(00:00):
Well, I'm in over my head. No one told me trying to keep my footprint small, was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need trying to save the planet. Oh, will someone please save me? Trying to save the planet. Oh, will someone please save me?

(00:24):
Welcome to In Over My Head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is Michael Maniates. Michael is a former professor of social science and former Chair of Environmental studies at Yale NSU College in Singapore. His teaching, research, and writing and focus broadly on environmental, politics, sustainable consumption, and oppositional forces to transformative environmental governance. He has authored or co-authored five books and dozens of articles, opinion pieces, book chapters, and review essays. His recent work explored systems of sustainable consumption and production, social innovations for a low growth, high prosperity world, and the pitfalls and promise of conscientious consumption. His latest book, The Living-Green Myth, looks at the promise and limits of lifestyle environmentalism. So welcome back to In Over my head, Michael.

(01:08):
Thank you, Michael. It's great to be back. Thank you so much for having me.

(01:12):
We chatted about two years ago. It was on the Rethinking Growth season. It's been two years. Yeah. What have you been up to in these two years?

(01:19):
Yeah, until just recently, I was helping run the environmental studies program at Yale, NUS College in Singapore, one of the first liberal arts colleges in Asia. So real active in helping undergraduates figure out where they want to go in the environmental studies realm. And I've just recently joined on with my pals at Story of Stuff, an environmental organization in Berkeley, California with a significant online presence. I actually mentioned 'em quite a lot in the book, and I'll be working with them to bring to the forefront a whole host of issues that are covered in my book and also around general issues of consumption and consumerism. And then of course, I've just been pushing hard on getting this book out, and that's been not a small effort, but I'm really pleased with the result.

(02:04):
Yeah, no, it's great. And yeah, I read the book and I really enjoyed it. So yeah, tell me about the Living Green Myth. What is this about?

(02:10):
Yeah, well, it's a short book, about 40,000 words. I hope people won't find it to be one of those typically academic books. I mean, I wrote it intentionally with some lively prose and provocative statements. And the book is for people who are trying to make a difference around environmental issues in ways large or small. The book unpacks what I call the dominant story of green living or of lifestyle environmentalism. It's that dominant story that says that you and I can be really powerful through our individual consumer and lifestyle choices with respect to the environment. And while in the book, I want to honor those kinds of behaviors and choices, what I seek to do is to show how this claim that we are powerful through what we consume and how we live individually, that it's by and large if we're about trying to make a difference in politics and economics and structure, that this is by and large a con job.

(03:16):
It's a sham. It's a story that has developed beginning in the late 1980s, early 1990s, at the behest of a variety of powerful actors that are looking to take advantage of our environmental concerns and steer us towards a kind of consumerism and commodification that leads to fatter profits, but doesn't lead actually to that much of a difference in environmental outcomes. But I don't end there. I mean, I want to offer some solutions by helping people think about how they can leverage off of their existing lifestyle environmental behaviors, how they can leverage off of that to be even more powerful than they are in the world in service of prosperity for the human and for the non-human world.

(04:04):
Maybe we can talk about maybe some more details around this job and this myth to really just established what your argument is about.

(04:12):
Yeah, sure. I think in some places I call out, I suggest that I don't think that there are five guys in a room looking to demobilize the environmental movement, but if there were, they would've come up with this dominant story of green living. And this is the one that I'm really focusing on that says that if you and I sort of just do the little things, it doesn't quite matter what we do. If we ride a bike, we plant a tree, if we go to vegetable garden, if we eat less meat. I mean, there's a long list and we all have seen those long list of things to do to save the planet. So the dominant story says if we just do those things, that somehow there'll be this aggregation of effort somehow that will spread, and all these little small drops will lead to a big ocean, a tsunami of social and political change. So that's the dominant story that I'm suggesting has been manufactured for us. And it doesn't work for a whole lot of reasons. I mean, I wish it did. At one point I was very much enamored of this dominant story, but if all of us did every little lifestyle change that we were told we would do, the math doesn't play out. The ultimate impact is still small compared to the enormity of the environmental challenges sort of before us.

