The Guilt Machine
Why do conservationists burn out at rates incomparable to almost any other sector?
The work itself can’t explain the burnouts because conservationists love what they do. Missing success can’t explain it either. Conservation can be spectacularly successful. My diagnosis: strong cognitive dissonance stemming from guilt that doesn’t belong to them.
In 2004, BP hired advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather to launch the first carbon footprint calculator. Citizens have felt responsible for climate change ever since. They are worrying about their driving, their flights, their energy use, while fossil fuel companies extract record profits. The mechanism is elegant: corporations engineer individual guilt for systemic damage. Then they sell solutions to manage the symptoms. Carbon offsets. “Green” products. Sustainability consulting.
Privatise the gains, socialise the losses
This mirrors the 2008 financial crisis perfectly: privatise the gains, socialise the losses. Except the losses are psychological, not monetary. BP burns the planet, and you feel guilty about your carbon footprint. Industrial agriculture destroys ecosystems, and conservationists apologise for not doing enough.
The conservationists I met work on habitat restoration, species protection, ecosystem monitoring. Essential, vital work. They earn a fraction of what they’d make as scientists and engineers in the private sector. They’re some of the most dedicated professionals I’ve encountered.
They also tend to shoulder professional responsibility for systems they didn’t create, decisions they didn’t make, and consequences far beyond their individual control. They attend conferences where research on pesticides fills the morning sessions, and meat that relies heavily on intensive agriculture fills the lunch menus. They explain biodiversity loss to policymakers who nod sympathetically, only to later vote again for agricultural subsidies that reward the practices driving that loss.
The displacement circle is complete, so is the cognitive dissonance
Those trying to fix the damage feel responsible for it, but those causing it remain unaccountable. The guilt flows downward to ordinary citizens — to us — never upward to the industrial systems, policy structures, and corporations that created the crisis.
Conservationists become the perfect victims. They’re educated enough to know what’s happening, moral enough to feel responsible, and positioned by their professional identity to believe they should fix structural problems through individual choices and underfunded, systemically limited projects.