The trinity of despair explains a fair portion of environmental movement frustration, getting caught in the trap of nagging, asking too little, and demanding full support. I agree that asking too little is a widespread issue in environmental issues. I mean, let's be clear, asking too little is rooted in the idea of people as 'consumers' who are not willing to act in ways that are not beneficial to them. Further, there is this idea that because we all share the planet we must all want to save it. However, as Mike mentions, social political movements don't happen because of full support. In fact, democracy is not ABOUT full support, it's about a majority. The issue here is more about environmental issues have a "powerful" majority rather than a "weak" majority. By this I mean that there is a difference between a united majority of people who care about environmental issues and can therefore pressure action to be pushed through a beauracratic sieve that in the United States often waters down and pacifies policies. The way to push forth social change to create structures that, as Mike said, make environmentally friendly actions the natural end result means working as a front, as a majority. Although there is that wonderful 51% of people who care deeply about these issues in the Yale graph, they care about them differently and act on their multiplicities of focal points in fractured ways. This means that a lot of people who in one way or another care about the environment are working separately...talk about demanding too little! Asking ecologically minded groups to stay small, to work as a resistance of sorts, even with such large numbers is asking too little.
Ecologically-minded social change would require that these fractures groups unite under a banner, be it a loose banner, to promote change at the structural level. Some theorists I am drawing on here, Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe, even Sartre, talk about this in the form of group action. Laclau and Mouffe, perhaps the most able to speak to current political social movements and their potential, refer to this as hegemony. Under a hegemony small groups are brought together to pressure the time wasteful bureaucratic paper shuffling to a point that it MUST act. Of course leading up to this, the hegemony and its coming to together signal to "empty signifiers" the change that must be done and they enact this...think politicians. This is a painfully watered down version of these assembled writings, but the gist of it is that heavy things don't get moved without communication and cooperative action. Even moreover, a collective saying, "we are now going to move this heavy piano....on three!" To further the analogy, the best cooperation might mean helping each other to put wheels under the piano then pushing it as a team...in the same direction with no one blowing their back out. Hegemony of course is problematic. Under what banner do ecologists unite? And, of course no social political theory demanding for group action can neglect the fact that groups are not permanent. Hegemonies are not meant to last, they are meant to get something BIG accomplished efficiently, then new hegemonies and groups form around that issue.
In my argument here for a social change strategy the trinity of despair is helpful in debunking the silly apathy that many feel when faced with these issues. However, I think that the 'tabs' are a small place to start and always a place to come back to, but might not lead to full structural change. Without a self-recognition of the numbers and power that exist within a more unified movement that can demand and push change through (patriot act is a fantastic example of a hegemonic front movement that pushed right on through the system and has had large structural repercussions), ecological movements are defining themselves as "fringe" and reactionary rather than comprehensive, effective, and empowered.
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