this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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Individual Climate Action

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Discuss actions that we can directly take as individuals to reduce environmental harm.

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Boycotting is participating in society - in fact, even more so. (slrpnk.net)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net
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The idea that boycotting is not participating in society could not be more perversely incorrect. Boycotting prioritizes society above yourself. Neglecting to boycott is the selfish act of putting your own personal benefit above all else and abandoning one of the few tools we have to improve things while feeding harms of society. Both kinds of consumption are “participation” but if you choose to feed the baddies then your participation is detrimental.

It’s really perverse to refer to boycotters as non-participants when they are actively taking on the burden of informing themselves of who the bad players are, tracking supply chains to brands, and sacrificing selfish benefits in order to participate in the least destructive way for the purpose of improving society.

Convenience zombies who just grab whatever they want may choose poorly, or not. But it’s worse than a coin toss whether the outcome is detrimental because the most harmful suppliers have the advantage of not being burdened by ethics. Scrapping ethics enables them to offer the most value for the money and undercut the more ethical choices. So if you simply neglect ethics in your consumer decision, you are only looking at value for the money and statistically expected to choose a more socially detrimental option.

It harms everyone because the lesser of evils gets driven out and the worst suppliers prevail. The US saw this with printers when Oki pulled out of the US marketplace. Now the least detrimental option tends to be Brother, which still exposes people to shenanigans. We lost the most ethical option while HP dominates.

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[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 7 points 2 weeks ago

I'm onboard. My whole life people around me have treated the economy and the environment as two abstract concepts that give us things, eternally opposed to one another - insisting that we need to make sacrifices to protect the economy (giving up a minimum wage, long-lasting infrastructure, and - most importantly - huge swaths of the world around us). After all, the economy gives us jobs and cheap cheap products. You won't be able to visit a national park or spend much time outside in general but you can buy a bigger TV every year so it's all worth it right?

I was already buying as little as possible for more general environment reasons. Producing less waste, reducing the need for new manufacture and shipping ever so slightly (and the need for extraction along with them). I put a lot of work into sheparding items around so they wouldn't end up in the landfill.

But now I'm doubling down on those actions and the motive is spite rather than worry for my world (and though it doesn't say great things about me, that's definitely the stronger and more effective emotional state).

I'm going to do my best to sit here like a tiny black hole in the economy, taking in my wage and spending out as little as possible, and helping others do the same. I can make and fix a lot of things for others and help them get lots of stuff for free that would otherwise be thrown away. They've complained for years about millennials and now zoomers killing industries because we don't buy enough. Buddy that wasn't even deliberate; you ain't seen nothing yet.