The eco-obsessed often get labeled as weirdos — even by their peers. Weird, however, is looking better and better.
Alec Mitchell doesn’t like praise for what he’s doing. Not for loaning out reusable coffee mugs at farmers markets, nor running a compost collection service on a bike, nor renting out dishware at events to discourage disposable plates. Mitchell spent months sleeping in a tent on the beach to conserve housing-related resources. He never, ever gets in a car.
“Great job!” so many would say. “You’re doing such wonderful work!”
But the cars and the disposable coffee cups don’t seem to diminish, so the praise feels meaningless. “You try and you try and you try, and you don’t know what you can do, so you do what you can,” he told me over the phone. (We had to plan the call in advance, as Mitchell does not keep his cellphone on unless he knows he needs to use it, to conserve battery life.)
Why keep it up? Why be such a weirdo? What can you possibly change?
Even within the environmental movement, there’s a fraught and often ugly debate over people like Mitchell, who radically change their lives to fight climate change. Critics say they are wasting their time and scaring away the critical audience of the unconverted. Major voices in the climate movement are dismissive of the choice to, say, forego a major flight. Why sacrifice, they chide; focus on what matters.
But Mitchell has also worked on the kind of systemic change that many environmentalists would criticize him for distracting from. He’s volunteered for habitat restoration, worked at the local recycling facility, run for local office, knocked on doors for voter registration campaigns. He’s just upset that for so much talk about wanting to fight climate change, most people don’t reflect it in their daily lives.
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