Why consumer choice isn't enough for a healthy future
Trading environmental health for economic prosperity is a losing proposition - for everyone.
There’s a reassuring order to a grocery store. Each product is differentiated from its neighbors, neatly labelled and thoughtfully organized, and if you know your stuff it’s easy to find what appear to be healthier choices.
Labels, claims, and certifications promise benefits to those who choose them. With enough time, money, and knowledge, the consumer can buy access to whichever lifestyle they please, and a whole ecosystem of assurances promise that your choices grant the benefits you’re seeking – or protect you from the dangers you’re hoping to avoid.
There are some obvious flaws here. Not everyone is equally free to choose, first of all.
But this essay questions the efficacy of this system for those with the means and ability to make the healthiest choices possible. A troubling number of people seem comfortable with the following trade-off: polluting the environment in exchange for economic growth. There’s an implied escape hatch in this arrangement: the beneficiaries of economic growth will be immune from the worst consequences of pollution because their wealth allows them to make healthier choices.
From DDT to glyphosate to PFAS to leaded gasoline to cigarettes to fossil fuels to fentanyl, history is full of corporate types knowing that their products are harmful and fighting to produce them anyway, as if the consequences won’t affect them personally – in the same way the farmers’ market shopper might be unconcerned about the quality of produce at Wal-Mart.
The belief system seems to go something like this: my wealth allows me to make healthy consumer choices for myself, and even if others don’t make those same choices, my lifestyle will still have the benefits I seek. Put differently: even if the world is run through with pollutants, there will always be some way to access healthy food, clean water, and safe air for me and mine. Therefore, so long as I profit sufficiently from environmental degradation, it won’t matter to me - I can always buy a healthier lifestyle.
I have two things to say about this. First, it isn’t true. And second, this kind of thinking is grounded in a philosophical disease that goes back centuries.
Too big to curtail
In the tea world, microplastics are in the spotlight. When boiling water is poured over plastic teabags, studies have shown that they release a significant amount of microplastics into the tea itself.
Naturally, people don’t want microplastics in their tea, so they’re looking for alternatives. But there’s a deeper problem lurking.
Microplastics are so pervasive that finding plastic-free teabags is akin to doing the dishes while your house is on fire – you’re solving one problem, but there are bigger issues at hand. It’s easy enough to find natural fiber tea bags, but that’s barely the tip of the microplastic iceberg. Most tap water already has microplastics in it. They’re in human organs, beer, salt, seafood, honey, rain, the ocean, even in the air.
The focus on improving individual consumer choices instead of clamoring for systemic change is symptomatic of a mindset problem: we’re trying to solve microplastics for individuals rather than for the collective. We’re conditioned by the grocery store to think that plastic-free products should exist, and we should be able to buy them in the same way we can find non-GMOs or organics – a bit more expensive, perhaps, but still accessible. That idea simply does not work given the scale of the microplastic situation.
If you want microplastic-free products, you need to live in a world where such a thing is possible – and we don’t. Nobody does. This is a problem you can’t buy your way out of.
If we truly want to be rid of microplastics we need to get our arms around the scale of the problem and act accordingly. Nobody can solve the microplastics crisis for themselves, no matter how wealthy or savvy they are, or what consumer choices they make. It can only be solved globally, on the level of international cooperation and sweeping regulation.
The same problem is at play with PFAS. They infiltrate water supplies, linger in soils, and are found everywhere, even in Antarctica. 97% of Americans have some level of PFAS in their blood. Even if you shop as diligently as you can, it’s simply not possible to avoid contamination.
Then there’s pesticides. Even the most diligent organic farmer isn’t safe from pesticide drift from conventional farms. Pesticides end up in ground water, rain, and irrigation systems. They’re in such frequent use, at such enormous volumes, that there’s hardly a place on Earth where some measure of cross-contamination isn’t inevitable. Approximately 8.6 billion kilograms of glyphosate alone have been used globally since 1974.
This isn’t to say that organic agriculture is useless – far from it. We need it more than ever, especially in light of new research on glyphosate’s carcinogenic properties. I only want to acknowledge a shortcoming: the world isn’t as neatly delineated as the organic/conventional binary suggests.
