Reaction to "I Am Therefore I Pollute"

Stanley Fish's New York Times Op-ed piece, I Am Therefore I Pollute, is multi-faceted and leads me to draw different opinions on his varying conclusions, his intended message especially seems to change in the different sections piece.

Fish laments the struggle of being a “good environmentalist”, which he does through a number of angels. His main argument (his dissatisfaction with environmentally friendly alternatives) I find the least compelling. It is interesting that he shows a generational gap in his adoption of “green stuff”, but his reasons for doing so seem petty. He laments that the lights are too dim, the meat taste too leans, and his friend’s wife makes him unplug appliances.

In each case the opposition is based purely in the material. Yet he has no issue with turning off the lights, or using traditional recycling methods; behavior he grew up with and has ingrained subconsciously. The small amount of effort required to adapt these behaviors is just not a burden I can sympathize with.

However I do not disagree with him on all his points, I find his first point to be quite salient. In reference to a call to action by Greenpeace to boycott Kimberley-Clarke over it use of virgin wood pulp Fish responded by looking back,

“But we had already done that once before when it turned out that the manufacturer of the paper products we used to buy — Procter and Gamble — engaged in research on animals. That’s when we found Kimberly-Clark”.

Kimberley-Clarke was suppose to replace the unjust company, but ended up practicing equally undesirable policies. All too often a company has green washed itself, making its customers feel good about what they are doing while hiding the true costs.

This leads to the more general question of what is means to live in an “environmentally friendly way” in a modern US city. This is a question I tackle on a daily basis. I profess to be a environmentalist. I turn off the lights, conservatively heat and cool my apartment, recycle, use mass transit or walk; you name it. But the overall effect of these small actions, the ones Fish found so hard to adapt too, can become ineffective if you are being fooled by a company into believing their products are sustainable, or if the real energy saving methods are ignored.

Being a true environmentalist means understanding all of the impacts of your choices and knowing how to mitigate those effects as much as possible. Buying carbon offsets for electricity, dropping meat from the menu and consuming less in general are all essential actions people will probably need to take if we are to leave as small an ecological footprint behind as possible in our day to day actions. It is accepting what might feel uncomfortable, the actions Fish finds so hard, that are most essential for this next generation to succeed where previous ones have failed.