A crowd of protesters stand in the way of several employees peddling their way to work on bikes. The employees are of Lawrence Livermore Labs, one of America’s foremost nuclear weapons development and research institutions. Richard Schumann, one of many protesters decrying the development of nuclear weapons, notes the extreme irony that the image presents. “Did they really think that riding a bicycle would save the world, even though they were building weapons that could destroy it?”

“I would say this is an instance of individual activism clashing rather dramatically with collective action,” Schumann says.

Money talks

Paul Wapner, the director of the Global Environmental Politics program at American University, says that people need to look at the bigger picture. “When people have fewer children or reduce their consumption, they save money. What they then do with this money is crucial to the consequences of their actions. If they place it in conventional financial mechanisms, such as banks or stocks, they merely shift the locale of environmental harm through those mechanisms, through the global capitalist economy.”

Anthony Freynolds, a second-year Engineering student at UBC, believes that lifestyle activism ”fosters the progressive change needed for society’s advancement on a personal level. It does this in a way that no state decrees or company policies can.”

But Aaron Schutz, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, isn’t convinced that this is the case. He jokes about throwing cans away, leaving lights on and not caring about these “trivialities.” He complains that “middle-class ‘political activity,’ like recycling, making eco-friendly consumer choices or creating compost piles in the backyard, rarely contributes in any effective or coherent way to positive social change.”

According to Schutz, private individual acts, however well-meant, have little or no impact on the actions of others. He credits this to a matter of identity, noting that studies found that 60s activists were often raised by parents who were activists or who encouraged them to think of social engagement as a central aspect of their lives. Schutz feels that modern lifestyle activism also largely seems to be a matter of identity.

“There is little evidence that a righteous lifestyle will lead many others to pick it up unless it was made part of their social identity,” he says.

What’s the problem?

However, is there anything explicitly wrong with lifestyle activism? Schutz believes there is. “Lifestyle activism assumes that you have the resources in order to make lifestyle choices. You need money to be able to buy a Prius instead of a beater car. You need money to eat organic every day. You need leisure time to maintain a compost pile that you don’t really need.”

Schutz maintains that “if you work two jobs to keep food on the table and a roof over your head, you just don’t have time for this.” He calls lifestyle activism an “expression of privilege.”

Individuals who follow these lifestyles seem to be, according to Schultz, self-righteous and irrational. “Lifestyle activism is largely a product of vanity. Others can see your glossy solar panel or wind turbine. You can brag about your compost pile and educate others about how to create one. Every time you drive your Prius around town, others can see how virtuous you are.”

Schutz mocks the self-congratulatory stance of lifestyle activists, who seem to think that “people who eat cheap unethically produced food and drive polluting cars are less virtuous than lifestyle activists. They are ignorant and apathetic. They don’t care enough. They don’t really understand that they are responsible for the degradation of humanity and the earth.”

Band-aid solutions

French sociologist Marcel Mauss once said that “if we told ourselves the truth about what we are doing, if we actually acknowledged that most of our ‘activism’ is about us, and not really about trying to make a significant difference in the world or for people who really suffer, then it wouldn’t have its self-serving identity purpose anymore.”

Peter Edwards, a member of an anarchist bookstore collective and a student at McGill, agrees with Mauss. “Lifestyle activism self-propagates the lie that it is activism instead of a form of [selfish] individual investment on the same level as buying a nice pair of jeans or having an espresso.”

Freynolds says that “capitalism incorporates everything into itself.”

His friend, Alex Cooper Moore, a UVic student, laughs and agrees. “It’s like Pac-Man in that respect,” he says. “The ‘green-washing’ trend is a perfect example. The idea that you can help the world by buying the right brand of coffee or the right dish soap feeds right into what many people already want to believe….

“I started engaging in collective activism a few years ago because I realized that much of the activism I was doing, like writing advocacy letters to ministers, was not effective and was really only about me feeling like I was doing something,” he adds.

Schutz apologizes for his extreme stance, explaining that people need to be shaken into consciousness. The convenient lie needs to be “rattled out of their systems….

“If you want to make serious social change, and are a first-world citizen of a middle-class type, you will almost inevitably need to get out of your comfort zone,” Schutz says. “We will need to face up to the fact that, ultimately, it’s about the public commons, collective action. We’ve got to look at the system as a whole.”

“Everything is in relation at a much larger scale. We’ve got to stop thinking band-aids,” Freynolds says.

“It doesn’t do any good to call them stupid or dishonest, though. It should be more about redirecting the energy that they are already spending towards effective social change.”

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