Climate Change (Emily & Audrey's Version)
Climate Change (Emily & Audrey's Version)
Blaming overconsumption habits and TikTok's Shein haul trend on Jake Gyllenhaal
Happy Sad Girl Autumn to all those who celebrate.
I’ll take a cue from Adele, Taylor, and my seasonal affective disorder and dive right into today’s depressing conversation: the planet is dying and humans are the cause of it.
There’s a lot of discourse around whether or not climate change was an inevitable event for Earth (aka absolving humans of their actions throughout history) so I did a little digging before we begin today’s conversation. What I ultimately found is that climate change and Earth's eventual future are two mutually exclusive occurrences.1
There are certain factors that naturally cause warm events as well as planetary factors that have a long-term influence on Earth as an existing rock. These are things that would happen regardless of whether or not any living thing existed on the planet. But
an uncertain factor is the continuous influence of technology introduced by humans, such as climate engineering, which could cause significant changes to the planet. The current Holocene extinction is being caused by technology and the effects may last for up to five million years. In turn, technology may result in the extinction of humanity, leaving the planet to gradually return to a slower evolutionary pace resulting solely from long-term natural processes.
Many “scientists say there is relatively low risk of near term human extinction due to natural causes,” but also there is between a 1% and 20% chance humans will go extinct sometime during the 21st century(x). While it is unlikely that we will die as a direct result of climate change, humans will be negatively affected by changes in the global ecosystem and could make the planet a miserable fucking place to live.
Essentially we are, as the kids say, the drama.2
Now it’s time to introduce today’s guest!!! My brilliant sister, Audrey Sharp, may not be a fully formed climate expert but certainly knows more about it than I do. This week, we talked about how overconsumption affects climate change, if there’s anything we as small little people can do to fight climate change on our own, and what in the hell green capitalism is.
Hi, I’m Audrey. I am the Prez’s sister and a junior at the University of New Hampshire studying Animal Sciences! My major is quite far removed from the topic I am talking about, but I am enrolled in an Environment and Society class as well this semester with my roommate/best friend, and while it’s very different from the curriculum of my other courses, it has had a very big and personal impact on me! We’ve learned about issues like climate change, advertisement and the media, agriculture, etc., throughout all kinds of communities and how it relates back to the ideal, material, and practical aspects of our society. I think it really just hits home to the reality of our current culture and societal climate that I have been growing up in especially now that my generation is beginning to enter the “real world” and are become the new leading voices for our world. I’ve learned veryyy quickly this semester how much of a passionate opinion I actually have on this subject and the topics it covers and I am ready to rant about it!
Kids These Days
If you had $500 of expendable income, what would you spend it on? And why would it be clothing from Shein?
Fast fashion is a massive issue worthy of its own newsletter, but for all intents and purposes, let’s just focus on this lil $10 billion subsection: Shein, TikTok obsession and site where I still have a $60 credit from 2017 that they won’t release because I refuse to send them an image of my drivers license.
Shein is the perfect example to kick off today’s conversation but first, comedy:
Emily: Would dying when the world catches on fire because of Shein hauls be a good or bad way to go?
Audrey: For Shein, bad. For Nasty Gal, good.
If you’re confused by all of these terms (fast fashion, Shein, TikTok):
But in all seriousness, Gen Z is told day in and out that we’re not going to have a planet to raise our kids on should climate change continue at its current rate and is then fed the idea that participating in acts of overconsumption is the name of the game on social media.
I asked Audrey:
Emily: As a member of Gen Z, what is your relationship to climate change?
Audrey: The entire topic of climate change, to me, has become normalized to just be a part of my daily life and worries.
It honestly stresses me out a ton thinking about it especially because I’ve watched the conversation go from a lightly touched upon topic as kids —where Disney Channel and teachers at school tried to get us to understand why recycling was important and to do beach cleanups for the ocean wildlife— to the discussions now where the mentality has become this idea that there’s no time left and the world is burning down around us.
Emily: How do your age and generation determine your consumption patterns?
Audrey: Trends, trends, trends. I think social media perpetuates the trend of fast fashion and impulsive wants, one example being the “must-have” videos on TikTok, but there’s also an abundance of more.
I recently watched a documentary for my class that addresses that there is this whole subset of the economy to keep the supply and demand of consumption which needs things like social media ads, sponsorships, and influencers to continue this cycle. All of that is what boosts bigger corporations to consolidate that into their own power, which all trickles down throughout individual consumption patterns within society. And it’s crazy because this all can start from a 16-year-old talking about something on TikTok.
There’s just this daunting effect of how much an Instagram sponsored post basically holds its own economy. To sum up, a quote from the documentary states, “for capitalism to survive and grow as a system, production would not be enough. At its core, capitalism depends on commodities going through a three-part circuit of production, distribution, and consumption.”
