and operative values. Put simply, expressed values are the ones we say and operative values are the ones we do. Sadly, too often the operative values of our lives aren’t the same as our expressed values. We say we believe in conservation and efficiency, freedom and fairness, equity and justice. But what we do is who we are, and when we look honestly at our lives, we basically buy into different values. In practice, our operative values include cheapness and novelty, fun and fashion, comfort and convenience, “cool” and conformity. When push comes to shove, we’d often rather look good than be good. We’d rather have “low, low prices” than high environmental standards. So “the good life” of American culture isn’t nearly as good as it needs to be for people or the planet.
By uncovering our implicit morality, we’re not only exploring the habits of our hearts, but also the more mundane habits of our days. Studies show that about 45 percent of daily behavior is habitual, which means that we don’t really choose almost half of what we do. It’s also true that many of our habits are things we don’t do. Thoughtlessness is a habit, for instance, as are silence and apathy and inactivity.
Environmental Values of College Culture (and American Culture)
| Individualism | Fun | Resourcism |
| Instrumentalism | Sociability/Friendliness | Remote Control |
| Credentialism | Sex-ability | Ignorance |
| Comfort | Materialism | Passivism |
| Convenience | Cheapness | Sitizenship |
| Cool | Fossil Foolishness | Presentism |
| Conformity | Indoor-ance | Anthropocentrism |
This is a book of ordinary ethics. It focuses on the stuff that everybody does every day, exploring the significance of the seemingly insignificant. It investigates the culture of college by probing the underlying ideas and assumptions of student life, trying to figure out why people act the way they do and why it matters to the global community. In the process, this book creates a space for reflection and conversation about some big questions that sometimes slip under the radar. If it works, readers will get to compare their expressed values and their operative values, and decide if they’re leading a good life after all.
4) Institutionalizing Environmentalism
Americans focus so much on individuals and “individual choice” that we sometimes forget the ways that systems structure choices for us. Even though we live in a world of systems—social, economic, political, intellectual, and natural—we often only respond to their symptoms. The price of gas, for example, is a symptom of overlapping economic, political, international, military, intellectual, and natural systems, but we usually only pay attention to the numbers on the pump. In a system that encourages externalities—the natural and social costs of production and distribution that aren’t factored into the price tag—the bill for our fuel obscures deep flaws in the system that creates it.2
Systems structure our choices, but institutions structure our systems. Institutions are communities defined by hope and habit, stories and symbols, patterns and privileges, rules and regulations. A community—or an institution—is a way of saying “we, the people” in different settings. The family is one example of “we, the people.” A church is another example, but so are colleges, corporations, media companies, and government bureaucracies. When it comes to environmentalism, college students and other Americans think that individual people choose to live “environmentally” or not. What they often forget is that institutions structure all of their individual choices. When values are institutionalized, they show up as habits, routines, peer pressure, and “common sense”—the standard operating procedures of everyday life. To most Americans, institutions are almost invisible, but their effects are profound.3
No matter how powerful institutions might seem, exploring their effects, including the influence they have over our hearts, can be empowering. In the 1930s, social activist Peter Maurin contended that institutions should be designed to make it easier for people to be good, and as American history repeatedly has shown, institutions can be changed. In this book, then, we’ll consider how human systems and institutions change natural systems, and how we might change them for the better. To that end, we’ ll examine the inputs and outputs of natural and cultural systems and examine feedback loops in nature and culture. In the process, we can study the science and art of ecological design—the alignment of human systems and institutions with the cycles of nature—and think about perspectives and practices that make it easier for people to be good.
5) The Nature of Hope
College is not always a hopeful place. Fear of failing often animates more student activity than hope does. Fear of failing academically keeps students working on reading and research and class work, while fear of failing socially keeps students going along to get along, for fear that other students will make fun of them for their ideas and ideals. The unfortunate result is what anthropologist Michael Moffatt calls “undergraduate cynical,” a way of talking tough that hides the sensitivity that could make a person vulnerable or compassionate. Such a social construction of conversation reduces the unique space a college provides for “going deep”—for thinking unconventionally about the unconventional issues of our day.4
If we seriously contemplate the nature of hope, however, we can replace our coping mechanisms with hoping mechanisms. Histories of hope offer a usable past for environmental activists, and stories of new hope emerging in America (often on campuses) remind us that change is possible and that our beliefs and behaviors do matter.5
6) Words and Worlds
Words structure our worlds. When we talk about a “good job” instead of “good work,” for example, it changes the nature of the conversation and sometimes it changes nature itself. Words like “profit,” “progress,” “success,” “cheap,” and “cool”—words we don’t even think of as environmental—have a lot to do with the way we treat the natural world. Paying attention, then, to how we talk about our lives, how rhetoric and persuasion work, gives us the opportunity both to understand the worlds we create through our words and how to tell the truth so that people listen. Looking deeply at language also invites us to think about new words and hybrids because, as Michael Pollan says, “names have a way of making visible [the] things we don’t easily see.”6
One such word is “ecologician,” connecting ecological perspectives with the magic that can happen once we see our world clearly. And scattered throughout the text are entries from an ecologician’s dictionary, defining words so that they make visible the real complexities in the moral ecology of our everyday lives.7
Ecologician:
