How I Became a Disillusioned Environmentalist
By: Yael Wolfe
Tags: Conservation, This Happened To Me, Activism, Climate Change, Environment

“This is pointless, you know,” my boyfriend told me often. “All this trouble you go to to ‘save the planet.’ That’s all liberal propaganda. There’s nothing wrong. You don’t need to be going to all this trouble.”

I never engaged in this conversation. We both knew we were on opposite sides of the political spectrum and mostly, we just avoided talking about those issues.

But my efforts often encroached on his lifestyle. He didn’t want to have to live in a house that didn’t have Ziploc bags in it. In fact, he was a plastic junkie — he even owned a 3-D printer and had boxes and boxes of plastic thread in the garage that he fed into that machine.

He owned two cars and a motorcycle which he drove hundreds of miles each week, just for pleasure. When he went shopping to restock his pantry shelf, he bought dozens of pre-packaged snacks that came in plastic tubs, nestled within cardboard sleeves, wrapped with an outer layer of plastic. And he wasn’t going to waste time cutting all his plastic soda rings to prevent them from ending up around some poor turtle’s neck when it eventually ended up in the ocean.

On my way to work in 2012. (Copyright Yael Wolfe)

There was nothing I could do about this. I am not the type of person who would ask her partner to take on all her causes. My boyfriend had already done a lot to accommodate my activism, but I knew where the line was and I wasn’t going to ask him to cross it.

But as the years went on, I began realizing how utterly pointless my efforts were. Every single thing I did was being canceled out by the person I lived with. Not to mention the other millions of people in America. Oh yeah, did I mention that by 2013, the “going green” movement seemed to have gone out of fashion? I guess a lot of people really did see it as a one-year experiment that might earn you a book deal and then after that, it was business as usual.

And maybe that’s not fair. There were certainly a lot of big names out there that I believe were legitimately trying to create systemic change. Yet I witnessed the public and even the media constantly criticizing them for promoting green living in soundbites, as if the little changes we make (like turning off the faucet while you brush your teeth) will actually create any kind of impact. Just take a look at all the pushback Colin Beavin received from journalists back in the late aughts, or watch his documentary No Impact Man to see people arguing that what he was doing was…superficial, I guess.

I was astounded by that then and continue to be astounded by it now. What’s the argument? That we can only make a genuine impact by taking extreme measures and since that’s not a realistic solution, we should do nothing, at all? That seems to be the message, so far as I can tell.

And yet, if everyone — or even nearly everyone — had taken these “soundbites” to heart, had made these adjustments, we would be in a very different place today. A better one.

To call any efforts to have a lighter impact on the earth superficial is a cop-out, pure and simple. It’s a great way to spin the message beneath that: that we don’t really care about the earth and have no intention of inconveniencing ourselves on her behalf.