This Is What Environmentalists Get Wrong

my mom used to tell me stories of uh our Native American Heritage and our connection to the land and environmentalism and um and then growing up in New York it's just there's garbage everywhere and you're disconnected from nature entirely uh and so I I fancy myself righteous to try and help the environment of course this Al Gore documentary and these stories of environmental destruction were starting to permeate uh you know my my my awareness um so I yeah I started doing environmental work I started lonely well which was a an ocean organization and we were focusing on single-use Plastics um I I ended up becoming a un environment Ambassador um and I was you know I pretty much just did a lot of work to help due do charity environmental charity and otherwise but um did you quit all that when you stopped the when you stopped working for Entourage no I kept I kept it up okay you know in fact this this sort of smug um virtue signaling as you say um was an annoyance from my colleagues on Entourage because they'd come in you know with a plastic cup and a straw and I like you know they'd be like oh oh sorry you know they see the way I would look at them look down on them right right and I started to realize I was like there's such an arrogance in the environmental movement you know where people really believe they're holier than now they believe that they know that they know what's wrong and they know what the solution is right and then they you know Point down you yeah yeah yeah and it's not inspiring at least and and it's most likely in many ways wrong um so I started to realize that I wanted to be a little bit more measured in my Approach and that um yeah it's just I you know I I relented I guess to my activism and I didn't and when people say oh you know agent gr environmental activism I was like no no no no don't don't use that word it just feels so aggressive and um well there's something about activism that seems to have a lot to do with changing other people yeah you know and that's definitely a moral hazard I mean you know the story you told me on the YouTube side was that you know you were living a lifestyle that's associated with the Rich and Famous and with everything that came along with that and you were shaking your finger at people who were using plastic straws right so well more than that we started my me and my organization it was my idea to to do a straw campaign and in fact we popularized the whole we called it stop sucking right yeah right so you're responsible for the fact that funniest thing the other day um it was a photograph and I don't know if it was real of a paper straw in a plastic in a plastic wrapper oh yeah yeah I loved that that was perfect that was absolutely perfect look I I I can defend it right it was a noble communication's challenge right so when when I'm looking at the ocean because I'd go scuba or go out into the ocean you see plastic everywhere and that's a real problem right and when you hear the statistics that 10 million tons of plastic makes its way into the ocean every year it's like how do you even begin to tackle a problem that big it's so abstract right it's like 10 million tons like okay what do you do and so I wanted to bring it down to something so I like well what's a the single unit of plastic what is that oh it's a straw it's something that everybody encounters every day that they can have agency to do something about you can Infuse the straw and for me it felt like a a gateway to you know the bigger challenge yeah and I think it you know it it it caught on because of that it wasn't so much fixed plastic straws and were totally healed it was more just here's something we're doing and it had you know catchy viral you know um slogan stop sucking yeah um and that was part of what I was doing was Communications like the communications department for the oceans how do we get people to connect with actually our mission at lonely well was not to heal or fix anything our mission was to connect people to the ocean to bring more intimacy and awareness um so we did our job in that and and I'm proud of that um for what it's worth but there there still is this sense that we are going to save the Earth there's a savior complex right so what was the difference what would you say the difference was between the efforts that you made let's say on the activism side with regard to we can just use this the straw issue and the time that you spent by yourself after you had decided that you were going to change your life right those are different levels of moral endeav so how how how would you compare and contrast them personally there's just this abstraction when you're taking on the whole entire world and all the systems there within you know when you're trying to fix legislation around the globe when you have different you know govern governments that are have different laws recycling you there's not one standard of recycling what can be recycled in any state yeah right so you have all the yeah and much of it ends up in landfills and so because all the different materials are clogging up a a a recycling system that might actually work yeah so unless you're doing a top- down um authoritarian you know just unified recycling system right then you're you're left with individual municipalities doing what they do so it's just extremely complex so my my belief that we can just ban it or stop it or you know you would need a certain amount of tyranny to be able to accomplish that yeah yeah well yeah yeah and that turns out to be that turns out to be a major problem right yeah because that tyrannical attitude tends to spread very rapidly too and my my impression is that the consequence of that and I think that's unfolding everywhere is that that will be very hard on the poor so anything you do to make anything more expensive energy for example immediately affects the poor and that has a downstream effect on the environment which is very negative now one of the things I've come to realize investigated was that the pa the fastest pass pathway forward to something approximating environmental sustainability is to eliminate poverty and the best way to do that is to make energy cheap I don't see any alternative to those to those Pathways forward if we were actually serious about the problem and then it would also have the additional benefit that people wouldn't be you know starving and burning dung and dying from indoor air pollution and so forth so okay so you said that one of the differences was level of abstraction right but I mean you could argue and people who are on the activist side would argue that you sorting out your life was a moral Endeavor but so was what you were trying to do at the systems level but when push cames to shove when you actually changed your life you did that I mean you changed your life yes right so when you were alone in your camper for a year you weren't fixing other people yeah so okay so that's what I'm interested in I'm interested in the distinction between those two things and also what that did for you what it does is it gives me a felt it gives me a felt sense of accomplishment it gives me a like I can or I can navigate through life and know where I am whereas I never knew what I did if it had an effect or not right right that's part of that problem of abstraction just telling stories you hoping things change or you know and and often it's like requires legislation so you think you're influencing people and you know if we all come together and make the change then something will happen every day I go out and what I do has an effect and it's responsive immediately right I know that I forgot to feed the an the goats because they're they're screaming at me or water the the the the plants because they're dying or whatever it is there's this um tangible immediacy and I mean it may it's like the music we were talking about before like it's just I know where I am I'm I'm here and what I'm doing is my responsibility and I can and I can totally be responsible because I can see it yeah right [Music]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

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Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson live, jordan peterson livestream, jordan peterson shorts, jordan peterson tiktoks, jordan peterson motivational clips

Id: NjxGd8MOqAM

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024