"Going green" takes some convoluted imagination these days. Take a step into Erewhon, a luxury eco-friendly supermarket in Los Angeles. They've got $30 pints of organic and truly raw nut butter, their own brand of sea moss gel, and a catalog of blindingly bright wellness shots. The store's marketing is impeccable, blending chakra balance with frequent mentions of sustainable this and sustainable that.
Sustainability might not be cheap, but it certainly is pleasant to consume. By 2033, you could spend your retirement on Pangeos, a giant turtle-shaped floating city featuring shopping malls, an airport, and hotels. Sound excessive? Don't worry, it will be entirely powered by solar panels. When giant leatherback turtles go extinct, at least there will be a giant solar-powered turtle-shaped yacht to commemorate them.
While you're dozing off by the pool-side bar on the turtle's lower back, why not take a sip from your frozen daiquiri served on ice mined from melting glaciers? It might seem extravagant, but it's all part of the sustainable future. Arctic Ice, a Greenland start-up, began shipping ice from glaciers to cocktail bars in the United Arab Emirates in 2024. "Helping Greenland in its green transition is actually what I believe I was brought into this world to do," said co-founder Malik V. Rasmussen. Arctic Ice promises to be carbon neutral, using carbon capture technology to offset the diesel burned to ship ice to oil barons, and, soon, your average superyacht.
It's cool to be green. In recent decades, a new class has emerged—people who are educated, have disposable income, and care about the environment. Investors have taken note—the International Finance Corporation found that there is potential for growth of $29 trillion in environmental goods and services by 2030. Sustainability-branded products accounted for 56 percent of all growth in consumer purchasing between 2015 and 2020, mostly driven by higher-income households. A tote-bag carrying, smoothie-slurping, Tesla-buying "sustainability class" is defining tastes and driving consumption worldwide.
The "sustainability class," a term coined by the geographers Kenneth Gould and Tammy Lewis, is a nod to the "creative class," popularized by Richard Florida in his hugely influential book The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida argued that it was creative types who would drive urban growth. The downside? Florida later admitted that rebuilding cities for the creative class made them exclusive, unequal, and highly policed.
Today, the creative class wants to be green. And yet, for the vast majority, green lifestyles are unattainable. Sustainability has become a marker of class distinction, separating the haves from the have-nots. In The Sustainability Class: How to Take Back Our Future from Lifestyle Environmentalists, we describe how people gravitate to these solutions precisely because they do not challenge their sense of safety, and because they calm the clutter and confusion of an increasingly chaotic world, if only momentarily.
Not only are these green lifestyles exclusive, they actually make things worse. People who think of themselves as living green lifestyles tend to have larger carbon footprints. This is because income is the best predictor of environmental impact. Working-class people are much more environmentally friendly, as they waste less and can't afford to fly all over the world. In New York City, for example, lower-income neighborhoods have carbon footprints about one-third those of the rich.
Globally, the lifestyles of the richest 1 percent are responsible for about 16 percent of the world's emissions. A recent study uncovered that the lifestyles of 50 of the world's richest billionaires on average emit more carbon through their investments, private jets, and yachts in less than two hours than the average person does in their entire lifetime. Eating less meat and driving a Tesla to work means diddly-squat when people like Elon Musk wipe away all your eco-friendly efforts by hopping in their private jets before it's even lunchtime.
Perhaps you're not satisfied with this vision of exclusive sustainability because it feels superficial and fake—just empty branding while the world burns. You might be tempted to calm that uneasy pit in your stomach by reaching for that $25 ashwagandha-infused smoothie. We beg you not to.
To address the exclusion, ecological destruction, and emptiness, we have to step outside our class position, reaching our hands out in solidarity with others. Within one generation, global incomes are set to decline by about 20 percent because of climate change. Though it might seem like a far off concern today, it is likely that you will be left outside of the "green" bunkers already being built by the super-rich—the very same elites cashing in on green consumerism. They don't have your back. To avoid an eco-apartheid future, we need to abandon lifestyle environmentalism.
Vijay Kolinjivadi is an assistant professor at the School for Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is also a co-editor of the website Uneven Earth.
Aaron Vansintjan is the founder and co-editor of Uneven Earth and co-author of The Future Is Degrowth. He has been published in The Guardian, Truthout, openDemocracy, and The Ecologist.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
English (US) ·