Shifting the Narrative: Why Eco-Guilt Doesn’t Work
By Teresa Helms
May 6, 2021
I may be biased, but I love environmental majors. Being in a program surrounded by students who are passionate about, invested in, and excited to engage with the same issues as I am is exhilarating. Simultaneously, it can be exhausting. I spend the bulk of my academic hours reading, writing, and thinking about impending environmental doom. I often feel like I need to be doing something, or at least doing more.
The front desk of my residence hall hands out biodegradable compost bags, which I can take and fill with the orange peels that collect in my room. However, I have little control over the food scraps I send down the conveyor belt in the dining hall. I can follow my vegetarian friends’ lead and eat less meat, but I know that this may distress the rheumatologist who monitors my iron deficiency. I see photos from protests and climate strikes and think I should be on the ground making noise, but I am held back because of the pandemic. Even though these actions seem inconsequential in the broader context of colossal environmental problems like climate change, I am still full of regret for the activism I failed to participate in pre-COVID. At the end of the day, I feel an overwhelming sense of inadequacy.
Maya Bostwick, a senior Environmental Studies major and manager for the Eco-Reps program at the University of Vermont (UVM), has had similar experiences. She affirms that the sentiment is not uncommon: “I’ve heard a consistent theme within the environmental majors that there’s sort of this culture of guilt...where some people are super, super involved and if you’re not that involved [and] you’re not doing everything perfectly, you’re a bad environmental student.” The guilty feelings that come when we think we are not living up to the standards of environmental activism required of us is termed “eco-guilt,” and the individualist framework from which it arises is fundamentally flawed.
A 2020 book by Sarah Jaquette Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, highlights the importance of relinquishing eco-guilt when advocating for environmental issues. Ray defines eco-guilt as “the feeling that we have so harmed the environment that we are eternally indebted and will never be able to right that debt, no matter how many green choices we make on a daily basis.” Corporations and media outlets exploit these feelings through marketing strategies, emphasizing individualism and ignoring the potential for—and necessity of—collective action. Many internalize this as guilt, a response to an unattainable standard of personal sustainability. They are left feeling that their own efforts are insufficient and that individual action is the only way to combat environmental challenges. Examples of guilt-driven individualism have been projected in the mainstream since the rise of classical environmentalism. For instance, the Ad Council’s “Crying Indian” campaign of the 1970s used shame-inducing advertisements to redirect responsibility for pollution from corporations such as The Coca-Cola Company to individuals. Another is the pervasive idea of personal “carbon footprints,” a term fabricated by British Petroleum in 2004 that has since become commonplace, effectively convincing consumers that their own carbon emissions are the cause of climate change.
This messaging does not reflect reality and does not address the root of the problem. An individual consumer’s carbon footprint is minuscule compared to the carbon emitted by a few select corporations. Making individuals feel personally responsible for the brunt of environmental crises distracts from the fact that the largest contributors to climate change and other grand challenges are societal structures and big corporations. According to the 2017 Carbon Majors Report, around 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are produced by 100 companies. Half of those emissions can be traced back to just 25 companies, namely in the fossil fuel industry. Shaming individuals does nothing to change that. Though individual practices are a necessary part of the future of sustainability, larger institutional structures should be addressed instead.
There is opportunity here for science media to present a more productive narrative. This type of effective communication is brought to us by folks such as Caroline Frigon, an Educational Programs Coordinator at the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain. Frigon describes science communicators as those “who have some sort of training or background in academia and the sciences.” She notes that these communicators “[take] their knowledge and expertise and then [interpret] science to make it more compelling, interesting, [and] relevant to the general public and to a broader audience.” Science communication exists to make complex concepts digestible and shape public understanding, which Frigon comments on: “One [concept] that comes up a lot for me is climate change and how that really complex system works. You don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty, necessarily, of specific drivers and the albedo of the arctic changing, but instead [you] want to create these narrative-driven arcs that people are compelled by.”
Moving towards big environmental goals, particularly climate stability, will require pressuring corporations and institutions of power. With most of this pressure misplaced onto individual consumers, however, people are burdened with responsibility. Rather, we should seek to encourage a response of collective organization, as this will more accurately achieve what Frigon calls “building an eco-efficacy.” Science communicators must also address the flawed economic system that surrounds us and how this exacerbates the ability of powerful entities to waive responsibility for environmental negatives. Régine Clément, CEO of The CREO (Clean, Renewable, and Environmental Opportunities) Syndicate, writes in her essay Catalytic Capital that "[t]he challenge of climate change is perhaps best defined as our challenge to end destructive capitalism." Change does not happen by working within the existing framework. Movements that succeed are those that disrupt capitalist systems, and those that fit in between the cracks. Grassroots collectives that do not rely on these systems are therefore instrumental in achieving success. Frigon emphasizes the importance of building change at this level, stating that “community outreach and grassroots efforts tend to be far more powerful and persuasive than larger movements or broader, coarser scale movements.”
