The coronavirus crisis is placing staggering restrictions on our individual freedoms. These measures are entirely justified, but they would make a dictator jealous: you have to stay at home, you can’t go where you like, you can’t meet up with friends, you can’t walk in the park, and you are required to wash your hands and spend time with your children (lol).

And yet the French (and everyone else) are putting up with it almost without a word of complaint.

Faced with the looming environmental crisis, scientists’ recommendations are just as clear and unanimous: we urgently need to _{change the way we live}. And yet we are not prepared to make those efforts.

Let’s be clear: the coronavirus crisis is extraordinarily serious. Around the world, tens of thousands of people are suffering and dying, millions of health workers are working in very difficult conditions, and tens of millions of workers may lose their jobs. But the scale is still far smaller than that of the crises climate change is likely to bring. Our food system is still running almost normally, no city has been swallowed by the sea, no mass migration or war has been set off, and this virus will never kill as many people as the ecological crisis: air pollution alone causes almost 10 million deaths a year worldwide. Above all, the epidemic is temporary, whereas climate disruption is close to permanent. As Juliette Nouel puts it: “The climate breakdown and the collapse of biodiversity already under way will last for centuries and produce an unbroken succession of crises like the one we are living through today.”

So, is there anything to learn from the way we are dealing with the coronavirus that could help us face the looming ecological crisis?

Yes. Because right now, we are discovering that when danger strikes, we are able to change the way we live, both individually and collectively. And in particular, that we are able to break out of the way we consume.

The problem with the way we consume: marginal comfort

We all have basic needs: drinking, eating, having a roof over our heads, getting medical care, keeping warm, getting dressed... And for most people in so-called developed countries, those needs are largely covered. So we can also satisfy more “artificial” needs: buying a pair of sneakers, going on holiday, ordering a phone, and so on. These needs are perfectly legitimate, and we all have the right to indulge them now and then.

The problem is that for some years now, our consumption has been drifting towards needs that are even more artificial, even superfluous, and created by technology, advertising and marketing: needs for “marginal comfort”. Things like buying a stylish pair of sneakers on top of the ones we already own, buying the latest iPhone when ours still works, getting a “smart speaker” to dictate our shopping list to, owning wireless earbuds, and so on. And it has got worse now that a whole section of the economy is devoted to making us give in to our biggest weakness: laziness. With a single click, we can call a driver, order a meal, book a dry-cleaning pick-up, get a massage, have someone come and clean our flat, have a bottle of whisky delivered…

Why is this marginal comfort a problem?

First, because it doesn’t do much for us personally. As with anything we consume, the more we buy, the less pleasure we get out of each purchase. A bit like an ice-cold beer or soda: the first sip is wonderful, but the more you drink, the less you enjoy it.

But the main problem is that the social and environmental impact, on the other hand, is more or less proportional to how much we consume:

A few examples of the problems this creates:

• When we buy a pair of very stylish sneakers we don’t really need, it doesn’t change our lives much, but it has produced an average of 15 kg of CO2, as much as every pair already sitting in our wardrobe
• When we buy a pair of AirPods even though we already had earphones, it does spare us tangled wires, but it uses rare metals such as tungsten, lithium or cobalt, of which only a few decades or centuries of reserves remain
• When we have a meal delivered with a tap on an app, it spares us the micro-effort of cooking or going downstairs to fetch our food, but the price is the sometimes appalling working conditions of the couriers

And honestly, it’s only natural that we are tempted to enjoy all this marginal comfort: companies only show us what we stand to gain and hide the downsides. They offer to deliver our parcels in under 24 hours without mentioning that this _{kind of delivery pollutes more} than a standard one, or that it puts extra pressure on the couriers. When fashion brands boast about the style of their collections, they never mention the terrible working conditions of the people who made their clothes. Tech companies let us believe that robots do the dirty work, when they also run on millions of invisible precarious workers.

Fortunately (so to speak), the coronavirus crisis is showing us that giving up this marginal comfort is well within our reach.