It’s not only companies like Shein that fuel the desire for overconsumption (although with the increase in microtrends and the negative environmental impact of fashion production, they certainly are a very big part of the problem). Essentially all companies are guilty of this form of marketing and that’s because it works: we learned months ago when discussing social media and celebrity culture’s influence on Gen Z that the use of aspirational marketing (ads designed to prompt consumers to want to buy the things their favorite celebrities are promoting) results in consumers over-consuming.
All of the things we overconsume have to go somewhere when we’re done with them. Oftentimes, that’s a landfill overseas and not trapped in the “reduce, reuse, recycle” loop we were led to believe would save the planet.
I asked Audrey:
Emily: This seems self-evident but how does overconsumption directly create an overabundance of waste?
Audrey: Touching upon what I mentioned before, we recycle through trends. The need for belonging in a material sense catapults these impulsive wants. Within overconsumption, specifically under the topic of conspicuous waste, there is the phrase “shifting the baselines.” As society shifts, it is harder for the individual to not think that a want is a need.
Take the iPhone, for example: we see value where there necessarily isn’t. As a society, we find reasons to redefine wants as needs, which breaks down the boundaries for us to become more comfortable with consuming. The sales of electronics and cell phones have exploded since the booming technological advancements starting in the 1990s, but there are incredible global environmental burdens we’re seeing with that. As the sales have increased, so has the disposal of electronics gone up dramatically, but unfortunately, these items don’t get disposed of in an environmentally friendly way.
The implications of the overabundance of waste are destructive to other communities, once again contributing to this dangerous climate cycle. We benefit much better in a developed world, but we externalize our environmental and social costs onto developing worlds, so we can’t deem these technological changes as “progressive” as we may assume.
Emily: Why do you think we all know so little about our consumption habits in the US? Is it willful ignorance (we would be able to find out if we just asked but we don’t want to), or is it intentional deceit (we’re taught not to look behind the curtain so that we will keep participating in harmful consumption cycles)?
Audrey: I think it’s a form of willful ignorance. In my class, what we talked about was that climate change is a “hyperobject” to our minds. This means that we know so much about it but it’s so hard for us to grasp its magnitude that we ignore it.
This is a theory developed by Timothy Morton who suggests that the features of climate change are so mind-bending and are too large to comprehend that we “reflexively discount their reality.” Personally, I agree and find that explanation very true.
In a 2017 Guardian article about Timothy Morton, journalist Alex Blasdel wrote: “We live in a world with a moral calculus that didn’t exist before. Now, doing just about anything is an environmental question. That wasn’t true 60 years ago— or at least people weren’t aware that it was true. Tragically, it is only by despoiling the planet that we have realized just how much a part of it we are.”
Gen Z is the most likely generation to take steps to live more sustainably and lessen their individual carbon footprint, but they are also equally the most likely to participate in dangerous overconsumption habits. In her notes, Audrey’s class looked at how consumption often feels like a need rather than a want, which feels especially resonant when we think about Gen Z’s perception of social media.
I asked:
Emily: What is the relationship in our society between consumption and interpersonal connections? How does this feed into overconsumption?
Audrey: Consumption and materialism are definitely geared toward our age groups. Media consumption has created this new world of advertisement and has blurred the lines between wants and needs.
We see this in the trends I talked about before such as on college campuses. The trend of things like UGG boots or HydroFlasks have cycled through universities throughout decades and while they’re not necessarily essentials, we fall into these overconsumption patterns where we buy them when they’re popular and dispose of them when they’re not until they come around again.
A lot of concepts we discussed in my class were debates between whether this can be credited to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, the theory of positional goods, or the aspect of “Hau.” To sum up, these all basically address different reasons for why we overconsume. It debates between reasons that we need to reach a certain level of power in society to prove ourselves to other members and the stuff we buy are of exclusive status, that material goods are labels to express ourselves and our individuality, or that the goods we consume are of sentimental value and there are deeper reasons to their social ties.
Emily: Do you think if there was an increased number of honest conversations about overconsumption and direct efforts to reduce its chokehold on our society that we would have a significant positive impact on climate change?
Audrey: Yes, but I believe that a lot of these conversations begin and are currently happening in classrooms such as mine. This poses a whole new realm of issues as opportunities like college require a certain level of privilege and class but the societal gap is widened by climate change which reinforces the current cycle we are stuck in.
The Greenzo Effect
In all honesty, when Audrey started talking to me about “green capitalism,” I did immediately think of 30 Rock’s resident capitalist plant-turned almighty tree hugger, Greenzo:
Oddly enough, that’s not what green capitalism is, so I asked Aud:
Emily: What is green capitalism? Is it a way forward to lessen the effects of climate change or a trap for us all to be complacent while big companies do the bare minimum?
