You say you want a resolution? Five ways to be a disruptor in 2024.
It’s that time again. Time when the calendars advance a year, and people set about identifying ways they might commit to improving their lives, and maybe also improving how their lives affect others and the planet. I think it is telling that so many people (including myself) live with a constant concern about what we can do better; how we can be more healthy, more satisfied, more accepting, better neighbors, and so on. I think it hints at a preclusion to activism that is inherent in all of us — we all intuit opportunities for change in our communities and in the world around us. We all prefer our lives and collective experiences to have meaning, to arc in a direction of happiness and wellness and justice.
Even when saddled with extreme anxiety about problems that seem too big to solve, the single most common question I get following speaking events is, “what can people do?” Climate deniers and opportunistic politicians and ‘influencers’ armed with controversial disinformation make for easy news. But in my experience, they are well outnumbered by folks who are starting from an assumption that they can make a difference but are hungry for advice. I regularly meet people eager to alter their habits, calculate their carbon footprints, buy different brands, even forego a yearly flight to see family if they feel confident it will make a difference. I find this to be especially true for the younger generations — undergraduate students in my classes always eagerly ask me to spend more time on plant-rich diets, ask for more preparation for jobs in environmental stewardship. They don’t want to be paralyzed by fear or placated by disinformation; they want actionable and evidence-based hope that the world hasn’t been irrevocably fucked by their progenitors.
The trouble is, there is a lot of bad, but well meaning advice out there. For example, I think many people are overselling the short-term wins of changing what we eat compared to changing where our food comes from. I’ve argued for caution when putting too much hope into technological solutions to what are inherently societal problems. I’ve also argued that we need to be very careful about foregrounding equity and justice in how and where we promote solutions — so that we are not displacing the burden of solving climate change onto people who are not, generally, responsible for causing it.
Here is what I think people get wrong: they direct people toward changes that are additive rather than those that are viral or disruptive. Additive changes — like everyone eating a serving or two less of animal protein per week, are rooted in a framing of problems like climate change as being collective in nature. That is, that people (or specific groups of people) are just doing too much of the wrong thing and too little of the right thing. If everyone just starts doing more right things than wrong things, the right things will “trickle up.”
This is the framing that the fossil and plastics and agribusiness industries prefer; in fact, the very idea of people calculating their individual footprints was an invention of the fossil industry. They like it because it serves the narrative that everyone, equally, is to blame, and absolves them of their extensive, decades long project to hide the truth about how damaging fossil fuels are to the planet.
Superficially, this “trickle up” approach to change is not entirely useless. Yes, there are too many people doing too much of the wrong thing. And any gains in efficiency — people reducing their individual footprints — matter. But the collective action framing often gets the root cause of the behavior wrong — it either passes the behaviors off as failings of human nature (people hurt the environment because that’s just who we are) or assumes that people are freely choosing environmentally damaging behaviors and, hence, are equally as free to choose others when given better options and better information. Neither of these assumptions is accurate.
The Case for “Systems Change”
If we want to change collective outcomes, we need to focus on changing the aspects of our society that drive people to accept and enact actions that cause them. And generally, these drivers do not operate at the individual level — e.g., a person’s values or knowledge — but broader features of our social and economic systems that reward corporate decisions regardless of their environmental consequences, or that constrain individuals’ power to demand change and take individual actions outside the narrow band of options that corporate and political actors choose to make available.
People have very little direct input into the decisions made by firms in sectors that produce the lion’s share of carbon pollution or deforestation: the agrifood industry and fossil industry are among the two largest. Sure, we make everyday choices — between Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes, cow’s milk and almond milk, conventional and organic vegetables. But in the last half century, consumer demand has played very little role in determining what kinds of foods are marketed and prioritized by grocers. Quinoa, avocado, and bottled water did not spread across the shelves of grocery stores around the Global North in seemingly unending quantities because people were actively lobbying for them; they appeared because a market was created for them — companies saw a business case for making these products available and were perfectly happy to keep growing these markets. Sure, consumers like these products, but it’s a business decision to keep growing these markets past what is sustainable and ethical. It’s a business decision to hide and ignore evidence of social and environmental harm.
