no harm in casual, premarital sex; polyamory; or recreational drug use (a few examples of “moral decline”); they are not incongruent with the fundamental value set. Environmentalism, too, is a value set: a moral code bearing on how our minds and bodies perceive the world.
At the intersection of science and philosophy, scholars have thought about morality as a physical, bodily reaction to morally commendable and reprehensible deeds. Researchers have discovered a moral emotion called “elevation ” — a mental and bodily response to witnessing a morally commendable deed. When experiencing it, breastfeeding mothers produce more oxytocin (a happiness hormone), measured through the production of breast milk when nursing.
In East Asian communities — like Bhubaneswar, India — that consider cleanliness to be indicative of moral purity, physical reactions of disgust occur in response to taboo acts like eating with one’s hands or wearing shoes inside the home. There are well-documented, visceral reactions to observing acts of moral depravity (like rape or crime): an uneasiness, a lurch in one’s stomach, that negative feeling of abdominal butterflies experienced upon lying or stealing.
Environmentalism, as a morality, gives its adherents an intrinsic, visceral reaction to “immoral” (unsustainable) acts performed by others and ourselves. It’s the innate “what would Jesus do?” that you don’t have to ask yourself; the angel on your shoulder you need not consult. It’s so ingrained that we would feel almost sinful throwing out something that could be recycled; abandoning trash on a beach; leaving the water running; sleeping with the lights on; relying on paper towels; buying a Hummer; or getting a plastic bag to carry a purchase that could fit in our purse.
Paul Rozin, a scholar on the moral emotion of disgust, has written about its transformation from a visceral reaction to human bodily processes and “animal nature” to a socialized reaction to breaching cultural norms.
According to Rozin: “It has expanded to a general system for putting out of mind, like smokers cast out of the office, anything one’s culture considers offensive. Disgust has become a powerful form of negative socialization and an abstract moral emotion.”
Coupled with cultural disgust, we encounter the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance: the mental discomfort that arises from acting in a way inconsistent with what you conceive of yourself to be.
As environmentalists, we go to great lengths to avoid this feeling. This is what we’re running away from.
We’re not fighting some base human desire when we reject Styrofoam; carpool to work; bike instead of drive; buy Priuses; drive instead of flying; shop at yard sales; print double-sided (or, better yet, email) documents; or peruse local, organic food at the farmer’s market. Some of us don’t eat meat — and we’re not doing it to look down on you all from a position of moral high ground. We do it because we can only stand so many sermons on the water and carbon footprints of a hamburger before excessively consuming them feels wrong. The elusive, cognitive dissonance stomach-butterflies come off the endangered list and make their valiant return. (As students, we often arrive at pedantic questions of our own hypocrisy: “is it ironic that I’ve printed two 10-page, single-sided drafts of my report on deforestation?” “How many times have I done the half-mile drive to the library to write about the transportation industry and fossil fuels?”)
The goal of education, I think, is to cause some sort of action guided by the knowledge we intake. The school day, ideally, doesn’t exist in a vacuum; ideally, Universities charge thousands of dollars to give you some way to think critically, perceive the world, and act for the rest of your days. For us tree-huggers, our learning and our recreation are inextricable. Our education was an enlightening agent, and there is no easy return to the darkness. We metro home from work — steel, reusable thermos in hand — flickering on our LED light bulbs to cook plant-based meals on our wood-burning stoves, tidying messes with a cloth towel, saving leftovers, perhaps prefacing bed with a brief shower. On our best days, we are outside, soaking up a beautiful landscape — like a National Park — those sacred lands that we feel a preservationist instinct to protect, that remind us that the good fight is well worth fighting.
As environmental destruction continues, the view that it is a moral infraction is becoming more popular. In fact, Pope Francis — the head of the Catholic Church — has called ecological destruction a sin. In his own words: “God gave us the earth ‘to till and to keep’ in a balanced and respectful way. To till too much, to keep too little, is to sin.” He has proposed that caring for the Earth be added to the seven works of mercy Christians are asked to perform. To start, he posits, wealthy countries must repay the ecological debt they owe the poor.
Some of our values directly map onto conventional ones — the nine circles of hell from Dante’s Inferno, for instance, resurface in the neo-environmentalist tradition.
We, too, oppose avarice— as we know, the world’s overdevelopment and ever-growing consumer-capitalist culture fuels the overuse and over-extraction of resources that is decimating ecosystems and driving thousands of species off the planet.
Gluttony, too, is not in our tradition — we know that mass food production with inefficient land and water use is unsustainable, and that our current trends in consuming and producing won’t be able to feed our 2050 world.
We’re not anti-lust categorically, but we know that effective means of contraception and abortion access are instrumental to culling the mass overpopulation of the Earth.
Violence is a foe to our tradition — in fact, we oppose all sorts of injustice, like the displacement of indigenous peoples to build oil pipelines, and the global poor’s disproportionate proximity to air pollution, toxic waste sites, extreme heat, and water scarcity.
Fraud, in our eyes, is when our country’s president lacks a basic understanding of what 97% of scientists are certain about: that humans are the main driver of long-term alterations to the world’s climate. Or withdrawing our country from the world’s most important, comprehensive policy to prevent that: the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Limbo, we know all too well, is the state we exist in now — the lack of a widespread behavioral shift, and the hesitance of world leaders to take strong, decisive action — despite conclusive evidence about our path of destruction and the dreary fate that awaits us. To lift ourselves out of the limbo state, above all, we want to spread knowledge, and the power inherent to it.
With knowledge comes those cognitive dissonance butterflies we go to great lengths to avoid, which motivate action that, with any luck, will protect the Earth from destruction. I guess, what I’m driving at — and maybe I’m proselytizing here — is that environmentalism is a morality well-worth subscribing to, in addition to whatever other belief systems you may maintain. The future of our planet — and all of its inhabitants — will depend on it.
