I think there’s a couple of things in play here though.
First, this kinda has, “if millennials just didn’t drink Starbucks they could afford rent” energy. Would it make a difference? Maybe. But in the grand scheme what it would do is just take away something they enjoy, while they remain unable to make their student loan payments, much less but a house. The actual problems are more systematic, and the “don’t buy Starbucks” argument is to some degree just a distraction from fixing those more systematic problems (or an intentional effort to divide people so they can’t cooperate to fix those systematic issues.)
Second, I think you’re maybe exhibiting a little bit more brinkmanship than is warrented. It’s important to care about the environment, and there’s obviously a ton that needs to be done there. But as you say, there are bigger and worse threats out there than people buying paper bags, and it sounds like you’re letting your existential dread over the environment sour your actual, meaningful interpersonal connections. It feels a bit over the top to “lose faith in humanity” just because most people buy paper bags. Most people are good people, and it’s not unreasonable for them to take small conveniences, even if those conveniences aren’t environmentally “optimal.”
I live in a state that has banned the use of them, so no, most people I know don’t use them. The people that said the same thing as you complained for all of a month before they acclimated to a simple fucking task. All parts of our system are fucked, but if it is a trivial matter to unfuck one small part of the system, then we should do that. And then fix the next trivial fucking thing that people say they would rather spend a dollar per bag on and argue for twelve hours about whether or not chopping just 14 million trees per year on top of the other billion trees we chop is all that bad.
This is exactly why I say I have no faith in humanity, your dollar a bag comment says more to how fucked we are than anything. People absolutely will not change. They will literally hurt themselves just so they can hurt the environment because ‘haha, I forget sometimes so I don’t want to try.’ Even when presented with the evidence they ask for on the environmental impacts, they will say ‘worse than I expected, but not that bad when everything else is shit.’ I’m tired of everything being shit. And I’m tired of people saying, oh it’s a just a little shit. Quit accepting shit people. And don’t buy starbucks, because it’s shit coffee from a shit company.
I think the “more than I thought it would be” comment was more a reflection on how low I thought it would be than on how high it is. It’s still a pretty tiny fraction of the overall problem.
But, like, look. The optimal decision, and the only way to “stop accepting shit” as you put it, is for every single person to drop what they’re doing and go live as a hermit in the woods, and never produce or consume another product.
That isn’t realistic for the majority of people though. And while I could succumb to self-flagellation as a form of symbolic protest, I think my time and effort is spent participating in the system as it is, and donating to organizations that can make more systematic changes that might ultimately do some good.
Beating yourself (or others) up for “not doing enough” is at best a form of coping with things that are beyond your control, and at worst a form of alienating people who broadly agree with you.
And, to be clear, I didn’t say I’d pay a dollar a bag for any old paper bag. I said I’d pay that much for one with handles. Big difference.
Bringing in a bag to store that I know I am going to be bringing items out of is not self-flagellation. Refusing to bring a bag into a store because I’ll just use a single use item instead is shitty behavior. It’s that simple. Minor shitty behavior? Sure. If you’re cool with that behavior, well obviously this isn’t going to change that opinion. It is a trivial behavior for you to change.
Look, it’s easy to have the viewpoint that anyone who isn’t doing everything you’re doing to save the world is a shitty person, and anyone who does more than you is obviously just a try-hard.
Everyone, yourself included, makes “shitty” decisions for convenience sake every day. I assume you buy food from the grocery store instead of foraging through trash cans. I’ve had friends who did the latter, and called the rest of us shitty if we ever threw anything away.
Just because someone looks at a situation and comes out with a different “worth the effort” assessment than you, doesn’t make it “shitty.” That’s just life man. Are you driving a car instead of a motorcycle? Using toilet paper? Buying food from restaurants instead of eating out of trash cans? These are all decisions you could trivially change in your life today to make the world a little greener. So why aren’t you?
But, really, I think our actual disconnect here is that I’ve not articulated my position well enough. I’m talking paper bags with handles! I mean, if that’s not worth a dollar, what is?
I appreciate the multiple attempts to diffuse with the bag handles, and I fully agree that we have to draw the line somewhere. My issue is that if people are unwilling to do something a simple as bringing a bag into a grocery store, then there is absolutely zero chance that we will change the more difficult but more necessary problems. How are you going to convince Bezos to reduce his footprint when you can’t even get people to stop using a straw? Who the fuck even uses straws? How am I going to convince people to buy less, when everytime they want to buy something, they buy a thing to carry they thing they want to buy? (Insert xzibit meme)
Yes, it is something as dumb as bags, and even if we did switch it may not have much of an impact. But so what? Far more important to me is the mere fact that bringing in a bag to carry items in is too much of a hurdle for people to help the planet? Doomed I say.
