Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (one of the best recent anthropology books in my mind, even if it’s not by an anthropologist), has an essay out today, Why Bother? It is part of the New York Times Magazine themed issue, The Green Issue: Some Bold Steps to Make Your Carbon Footprint Smaller.

In his essay Pollan sums up how we, as normal people with normal powers, might change our approach to energy dependence. In particular, he focuses on overcoming the sense of helplessness we often feel, arguing cogently that this sort of “dependence” has been instilled through increasing social and economic specialization and a universalist approach in economics and politics.

Pollan points to the importance of local doing, to How and not just Why, as a central way to break the specialization and universalist trap. By focusing on mindsets, behaviors, experiences, and life roles (sound familiar?), Pollan gets at the everyday dimensions of life that can work as much change as technology or global accords. We just have to do it ourselves, even as we cultivate new ways to encourage and support these everyday processes.

(Still, for those of you who prefer a more political economy take on the problems we face, see Pollan’s highly recommended pieces You Are What You Grow and Weed It and Reap, taking on the US food bill, agribusiness, and energy-dependent processed food.)

Here’s an annotated version of Why Bother?

Early in the essay Pollan writes, “For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.”

Continue reading “Michael Pollan, Energy, and Change”