Boutique environmentalism/conservation/ecology, or how deeply hypocritical am I?

There is a passage in an Aldo Leopold book that describes the history of a molecule, as it passes through various life forms in the natural world (animal, plant, etc.). The point is that we’re all going to die, and our bodies will eventually disperse into fine particles and become part of something else, and something else after that, and something else after that, and so on. You are divisible, in essence, and I am too, and there is nothing to be done about it, both of which facts make it kind of hopelessly beautiful. The passage is moving, despite my limpid attempt to paraphrase, and it proves strangely disorienting for anyone who has not come to terms with the death of the subject and the erroneous notion of a stable ego. All of you poststructuralists have moved to bigger, greener pastures without horseshit or objects even. (Also: If that sentence makes it sound like I have a solid conceptual grasp of the consequences stemming from an embrace of poststructuralism, it’s semi-pseudo-misleading)

I bring this all up because I am a hypocrite, and baldly so, in part because I think I am an I, and I act like one, without regard for much else, rather than thinking that I am transitory and inveterately a fragment. Sources of my hypocrisy are legion, but lately I’m been stuck on things over which I have responsibility in some way related to the health of other living things. My vehicle guzzles gas; my meat comes from factories; I take long showers and who the fuck else knows, but I also would like air to be clean and rivers not to catch on fire plus I think it would be nice to keep certain areas in this country roadless, exercise discretion when logging, not make shit we don’t need, not waste shit that others are going to perish if they don’t have, and so on.

I was a vegetarian for five years or so, and then kind of just folded into protoplasm during the summer of Excess without thinking through why I behaved in that fashion. In hindsight it wasn’t so much a moral failing as a moral forgetting or erasure. So now there has been an uptick in my emotional attachment to land and health and game, and a similar uptick in my disparagement of pollution and waste and excessive appetite and torpidity. I presently send some $$ to organizations that advocate for wilderness protection and land easements, and have written letters to politicians who supposedly represent me on agriculture policy and other banalities that nevertheless are significant. But my actual behavior, the practices out of which I make a life, represent sheer human laziness and an inability to reconcile things I truly I believe in w/ actions I ontologically initiate.

So the fuck what? you say. I shall try to change. I hope I can. But that’s my business.

The point is, as this is not the only instance in which my hypocrisy and I sort of arrive at an uneasy mutual peace (like I did Ben Buckley, my fascistically arrogant roommate first year) there is something going on here. Knowing that there is a disconnect between what one believes and the arena of praxis in which those beliefs take life is one thing; not really caring about it is another. And obviously anyone who’s read the Gourmet article on lobster knows I’m biting off it, but – oddly – I think I repressed the entire question of taking a self-inventory vis a vis food choices, consumption, waste, etc. issues. It is one thing to say: “Who the fuck cares?” in response to veganism or PETA or whatever, but it is another to say “Well, I care” and do nothing about it.