I think that it’s a bit of a false equivalent to say that since we can’t convince people to use reusable bags, we can’t get Jeff Bezos to reduce his.
They’re different problem sets. Industrial pollution (or pollution from people with access to industry levels of capital) is something that can be addressed with legislation. It’s also something with fairly broad, populist appeal. And it’s something that, if addressed might make meaningful and lasting impact.
The “people need to take personal responsibility for recycling” narrative has been largely funded by oil companies and polluting industries as a cover to avoid people realizing that those things make up such a tiny fraction of the overall problem. They work to turn people against each other so that were too busy fighting to address the much bigger environmental issues.
Also, I love straws. If I don’t have one the drink gets in my moustache.
It isn’t a different problem set though, just a different flavor of the same issue: over-consumption and overexploitation. It is also something that can be addressed through legislation, as the article this discussion originated from is an article about how legislating bag bans is effective.
People do need to take responsibility. That’s the whole issue. People at the bottom do not take responsibility, they do not push for people above them to take responsibility, and they will actively curtail measures to improve things because ‘it’s the big guys we need to worry about.’ No, we all need to make efforts. And in the example of bags, I am asking you to make a trivial change to your lifestyle, that you would all but forget about once you had made the change.
Let me try to use a different example. Cigarette butts on the ground are fucking gross right? Major ecological concern as well. Nobody should be throwing cigarette butts on the ground, I think we can all agree. You throw a cigarette butt on the ground? No big deal, coal plants are worse. Same energy.
I think the issue is that we each have our own internal line of “acceptable participation in the upkeep of the world around us,” and they’re different.
So, like, if there’s a line graph here, it has the following points:
1: not throwing cigarette butts on the ground
2: not using disposable bags
3: eating food out of trash cans.
I’ve said, existing between points 1 and 2 is my personal level of “acceptable participation,” and you have said it’s between 2 and 3. Many people exist above point 3, and many exist below point 1.
And someone above point three might approach you and say, “why are you letting perfectly good food go to waste,” and hit you with all the stats and figures about how food waste is destroying the earth. And it would be such a tiny change for you to, instead of making or ordering food, just find some in a nearby trashcan. It’s all over the place, and super accessible. And it’s really dangerous. Freshly thrown away food is pretty much always potable.
But you have chosen that your personal level of “acceptable participation” doesn’t require that of you. Should the “above point 3” people judge you for not making that tiny lifestyle change?
And honestly, perhaps they should? You are living below what they have determined is the “minimal acceptable level of social responsibility.” You aren’t doing your part to help combat a real environmental problem.
But a majority of people have chosen not to eat out of trash cans. Just as a majority of people don’t bring reusable bags into the grocery store. And the only difference between those things is where your personal line of “acceptable participation” is.
And yes, there is a “generally societally agreed upon level of participation” which would say that throwing your cigarette butts on the ground is unacceptable. But you know why I know that’s the generally agreed upon standard? Because only a minority of people do it. The general societal standard for disposable bags is on the “use them” side.
And sure, would it be beneficial to put in work to shift the Overton window on that issue, sure. Campaign for it. Push the cause. (Which I recognize is kind of what you’re doing here). Who knows, maybe I’ll pick up some bags and forget them in my car next time I hit the store, only to get mad the stores paper bags don’t have handles.
But I think there’s a big difference between advocating for a shift in the societal expectation, and investing emotional energy into despairing over the condition of your fellow man. You can recognize that, just because someone is on the other side of an issue than you, doesn’t mean they’re “bad” or deserve derision. None of us, yourself included, are doing all the “little” things we could be doing to make the world a better place. There’s always a higher level of societal participation. But I think my concern here is that your mentality is, “people who chose differently than me are bad,” not, “how can I best advocate to help encourage people to improve.”
You kept at this way longer and put far more energy into it than it was probably worth. Imagine if instead of bitching about bag bans to anyone online we just, like, looked up from our phone and paid a tiny bit of attention to bringing a bag to the store. Then we wouldn’t have to spend all this time justifying our lack of care.
I appreciate the examples you gave and I hope someone benefits from them. The simple fact is that the person you’ve been going back and forth with will not.