(05:37):
The things that we really need to be doing typically aren't for sale in the supermarket or the checkout stand. So rather than choose between an electric vehicle or a hybrid or a petrol vehicle with high efficiency, what we really need to be offered is a choice between automobility and perhaps a kind of high efficiency public or mass transit. But you can't buy that sort of option at the checkout stand. It turns out that even if we do do some of the small things, maybe to reduce some of our consumption, perhaps fly a bit less, for example, that we live in this ever expanding economy, if we fly a bit less, everything else being equal, that drops the price a bit on the seat and somebody else snatches that up. And marketers sort of push all of that. And so there are a number of other reasons why this accumulation of small little things that we might do doesn't lead to big impact. But those are the major ones. This idea that the math doesn't work out the stuff we really need isn't for sale. The quest for increased growth, it easily swamps any little gestures we might make. And in addition, of course, the dominant social form on the planet, the publicly held corporation is about maximizing revenue in every quarter, and they will continue to push green products on us to increase overall consumption. That leads then I think, to just almost a fruitless endeavor to try to make a difference in our role as an individual consumer.

(07:14):
I know early on in chapter two, you talk about four varieties of green living that can springboard deeper change. Let's talk about those four varieties of green living.

(07:24):
Yeah, sure. In that second chapter, what I aim to do, and I hope that your listeners will identify themselves among these four options, what I mean to do is to say, look, a lot of people try to live green in various ways, either by how they live their life or what they buy or both, without assuming that those little choices are going to aggregate to lead to political or social change. To say it another way, there are a lot of people who do the right thing environmentally from a personal standpoint, who don't assume that by doing it, it's going to somehow bring ExxonMobil or BP to its knees, right? But they just do it. And so I wanted to honor those folks who weren't perhaps captured by this dominant narrative. And the four varieties quickly are this idea of inverted quarantine, mindful living, street cred, and community connection.

(08:22):
And I'll just give a teaser on each, knowing that people could always have a look at the book, but inverted quarantine, it's an established notion that says that we make consumer live in ways where we aim to protect ourselves from environmental insults. So the biggest example perhaps is people buying organic food to protect their families from possible pesticide residue. The mindful living is getting at this idea that oftentimes we do things that are important to us ethically without the expectation that those acts are going to make a big difference. We just do them darn it, because it's the right thing to do. And perhaps it provides a daily reminder of our commitments that help us then be more ambitious in other aspects of our life to change the world. So a variety of green living practices can fall into that category that just center us, perhaps give us some peace.

(09:18):
Remind us of the larger struggles before us. Street credit is a more recent one, and I felt like I was not hanging out there on a limb, but it was a new idea in the literature, this notion that perhaps some of us live green because if we don't, the folks whom we work with or whom whose good graces we depend on, may think that we are bad people perhaps, or at least they might not take us as seriously. So the same way that a lawyer has got to get dressed up in a suit to impress a jury and a judge, it may be that folks working in the environmental movement or elsewhere feel the need to live green less they be deemed hypocritical by colleagues and friends. And the fourth, a variety of green living is this notion of community connection. This speaks in particular to my experience.

(10:11):
And so much of my green living comes as I try to make connections with small entrepreneurs who are putting out really wonderfully sustainable products. And I just want to show 'em some love, man, but without the expectation that that's going to change the world, but it may help change their life. And it develops a connection. I can see them around town, we have a nice chat. It's a good thing to do. It is a way of demonstrating a shared ethical commitment. But none of these activities in and of themselves link back to this idea that if everyone just consumes a little bit on the green side, it will somehow aggregate into massive change. These are other reasons I call out these four varieties because I think people who practice one or more of them are on the vanguard for mobilizing around a new kind of living green that could make a difference.

(11:07):
Yeah, no, I'm really glad that you kind of broke those down. And for myself, I obviously identify with different areas, but I think the one that's, yeah,

(11:14):
Where are you? Which ones do you

(11:16):
Like? Yeah, I mean, I think with my tiny living, frugal living, mindful living definitely resonated. But I think the more interesting one was actually the street cred, because I feel like that idea around what came to mind was really guilt. And there's so much guilt. And to me, it seems like it can be quite endless because what you're eating, how you got to, let's say a gathering or a conference or something that hypocrisy, it really never ends. Although, like you say in the book, it also can springboard other change too, right? If you're meeting up with like-minded people and also just living those values, right?

