“Reduce, reuse, recycle.” For more than 50 years, those three Rs have been the world’s go-to environmental mantra.
On the face of it, the three Rs sound like an empowering call for each of us to play our part for the planet. However, the individualist approach behind the slogan has come in for increasing criticism by climate change activists.
I am one of them. As a scholar-activist who has spent over 16 years working with climate justice movements, I have studied how movements are challenging the individualistic focus to climate change – an approach that is heavily promoted by corporate public relations campaigns.
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Fossil fuel corporations have worked with public relations firms to convince the public that environmental problems are the fault of consumer behaviour. One of the main aims of these campaigns is to shift attention and blame away from the main actors responsible for ecological destruction – wealthy corporations, polluting industries and the captured governments that enable them.
Individual emissions within the average person’s direct control account for less than 20% of total emissions. The vast majority come from industrial systems and infrastructure beyond people’s control.
The fossil fuel industry’s public relations campaigns also want individuals to focus on their own environmental footprint so that they are distracted from pushing for more structural and policy driven changes. Those structural changes would threaten the profits of the fossil fuel industry.
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate change, has said that
rapid and far-reaching transitions across all sectors and systems are necessary to achieve deep and sustained emissions reductions.
Compared to the scale of change we need, “reduce, reuse, recycle” falls short.
Building on that evidence, climate ethics literature, and discourse analysis, in a newly published book chapter I argue that it’s past time to go deeper than just the old “Three Rs”. In addition, environmental education should embrace new, more radical mantras that tackle the root causes of our ecological crises, such as Regulation, Redistribution, and Reparations.
These more radical Rs focus on the structural and economic factors that drive ecological crises, working to reorient societies towards more socially and ecologically just ends. Social movements are increasingly realising that we need to focus on such systemic factors, which is part of why the slogan “Systems Change, Not Climate Change” has become such a key rallying call for climate justice movements across the world.
Regulation: reining in polluters
The first R is regulation – putting in place strong, enforceable rules to rein in destructive industries and hold elites accountable. Corporations have tried to sell the idea that they don’t need to be regulated and that markets will solve the problem.