I think there’s a couple of things in play here though.
First, this kinda has, “if millennials just didn’t drink Starbucks they could afford rent” energy. Would it make a difference? Maybe. But in the grand scheme what it would do is just take away something they enjoy, while they remain unable to make their student loan payments, much less but a house. The actual problems are more systematic, and the “don’t buy Starbucks” argument is to some degree just a distraction from fixing those more systematic problems (or an intentional effort to divide people so they can’t cooperate to fix those systematic issues.)
Second, I think you’re maybe exhibiting a little bit more brinkmanship than is warrented. It’s important to care about the environment, and there’s obviously a ton that needs to be done there. But as you say, there are bigger and worse threats out there than people buying paper bags, and it sounds like you’re letting your existential dread over the environment sour your actual, meaningful interpersonal connections. It feels a bit over the top to “lose faith in humanity” just because most people buy paper bags. Most people are good people, and it’s not unreasonable for them to take small conveniences, even if those conveniences aren’t environmentally “optimal.”
I live in a state that has banned the use of them, so no, most people I know don’t use them. The people that said the same thing as you complained for all of a month before they acclimated to a simple fucking task. All parts of our system are fucked, but if it is a trivial matter to unfuck one small part of the system, then we should do that. And then fix the next trivial fucking thing that people say they would rather spend a dollar per bag on and argue for twelve hours about whether or not chopping just 14 million trees per year on top of the other billion trees we chop is all that bad.
This is exactly why I say I have no faith in humanity, your dollar a bag comment says more to how fucked we are than anything. People absolutely will not change. They will literally hurt themselves just so they can hurt the environment because ‘haha, I forget sometimes so I don’t want to try.’ Even when presented with the evidence they ask for on the environmental impacts, they will say ‘worse than I expected, but not that bad when everything else is shit.’ I’m tired of everything being shit. And I’m tired of people saying, oh it’s a just a little shit. Quit accepting shit people. And don’t buy starbucks, because it’s shit coffee from a shit company.
I think the “more than I thought it would be” comment was more a reflection on how low I thought it would be than on how high it is. It’s still a pretty tiny fraction of the overall problem.
But, like, look. The optimal decision, and the only way to “stop accepting shit” as you put it, is for every single person to drop what they’re doing and go live as a hermit in the woods, and never produce or consume another product.
That isn’t realistic for the majority of people though. And while I could succumb to self-flagellation as a form of symbolic protest, I think my time and effort is spent participating in the system as it is, and donating to organizations that can make more systematic changes that might ultimately do some good.
Beating yourself (or others) up for “not doing enough” is at best a form of coping with things that are beyond your control, and at worst a form of alienating people who broadly agree with you.
And, to be clear, I didn’t say I’d pay a dollar a bag for any old paper bag. I said I’d pay that much for one with handles. Big difference.
Bringing in a bag to store that I know I am going to be bringing items out of is not self-flagellation. Refusing to bring a bag into a store because I’ll just use a single use item instead is shitty behavior. It’s that simple. Minor shitty behavior? Sure. If you’re cool with that behavior, well obviously this isn’t going to change that opinion. It is a trivial behavior for you to change.
Look, it’s easy to have the viewpoint that anyone who isn’t doing everything you’re doing to save the world is a shitty person, and anyone who does more than you is obviously just a try-hard.
Everyone, yourself included, makes “shitty” decisions for convenience sake every day. I assume you buy food from the grocery store instead of foraging through trash cans. I’ve had friends who did the latter, and called the rest of us shitty if we ever threw anything away.
Just because someone looks at a situation and comes out with a different “worth the effort” assessment than you, doesn’t make it “shitty.” That’s just life man. Are you driving a car instead of a motorcycle? Using toilet paper? Buying food from restaurants instead of eating out of trash cans? These are all decisions you could trivially change in your life today to make the world a little greener. So why aren’t you?
But, really, I think our actual disconnect here is that I’ve not articulated my position well enough. I’m talking paper bags with handles! I mean, if that’s not worth a dollar, what is?
I appreciate the multiple attempts to diffuse with the bag handles, and I fully agree that we have to draw the line somewhere. My issue is that if people are unwilling to do something a simple as bringing a bag into a grocery store, then there is absolutely zero chance that we will change the more difficult but more necessary problems. How are you going to convince Bezos to reduce his footprint when you can’t even get people to stop using a straw? Who the fuck even uses straws? How am I going to convince people to buy less, when everytime they want to buy something, they buy a thing to carry they thing they want to buy? (Insert xzibit meme)
Yes, it is something as dumb as bags, and even if we did switch it may not have much of an impact. But so what? Far more important to me is the mere fact that bringing in a bag to carry items in is too much of a hurdle for people to help the planet? Doomed I say.
