A deep-green friend just posted about defrosting a freezer on Facebook, & I recommended that it was quite fun to use a hairdryer and blast at it like a spaceman with a ray gun. He's a lovely guy but his response was to say he didn't own a hairdryer & ask where the electricity to run it came from. And honestly that made me feel really bad and defensive & want to post that actually I borrowed the hairdryer from a friend and the electricity came Ecotricity, like the electricity running the freezer
And it just made me think that honestly my lifestyle probably has a lower environmental footprint than 70 to 80% of the UK population, but that response still made me feel ashamed and guilty. This sort of thing really doesn't work to make people want to make changes, it's just going to turn them off the environmental movement.
I just wish we could get away from all the shaming because a) putting energy into collective campaigning will always be more effective than putting that energy into trying to minimise our individual lifestyle impacts, and our time and energy isn't infinite, and b) we live in a consumer capitalist society, we can never live a fully harm-free lifestyle without completely detaching from majority society and in doing so giving up our ability to influence it.