My argument is simple: these problems’ impacts are global to the extent that nobody can be free of them, whatever their consumer habits or purchasing power. With these pollutants in such widespread use globally, it is impossible for genuine alternatives to exist at all. If we admit that life without microplastics, PFAS, and pesticides is desirable we must make it possible through political action for everyone, not consumer choice for a few – nothing else will be enough.
Breaking the habit
It’s hardwired into our consumerist worldview that we can buy our way to safety from any threat. Every consumer choice, from what clothes you wear to where you live to what you eat, comes with some well-being dimension. For those with the means, a consumer society persuades you that health and longevity are the result of a long series of correct consumer choices.
The foundational fallacy here is that the properties of things are immutable: an organic product will always be organic, whatever the state of global agriculture. A natural-fiber teabag will be free of microplastics, whatever the state of global pollution. Taken to the extreme, the assumption seems to be that the mega-rich inhabit some other Earth that isn’t impacted by the same pollutants, as if Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian compound is somehow exempted from the swirling pollution befouling Hawaii’s beaches.
But that’s simply not the case. The world does not adhere to such strict segmentation. When we create a world that is full of pollutants, we will all be polluted. By treating health and sustainability as a consumer choice problem we actually undercut consumer choices’ ability to have the qualities we seek.
The roots of this misapprehension, however, run deep.
René Descartes’ 17th century proclamation, “I think, therefore I am,” is deeply embedded in our cultural history. But it’s a troubling idea. The difficulty starts as soon as you think about anyone else.
Descartes elevated the self to the realm of certainty and cast everything else as fundamentally unknowable. I think, but do you think? I can never know. In this model everyone is an island, and we’re always separated from the world around us.
Subject/object, mind/body, us/them – these binaries emerge when we frame things as either one thing or another with impenetrable boundaries between, in the manner suggested by Descartes’ original declaration.
This is the thinking of the grocery store: that things are discrete in their boxes, capable of having qualities independent of the world that gives them rise. The natural extension of this thinking is that individuals can be free of pollutants even if the world they live in is overflowing with them.
This is a false assumption. The liberatory potential of consumer choice is built on shaky foundations, materially and philosophically, because it implies the possibility of separateness in a world that is entangled.
I’m not suggesting that we should stop making better choices, or that our efforts are futile. What I am saying is that if we are to address the problems presented by global pollution, it’d be helpful to realize that that we’re all on the same team. We are all in and of the world we’re creating, not apart from it. It is impossible to create a healthy world for the privileged few amid an unhealthy world for everyone else, and we should really stop pretending otherwise. My modest proposal is that business leaders might be less keen to continue polluting if they realized that they were harming themselves, too.
An alternative way of thinking (in the western tradition) starts with Baruch Spinoza, whose monism contrasts with Descartes’ dualisms. For Spinoza, there was no distinction between mind and body. There was only one infinite substance, what he calls “God or nature.” Myriad other belief systems, from Buddhism to Taoism to indigenous cosmologies, don’t adhere to Descartes’ rigid binaries either.
These orientations allow us to see that we are not separate from the world we’re creating; in fact, we’re creating ourselves along with it. And whether we create a healthy world or a polluted one will dictate whether we are healthy or polluted too.
All for one and one for all
The world is not a store; it does not adhere to the same rigid categorization, and neither do the lives occurring within it. No one can be insulated from the destruction of the commons. We should recognize and protect our common vulnerability; this is what a government is supposed to do, and they should really be better at doing it.
This isn’t to diminish the power of small changes in the meantime. We should continue to make the best choices we can and make those choices as accessible as possible. But to focus on finding a few better options, instead of improving the entire situation, is to ignore the magnitude of the problem and give more leeway for bad actors to continue their destructive ways.
Spinoza was excommunicated in the 17th century and is still excommunicated now. There is something about a monistic worldview that makes the powerful nervous – possibly because their status relies on these same binary distinctions. My hope is that if the powerful realized that wealth is an inadequate shield from environmental collapse maybe they would start acting as if the planet mattered to them, too.
We will solve these problems for everyone, or we will not solve them at all. Let’s work to ensure the former outcome.