(11:50):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, the hypocrisy thing is maybe the next book. For me, it's impossible in the current structures within which we live not to be an environmental hypocrite, that is, it's impossible to live our lives in a way that isn't going to have some environmental impact because significant impact because of the structures within which we live. And so as you know from looking at the book, rather than blaming the mouse, we've got to be looking at the maze. And the downside of this living green myth is that it may foster a dynamic where the me are busy blaming each other for which way they're zigzagging in the maze and maybe doing a little self-loathing themselves, rather than just getting together and saying, damnit, we got to change this maze.

(12:39):
Speaking of that, I know in the book you talked about on campus years ago, there was an initiative to reduce food waste that ties into that getting everyone on board thing. Maybe you tell me a bit about that.

(12:48):
Sure. Yeah. Without going down a rabbit hole, many years ago I was working with a group of students who were very, and I tell this story I should say, because I think it captures perfectly the mental and emotional trap that the Living Green myth in its dominant form can pull or these traps that can spring on people. So I had a handful of undergraduate students in environmental studies program at a nationally ranked liberal arts college. I was working at some time back who were very concerned about food waste on campus. And it turned out that in the dining halls, we had just set up this system that some may remember from their days on college campuses, whereas you're taking your tray with your plate and taking it to the counter to give it to the people who are going to wash it. There were bins, there was a food waste bin and a paper waste bin.

(13:40):
And I don't an aluminum bin. There are a lot of bins, and you're supposed to sort, and then you sort of move on. Well, this was a system that is just super vulnerable to people just spac out. I mean, not malicious behavior. I mean, it just takes one or two people to put the food waste in the paper bin or the paper in the food waste bin or whatever, and then suddenly your bins are contaminated. You got to toss it all out. Well, this was a great concern to my students who did I think what many environmental folks might do. They said, the problem here is that these folks, they're not paying attention, and we got to make 'em pay attention. Maybe there is a hint of they have bad values or they don't care. So there was a whole sequence of posters in the cafeteria and tent cards saying, come on, let's get it together, folks.

(14:27):
Well, the problem still persisted. So long story short, the decision was made for a group of students to collect this contaminated food paper, recycle stuff over a couple of days, and pile it all up in the middle of the interior courtyard leading to the cafeteria and said, this is supposed to shame people. And it just led to more disaffection on the part of the student body who just saw this as kind of a weird guilt, trippy kind kind of thing. So I had suggested the students a few days later that instead of trying to get people to be 100% on top of things 100% of the time, wouldn't it just be easier just to have 'em take the whole darn tray up to the counter and hire somebody in the back to just do the sorting? And their response just sticks with me to this day was powerful.

(15:16):
They said, no, we need to teach these people how to do the right thing. And at that point, it seemed to me that in this whole living green scene, we might be confusing our strategy with our theology. A good strategy would be just to structure the system so that even when we're spacing out, we still act sustainably. But they weren't interested in strategy. As so many folks that I've worked with aren't. They're interested in calling people to the Church of Gaia, to bringing them in and being conscious environmentalists. And that's, I think, where this critical juncture comes. In. The Living Green myth, it says that we solve this problem only by converting large groups of people whose then consistently persistent small acts will lead to big change, where in reality, we just need a couple of people to come together and hire that darn student to sit in the back of the counter and do the sorting.

(16:11):
The postscript here is about a year later without any pressure, the college administration went with exactly the model I described, because it was just the optics, the optics of throwing all this stuff out. It was too overwhelming, Michael. It's the maze, not the mouse. We can't be blaming each other and getting upset when people don't prove to be 100% on top of things 100% of the time. As Hawkins says, rather than working as consumers, we need to be thinking about our power as citizens and as workers and in other venues as well, to change the structures that then make it natural and easy for people to behave sustainably.

(16:53):
And another thing that stood out for me, like you briefly talk about some of the history around this living green myth and how it wasn't always the case that it was always about individual choices. Yeah. Could you briefly talk about maybe some of a little bit of history around that?

(17:06):
Yeah. Isn't that history crazy? I mean, were you sort of struck by that? I was struck by it when I figured it out.