I think that it’s a bit of a false equivalent to say that since we can’t convince people to use reusable bags, we can’t get Jeff Bezos to reduce his.
They’re different problem sets. Industrial pollution (or pollution from people with access to industry levels of capital) is something that can be addressed with legislation. It’s also something with fairly broad, populist appeal. And it’s something that, if addressed might make meaningful and lasting impact.
The “people need to take personal responsibility for recycling” narrative has been largely funded by oil companies and polluting industries as a cover to avoid people realizing that those things make up such a tiny fraction of the overall problem. They work to turn people against each other so that were too busy fighting to address the much bigger environmental issues.
Also, I love straws. If I don’t have one the drink gets in my moustache.
It isn’t a different problem set though, just a different flavor of the same issue: over-consumption and overexploitation. It is also something that can be addressed through legislation, as the article this discussion originated from is an article about how legislating bag bans is effective.
People do need to take responsibility. That’s the whole issue. People at the bottom do not take responsibility, they do not push for people above them to take responsibility, and they will actively curtail measures to improve things because ‘it’s the big guys we need to worry about.’ No, we all need to make efforts. And in the example of bags, I am asking you to make a trivial change to your lifestyle, that you would all but forget about once you had made the change.
Let me try to use a different example. Cigarette butts on the ground are fucking gross right? Major ecological concern as well. Nobody should be throwing cigarette butts on the ground, I think we can all agree. You throw a cigarette butt on the ground? No big deal, coal plants are worse. Same energy.
I think the issue is that we each have our own internal line of “acceptable participation in the upkeep of the world around us,” and they’re different.
So, like, if there’s a line graph here, it has the following points: 1: not throwing cigarette butts on the ground 2: not using disposable bags 3: eating food out of trash cans.
I’ve said, existing between points 1 and 2 is my personal level of “acceptable participation,” and you have said it’s between 2 and 3. Many people exist above point 3, and many exist below point 1.
And someone above point three might approach you and say, “why are you letting perfectly good food go to waste,” and hit you with all the stats and figures about how food waste is destroying the earth. And it would be such a tiny change for you to, instead of making or ordering food, just find some in a nearby trashcan. It’s all over the place, and super accessible. And it’s really dangerous. Freshly thrown away food is pretty much always potable.
But you have chosen that your personal level of “acceptable participation” doesn’t require that of you. Should the “above point 3” people judge you for not making that tiny lifestyle change?
And honestly, perhaps they should? You are living below what they have determined is the “minimal acceptable level of social responsibility.” You aren’t doing your part to help combat a real environmental problem.
But a majority of people have chosen not to eat out of trash cans. Just as a majority of people don’t bring reusable bags into the grocery store. And the only difference between those things is where your personal line of “acceptable participation” is.
And yes, there is a “generally societally agreed upon level of participation” which would say that throwing your cigarette butts on the ground is unacceptable. But you know why I know that’s the generally agreed upon standard? Because only a minority of people do it. The general societal standard for disposable bags is on the “use them” side.
And sure, would it be beneficial to put in work to shift the Overton window on that issue, sure. Campaign for it. Push the cause. (Which I recognize is kind of what you’re doing here). Who knows, maybe I’ll pick up some bags and forget them in my car next time I hit the store, only to get mad the stores paper bags don’t have handles.
But I think there’s a big difference between advocating for a shift in the societal expectation, and investing emotional energy into despairing over the condition of your fellow man. You can recognize that, just because someone is on the other side of an issue than you, doesn’t mean they’re “bad” or deserve derision. None of us, yourself included, are doing all the “little” things we could be doing to make the world a better place. There’s always a higher level of societal participation. But I think my concern here is that your mentality is, “people who chose differently than me are bad,” not, “how can I best advocate to help encourage people to improve.”
You kept at this way longer and put far more energy into it than it was probably worth. Imagine if instead of bitching about bag bans to anyone online we just, like, looked up from our phone and paid a tiny bit of attention to bringing a bag to the store. Then we wouldn’t have to spend all this time justifying our lack of care.
I appreciate the examples you gave and I hope someone benefits from them. The simple fact is that the person you’ve been going back and forth with will not.