UO Student Series: Why it’s time to walk away from the carbon footprint
We can walk away from the carbon footprint and still value its success in raising climate awareness. We can shift our language away from basic metaphors and, instead, towards layered analogies.
**This post is from a member of Professor David Frank’s class at the University of Oregon. In the coming weeks, we’ll share several more of these posts from young Oregonians. Go Ducks!**
Delaney is pursuing a double major in Environmental Science and Biology at the University of Oregon and is a student of the Clark Honors College.
Sea levels are rising, glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates, and the atmosphere is littered with invisible gases that are pushing the global average temperature into a deadly zone; attempting to grasp what scientists tell us feels like grabbing at something intangible. Comprehending such large and significant numbers is seemingly beyond comprehension. Enter: metaphor. Metaphorical language, like the classic and ubiquitous ‘carbon footprint’, makes intricate concepts digestible.
With a quick Google search, you can freely access carbon footprint calculators that tell you the extent to which you’re living an eco-friendly lifestyle. All you have to do is answer simple questions regarding diet, transportation choices, home size, shopping, recreational activities, etc. With those basic questions answered, you’re supposed to see just how much you’re contributing to a global and decades-long crisis.
Should we thank British Petroleum for the carbon footprint metaphor?
Though carbon footprint may not seem like an actively divisive phrase, its origin suggests otherwise. The phrase earned its legacy as the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2007 because of a problematic, deceptive PR campaign run by British Petroleum (BP) — one of the world’s top seven producers of oil and gas. The campaign urged individuals to calculate their carbon footprint and focus on lowering their personal impacts, while BP continued to extract fossil fuels. Just three years later, BP spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in what we know as the largest marine oil spill in history, the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
BP’s use of the carbon footprint metaphor effectively subverts the responsibility of fossil fuel producers for climate change and, instead, blames individuals for their contributions to global emissions. What started as a strategic move to shift climate change responsibility (and blame) from corporations to individuals has now become one of the most popular metaphors used to communicate environmentalism and conceptualize climate change.
The carbon footprint is flawed
Metaphors take the abstract and make them concrete. By these standards, the carbon footprint is an impeccable metaphor. One of the most massive and abstract concepts, climate change, is made into something mappable and familiar — a footprint. It almost seems misguided to make a case against something that’s effective, convenient, accessible, and widely understood.
The problem with the carbon footprint metaphor becomes apparent when we unpack its implications and evaluate how/where it breaks down. As climate change barrels on, our understanding and actions remain limited by our language, leaving us pacified and littered with misconceptions, doomed for stagnancy and polarization.
When we step back and analyze how the idea of the carbon footprint is flawed, its one-dimensionality and associated danger become clear:
The notion of a footprint champions the idea that climate change is a simple relationship between humans and the Earth. The carbon footprint functions by defining a power dynamic: there is a force that acts and a thing that is acted upon. The carbon footprint, the image of a “weighty foot upon the Earth,” sets up the planet as “de-creative—its only response is to come undone.” In speaking of Earth as something we must tread lightly upon, we are positioning ourselves as actors and Earth as our stage. We reinforce the idea that Earth is an entirely separate entity from ourselves. This is a textbook example of anthropocentrism (read: human beings are the most important entity in the universe). The carbon footprint functions as a holdfast between our society and anthropocentrism, which has been extensively argued to be ethically wrong, logically false, and at the root of the climate change crisis.
Not only does the idea of a carbon footprint illuminate a human dominant outlook, it does so in an oddly static way. We do not describe our carbon footprints but rather, our singular carbon footprint. This metaphor sums up various forms of human carbon emissions and consumption into a single action—a step, entirely omitting context. Climate author, Emily Potter, illustrates this point in her piece, Climate Change and the Problem of Representation. She argues we should make “the dance of feet the site of interest, rather than the single footprint.”
This one-dimensional metaphor enforces an anthropocentric binary on our efforts and alienates consumer decisions from reality: we are forced to choose between consuming more or consuming less, to make “good” or “bad” decisions for the Earth, to be “in” or “out” on caring about climate change. The carbon footprint fosters a static, fixed relationship with our actions. As convenient as that would be, the relationship between humans and the Earth is complex, dynamic, ambiguous.
The carbon footprint doesn't scale well; it distorts and collapses when applied across the various temporal and spatial scales of climate change. Consider the purchase of an electric vehicle — it’s generally viewed as an act of shrinking one’s carbon footprint. At a different scale, it can be seen as an act of consumption, growing one’s carbon footprint. This is overly simplistic and fails to accurately scale beyond one-dimension. The carbon footprint builds confusion and applauds adjusted consumption over systematic reevaluation.
We can simultaneously walk away from the carbon footprint and still value its success in raising climate awareness. We can shift our language away from basic metaphors and, instead, towards layered analogies of climate change; rather than communicating about climate change using one-dimensional comparisons, we can expand our framework of communications, deepening our understanding of the nuanced interplay between human consumption and ecology.
Consider a massive quilt, one that billions of pairs of hands work on simultaneously. Imagine all humans on Earth are contributors, repeating a designated pattern on the same quilt as it grows from all sides. Even when many people sew the quilt, neatly following the pattern and being highly precise, if someone else working on the quilt is sewing rapidly, making mistakes, and creating tangles, the entirety of the quilt gets distorted. It doesn't matter how skilled of a seamster you are, if another contributor continues to make mistakes, the quilt’s structure comes undone. Rather than increase your own precision and refine your technique, the only way to correct these mistakes is to hold the sloppy teammate accountable. If you wanted to dispose of the faulty segments of the quilt, you wouldn't just set down your needles—you would need to actively undo the knots and unravel the thread.
This is an analogy of how carbon emissions accumulate, where the size of this quilt can be thought of as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. To blame climate change on an individual’s carbon footprint is like placing all of the failures of the quilt onto the action of one seamster. The carbon quilt exposes the disparities between individuals and corporations, like BP, when it comes to emissions and accountability. When we turn to multi-dimensional analogies instead of one-dimensional metaphors, we move from simple, fixed, and unscalable understandings of climate change to an understanding that is nuanced, dynamic, and functional across scales. Just a thoughtful switch in our language can shift our attention from a single footprint to the intricate dance of a myriad of feet.