(17:11):
Yeah, no, yeah, it was really interesting.

(17:12):
Yeah, no, I am old enough to remember the first Earth Day. So I was in sixth grade in the first Earth Day and in the seventies and well into the eighties without romanticizing that period, people did try to live green. I mean, there was a lot of talk about green living and about wanting to put our environmental concerns into action. But back then, living Green really had a much more kind of citizen hue to it. I mean, I don't mean activists, people weren't all storming the streets or making trouble, but a kind of citizenship veneer, veneers too is not the right word. A hue, a flavor, a citizenship sort of focus. So people, it sounds quaint now, but people would write letters to the editor or they would call up their Congress people or they would go to their provincial authority, or they would sit in on city council meetings or they'd get together with neighbors and friends and do a teaching.

(18:02):
It was kind of collective. It was trying to think about how to pull things together that way. There were no green products to purchase to speak of at that point. I mean, the idea that you would try to make a difference in the world through your individual lifestyle would be treated, I think as maybe kind of odd back then in the seventies and eighties. I mean, there were people who doing voluntary simplicity and appropriate technology, but a lot of that was out of the mindful living be true to myself rather than try to affect larger change. And it all changed in the 1980s, and in a rather sudden stretch of time, just maybe six or seven years, you had this interaction of these different kind of uncoordinated forces that came together and produced this living green narrative in really quite unexpected ways. So this idea that we saved the world one lifestyle change or consumer behavior at time, I mean, nobody came up with that in a considered way thinking that was going to make a difference.

(19:02):
It merged because of three forces. The first was in the early eighties, there was a rise of international or global environmental issues that really began to generate a great degree of public alarm. I mean, the ozone layer was one issue, the degradation, the ozone layer. There was the loss of tropical rainforest and biodiversity. There was international trade in toxics. And we can see in the early eighties a palpable increase in public concern across at least the so-called richer developing world of the global North around international issues. And it wasn't clear what to do with that anxiety because you couldn't really write a letter to your editor saying, we need to stop deforestation half the world away. And so a lot of that anxiety then got funneled into a stratospheric increase. Can I say that a striking increase in the contribution to a whole array of environmental organizations around NGOs?

(19:57):
I mean, I was working in California at the time. In the US it would be the Sierra Club, it'd be the friends of the Earth, it'd be the World Wildlife, WWF. It would be Natural Resources Defense Council, I'm sure there are similar analogous groups in Canada and in Europe as well. And so the second force here is that environmental groups get just a boatload of money, which doesn't sound like a problem if you're pro-environment, but it put the environmental groups into a bit of a pickle because they had all these new members coming in and money to grow programs, and they needed to show that they were good for it. They wanted to keep those new members while retaining legacy members. But that was hard to do because beginning in the eighties, we had Ronald Reagan in the US, we had Maggie Thatcher in the UK.

(20:43):
We had the rise of neoliberalism and environmental groups were really playing defense. They were losing on a whole lot of policy initiatives and their tried and true approach when they had new members, a tried and true approach of saying, Hey, join us in another campaign for a better regulation just wasn't going to work. Then the best they could really say to people in that context was, give us your money, be a member, and we'll do our best to keep things from going from bad to really bad. I mean, it's just not really a very inspirational message. So the groups hit on a strategy of saying, Hey, you can be powerful by Living Green. It was a way of dodging the gnarly politics of the time, keeping members busy until this neoliberal erosion of environmental regulation passed. Some environmental groups saw that for what it was just a way of keeping members busy.

(21:35):
Others didn't really care. They were just trying to keep members. But the long and the short of it was that beginning in the mid 1980s, the major environmental groups almost overnight began preaching this story that says, we can change the world by doing individual lifestyle changes, and we're going to tell you how to do it. Corporations had picked up on this. They had tried major corporations in the early eighties to sell us green products, but it didn't really go anywhere. But with this combination of environmental groups being pushing the narrative and a public anxious for action fits and starts, major corporations began to figure out that green living narrative beginning in the late 1980s, and then it just went full speed ahead in 88, 89, more than half of new product releases in North America had a green component to it. And it had a green component that was attached to a story.

