In The Sustainability Class (New Press, Dec.), climate policy analysts Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan lambast the “green” lifestyle as a consumerist distraction from global warming’s root cause: overconsumption by a few.
What’s the story behind this book?
Kolinjivadi: In Montreal, where we’re from, a new university campus that was branded as ecologically friendly was being constructed in a very poor neighborhood, and it displaced people. Environmentalism became an excuse to force out the poor and replace them with wealthy students who could afford to participate in a particular lifestyle—the “sustainable” lifestyle. We realized environmentalism was being co-opted.
Vansintjan: But it was a book agent who told us, “You have to go to L.A. You have to go to Venice Beach,” because, as we ended up writing, that area epitomizes this kind of disparity—you have people living these “green” lifestyles, drinking $25 smoothies, while homeless people aren’t allowed to sleep on the sidewalk.
Sustainability is usually thought of as a good thing; in what way is it not?
Kolinjivadi: “Sustainability” is now about sustaining the status quo—it’s transformed into the opposite of a desire to change the system.
Vansintjan: We admit in the book that we’re also “lifestyle environmentalists.” I’ll feel bad about choosing to fly, but I’ll still fly—that kind of thing. Environmentalism has come to be about your relationship with what you buy. What we need is an environmentalism that’s about relationships between people, between classes.
You depict people’s preference for “sustainability products and solutions” as a kind of denialism. How do we fight that, when doing so means asking people to give up convenience and pleasure?
Kolinjivadi: What we show in the book is that actually these solutions are leaving people uneasy. If you’re building a new house, you get it LEED-certified so you can feel like you’ve done the right thing. But in interviews, we found that even the people who advocate for those kinds of personal, consumption-based solutions—vegan influencers, directors of environmental charities, “green” realtors—seem a bit uncomfortable. They seem to be questioning things.
Vansintjan: Many people are feeling an anxiety, a mental anguish because they can see things aren’t getting better. Especially now that the technologies being proposed as the next “climate solutions”—AI, crypto—are clearly drawing too much energy. We clearly seem to be rewarding people who waste energy. So it’s like, what’s the balance sheet here? Are we destroying the entire earth in order to benefit a few people? This is a social problem—the ecological crisis is fundamentally a social problem.