It’s O.K. to stop. It’s OK for the store to be out of avocados. But the cult-like devotion to growth at all costs in our society has made a lot of people forget this.
And in many cases, the products that create environmental and social harms are developed, bought, and sold in markets that do not involve everyday consumers. Take palm oil. Palm oil has been used in food products for well over half a century, but production quadrupled in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And it was business decisions, not consumer demand, that were behind the food industry retooling around this ingredient. Business decisions, not consumer demand, were behind the agricultural decisions that prioritized growth of the palm oil industry over vast deforestation and the mass slaughter of orangutans.
Business decisions, not consumer demand, are behind the addition of endocrine disrupting chemicals and to plastics and the linings of aluminum cans.
Business decisions, not consumer demand, are behind the proliferation of pointless plastic packaging in packaged foods and all manner of other products.
Business decisions, not consumer demand, are behind the proliferation of harmful agrichemicals like glyphosate and neonicotinoids in our agricultural systems.
Business decisions, not consumer demand, are behind trends such as the petroleum-to-plastic pipeline and growth of non-food crop production that undermine any of the gains that we consumers might achieve by using our purchasing power to shrink our environmental footprints.
It isn’t that people can’t make better choices when offered better information. This is the premise of ecolabels and certifications like the Marine Stewardship Council: that by increasing the ability of the consumer to access knowledge about the environmental impacts of a product they can choose differently and, as the theory goes anyway, force the industry to change. And some consumers do take this route, but a surprising number of good people still do ‘bad’ things when it comes to the environment.
When it comes to the choices we have — to support the deforestation free or fair trade or organically produced products — a large fraction of American society, and billions of people world wide — are simply priced out. The same can be said for smallholder farmers trying to do things differently. It is very risky, often very expensive, and in some cases politically dangerous, for a farmer to buck convention. It can come with losses at first, and requires a commitment to operating at a significant disadvantage — in the shadow of all the subsidies and political power and land and wealth of the existing regime.
Don’t get me wrong. A lot of people think when I make this argument that I am underestimating the power of individual people to create radical change. I don’t — I think individuals and collectives are our only chance at success. We can’t wait around for corporations and policymakers, because neither face the incentives to enact real radical change. My argument is that when it comes to strategic action at the individual level, additive change is, at best, a weak pressure point; at worst, it is a red herring.
Solving the Real Problems
It is impossible to not bring our biases and deeply seeded cultural models and assumptions to how we approach the big, existential problems we face. Biases about human nature, about how markets work, how change happens, even about right and wrong, and so forth. My strategy for working with my biases and trying to think past them is to look at the writings and analysis of those who are different than me, people for whom our social and economic systems were not built to favour. Indigenous Peoples, People of Colour, Women, and others in the Queer community are all offering strikingly important, incisive, and nuanced perspectives that ought be centred in these conversations. I eagerly seek out new and insigthful ways of thinking in the writings of amazing thinkers like Farhana Sultana, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, adrienne maree brown, Max Liboiron, and Robin Wall Kimmerer.
At the risk of being too reductive, one insight that I think is important to elevate from their works in the context of the present discussion is the central role of oppression, marginalization, and isolation through the economic and political dismantling of communities of care, as root causes of the climate and biodiversity crisis. The violence that our food and fuel and production systems inflict on forests and insects and whales is the same violence as white settler societies repeatedely inflict on Black and Brown bodies. Often, the acts are one and the same.
There are multiple pressure points, places we can disrupt the systems around us to address these issues. But it takes something different than additive change. You simply can’t change a system that is inherently violent and oppressive by just choosing a little less violence today, a little less oppression tomorrow. That kind of change doesn’t trickle up. You have to abolish violent systems. Abolition starts with disruption — targeting these systems at their points of weakness, creating new spaces where their power is weakened, and then pushing to expand those spaces from within.
Yes, we can act for change as consumers — but as human we are neither defined by or limited to this role. We are also citizens, rightsholders, friends, neighbors, caregivers, parents, creators, and so forth. With access to all of these modalities of our identity our options for individual action expand exponentially. We can create art. We can enjoy and share others’ art. We can develop a new kind of practice or busiess. We can build new relationships. We can be good allies. We can protest and boycott. We can choose civil disobedience. We can vote. We can organize. We can start or join collectives and cooperatives and communities of practice. We can run for office — especially local offices. We can make decisions that are designed to actively counter the oppression, marginalization, and isolation upon which our existing systems thrive.
