{"id":480,"date":"2019-11-20T11:56:26","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T09:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/?p=480"},"modified":"2019-11-22T12:26:38","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T10:26:38","slug":"why-should-i-give-up-flying-for-the-environment-if-almost-three-billion-people-in-india-and-china-dont-give-a-damn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/2019\/11\/20\/why-should-i-give-up-flying-for-the-environment-if-almost-three-billion-people-in-india-and-china-dont-give-a-damn\/","title":{"rendered":"Why should I give up flying for the environment if almost three billion people in India and China don\u2019t give a damn?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We\u2019ve all heard this line of\nargumentation. Heck, most of us have gone down that rabbit hole of thought\nourselves from time to time. There are many versions of the same line of\nreasoning and boiled down to its basics, it goes something like this: it does\nnot matter one bit what I do, because there is a myriad of people doing the\nexact opposite which negates all the effects my actions had. This might refer\nto our actions against climate change, efforts to keep our neighborhood garbage\nfree or trying to uphold tax laws at every opportunity to not do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Economists have a term for\nthis phenomenon: tragedy of the commons<\/a>. The term originates from a British\neconomist back from 1833 named William Forster Lloyd<\/strong>. In a nutshell, the\nexample he gave was a commonly owned pasture where herders could graze their\ncattle. The pasture could sustain many herds if the surrounding ranchers all\nlet the pasture regrow its grass periodically. In other words, everybody\u2019s cows\ncould eat the grass in no-man\u2019s land from time to time, but not all day every\nday. If everyone would stick to this regime, all would be fine, but if someone\ncheated, the grass would be munched too often, and the land would dry out and\neverybody would be worse off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And of course, there\u2019s always\nsome cattle rancher who takes advantage of the situation, gets their cows a bit\nfatter than everyone else and ruins the pasture. Call them calculating\npsychopaths, cunning social pariahs, or as we say where I come from, selfish\nassholes. It\u2019s a common realization that there\u2019s always someone who makes sure\nwe can\u2019t have nice things. This has left us with problems like the overfishing<\/a> of our seas, the overuse of antibiotics<\/a>, public bathrooms that are in ungodly\ncondition, and the Holocene mass extinction<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One sobering fact seems to murky the waters here. And that has to do with numbers, or better yet scale. When it comes down to it, you don\u2019t matter. Nothing you will ever do in your life will matter. Not even a little bit. Not on a global scale. Heck, not really on a national scale either. Most of your good deeds barely have an impact on even your kids. Your trip to the recycling center won\u2019t matter. Neither your choice to buy a hand-crafted re-usable shopping bag made from recycled Ikea furniture, which will save you from buying at least a dozen plastic grocery bags. To make things worse, your vote doesn\u2019t count for anything either. There has been practically zero elections in the history of our species where a single vote ever changed anything \u2013 and Radiolab truly tried to find one<\/a>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the very essence of egocentrism that gives us the power to influence each other. <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There are closer to eight than\nseven billion people on the planet. You don\u2019t have to dive deep into Google to\nblow your mind on the scale of human activity to realize how tiny you are and\nhow little impact you have. Just to toss one example in the mix, on average,\neighty billion pairs of chopsticks get discarded every year. That\u2019s billion,\nwith a b. But I bet you still have a used pair in your drawer from that one\ntime you got Chinese takeout and felt bad about just throwing them away, don\u2019t\nyou? For scale comparison, let\u2019s say, not throwing those away extended one\nminute of mother earth\u2019s lifespan. Eighty billion minutes is 152 106 years. The\nscale here is one minute to 152 106 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, why should I give up\nflying for the environment if almost three billion people in India and China\ndon\u2019t give a damn? Or do any other environmentally conscious act to save the\nplanet. First, because it seems that the risk of an upcoming environmental\ncatastrophe \u2013 a climate emergency<\/a> \u2013 is very high, according to the\ninformation we have at this moment. So, we must deal with that \u2013 not as an\nindividual but as a species. At least if we want the species to survive. And\nthis is the hard part \u2013 thinking as a species, not as a single actor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Especially in the west, we\nhave a long egocentric worldview and life philosophy. We have a rich history of\na so-called dignity culture, where we state that every human being is born with\ninalienable human rights. Rights that do not have to be earned, as in some\nhonor cultures, but the dignity of the individual is seen as a birthright. