Jenny Price - Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto

An Environmentalist Manifesto

Jenny Price

Copyright 2021 by Jenny Price

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Cover design: Lauren Peters-Collaer

Cover art: (birds) IconicBestiary /

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Book design by Lovedog Studio

Production manager: Lauren Abbate

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Price, Jennifer (Jennifer Jaye), author.

Title: Stop saving the planet! : an environmentalist manifesto / Jenny Price.

Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020044355 | ISBN 9780393540871 (paperback) | ISBN 9780393540888 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism.

Classification: LCC GE195 .P74 2021 | DDC 363.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044355

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For Danny, Shlomit, Yishai, Jake, Ian, Micha, Gabe, and David, and for your children

The future is yours

AS A CARD-CARRYING AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALIST, Im obsessed with two questions that environmentalists mostly dont seem to be askingand that Ive become convinced are two of the most urgent questions you can possibly ask.

ONE, why arent we making more progress on environmental crises?

More than half of the 1,340 Superfund sites have been listed for 3040 years. The air in thousands of communities across the U.S. remains exceptionally dangerous to breathe. And can our climate-change policies even begin to save Miami?

TWO, why do so many Americans hate environmentalists?

How can a green agendalets clean up the air and water for your kids!possibly inspire such widespread rage?

Are you saying, but the problem is big money! Its the ultraright, its Fox News, its the oil companies! If so, I dont disagree.

It is also way past time to grapple with the enduring and substantial failures of American environmentalism.

In Stop Saving the Planet! , I urge anyone whos having nightmares about climate change to immediately stop obsessing about how to save the environment as a separate world out there.

Stop talking about it, stop hand-wringing about it, stop arm-waving righteously about itif you want to save people, polar bears, or anything else.

Instead, the most passionate environmentalist question should be:

How can we change environments vastly better? And by better, I mean a lot more sustainably but also a hell of a lot more equitably.

We live inside of environments 100%, and we change environments 24/7 to live. Most of us do it ferociously badly and unfairly: thats why the world is 2 warmer than it was in 1900 and why polar bears are starving and why industries pump out over 300 million tons of plastic each year.

Maybe youre objecting, but environmentalists do ask that! Not mostly, though, and not really.

Stop Saving the Planet! is about how and why the save the planet! approach fails to seriously and sufficiently challenge how most of us live in the 2020s.

I ask why environmentalists find this way of thinking so deeply appealing. I ask why it makes other people so deeply angry.

And I ask what we desperately need to do instead.

I try to be reasonable, if not entirely polite.

Can we please stop saving the $#!ing planet?!

Fahrenheit, soon to be centigrade

Start protecting our environment today

earthday.org

IN A NUTSHELL: WE NEED AN IN HERE, INSTEAD of an out there, environmentalism.

We need to object vociferously toinstead of double down onthe deeply bizarre assumption that environment is a not-human world out there.

You change environments to provide food and shelter. You change environments to drive a car, to Facetime with your mom, and to turn on the lights. Your T-shirts, MacBook, Nikes, Ford or Prius, and favorite couch are all 100% made out of wood, oil, rocks, dirt, trees, cotton, animals, and so on.

As humans on earth, we literally change environments to live. Environment is not out there! Your life in 2021 is foundationally environmentalwhether you live in a 6th-story East Village condo or in the White House or on a farm in Wisconsin.

So yes, to change environments sustainably, well need to preserve rivers, wildlife, and lands. Absolutely. Well need clean watersheds, and well want the bears to stick around. Well need ecosystems we can all thrive in. Well have to appreciate, generally, how we co- inhabit environments and how everything thats not human responds.

And yet, good luck trying to stop climate changeif you think about it as trying to save, protect, or rescue the not-human environment.

Rather, how can we change environments a thousand times better, to sustain the health and well-being of people and environments?

We need a Great Changes, not a save the planet!, environmentalism.

And a Great Changes environmentalism starts with two key premises.

Great Changes environmentalism, key premise #1

We have to change environments dramatically better to create and use our stuff

Consider how a Prius, for exampleas an established save the planet! symbol since the 1990s changes environments.

Who cares, in other words, how it saves the environment or doesnt emit CO2?

How does a Prius actively contribute to the spewing of greenhouse gases and other pollutants over its 1020-year life?

Think mining the ore, for example, and growing the cotton, forging the steel, changing the brake fluid, shipping everything, and junking the battery. Your Prius or Tesla, if you own one, facilitates an awful lot of greenhouse gas spewing as you and other people make, ship, market, sell, buy, drive, park, maintain, repair, resell, and finally junk the car.

When you ask how your Prius does polluteinstead of how it doesntit can look far less climate-friendly, and a lot closer to your neighbor Tims Escalade, than its save the planet! reputation suggests.

Your Prius, like any car, changes environments wretchedly badly. It contributes a lot more than it doesnt to the wildly high-polluting industrial practices that devastate our atmosphere, bodies, forests, rivers, oceans, wetlands, wildlife, and more.

To create and use our stuff to not do that, were going to have to massively clean up our ultra-toxic industrial practices.

So a Prius? Really, itll save the planet? As an environmentalist strategy, it mostly just sidesteps the problem.

Great Changes environmentalism, key premise #2

We have to change environments dramatically better to create and use our wealth

How does your high-mileage hybrid contribute to the spewing of greenhouse gases and other toxics for 1020 years as it makes money go round? And why do you almost never hear a Prius driver ask this question?

American environmentalists tend to define environment as a world outside of economyand even to define and worship the environment as an antidote to all our 21st-century profit-mongering.