Audrey: I think green capitalism can be a really progressive and beneficial asset in lessening the effects of climate change but it’s taken advantage of and has become a sort of trap. It is parallel with the consumerism part of it. My textbook has an excerpt that says:
“In addition to their insinuation of environmental power, ads… have another insidious implication. Whereas the promise of environmental power attracts consumers in some corners, advertisers have found the opposite to be a quite successful selling strategy: green consumerism. For marketers, green consumerism captures those purchasers who self-report they are committed to the environment, purchase in ways that demonstrate environmental commitment, and have psychometric measurements (personality traits, attitude, knowledge, etc.) of ‘environmental consciousness.’ 44 Companies like The Body Shop (cosmetics) and Whole Foods (an organic food supermarket chain) have lined up to demonstrate through their environmental and social good works that they care about more than profit. They also make a sentimental appeal to the guilt we feel over our own consumptive and destructive habits.”
Basically I think green capitalism is a promising idea, but it won’t solely get us to where we need to go. Profit-making and social responsibility can be complementary like how the excerpt mentioned. The marketplace should reward companies that foster environmental sustainability and justice.
Citizens can demonstrate their environmental values through consumption like purchasing organic foods at places such as Whole Foods. Basically, with green capitalism, business becomes a social movement which in part plays a role in the solution.
Going off of this concept, another term to know is “feel-good consumerism” which refers to how businesses try to promote by incorporating environmental values into the marketplace to continue to promote the cycle of consumption. Whether this is a good or bad thing can be debated.
Corporate power and its media consolidation have numerous dominant effects in the global media market such as removing consumer choice and being able to send a consistent message through the media by having fewer nuance and complexity in contributing perspectives. Corporate voices are increasingly unified and set the agenda for economic expansion, privatization, and consumption by controlling what can be defined as “issues” or not and what things actually do come to attention about climate change in the media.
Unfortunately, the quest for ratings that includes views, likes, reposts, etc, directs the content produced by these mass media voices in the corporate world which affect our stances and reactions to subjects like climate change. As the documentary clearly and elegantly expresses, “there’s no limit to capitalism’s revolutionary impulse to suck the life out of the planet.”
Emily: Who will have the biggest impact when they make large-scale environmentally conscious changes: individual Emily’s and Audrey’s, influencers like Kendall and Kylie, or corporations like Jeff Bezo’s capitalist death trap?
Audrey: A lot of the time, the bigger companies and influencers are the faces for change in hopes that it trickles down to individual people and inspires them, but in reality, most of the time we view it as that the “bigger” people are handling it so we’re good. However, I believe if each individual person does contribute and work to make personal change, it will have just as much of a widespread effect as the bigger capitalistic companies.
Anything Good?
In the wake of last week’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), many are criticizing the agreement reached by participating countries: an article in Nature sums it up with the subheader: “The Glasgow Climate Pact is a step forward, researchers say, but efforts to decarbonize are not enough to limit global temperature rises to 2 °C.”
I asked Audrey:
Emily: In your opinion, is there any chance to save our planet for the rest of our lifetimes?
Audrey: For the rest of our lifetimes at least, I think yes. But for our kids or for the next couple generations, I don’t think so. Not that there’s a chance that we can save the Earth, but that we will just be able to live our lives out through the end, although I don’t think the future generations starting in the next ten years will have that same privilege and opportunity.
A recent excerpted reading I had, titled “Cascades” written by David Wallace-Wells, stated that “the Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through right now… [and] all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gases.” The crisis of climate change unfortunately is inevitably happening, and it is very scary and dystopian to admit that reality.
From an optimistic approach on the other side, our generation has learned about things different from our parents in the classrooms growing up, but we would just still live by the way of our parents because those were the authoritative figures we responded to. However, now that we are growing up and out into our own homes we can dictate the new ways of life for our future society and implement all that education we obtained throughout our schooling.
Emily: The government is very often in our business in very unnecessary ways (read: reproductive rights). Why should they be nosy about our overconsumption and overabundance of waste habits and not about our uteruses?
Audrey: It’s because this issue impacts EVERYTHING. I used to debate what was the most important stance in politics and now I believe it's our climate issue. It affects everyone without discriminating by race, poverty, economy, or gender.
In my class, we discussed the sociological explanations for natural disasters. Disasters expose and amplify social qualities and characteristics of the places they affect and there are many examples that demonstrate this. Women often move into more traditional domestic and caregiving roles in the wake of a natural disaster. Where you live and your social class affects what emergency services you can access, and what rebuilding and rescue efforts you will receive.
Natural disasters are such a prominent aspect of climate change and its societal, political, and economic implications are just some examples of why the government should focus more attention on the overconsumption and overabundance of our waste habits.
With no environment, there’s nothing else for us.
Well damn. That makes more sense than why Jake Gyllenhaal still has Taylor Swift’s scarf from 2010.
A billion and one thank you’s to Audrey for being so unbelievably smart and perceptive and very good at school!!! Thank you to everyone reading down this far who has still supported me and E4P through this incredibly busy and messy season!!!! And of course, thank you to Dionne Warwick, Taylor Swift, and Adele for the drama!!!!
Just a heads up: The “Future of Earth” Wikipedia page is actually a trip so be careful while reading it if you’re prone to paranoia and/or crushing existentialism.
Fun fact: if the extinction of humanity happens as a result of our actions, it’s called omnicide. The fact that there is a word for that, however, is not very fun at all.