I decided that environmental activists were not on the side of the angels after watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. My middle school teachers showed it to our class — twice, presented first in Environmental Science and then Social Studies. The teacher of the former had already bared her allegiances by taking an impromptu poll of the class: “How many of you come from military families?” she asked. I put up my hand, along with a scattering of others. “You’re the reason the rate of solid waste in our city is so high,” she declared. “It’s because you move house so often and throw so much away.”

At the age of thirteen I did not feel the affront of this public denouncement as keenly as my mother, who burned with indignation on my and my father’s behalf. Nonetheless, I knew enough to suspect any objections would not meet with sympathy from that quarter, so I complained to the Social Studies teacher instead.

“This film is political,” I objected.

“How so?” he wanted to know. It seemed neutral and balanced to him.

“Then why does it only show Republicans doing bad things?” I countered, and he (to his credit) admitted the justice of this charge.

Environmentalism, I suspected, was a ploy — a rhetorical charade, partisan politics in the guise of humanitarianism.

Even the humanitarian credentials struck me as suspect. The earth has undergone a catastrophic, total extinction event four times before, droned the narrator of another documentary, which I endured many years later in a misguided attempt to forge human connection during a lockdown-era Netflix party. This factoid presumably served to persuade us of the urgency of the environmentalists’ appeal, by confirming beyond the shadow of a doubt that despite all appearances to the contrary from our comfortable vantage point, Armageddon loomed. It’s happened before so it could happen again, went the logic. 

Setting aside the general air of fallacious reasoning, along with questions of how we had ascertained this insight into obliterated history (that is, on what evidence), I still found myself wanting to inquire waspishly, “So what?” Our present earth is a marvellous place — the same documentary had laboured to demonstrate as much. If such a planet had emerged from the fifth go-round, why worry about the sixth? Besides, who would be there to complain? 

Therein lies the tension at the heart of the environmental movement. Humans are a nasty lot, they tell us. We don’t deserve creature comforts like gas stoves in winter and comfortable family-sized cars because our conveniences muck up the place for everyone else. On the other hand, the urgency of the cause seems to derive all its force from the peculiar preferences of our species. We like the variety, having many beautiful birds to study, large animals to admire, coastlands to safely reside. Perhaps other species don’t. No one has asked the rabbits for their vote on biodiversity, or the bamboo for its stance on the role of invasive species.

That raises another question — just how did all the other critters manage to incite the apocalypse four times without our help? Perhaps all this soup-throwing and road-blocking is throwing a wrench in nature’s peaceful cycle of rebirth, which it would carry on happily if we did the same.

These objections presume we are just one among many, a species with no particular privilege, only a penchant for punching above our weight in the arena of problem-causing. This premise sits uncomfortably alongside the equally fervent conviction in the eco-campaigning that we must assume a responsibility to preserve natural life, to bestir ourselves and interfere — but only in the name of limiting and curtailing. 

Preservation of the species, a Darwinist might hasten to reply, provides any animal with compulsion enough to act — in our own self-defense. Any student of C.S. Lewis will tell you that this escape raft won’t get you far. In Mere Christianity, he dismantles the idea of a “herd instinct” propelling humankind to serve one another. “Feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not,” Lewis points out. After all, you simultaneously wish to satisfy any number of other urges. “This thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard.”

I may have evolved with an irresistible urge to propagate my own species, which my highly advanced brain now extends to the year 20…er, what decade are we on now, when the earth is due to expire? Regardless, that same evolved brain surely impels me likewise to stay warm in the winter, to eat delicious and calorie-rich foods, to spare my tired feet when hauling groceries home late at night. Who am I, a mere animal, to say which impulse ought to win out at any given moment? How shall a bundle of impulses decide which impulse to prefer for my own actions, let alone labor to persuade my fellow animals to feel the same?

… today’s environmentalism rubs me wrong because it is so ungenerous

These objections may be easily answered if we allow any sort of spiritual motives, to say nothing of the robust vocation of Christian conservationists like Paul Kingsnorth. It is not the philosophy of environmentalism that bothers me most; I might even entertain a case for government interference if someone would take the trouble to account for the distinctions between public goods and the tragic commons. 

With all the good will and sound reasoning in the world, today’s environmentalism rubs me wrong because it is so ungenerous. What benefits me could not possibly benefit the other creatures on the planet. We must sacrifice, suffer small inconveniences, sanctify ourselves by mortifying the flesh. The world is a pie, and we have already eaten more than our fair share of it. We are the problem. Solving it means not only efficacious methods for producing tangible change, but necessarily acts of penance. True believers are proud to show their devotion by harming themselves, though naturally they expect everyone else to join in, too — by government fiat, if not willingly. The pain provides the appeal, even as during lockdowns when private entities would volunteer to pointlessly prohibit harmless fun, on the grounds that “having fun” was not in keeping with the spirit of COVID crackdowns. “Don’t you know there’s a pandemic going on?” 

Likewise, the environmentalist appears to believe that we ought not be enjoying ourselves. We find ourselves in the midst of a crisis — a claim much more easily believed if we act like it is the case. Thus the self-annoyance and petty martyrdoms acquire a tinge of moral imperative: how much more satisfying to suffer for a good cause, when suffering is itself the cause.

Given the perverse appeal of such reasoning, I anticipate resistance to my counterproposal: a spirit of hospitality in our relationship with nature. If Earth is “the only home we’ve got” then surely we want it to be a pleasant one — not only for the penguins and the polar bears, but also for ourselves and (dare I suggest) our descendants, too. Imagine an activism that made the lives of people better, not abstract generations of the future but here and now; not because we shiver in our bedrooms to keep the thermostat turned a few degrees lower or forego holidays to the world’s most enchanting destinations, but because we have in mind the good of all beings, including ourselves and our neighbours.

A spirit of hospitality would … extend beyond the particularities of policies, to transform our underlying attitudes

Take for example organic products or Low Traffic Neighborhoods. The environmentally conscious pitch these innovations to us as meaningful sacrifices, a collective ennobling that will reward our giving up short-term pleasures (cheap milk, quick commutes) with long-term benefits (health, fitness, community). On those terms, it is difficult to object. Hospitality means accounting for difference, though. The hostess thinks beyond what would benefit her and those like her, to consider the diet, customs, preferences of strangers. The hospitable city would ask how mandating “green” policies would accommodate the family who puts savings on groceries towards buying new shoes, the mother who ferries small children home from the shops — to say nothing of the deliverymen consigned to working night shifts by Low Emission Zones.

A spirit of hospitality would also extend beyond the particularities of policies, to transform our underlying attitudes. The vicar’s wife brings jars of homemade marmalade to Sunday morning breakfast, because they will feed dozens of hungry young men for weeks to come. Friends dine on salads of arugula, freshly picked from the greenhouse behind a terraced house. An avocado tree springs from a pot of composted soil, itself collected from the scraps of a family’s meals. As we share these little delights, we understand the natural world as rich, bounteous, a treasure to bring into our kitchens and gardens. We cultivate it; it nourishes us.

Let us conceive of life as an ongoing exchange of gifts, rather than cycles of exploitation where the most good we can do is to deprive ourselves. Instead of asking how to consume less, ask how to enjoy it better.