Environmental Ideology and The Ascetic Meme

I’ve always been ambivalent about environmentalism. On the one hand, my gut instinct is usually to conserve and preserve as a default policy. On the other hand, a lot of environmentalists seem to adopt an absolutist posture. Any harm to the environment is bad. No tradeoffs. No cost-benefit analysis. No looking at the big picture. I’ve become more concerned with this tension as the need for practical environmental policy has become more imminent. I think I’ve managed to tease out some of the underlying causes of this tension and I believe it boils down to what Rafe and I have started calling the Ascetic Meme.

First, I must warn you that these thoughts are pretty preliminary, highly speculative, and undoubtedly controversial. It will also likely require more than one post to flesh them out. So bear with me. The crux of my hypothesis is that the polarization we are currently seeing on environmental issues is an emergent phenomenon stemming from some deep evolutionary psychology. Developing workable policies will require getting past this psychology and rationally examining what is actually in long term best interests of the human species.

My insight began by observing a common internal dialog of mine, “That’s cool! I want one. Yeah, but it’s really too flashy for me.” There seem to be competing personalities in my head when it comes to luxuries. I see similar behavior in my family and friends. These well off people forgo small luxuries that are pretty clearly a benefit to them with the rationalization that, “Oh, I don’t really need that.” Then for the big luxuries they do finally cave in to, they have to convince themselves that it’s alright to get them, which seems to require long drawn out conversations with me.

I see similar behavior among environmentalists. Take the “locavore” movement. The thinking here is that eating food grown close to you is better for the environment because it reduces the emissions from transporting food. Unfortunately, it turns out that the dirt-to-table emissions attributable to food are dominated by the production phase. So it’s better for the environment to produce foods in areas that require the least intensive methods and then ship them. For example, we should grow a wide variety of foods in New Zealand and ship them to England rather than grow them in England. But emotionally it seems more extravagant to eat food from far away. That’s why when you point out the efficiency argument to avowed locavores, they come up with all sort of other reasons why you should eat local–not why they eat local, but why you should. If they’re willing to bear the costs of eating local, more power to them, but leave me out of it.

It’s this combination of internal pressure and the incidence of proselytizing that leads me to believe evolutionary psychology may be involved. Humans appear to be wired for cooperation and enforcing cooperation. It’s easy to see how a bias against luxuries could also be adaptive in the ancestral environment. There’s already pressure to accumulate luxuries to signal status . Without some countervailing factor, early groups of humans may have dissolved into a counterproductive escalation of selfish accumulation. Note that I’m not claiming strong evidence for this effect, just putting it forward as a hypothesis.

In and of itself, this bias is probably a good thing even in modern times. Max Weber described how frugality was part of a highly successful work ethic in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I owe my existence to this work ethic (all four of my grandparents are/were paragons of Protestantism), so I’m a fan. Also, people are generally bad at predicting the future, so “saving for a rainy day” is still good advice.

Let’s call this adaptive bias the Frugality Meme. Where we get into trouble is when it mutates into an extreme form: the Ascetic Meme. In this version, the goal is not to savings or modesty, it is suffering through deprivation, typically to achieve some sort of spiritual goal. Asceticism is a recurring theme in many world religions. More offensive is that it sometimes includes a compulsion to see other people join in this suffering. You can flog yourself, but please don’t flog me.

I see some environmentalists going down this extreme path. There are people dedicated to “sustainable living“, which appears to bear an uncanny resemblance to living like a monk. But hey, that’s their choice. What really worries me are environmentalists that don’t seem satisfied unless everyone suffers. You can find plenty of environmental extremist quotes on the Web, but here are my top three scariest:

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” — Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

“If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” — Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

“We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.” — Carl Amery

Obviously, these guys are wackos. What worries me more is that regular people often seem to reflexively behave as if anything that protects the environment is good. I plan on exploring how the propagation of this meme stifles debate in future posts.