It's time to rally around an embattled concept: free will.
Having aligned myself against a battalion of irresistible forces over the
years, I've become a student of inevitability. How do environmentally
destructive choices become inevitable? Near as I can tell, it starts when
the people who will benefit from these choices simply begin to assert their
inevitability. People seem especially receptive to inevitability right now.
We're comforted by the notion that amid all the uncertainty and confusion,
the restructuring and rightsizing and layoffs and insecurity-some larger
forces are at work toward a predetermined outcome. We're sort of relieved to
hear that something's inevitable, even if it's not necessarily something we
like. It clarifies things. It's more pragmatic to be resigned to the
inevitable than to chart a new course through the chaos. So the myth of
inevitability spreads and the prophecy fulfills itself. If the proponents of
a particular course can get a critical mass of folks to believe that it's a
foregone conclusion, pretty soon it will be.
Those who assert that conservation, renewables and environmental protection
are at their inevitable end are using the only strategy available to them.
They propound the myth of inevitability because they know that few of us
would actually choose more waste, dependence on fossil fuels, and
environmental degradation. Having no chance of convincing people that these
outcomes are desirable, perhaps, they reason, we can be persuaded that we
have no choice in the matter.
But inevitably we do have choices to make. Failing to make them consciously
isn't failing to make them at all: It's just falling for the inevitability
trap. It's just giving ourselves an excuse for allowing the wrong choices to
be made, and a feeble excuse at that. Among all the reasons for making the
wrong choice, I think the least satisfying, the least noble, the hardest one
to forgive ourselves for is: "It wasn't up to me."
Well, it is up to somebody. Who's it gonna be?
From The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a
Time of Fear edited by Paul Loeb (Basic Books,
www.theimpossible.org), named
the #3 political book of Fall 2004 by the History Channel and American Book
Association.
KC Golden is policy director of Climate Solutions
(
www.climatesolutions.org), which promotes clean and efficient energy
sources. He's former director of energy policy for the State of Washington.
