More on green & morality…
I’ve a good friend who talks about food having replaced sex as contemporary America’s moral fixation, as a site where we publicly act out our ethical concerns, define our own moral high ground, exercise judgments. I think he’s largely right and I also think he’s baiting me when he says this.
You see, he knows that I fret about food. After I learned about peak oil and peak water around a decade ago, I planted my first garden. I started small, but made yearly expansions, as I wanted to eventually grow the bulk of what I ate. This was partly about doing my environmental bit, but partly pragmatic: envisioning the world with less oil and water, I figured if I wanted to keep eating delicious things, I was going to have to grow them. (If you’re thinking that’s a tad extreme, imagine what my friends thought ten years ago!)
This particular friend and I have had the predictable arguments about organic and local foods being a luxury. And I’m sure it’d all be more expensive if I didn’t have a 640-square-foot garden and folks down the street who fish for their livelihood. No doubt it’s much harder—and pricier—in his town.
This tussle could put a serious strain on the friendship. We manage not to let it—but mostly by avoiding getting down to the nitty gritty, which we have the luxury (that word, again) of doing because we aren’t life partners. But what if we were? Today, the New York Times has an article on green ethical conflicts creating tensions inside families.
In “Therapists Report Increase in Green Disputes,” Leslie Kauffman notes that families, couples in particular, increasingly bicker about how green is “green enough,” about recycling, and—quite often—about food. In the most extreme situations, “Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said he had seen divorces among couples who realized that their values were putting them on very different long-term trajectories.” I can see this. Depending upon the couple’s dynamic, it’d be so easy for personal conviction to slide over into judgment.
This overall moralizing of environmental decisions into a much broader framework is akin to the point philosophy professor Stephen Asma made last week in the Chronicle article I wrote about in “Enviro-Faith.”
It is a moral issue, I realize that. Indeed, when my friend argues about food ethics having supplanted sex, I want to say “and rightly so!” for the network of creatures affected by any one person’s eating decisions is far larger than that affected by one person’s sexual decisions. (I suppose there are exceptions, but this strikes me as a pretty reliable generalization). Since morality is the undergirding for the ethical systems we use to maintain society, it makes sense to me that it should come into conversations about how we will interact with lo, these many food-network creatures.
And yet, and yet…. so many articles on morality in relation to environmental issues have their own aura of baiting. I think it has something to do with the way the issues are framed, with the implication that environmental concerns are inevitably divisive. More on this later I’m sure, but for now, I’ll just say that might well be a false premise.
In: Text · Tagged with: environmentalism, food, morality, sex
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