The individual effort

What lockdown is making us realise is that all the things we found absolutely “necessary” a few weeks ago are not that essential after all. We are finding out that we will survive without the new iPhone, and that one more pair of sneakers won’t change our lives much. And those brands that keep trying to sell us stuff with promotions, free delivery and “x% of sales donated to this or that charity” start to look almost indecent, once we realise that people are putting their health at risk so that we can enjoy those “great deals”.

And if we accept all these restrictions, it’s because the media are all explaining the risks of the epidemic and we understand why it matters. In the same way, we need to learn as much as we can about the social and environmental impact of each thing we buy, refuse to be dazzled by brand messaging and keep thinking critically. It’s psychologically much easier to stop ordering food deliveries once you have seen what goes on behind the scenes.

The thing to keep in mind is that every purchase is necessarily a trade-off between three things: our personal comfort, the impact on other people and the impact on the planet.

Of course, right now we wouldn’t say no to a good restaurant, or even a bad concert. But lockdown is showing us what we really miss: seeing the people we love, going for a walk, being out in nature. So if in the past we were financially privileged enough to afford this marginal comfort (which is far from true for everyone), this quarantine is showing us that we can do without it. We can move towards a simpler everyday life that won’t make us any less happy:

• Spending less time buying things means more time to see the people we love, to learn, to do sport…
• Flying less means (re)discovering just how beautiful and varied the French countryside is
• Buying only seasonal fruit and vegetables means learning to cook new things
• Spending less means being able to choose a job that may pay less but suits us better
• And so on.

But let’s not kid ourselves: in the long run, it’s hard to change the way you live on your own when everyone else carries on as if nothing were happening. Why would I cycle to work if it means choking on the exhaust fumes of the cars around me? Why would I fly less when I see people coming back tanned from a week in Thailand? The truth is, when you are the only one doing the right thing, you feel like you’re losing twice over: not only is it infuriating to go without things everyone else keeps enjoying, but ON TOP OF THAT, if the others don’t change their behaviour, your sacrifices achieve nothing.

Isn’t that unfair? Leading by example is bound to wear you out in the long run.

The collective effort

If lockdown is broadly accepted, it’s because it applies to most of us. Of course, some people are living it in far more comfortable conditions than others: it’s easier to be locked down in a 200 m² home or in your holiday house than in overcrowded or substandard housing. And of course, many people still have to go to work (health workers, but also the people at supermarket checkouts, the ones collecting our rubbish, delivering our parcels, and so on). But nobody is allowed to see their friends, nobody can go out for a coffee, nobody is allowed to go clothes shopping or to the hairdresser.

Would you agree to stay locked down this long if your neighbours could go out for drinks with their mates every evening?

In 2018, the French government tried to reduce car use by raising the carbon tax on petrol. Naturally, the measure didn’t weigh on everyone equally: the tax was small change for the wealthiest but a real hit for many others (not to mention that it didn’t apply to jet fuel). It was unfair, and it gave us the gilets jaunes (the “yellow vest” protests).

There is no chance that measures against the ecological crisis will be accepted if they widen social inequalities.

There can be no green transition without social justice.

So we need binding legislation, applied to everyone in the same way, to get us out of our current consumption model. If the state can ask the population for a collective “war effort” against the coronavirus, it should be able to impose more restraint on every citizen to fight the climate crisis. For example:

• Ban certain forms of advertising (in public spaces, on video screens, aimed at children…)
• Introduce progressive energy pricing¹ to cut waste
• Penalise planned obsolescence and require manufacturers to guarantee their products over a long period
• Require brands to display an environmental score on their products that takes durability into account (including clothing brands)
• Ban imports of certain superfluous products (honestly, do we need green beans flown in from Kenya or roses from Ecuador?)
• Consider introducing per-person CO2 quotas (to encourage people to fly less, for instance)
• Restrict certain heavily polluting industries (e.g. the roll-out of 5G) or heavily polluting vehicles (e.g. cap their weight to stop the production of ever-heavier SUVs)

Do these efforts strike you as an attack on your freedom? Does it sound like we are describing a “green dictatorship”? “Punitive environmentalism”?

Let’s not forget that plenty of restrictions once seen as attacks on our freedom now look like common sense and have saved a huge number of lives: the smoking ban in public places, compulsory seatbelts... And this time, we aren’t just talking about personal safety, but about the survival of all of us. Doesn’t our freedom end where the destruction of the environment begins?

