Note: this is drawn from the daily journal of my roadside vigil, an hour every weekday morning at a heavily-trafficked intersection with an assortment of signs about climate change. This post can be read in its entirety (musical excerpts and all) at the Man With Sign page on FB. For the purposes of a DK diary I’m posting only the final paragraphs.
Man With Sign, Week 113, Day 5
(snip)
Reflecting on sexual harassment and issues of gender oppression in the light of yesterday’s flurry of news about Senator Al Franken’s misbehavior during his days as a traveling comedian, I find myself, as I so often do, making analogies with the issues of climate and environmental responsibility. Bear with me for a second.
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I’m 59, and I grew up in a society where energy was cheap, there for the taking, there for the burning. All kinds of unvoiced assumptions about the dynamics of (actual caloric) power were embedded in everyone’s actions, responses, imaginings. We saw no conflict in a rock band using enough electricity to light a small country, just to show us a good time. We felt no dissonance in the idea of traveling all over the country, or the world, in order to “find ourselves.” We left the lights on when we left the room, and we turned up the heat rather than put on a sweater, or turned up the AC rather than take it off.
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These easy presumptions about our use of the Earth’s stored energy reserves were part of everyone’s mental landscape — even those of us who aspired to be “environmentalists.” The default culture was one in which we never *asked* the Earth or Sun for their gifts, but *took* them: digging, drilling, strip-mining — and leaving the land behind after it was exhausted.
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Now, in light of our understanding of the climate crisis, of sustainability and resource overshoot, of the hitherto unexamined externalities of fossil fuels, we see such behavior as profoundly irresponsible, deeply damaging, ugly, morally compromised.
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Do you see where I’m heading with this? All of us grew up in a society where patriarchal norms were never questioned, where unvoiced assumptions about the dynamics of inter-gender power imbalances were embedded in our actions, responses, imaginings (even those of shy, geeky, feminist wannabe intellectual teenagers like someone who’s in my head with me even as I write). Easy presumptions about gender roles and our place in them were part of everyone’s mental landscape — even those of us who aspired to be “liberated.” The default culture (reinforced in music, movies, literature, conversation, religion, the workplace, you name it) was one in which men *took* from women, leaving them behind when they were exhausted.
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All of us — even the most “woke” feminists — were part of that culture. We had no choice, any more than we had a choice about where our electricity came from. And the gradual emergence of feminism and environmentalism as ethically compelling approaches to living introduced us to the idea that we could choose — what we burned for our heat or cooling or transportation or illumination, what we did in response to the urges of hormones or mating or affection. Some of us chose more responsibly than others, some of the time — but all of us participated. Some of us (men and women both) denied the validity of female sexual agency, just as some denied the existence of non-extractive sources of energy. I remember a cartoon in which an energy company executive explained, “We own the oil, we own the gas, we own the coal, we own the…(ahem) solar power isn’t FEASIBLE!”
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We can dream of a society in which sexuality is, so to speak, sustainable — one in which the default setting is no longer one in which men take and burn. We can dream of a society in which energy is, so to speak, consensual — in which the fuel for our daily lives is not produced through crimes of violent penetration and extraction against the earth, but in cooperation with natural forces.
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It’s our responsibility in both these areas to examine the extent of our participation in societal structures and civilizational paradigms that we now realize are not morally tenable. We — none of us — can escape the stigma of that participation, and we — all of us — have amends to make.
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Man With Sign