Ecology, Individualization, and Systemic Change

ECOLOGY, AND SYSTEMIC CHANGE INDIVIDUALIZATION,

If recent news is anything to go by, there has been a surge of environmental awareness in Indonesia. A growing number of young people have become acutely more conscious of environmental destruction in their everyday lives. This can be seen in their heightened and at times angered response toward several of environmental issues, ranging from climate change to Jakarta’s suffocating air pollution and most predominately the problem of waste. Several of youth-led campaigns promoting less single-use plastic bags, less plastic straws, recycled clothing and of course tote bags have become ubiquitous amongst middle and upper class urban Indonesian youths. Being green it seems is slowly becoming the new hip lifestyle.

by Ben K.C.Laksana IULI’s International Relations Lecturer

Is it commendable? Yes, without doubt it is, popularizing environmental awareness is indeed necessary. After all, we are to some extent, some more than others, responsible toward all of this destruction and thus there is the need for us to personally change not only our ways of living but also our relationship with nature. However, it must be made clear that environmental issues are not simply the problem of individual choice. There are limits to how much we can personally address problems that are very much rooted in the system.

Lacking or ineffective policies, a socio-economic-political system that promotes over-industrialization, overconsumption, unequal distribution of resources, seeing nature only as an economic resource which in return engender over-exploitation of nature itself. This cannot be tackled only through individual means. If we understand what the sociologist C. Wright Mills once said about how the “personal is political”, then the personal, the everyday experience is Let us take an example that I have recently personally experienced. I have been struggling to separate my trash within my household. There are recyclable plastics, glass, organic matter, paper and cardboard and general waste that cannot be recycled or reused. All of which I have separated into different trash cans for later to be collected. This is an individual act based on wanting a better trash management system in hopes that it will overall lessen the use of polluting landfills and in the long run lessen my contribution toward climate change. This might look good for marketing our ‘green’ self on Instagram but this is also where my agency in dealing with environmental issues end. What happens next is also a question we need to answer? I have very little personal control over what happens after all of my waste very much connected with larger social and political structures. The lives we live are tremendously shaped by the system in which we live in, and again, the act of personal change will be vastly limited by the confines of the system.

To sum, the individualization of socioeconomic-political issues, which the problem of the environment is a part of, will not result in anything new. On the contrary, only those privileged enough will be able to free themselves, albeit temporarily, from environmental catastrophe. of this exploitation and deteriorating ecosystems on our economy and our collective well-being. Despite the challenge toward these exploitative systems and widespread recognition and desire of an alternative sustainable socioeconomic system, the rise of globalization and thus the globalization of our economy and the resilience of aspects of the traditional ways of our socio-political economy, have hindered the shift to potential new models of economy and society. A socioeconomic model that understands and acknowledges the impact of having resources distribution heavily toward the hands of the few resulting in the overexploitation of natural resources. New models of a socioeconomic system that is based on both the well-being of not only the society but also the ecological ecosystem, such as an eco-socialist based system. However, it must be reminded that in time, the effects of environmental destruction knows no politics, culture, class, race, creed nor nation, and thus the solution is also dependent on understanding the intersection of all this with individual agency. Essentially, radical personal change must be connected to a wider goal, and that is radical systemic change, be it a socio-cultural and/or political economy.

Without it, there will be little effect and with the world, on the verge of collapse, these individual acts of change may easily end in heartbreaks, despair, and hopelessness. As the power to change is in the collective not in isolation from others.