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Most would view Bangladesh—one of the most densely populated countries in the world—as an unlikely innovator of practical ways to fight global warming. Besides establishing floating communities to cope with increased flooding, they recently banned business suits for government employees. Officials are encouraging all professionals to dress in casual, un-tucked shirts and pants from March to November so they can turn down the air conditioning. They hope this will relax the urgency to build more power plants, which have not kept pace with the country’s 6% population growth for the past five years.

Even the most dignified ministers are giving up ridiculous suits to conserve energy. In Bangladesh, they feel the gravity of more erratic weather and rising temperatures, and don’t let their sense of fashion override that feeling.

In Western society, superficial, class-based fashion trumps common sense all too often. Despite our hyper-individualism, homogenous styles in clothing, architecture and vehicles lock in the masses. Rarely do the designers who set off such trends take the long view and consider how their designs might play out on future generations or the health of other species.

Take, for example, people who cry NIMBY (not in my backyard) to protest what they perceive as the visual blight of solar panels and wind turbines. Granted, we shouldn’t pave our national parks with photovoltaic panels, nor should we install wind turbines that jut into known bird-migration corridors. We can, however, catch rays on existing rooftops or along highways, as the Germans do along the autobahn, and erect the wind turbines where avian traffic is minimal. With an increase in natural disasters blamed on global warming, wouldn’t “unsightly” solar panels and wind turbines be preferable to the aftermath of these disasters?

Most absurd, perhaps, are homeowners-association covenants that ban such innocuous installations as visible clotheslines, compost piles and even gardens. How, pray tell, could a visible clothesline or garden diminish property values?

When people are attracted to something and they don’t know why, they are in their most primitive mode of thinking. Destructive-trend lock-in is a symptom of too many people functioning in their reptilian brains. Car manufacturers bet on this to sell oversized vehicles that get poor mileage, and reinforce their profits by convincing consumers that small cars are just not in our cultural DNA.

As ecosystem health rapidly declines, it’s time to make our brains work harder.

I wonder if reptiles are distant relatives of lemmings. Though lemming mass suicide is really a myth, the poem The Lemming, by Jeanne Steig, provides an apt metaphor for fashion-crazed human behavior:

Consider the lemming:
No hawing or hemming
No dilly or dally
No shilly or shally
The whole lemming nation
In one wild migration
Is off to the sea.

He can’t swim, the lemming,
And yet there’s no stemming
His rush to the water.
A lem to the slaughter!
Don’t ask him “Who sent ya?”
It must be dementia—
Unless it’s ennui.

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