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights<\/a> includes the well-known rights such as\nfreedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution. But a right that is\ntalked less about, but nevertheless is under the same declaration, is the right\nto your own name. This is a right to individuality. The right to personhood.\nThis fundamental philosophical principle has arguably given rise great things\nsuch as freedom of thought, speech and expression, but has also given us a very\nindividualistic and egocentric mindset. If it\u2019s usually hard to see the tree\nfrom the forest, this mindset makes it hard to see ourselves as nothing more\nthan a single tree, and we miss the forest. But in this moment of history, we\nhave to move and take action as a forest, not a tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news is we are a\nnetwork, a superorganism and a collective. We are a family, a group of friends,\na coven, a football team, a school, a nation, a union of nations and a species.\nWe are arguably the only species we know of capable of higher-conscious thought\nand abstract experience. Maybe the only species capable of transcendent qualia<\/a>,\nhypothetical wonder and deep love. We might be the only thing in the universe\ncapable of pondering its existence. We might be the universe figuring itself\nout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poetry aside, what can we do?\nOur psyche is tuned for cooperation. We do not operate in isolation. It is\nexactly our ability to move together that has gotten us so far \u2013 our capacity\nto create culture. Culture is a collection of values, norms and scripts that\nmove all of us. Culture is a feedback loop where we\u2019re both influencing it and\ninfluenced by it. Norms create culture. Culture creates group identity. Group\nidentity creates tribes, tribes create nations and nations form global unions.\nProjecting our values creates manners. Manners create norms. Norms create laws,\nlaws create treaties and treaties create mandates for global actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the very essence of\negocentrism that gives us the power to influence each other. The capacity to\nmake decisions by ourselves gives us the power to create values and to project\nthose values around us. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that the very\nfact that we have unique features and capabilities to identify ourselves and those around us as individuals\nhas given us the higher capacity to work towards a mutual and complex goal<\/a>. And that that goal can be altered\ntogether if necessary. The very same capacity that makes you able to point\nfingers at peoples across the oceans is the same capacity you can use to show\nthat we can be and do better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s time to be more of a virtue ethicist<\/a> or a deontologist<\/a>. We need values and rules to solve this.\nDoing the moral math of individual actions versus everyone in India, that is to\nsay, personal consequentialism<\/a>, only works if you are omniscient. We\ndon\u2019t know how the clockwork of our ecosystem works. We can\u2019t really predict\nthe future with high certainty. The math here is too hard, and we cannot do it\nalone. I bet you didn\u2019t know that eighty billion minutes were 152 106 years.\nAnd I bet you couldn\u2019t even guesstimate it. Me neither. None of us can. But it\nwas computable because many of us working together created math, calculus and\nrelativity. Not one of us figured any of that out by themselves. We created a\nculture of learning, norms about schooling and built universities as a nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, when someone gives you the headline argument, throws a cigarette butt to the ground or refuses to recycle, they might call it a teleological, consequential or even a utilitarian approach. But we have a better term for that. Being an asshole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jori Grym<\/a><\/em>
Doctoral Student<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: Pixabay<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve all heard this line of argumentation. Heck, most of us have gone down that rabbit hole of thought ourselves from time to time. There are many versions of the same line of reasoning and boiled down to its basics, it goes something like this: it does not matter one bit what I do, because …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,8,11,10,9],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cers-blog","tag-climate","tag-environment","tag-philosophy","tag-planet","tag-scale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":485,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions\/485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}