Voicemail (January 24, 2008)

Kudos to Geoff Trowbridge in his Jan. 10 article “The Shared Economy” for raising a topic of discussion which seems to me an obvious culprit of environmental degradation: Western society’s focus on individualism.

Unwittingly, Sartre and his existential counterparts spread a message of self-definition that was usurped by capitalism. According to corporate America, your individualism can best be defined by physical expressions — expressions which only consumption has the power to manifest. In today’s world, we express our “uniqueness” by the images we present to the world. “Lifestyles” are those images, whether they are grounded in substance or not.  But we could express ourselves by our experiences rather than by acquiring material goods.

Trowbridge notes the philosophy of Albert Bates of the Ecovillage Training Center: Experiences lead to a richer life. I believe our experiences most often reveal relations between people, a train of thought that might lead away from individualism and toward a more collectivist mentality. Existential philosophies are not necessarily undermined by conceding that all people and activities are interdependent, but an individual’s actions and expressions can have environmental consequences that affect the rest of us.

Perhaps our greatest dilemma today is striking a balance between the recognition of this interdependence while maintaining individual freedom of choice. A basic tenet of environmentalism is to expand our notion of “one’s rights end where the other’s rights begin” by including the environment into the category of “other.” God may not have created our essence first, but our self-definitions must still play by the rules of a sustainable human environment; otherwise the philosophies won’t matter — we’ll be gone.