Suzanne Harrington: Our desire to obey is why corporations are getting away with destroying the planet

"We’ve ditched the plastic bags, straws and coffee cups, maybe even gone vegan or got an electric car or stopped flying - so what more can we do, short of going off grid and upholstering ourselves in solar panels?"
Suzanne Harrington: Our desire to obey is why corporations are getting away with destroying the planet

Suzanne Harrington.

Someone forwards a clip of a dinosaur – it looks like a T Rex, although I’d have to ask a palaeontologist - walking into the UN assembly hall. Oooooh. A trailer for a new Jurassic Park film? As global UN representatives freeze in terror, the dinosaur asks the petrified security guard if he’s ok, before taking the mic at the main podium and giving a little speech. Turns out he’s a talking T Rex, with a gravelly American accent. And it’s not a movie trailer.

“Listen up people,” he says. “Going extinct is a bad thing. And driving yourselves extinct? In 70 million years that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. At least we had an asteroid. What’s your excuse?”

We don’t have one. What we do have is (a) overwhelm (when we contemplate how the human species is creating the extinction of the human species, our brains melt) and (b) deadly obedience (we are quite literally choosing extinction over making a fuss).

The overwhelm is obvious – how on earth can little old us, rushing to pick the kids up from school and wondering who is going to be kicked off Bake Off this week, do anything about deforestation and ice caps? 

We’ve ditched the plastic bags, straws and coffee cups, maybe even gone vegan or got an electric car or stopped flying - so what more can we do, short of going off grid and upholstering ourselves in solar panels? How would that work, when you live in a flat in town?

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB

Our desire to obey is more complicated. In a recent Guardian essay, activist George Monbiot writes about how “the obedience reflex is our greatest flaw, the kink in the human brain that threatens our lives.” 

Think how Extinction Rebellion and other direct action environmental groups are perceived by society, thanks to hostile media reporting: how dare those entitled hippies disrupt ordinary people going about their ordinary business. 

How dare they interfere with traffic, transport, commerce and workers. How dare they demand that we all wake up and realise that we are being herded towards extinction, like lemmings with store cards. Who do they think they are?

The greatest swindle of our time is that we have been persuaded that if we use bags for life, everything will be okay

That it is all down to us, and our tiny daily decisions. The blame has been shifted from planet-wrecking corporations to individual citizens, or ‘consumers’, as we have been rebranded. Monbiot gives a vivid example – the head of Shell berating his chauffeur for buying strawberries in January, when strawberries are not in season. You couldn’t make it up.

Yet for the past fifty years or so, such blame-shifting has worked a treat for the corporate giants – for instance, litter and plastic are thought by us, the little people, to be worse for the environment than animal factory farming. Except it isn’t.

And yet we remain (understandably) paralysed by overwhelm, and (inconceivably) terrified of sticking our necks out. Hopefully, our kids won’t.

x

More in this section

Lifestyle

Newsletter

The best food, health, entertainment and lifestyle content from the Irish Examiner, direct to your inbox.

Cookie Policy Privacy Policy Brand Safety FAQ Help Contact Us Terms and Conditions

© Examiner Echo Group Limited