Pachamama Won't Forgive Our Market Failures

-- By MonicaRuiz - 10 Mar 2017

Balance

I was in Huchuy Qosqo, an Inca royal estate, overlooking the Sacred Valley. Julian, a Quechua individual, explained his belief that the relationship between humans and the environment is reciprocal. “Pachamama provides us protection and sustains our life on Earth. She is the fertility goddess responsible for harvests. Pachamama provides me with life but I cannot take too much from her or injure her. I won’t throw boiling water on the ground because Pachamama will punish me. She will do horrible things and ask why I have harmed her in that way.” Julian’s explanation was simple. The Earth and nature have an energy and must be maintained in balance. When Pachamama is not in balance, rituals must be performed to regain that balance.

The Climate Change Denier

Climate change denial is prominent in the United States and I don’t believe it is losing traction any time soon. What first comes to my mind are some right wing conservatives with a check paid by fossil fuel industries on one hand as they hold their bible in the other. High profile skeptics, conservative politicians, and Donald Trump have managed to convince many that global warming is a hoax. However, I wonder how people began to reject undeniable science in the first place. In denying the reality of global warming, skeptics adhere to the status quo that they have benefitted from. They will seek information to affirm their beliefs to avoid a cognitive dissonance that would require them to alter their behavior. Thus, they cling on to false beliefs and disregard the 97% of scientists who say climate change is real. Big oil companies benefit from climate change denial where they don’t have to admit they are contributing to this global calamity and alter their business practices. Individuals benefit where they do not have to alter their behavior to mitigate this “nonexistent” problem.

The Climate Change Believer

Al Gore delivered a powerful and moving speech at the Power Shift environmental conference in Washington D.C. He spoke on the ramifications of climate change and the need for youth like me to mobilize against global warming. College students from around the country were moved by Gore’s words. Admittedly, I was in the last row of the auditorium during Gore’s speech, preoccupied with drinking from the two-liter bottle of Coke my friends had spiked with rum. I was like the average climate change believer. The majority of Americans believe in climate change is real, whether it is caused by humans or some other unexplained phenomena. I think the believer is complacent to say the least. The believer has the awareness that their actions are more likely than not contributing to this invisible crime, however takes little action to alter their behavior. We have grown accustomed to our habitual behavior and altering our individual consumption patterns do not manifest immediate results. We accept the science but lack a reaction.

Sometimes I think that perhaps I may be worse than the climate change skeptic. I accept the science, I studied Environmental Economics & Policy, and have attempting becoming vegetarian several times. Yet I am overwhelmed with guilt when I forget my reusable mug. However, I still conveniently purchase my morning cold brew in its clear plastic cup. The climate change skeptic does not carry the guilt that I do. The climate change skeptic sleeps well, believing they have done nothing wrong.

Our Ritual for Balance

The typical climate change skeptic and I both pursue our self-interested paths. We both continue to use nonrenewable resources, forget to recycle, and enjoy our convenient lives. As a result, we both contribute to this collective action problem. Climate change is considered by many as the perfect market failure. In these instances, government intervention is required to hold our industries and resource consumption practices accountable for their externalities, emissions, and unpriced social costs. Government - please spot us on this one.

The Trump administration has already begun to severely impair governmental efforts tackling climate change. The disturbing headlines appear on my news updates. Scott Pruitt, a climate change skeptic, spent his career suing the very agency he now leads. Trump instructed the EPA to freeze its grants contracts, possibly affecting research on climate change. The EPA will roll back on environmental regulations that are harmful to business in the next four years. They are also in a media blackout where they have been instructed to halt external communications regarding climate change. I first reacted by searching for ways I can help. Today, the headlines stated the chief of the EPA does not believe carbon dioxide is the leading contributor to global warming. Today my reaction was a dispassionate “oh.”

I could not understand nor rationalize my following actions. Amid these headlines I was applying for 1L summer positions. I withdrew from every environmental internship I had applied to within the government and from all the internships located in Washington D.C. Frustrated, I wanted no part in this agenda for the coming four years. Was this the proper reaction? My own climate change denial perhaps? Do I feel incapacitated? Am I a coward? I avoid these question altogether. All this during a time where 2016 was the hottest year on record and the Spring season came as early as February.

Our relationship with the Earth is reciprocal. We have harmed Pachamama and have failed to mitigate our individual contributions. Our regulatory schemes to protect the environment have been further undermined with the current administration. Pachamama knows we have harmed her and bad things happen when we do. Pachamama is warming, with anger, as she regains equilibrium. Maybe I will regain my equilibrium and the enthusiasm I had when I said I wanted to become an environmental lawyer. Currently I remain in a state of mourning.

It seems to me that you're taking a comparatively unscientific approach to the science here. Arithmetic would suggest that your activities result in the addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at a tolerable level, and that nothing you do (with the possible exception of refraining from traveling by air) are relevant at all to Earth's atmospheric chemistry. So far as feeling guilty for eating animals is concerned, whatever that is, it is not a climate issue from any scientific point of view.

You would like to use electricity that has been produced without burning fossil fuels. You would like to be able to use efficient and ecologically sound public transit. These are subjects about which you need not feel either helplessness or guilt.

It is fine to be thinking about other forms of practice now. You do not owe anyone a particular outcome to that rumination, even yourself. I would very much like to read a version of this essay that didn't contain primarily either guilt about your own actions or self-doubt about the motives leading you to think about other practices. I also think it would be good for you to write such a draft.

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