As an aside, if you need any evidence that these modalities of activism are powerful, look to the great lengths that those in power go to to restrict (or leverage) them. Conservatively goverened jurisdictions around the world are banning books, stifling speech, and passing laws that target the safety of legal protests. Agribusiness has long fought tooth and nail against consumers having access to information about what’s in their food, e.g., labels for nutrition and genetically modified ingredients. Laws have been and are being passed to limit unionization, curb the growth of renewable energy, limit fossil divestment, and discourage boycotts. And the conservative political establishment is trying its best to use pejoritave labels like “woke” to stoke a culture war that fractures our communities, all in the name of slowing progress to issues of social and environmental justice.
All of these are last-ditch strategies because when people act as more than consumers, we are capable of real, radical change.
Five Resolutions for Disruption
Choosing to be disruptive is a where we can be most powerful, where your actions, even small ones, will do more than trickle up. So, without any more ado, here are five suggestions for powerful resolutions you could make to be a disruptor in 2024.
- Eat local. Eating local gets a bad rap. Based on current ways of accounting for our food systems and their environmental impact, eating local doesn’t always measure up to industrial efficiency. As such, proponents of additive change frown on local eating, saying our food systems need get more out while putting less in. But is there any clearer shorthand for oppression than taking more while giving less?
If you have the financial means to do so, eating local is a tremendously powerful and disruptive act. Its goal isn’t to slim your own footprint, but to support an emerging niche as an early adopter. What buying local does is erode the power and control currently held by abusive industrial firms; it creates space to emancipate food and farms and farmworkers and eaters from their control and violence. I have written more about this one here. - Make a friend. Or make many! One of the biggest challenges in modern society is that the rules we must follow and economic practices we must buy into if we want to have some measure of security and safety push us towards isolation and make us work against one another. Making a connection, whether to someone who produces or sells your food (this works great with #1 above), is the ultimate act of care and resistence. Learn the name of the person behind the meat counter. Join (or start) a community group that works on local issues. The more connected we are the more empowered and resilient we are.
- Run for local offices, such as the school board. Or at least, start attending meetings and speak up when you hear something unjust. The importance of local politics is often extremely underestimated — you do not need to search long to find multiple local news stories about how a very small handful of activists have been extremely successfull at exploiting spots on school boards to enact wildly unpopular and discriminatory policies. These same positions can be used as a force for good, but only if people run for them.
- Be a visible ally. If you are not from a marginalized community, one of the most powerful things you can do is be visible in your allyship. Put out a yard sign. Wear a t-shirt with an LGBTQ+ flag. Suggest a book by a queer or Black or Indigenous author for your book group. I know this one can feel intimidating for many, especially because creating a culture of fear is a primary tactic of those who promote oppression. But if you feel safe and secure enough to do so (I’m looking at you, heterosexual men), this simple act is more powerful than you think.
- Eat seasonally. A root problem with how our food systems is that we do everything in our power to maintain stability and uniformity at all costs: to make sure every product is available every day, regardless the season, everywhere in the (developed) world. But that simply isn’t how ecosystems work. Ecosystems regenerate by moving energy from unusable to usable forms and back again, through cycles: cycles in the soil, cycles on the landscape, and cycles of weather and the seasons. The more we fight this, the more we break cycles of regeneration and bring rise to problems like deforestation and soil loss. It may sound simple, but canning fresh veggies when they are in season, and opting out of foods at times of year when they have to be produced in energy-intensive controlled environments located halfway around the world, is a strategic way to take what otherwise would just be an additive change and turn it into a disruptive one.
These are not your only options, and I’m sure they aren’t perfect. But what they share is a strategy of disruption — intentionally choosing patterns of behavior that deviate from established norms and practices. They work because when you create a bit of space for something different, that difference can thrive and grow and before you know if multiple spaces of difference are intersecting and joining and eventually, a new regime — one that values equity and diversity and justice — has overtaken the old one.