(22:28):
And the story almost always was, you're worried about the environment, Michael. You want to make a difference by this product and it's going to make a difference. You matter as a consumer. And from there, it just took off because there was too much money to be made. This consumer scapegoating lets politicians off the hook. It provides not all environmental groups, but it provides some environmental groups, the opportunity to put lists of ways to save the planet out there and recruit new members. And so you get this quixotic dynamic between an anxious public corporations who have to maximize profit on a quarterly basis, environmental groups and governments all pushing this narrative. And it's become, as I say in the book, I fear the new norm. Now, living Green doesn't have that citizen hue. More often than not, it's got that lifestyle consumer angle on it. And it happened so very quickly,

(23:29):
And you mentioned there briefly how the lists of things that people can do, and I think just to round out the conversation, you created your own list, right, of ideas that could springboard actual change. We've kind of danced around 'em a little bit with our conversation, but I'm curious to get into that a little bit more because I found them very nuanced and very refreshing. So the one to start that stood out for me was the get smart. Tell me about Get Smart.

(23:51):
Some of your older listeners will remember the Don Adams Get Smart sort of Secret Agent series. And that's, that's not what this is. That last chapter, the last major chapter is really about helping people to develop their own lists in creative ways and to cultivate this ability to seize opportunity to make a difference rather than become committed to a set list of practices. I draw a comparison to an athlete on a football team. We don't tell athletes in competition, you must do this at a particular moment. We equip them with the ability to see openings and work with others to exploit opportunities. And that's what that last set of recommendations in chapter four is about. So get smart. It's essentially about that little section. It asks people to just become expert in one of the environmental issues or concerns that most concerns them. So if for instance, your green living behavior is buying organic food perhaps then get smart about the agricultural system.

(24:55):
Get smart about what organic food comes from. Get smart about how it is that we live within a system where food that is demonstrably unhealthy for us is less expensive than food that might be virtuous for us. And the reason for the Get smart focus is because in my experience, as we learn more about an issue, we then begin to see where we can be most powerful in working with others to sort of make a difference. I fear that these 10 ways to save the world kinds of lists or 50 easy ways to save the planet books are really dumbing us down. They embrace and reproduce a facile, superficial understanding of environmental issues, and we just jump from one item to another to another, never really digging into something that might help us. The digging in that is might help us actually develop some citizen expertise, see a few really provocative openings, talk to a few other folks, and make something happen beyond the realm of just a simple lifestyle choice or purchasing decision.

(26:05):
And I guess that ties also in with another one we can touch on, which is think organizationally choice edits. Tell me a bit more about that.

(26:12):
That section is one of my favorite sections, and so I'm so glad that it resonated with you. It captures many of the aha moments in my career and three in particular come to mind that get called out in that section. The first is that most of the environmentalist success stories that we think about don't come about as a result of this kind of spontaneous consumer demand driving businesses or government to make a difference. Instead, these environmental successes have come often than not from a small group of individuals working within organizations to shift the available choice that's available to us as consumers. So I'm thinking here, for instance, Walmart's big push towards sustainable seafood that's really focused consumer choice on sustainable products or the reduction in food waste in cafeterias across university campuses in North America through taking away food trays and putting out smaller plates.

(27:12):
It's amazing, like a 40% reduction in food waste just by that or the flying less movement in Europe that I talk about in the book that gets universities and businesses to really ask their employees, do you really need to fly or can you take the train? And then of course, speaking of universities, there's the sweatshop free clothing movement. A lot of the hoodies and t-shirts and whatnot that you see in college campuses are sweatshop free. And these kinds of environmental successes, again, didn't result from consumers suddenly using their buying power to make the shift. Instead, it happened through a small group of individuals who are pushing hard. That was the first big aha experience for me. The second is that this kind of this editing, this constraining, this narrowing or rejiggering of the choices that are available to consumers. Man, it's not something new. Corporations and governments have been doing this for more than a hundred years to drive economic growth and to increase consumption and all the environmental impact that comes with it.

