A Greener Eph: Accountability

Accountability is one of those big, moral words that parents use. It means one is responsible for the effects of one's actions. You have to be responsible. You can't cut corners, you can't get away with things and you can't blame someone else for your mistakes or wrongs.

We don't like being accountable. If we aren't forced to by strong social custom or well-enforced laws, we aren't. Think of how many times we have rolled through a stop sign when we didn't see any other cars, let alone police cars! We might grab a handful of candy from our friend's stash when they're not looking, and the success of illegal file sharing programs attests to our propensity for stealing as long as it doesn't seem like stealing.

It doesn't matter how good a person is, there will always be conflicting pressures and corners to cut and things will not get done as well as they might. The biggest check on this tendency is the reaction our actions might cause. The friend who shouts at you for stealing candy is going to influence your future actions differently than one who doesn't notice, or doesn't say anything. If you ever get caught file-sharing, there's a good chance you'll never do it again, even if the risk isn't any higher than before. Either when confronted with friends who feel wronged, or strangers who can use the law on their side, confronting the negative effects of our actions can be extremely.

Because these negative effects can be so unpleasant, we face a choice. We can either act in a more ethical way, at the risk of being obtuse and exhausting, or we can distance ourselves from the effects of our actions. Downloading a song distances one from the negative social norms (and risks) that taking a CD out of a store does. It also distances one from causing harm to a particular store, and instead broadens the loss out over the industry, making it seem much less serious. We might feel comfortable taking only a small handful of candy because it will either go unnoticed or be easily forgiven, but we would hesitate to take the whole bag for fear of the consequences.

We face consequences from all sorts of actions, large or small. We really don't want to live next to a pig farm, but that won't stop us from eating pork. As long as we don't see the pig farm we don't have to confront the fact that someone lives next to a pig farm. We like to have electricity when we flick the switch, but generators are too noisy (not to mention inefficient), and coal is far too dirty to have in our own city, so cities and energy companies realize they can get more customers if they put the coal plant somewhere else. We are not confronted with the consequences of flicking a light switch, and we are happier that way. There are few fashionable metropolitans who would enjoy their clothing quite as much if they had to walk into the illegal sweatshop downtown to purchase the item. But of course the people in the sweatshop wouldn't be working their (against their will?) if there wasn't a demand for such clothing.

Our economy is very good at helping us stay away from the negative consequences we cause. People make money doing this and people frequently pay for the right to not see the results of their actions. This is not a shocking instance of neglect, or a cry out against some type of injustice. This is something so fundamental to the way our civilization works that it goes beyond questioning. And if we do question it, we are immediately daunted by the task.

The depth and subtlety of our lack of accountability is not a detriment, but rather precisely the reason why we must confront it. By working accountability into our society and our lives, then we have made a fundamental and radical change. That is why fighting climate change is about even more than the future stability of global civilization. It is about fixing the world around us.