Take a bag, leave a bag. Compost. Don’t use paper towels. Choose eco-friendly laundry detergent. Such prescriptions, which emphasize the impacts of individual consumption, dominate our culture’s environmental consciousness. Alexa Jay’s Wespeak “Missing the forest for the trees” (March 4, Volume CXLIII, Number 34) calls for a dialogue about a bigger picture, one that encompasses more than “the penguins” when considering the problem of global climate destabilization and what we can do in the face of it. Without any intention of smiting Jay or any of her bottled-water drinking and driving associates, we’d like to both agree with some of her points and contest others.

“Do it in the Dark (shout out to EON, before you smite me down), Focus the Nation, composting, all that stuff is fine and good,” Jay writes. “I just don’t want it all to take attention away from the bigger picture and turn into yet another way for us to massage our egos.”

Egotism, self-righteousness and guilt can certainly distract from efforts to reduce our individual and collective contributions to climate change. However, it’s imprecise to conflate Focus the Nation with actions like composting, or to equate an individual “whining about the evils of bottled water” with an individual attending a nationwide teach-in about global warming. We live in a nation where we each create 4.5 pounds of garbage per day. If everyone consumed at U.S. rates, we would need five planets to support our species (www.storyofstuff.com). It is clear that the cultural change mandated by the size of the climate change problem, needs to be widespread and large-scale, perhaps inconceivably so. But, as Jay puts it, “we are all complicit,” a fact that at once highlights personal responsibility and makes it clear that individual change is not enough.

Individual actions, when carried out successfully, don’t distract from the larger problem. Rather, they often focus attention on specific aspects of an overwhelming crisis and break down the solutions into manageable pieces. The danger occurs not when we stop, say, buying Solo cups, but when we think that doing so is the last step toward sustainability, when it’s really the first. Individuals choosing to be accountable for the carbon that they emit into the atmosphere, and choosing to cut back on their consumption, both criticizes and undermines this extravagantly wasteful system. It’s worth acknowledging the limits of individual changes in consumption, but those changes hardly preclude structural transformation. Not only that, but the power of the individual to act in other arenas, such as the political sphere, expands the potential of actions on the individual level to engage in restructuring societal problems.

Of course, the awareness that we each contribute to this problem can create guilt, and guilt can turn into self-righteousness when we are desperate to feel like we’re doing something to help. It is simplistic to think that “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Even if we are part of the solution, we are part of the problem. Walking, composting, recycling—these are not get-out-of-global-warming-free cards in the moral universe. We might remember that, as Elizabeth Gilbert writes, “Guilt is just your ego’s way of tricking you into thinking you’re making moral progress.”

So, we all want to be part of the solution, but maybe we don’t know how. Feeling guilty leaves us vulnerable to the commercialized sex appeal of “going green” and the forces that would exploit our well-intentioned “green spirit.” This is especially true if we don’t have a comprehensive understanding of climate change. Speaking for ourselves, we don’t, and we live in the most knowledge-saturated environment of our lives. For someone who hasn’t been in a classroom for decades and gets their information from the 6:00 news, it may be even harder to escape the media’s oversimplification of this problem. We are all bombarded with sensationalist images of global warming, from movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” to those fucking cute penguins on withering ice floes. Global warming is increasingly a part of our collective consciousness, but this television-mediated oversimplification—in response to our growing awareness, fear and sincere desire for change—is what is distracting from the bigger picture. Using words like “eco-friendly” and “green” glosses over the effects that we have on the environment and distorts the problem to seem as though it can be solved if we merely buy the right products.

It is a delicate question: How do we talk about “the environment” in a way that everyone can appreciate but that isn’t overly simplistic? We need to speak a variety of languages, calling on many disciplines and cutting across levels of formal education. The experts need as much say as the “bombastic un-experts,” because we all influence our climate. When we speak more accurately about the complexities of global climate change, and about our society’s untenable patterns of consumption, we can begin to appreciate the complexities of any sincere solution. That might put those self-righteous Nalgene-carriers in their place.