OK, but what can we do as individuals to get such measures passed? Nothing you don’t already know: first, you can vote. But if that isn’t enough (and clearly it isn’t), there are other ways to put pressure on governments: go to demonstrations, get involved in citizens’ lobbies, join local groups that fight to protect biodiversity or support the most vulnerable. In fact, every time we get our hands on a small piece of power, we should use it to try to tip the balance towards the environment.

That said, we know perfectly well that for things to really change, citizen action isn’t enough: companies have to move too.

The corporate effort

In June 2019, Tropicana ran a study on what consumers expect, and apparently what the average customer wants is transparent bottles. And since “the customer is king”, they switched from cardboard cartons to plastic bottles without a second thought. As the company itself states in a Medium post, even though it chose partly recycled plastic, its only goal was to satisfy the consumer. In other words, carbon footprint was not among the criteria for the decision.

This dogma of “the customer is king”, of “customer first”, cannot go on. There is no room for 7 billion kings on our planet.

If a company genuinely wants to fight the ecological crisis, it has to weigh the social and environmental dimensions of every decision it makes, even when that isn’t what the customer is asking for and even when there is no financial gain in it (we have already written about this at length if the subject interests you).

And frankly, treating someone like a king rarely makes them a nicer person. People “on the front line”² (shop assistants, cashiers, after-sales staff, call-centre agents, people behind counters, and so on) often bear the brunt of these “king” customers who think the world owes them everything. And even for brands, treating customers “like kings” isn’t really smart: being obsequious, opaque, terrified of their verdict, all while trying to sell them things they don’t need. In the end, we always prefer the people who treat us with honesty and kindness.

The good news: what the current crisis is showing us is that companies, too, are capable of mobilising, of looking beyond their financial targets and of thinking about something other than their “customer experience”. We are seeing waves of solidarity we had never seen before, like the part of the textile industry that has switched its production to making face masks.

Let’s use this crisis to change the world

The coronavirus crisis is a human catastrophe, but it has one merit: it exposes failings in our society that we can no longer ignore.

We are collectively realising (in no particular order) how important it is to fund our health system properly, that we urgently need to give certain jobs the recognition they deserve (and, for our part, how superfluous our own jobs can be), and that some social inequalities are unbearable.

But we are also realising that, for the common good, we are capable of things we thought impossible barely 10 days ago, as individuals, as a society and even inside companies. By showing us that we can break out of our current consumption model, this coronavirus is a chance (and perhaps the last one we’ll get) to change things.

Giving up our marginal comfort won’t be enough to solve the ecological crisis: it will take systemic changes that only the state can drive, such as decarbonising farming, electricity generation, construction and so on. But one thing is certain: we won’t get through this ecological crisis without giving up our marginal comfort. The good news is that it’s a lot easier than giving up our fundamental freedoms.

‍A few things we read while writing this article, worth a look if you want to go further:

• Les Besoins Artificiels, by Razmig Keucheyan
• Les Possédés, by Lauren Boudard & Dan Geiselhart
• Vers la Sobriété Heureuse, by Pierre Rabhi
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

And how do we get you to give up marginal comfort at Loom? We do of course consider the customer very important, but not a king either. For example:

• we don’t offer express delivery, just standard Colissimo delivery in two or three days. It may be a little less “convenient”, but it avoids 1- sending out lorries that are less full and therefore pollute more, and 2- putting needless pressure on couriers
• our packaging is kraft paper, not plastic. It sometimes reaches customers a bit torn, but its carbon footprint is better
• we no longer sell “easy-care” clothes, such as non-iron shirts. It’s less convenient for our customers, but it’s better for their health and for the environment.

Footnotes

¹ California’s example shows that it can be done and that it can have a huge impact on electricity consumption, while protecting the poorest.

² And this period shows more clearly than ever why it is these people who deserve to be treated with the most consideration.

Who are we to say this?
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You’re reading La Mode à l’Envers, a blog run by the clothing brand Loom. The textile industry is in a sorry state, and the planet is footing the bill. So whatever we manage to understand about this industry, we try to explain here. Because making clothes that last is good, but revealing, sharing and inspiring is even more powerful.
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