That said, capitalist institutions can exploit grassroots efforts, and authorities and systems at UVM are no exception. As a university that prides itself in “sustainable leadership,” UVM instrumentalizes these phenomena in order to place the responsibility of maintaining this status onto its students. Take for instance the University’s Sustainable Campus Fund, which, according to their website, exists to support a “vision of enhancing a culture of sustainability, innovation, and research on campus” by providing grants for sustainability-oriented projects proposed and led by students. While this may seem like an opportunity for many students to have their ideas realized, the program has problematic implications. Rather than addressing environmental concerns from an administrative level, the University’s presentation of the Sustainable Campus Fund as the main pathway to implementing change on campus suggests that sustainability is the responsibility of students instead of professionals with administrative power.
Molly Hetzel is one student who has been able to take advantage of this program, using the funding to produce the podcast Ripple Effect, which has discussed the Sustainable Campus Fund. When asked about the role of the University’s administration in sustainability, she affirms that “infrastructure should be taken care of by the University and should not fall on the shoulders of students.” In her eyes, students should be able to utilize this opportunity primarily for “projects that are more creative and unusual,” instead of feeling pressure to compensate for initiatives that should have already been taken by those with the money and power to do so.
UVM frequently boasts of its ranking in the Top Green Schools listed by the Princeton Review and makes this a selling point to prospective students. Once tuition is paid, the burden of sustainable ethic is passed onto these students. UVM profits off eco-guilt as with any other institution. The concept of a Sustainable Campus Fund is not inherently bad, and there should be support available for creative student endeavors. However, student-led initiatives, while necessary and important, are not sufficient alone when more powerful administrative entities withhold readily expendable resources. The Sustainable Campus Fund, as Hetzel says, “is a great way to…make changes on small-to-medium projects and individual areas, which is a necessary part of making progress in environmental challenges, but is by no means enough.” She adds that “individuals can’t make big strides quite like those in charge of the systems can,” and concurs that UVM as an institution is not doing enough to address environmental concerns. In its current state, the Sustainable Campus Fund may be doing just as much harm as it does good by serving as a distraction from the University's lack of initiative in sustainability. These microgrant projects make students feel accountable for the actions of the school they attend when in reality they have little effect on the way UVM operates as an institution.
UVM often claims the positive outcomes that arise from this fund and other instances of student activism on campus without acknowledging the efforts of student leaders. The website for UVM’s Office of Sustainability displays a headline declaring “UVM Divests from Fossil Fuels,” which links to a page that briefly explains the implications of the University of Vermont’s Board of Trustees decision to divest and a statement that reads, “it’s the right thing to do, and it’s in our nature.” Missing from this page as well as the official report on divestment from the Sustainability Work Group is mention of the years of student activism from groups such as Organize UVM that led up to this decision. This includes the proposal that was denied by the Board of Trustees multiple times within the last decade until the recent vote on July 14, 2020. Despite its long-standing resistance to divestment, UVM has now co-opted this as another “green campus” appeal to students, pushing it to the forefront of their marketing efforts now that they can. Conveniently, this marketing scheme omits their own reluctance to the decision and the labor of students who actually made divestment possible.
It is important to note that this collective, student-driven movement was ultimately successful in its goal to pressure UVM into divesting from fossil fuels. Maya Bostwick identified that the common theme among successful environmental initiatives at UVM is that “they’re [initiatives] that give students power or where students take that power for themselves.” She pointed to the perseverance of student activism that pushed UVM to divest: “I remember as a freshman the divestment club was sort of dying…and then cut to last year and they actually succeeded.” This example of ground-up activism productively utilized the collective power of students to call for institutional change, and it is something we should aim to repeat. “[It] just goes to show how much four years can change something and how much student activism can actually make a difference,” she adds, continuing “it’s just a matter of buckling down and really being in it for the long run.”
We are still stuck in a narrative that prioritizes individual action over institutional obligation and misplaces the blame for environmental issues. We need to recognize that student movements are powerful, but they should not be the only actors in this story. Most importantly, we need to leave behind our experiences of guilt and individualism. Until we address this, measurable progress in the realm of global sustainability will not be possible. Rejection of guilt is not a rejection of responsibility or failure of will. It is not apathy. Rather, it can help us shift accountability to its rightful place and steer us away from environmental passivity. It can also help us understand that collectively we hold far more power than we do alone. By acting together, there is greater potential to influence power where it is concentrated. To forego guilt is to embrace hope and the possibility of collective movement.
