I’ve been wondering whether we don’t need saints – climate saints, green saints. Because so many of us on the green side of things get attacked for hypocrisy. Merely human activists. So how did you get to the protest outside the oil refinery? I suppose you flew their on a magic carpet powered only by self-righteousness? Or wasn’t this diesel van? When interviewed on television, the consumer objects behind the merely humans – a wooden bookcase or a lamp – are called into question. And if not them, then the clothes the non-saints are wearing, or the computer or phone through which the interviewer is speaking to them. Don’t you use technology? Of course you do. Because they still admit to, say, loving Blondie (though not ‘The Tide is High’, which they find too triggering, or ‘Rapture’, because it’s awful), or they find the extra chemical resources to dye their hair pink and blue.
Perhaps, to counter this, we do need some exempla – some public, examined individuals who have renounced everything petrol-powered, everything plastic or petrochemical in anyway. Their suffering, because of their extreme avoidance, might communicate. It’s not that people would be expected to follow them, just that when they spoke it would be from a distance of separation. Another world is possible, even in this world.
But I’m sure there are many avoiders out there – they’re just also avoiding reporters with cameras. Alternative communities are filmed as freakshows, and the story is always their hypocrisy or their collapse. For everyone else, the question of saints is: What would it take for me to become one? It wouldn’t just be change of self, although that is vast. It might require a new society in which rural communities supported small monasteries. Or rather, small monasteries nurtured small communities. There would need to be a meaning given for all those necessary renunciations. Earth-worship.
That I can’t personally imagine anything not modelled on the pre-industrial revolution shows how limited and unsaintly I am. Merely human.