(28:15):
I mean, supermarkets are a great mini example of this. Everything on the shelf is on the shelf for a particular reason. The high profit, highly processed products that many marketers want us to buy are at the end of the aisle or they're at eye level or they're in the checkout lane. So that's an example of just how the choices that are presented to us get framed in a particular way. And the third and last sort of big takeaway for me in all of this was that fans of Living Green, those of us who want to see a better kind of environmental outcome in the future, we've got to double down on choice editing. I mean, there's a tendency to think that this kind of manipulation of the choice menu or the choice architecture that we see is somehow kind of sneaky or below the belt.

(29:03):
And I guess in some ways it is, but that's what we're up against. And so what I try to do is in that little section that you called out, is to give the readers the tools to think about how they could come together with their friends and neighbors working within organizations that they know to do the same kind of choice editing or choice reconfiguration that we might see in supermarkets to drive high consumption. But to do that kind of choice, editing your choice reconfiguration to bring about better consumer behaviors, higher degrees of sustainability and just better health for us all.

(29:40):
Yeah, it seems like making those changes, that takes time. And actually that reminds me of another one on your list, which is take the long view. So tell me more about that.

(29:48):
Take the long view section asks the reader, I guess in the same way that I'm now asking your listeners ask the reader to consider the possibility that we are going to save the world, that we are going to be successful in bringing about a healed planet, both for humans and for non-humans alike, but that it's a generational exercise that we're talking about several generations we're probably, things are likely going to get worse before they get better, and that is not at first blush an easy thing to hear. But if we were to understand that our role right now is to do what we can where we can with others to make it easier for our great, great, great grandchildren to pick up the pieces and build out a world that's absolutely marvelous, if we see it that way, then what could we do? We could do an awful lot.

(30:49):
How would we behave? What choices would we make if we wanted those distant ancestors to say, oh man, those people back in 2025, they had it tough, lots of reasons to be discouraged. That seemed like the odds were against them, but they really thought through this idea of how to set the stage to get through the worst of it and give us the advantage to build back better. So if you take the long view, it may very well be the case that the choice here isn't between a petrol car and an electric car. It may be that the problem is with cars. And so one then might want to be thinking about what one can do perhaps by getting smart on that particular issue and working with others, identifying organizations through choice, edit and other things that I suggest to move away from automobiles. That's that's one of several of examples. I particularly liked writing that long view section because I think what it does is that it invites us to see our present situation, you and me and others as a gift. It doesn't feel like as a gift, we are part of a multi-generational exercise and steering the planet back to health. I mean, nothing that we do to the planet except elastic extinction is irreversible. Things can change for the better, and we may be now the thin edge of the wedge of a multi-generational exercise in making something beautiful happen.

(32:21):
Yeah. I guess, Michael, was there anything else you wanted to mention about the book or anything else that we haven't covered yet?

(32:27):
I think what I would say, and readers will pick this up in the postscript that I wrote, is that it's been a long struggle for me to figure out how to talk about this living green myth. This idea that if you believe your individual choices, individual consumer choices are going to drive big change. It's been a long haul for me figuring out how to talk about that in ways that don't make people feel bad. Because increasingly, I think so much of our identity is wrapped up in wanting to do right in the world through our lifestyle choices. And then I come along a SmartyAnts professor and writer who's basically saying, no, no, that's all wrong. And over time, I've discovered that understandably, that doesn't make people feel good. They think I come off as a bit condescending. And so this book has been an attempt to avoid that trap, to say that we are all in this together. It's a seductive story that we could change the world one lifestyle choice at a time. It's the wrong story, but we can leverage off of that story and our own commitments to more deeply realize the true source of individual power as we individually and collectively try to make a difference in the world.

(33:43):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I'm glad that you've figured out how to craft that narrative and get the story out in the world. And I very much enjoyed the book, and I hope people read it. Where can they find the book?

(33:53):
They can find this book through all the normal sort of book channels you might find online. It's published by Polity Press, Polity Press in the uk. And so listeners who are in the UK or in Europe can get it through polity. It's been released in the UK already, but it enjoys North America release through all major booksellers in the middle of November and then goes to Asia and Australia in December. Again, through all those normal online booksellers.

(34:25):
Awesome. Yeah. Well, yeah, again, that's the Living Green Myth. Really enjoyed the book and thanks so much for the conversation, Michael.

(34:31):
Sure. Michael, thank you so much.