In a thoughtful article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, author Michael Pollan (who wrote the excellent “Botany of Desire,” “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and most recently, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”) takes on the issue of individual action to combat climate change.

It’s not an easy issue to suss out because of the multitude of ways we impact the environment, the difficulty of measuring exactly what that impact (or the impact of changing our ways) actually is on an individual basis, and the seeming insignifance of say, changing out your incandescent bulbs to CFLs (compact fluorescent lights) in the face of the global-scale, dire predictions of climate models.

If you talk to James Lovelock, who proposed the Gaia hypothesis, anything we do now, even if it’s on a much bigger scale, is too little too late. An article I read a couple months ago in the New Yorker, which Pollan discusses, also pointed out the difficulty in assessing the carbon footprint of products — just because something was grown nearby, doesn’t necessarily means it’s more “green” to buy, since the effects of fertilizers and other factors must be taken into account, not just the greenhouse gases emitted in transporting the product to you.

The New Yorker article, and many people, have pointed out the need for overarching policies and substantial investment to bring about a “green” revolution. But Pollan makes the case, and I would tend to agree, that the fundamental problem contributing to climate change is an un-sustainable lifestyle — one that will have to be changed if we’re really going to address the problem head-on.

As Pollan put its, “the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us … and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.”

Part of his point is that politicians aren’t going to get into gear on this unless they know that people care about it, and one way to show you care about it is by starting to make the necessary changes in lifestyle without waiting for legislation that forces you to.

And some of the changes you can make are easy and can actually benefit you in other ways, such as using CFLs or making sure your home is well-insulated so it doesn’t leak away all that costly heat in the winter. Or maybe start a garden and grow a portion of your own food (if you live in New York like me, that can be easier said than done, but it’s not impossible. I have a friend who grew tomatoes in a pot on her windowsill. Or you can get a plot in a community garden or join a food co-op.) Growing food, naturally is Pollan’s focus, as he points out the many benefits of keeping a garden, from providing your own food to giving you exercise.

Pollan goes through why we are so resistant to such changes and also why they are so critical to make. He also points out that making such changes in your personal life does more than the immediate environmental impact of your action. It can also influence others to make changes, eventually setting up markets for greener products — a process of “viral social change” as Pollan puts it. It may seem like getting enough people to grow a garden would be hard, but during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of American food, Pollan notes.

Going green is a gamble, he says, but “sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.” If we make changes, and they work, then we could save ourselves. If we make them and they don’t, we really won’t be that much worse off than we would have been anyway.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 11:52 am and is filed under Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.