On practicality, reality and idealism

(This post is inspired by The loss of the future, an essay in The Long-Legged House by Wendell Berry.)

As I have written about previously (1, 2, 3), trash is borne out of convenience. Trash can in fact be viewed as an outcome of "solutions" to "problems" like decomposing food and cracked computer screens. Without trash, we would be unable to enjoy getting to places like the top of Mt. Everest (1, 2), we would be unable to transport food to famine-stricken areas of the world, and we would be unable to perform medical procedures on people. Depending on how we weigh the outcomes, positive and negative, of what we do, trash is a natural outcome of solutions to problems, which may be ill-defined. I use the word natural because the way we currently think makes it close to impossible to do anything without degradation, waste and trash. As a society, we claim to think "practically." We do not address problems if the solutions are "impractical." Or, put another way, the only solutions we come up with are those that are "practical." What does "practical" mean in today's world? It means doing something that will, at the most, only slightly nudge the status quo. If a few people will lose their jobs, or funding for a program will get cut, or the vast machine of the US military will be affected, a solution will be deemed "impractical" - impractical because the people you will have to convince to change their ways of being are members of the National Rifle Association, or because they sleep with the board of directors of large oil corporations, or because they claim to advance US interests abroad. Concisely, such solutions are "impractical" because those that need to be convinced wield power - the power of money and the power of violent force. Also, people are not ready to "spend the money" that it would take to make biodegradable materials, or less harmful products, unless it is "economically viable," and unless China will do it, too. What is lost in this "practical" way of thinking is the idealism that needs to be incorporated into our thoughts. An idealism that will address the reality of the situation - of ecological degradation, of social and environmental injustice - is badly needed now. It is easy to lose faith in "practicality," and I have. Indeed, it was "practicality" - of time - that led to the BP-Macondo well blowout (1, 2, 3, 4). "Practicality" has held back climate change talks for more than a decade now. "Practicality" has inflicted serious harm on the nature that feeds us.

When is it right to start criticising our ethics?

Now it is Ireland that has to be bailed out by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Why does the country of Ireland need to be bailed out? Here's what a BBC article reads:

"Put simply, the seriousness of the situation it finds itself in with regard to the debts of the Irish banks.

As several of the banks have been part-nationalised, most of their massive debt is now actually government debt.

And the great majority of this debt is owed to foreign lenders, which the Irish banks, and therefore the Irish government, simply cannot afford to default on.

This is because the Irish Republic, as a small country, is greatly reliant upon this overseas investment. And to default on their overseas loans would make it very difficult - and far more expensive - for Irish banks to borrow from their foreign counterparts in the future.

More importantly, if Irish banks could not pay back their overseas debt, it would have a knock-on impact on the Republic's overall credit rating.

This would make it more expensive for Dublin to sell government bonds, as it would have to offer a higher rate of interest to more sceptical institutional investors."

.......
House values have fallen by between 50% and 60%, and bad debts - mainly in the form of loans to developers - have built up in the country's main banks. This almost wrecked the institutions, leaving them needing bailing out by the government at a cost of 45bn euros (£39bn; $60.1bn).

This has opened a huge hole in the Irish government's finances - which will see it run a budget deficit equivalent to 32% of GDP this year."

I don't claim to be any sort of expert on banking, international debt and investing and the proportion of GDP that a country's debt is. What I do see, however, is a confluence of events across the world, that although seem disparate to most people, are fundamentally connected through their root cause(s). I think two graphics that are particularly telling are those two below, that I have pulled from here:

 

What the two graphics together tell me is that most Western countries (including the US) live well beyond their means - services are promised to people that the government takes loans out (from other countries or the IMF or the World Bank) to provide, and these loans are used to create vested interests in those services, ones which people will absolutely not do without. Then, when a problem does arise, say that too many people are starting to default on their mortgage payments, or people's pensions are lost because an airline goes bankrupt, we address the problem by band-aiding it, and addressing it with even more complexity than that which caused the problem in the first place.

Let's take the case of the automobile. We realise that we can use high-energy-density fossil fuels to power internal combustion engines that will propel people from place to place. We don't think of the consequences of sprawl, fluctuating gasoline prices, or greenhouse gas emissions. Now the world is in a bind. We have all of these people that live incredibly far from the places they work and shop, and think of an automobile as an expression of freedom. With "growing" environmental and climate change concerns, there are several options proposed - 1) let's cap carbon dioxide emissions and have companies duke it out to not be the ones paying to pollute, 2) let's tax those entities that pollute based on the amount they pollute, 3) let's find a way to continue driving cars and extract resources from the Earth, just this time let's not let it be fossil fuels. Okay, so we will drive....electric cars and have wind turbines. What do electric cars and wind turbines need? They need batteries and magnets. What are batteries and magnets made of? Lithium, lanthanum, neodymium, and other rare earth elements. Well, the largest deposits of lithium lie in Bolivia (but also in Afghanistan, now!), with an indigenous President who threatens vested interests by instituting land reform (read/listen here and here), and says "Either capitalism dies, or Planet Earth dies." At the same time, the largest deposits of rare earth metals lie in China (here's something for the techies). What will a country like the US do to get access to large reserves of lithium or rare earths? Well, maybe they go to war or assassinate those whose views are markedly different than their own. Also, did you hear about more coal miners stuck underground in New Zealand?

It seems to me that the foundational causes of these problems lie not in that the coal is too deep, or the oil is too far away, or that the rare earths are reserved in a country whose Communism we don't like, but rather in our ethics that compel us to want access to these resources so we can continue to live lives on debt and deficit. We are taking debt at the expense of those people, creatures and ecosystems that will come after we are gone, and we live in a world full of moral, ethical and spiritual deficit.

The business of trash

Trash Inc: The Secret Life of Garbage is an investigative documentary that just aired on CNBC. Here's a summary for those of you who haven't watched it yet, and may be followed with some thoughts...who knows how this post will pan out...?

• The US produces 250 million tons of trash per year, and the trash industry is a $52 billion per year industry in the US alone.
• New York City produces 22 million pounds of trash a day, and 4.2 million pounds of recyclables a day.
• The New York City Sanitation Department uses 1,500 trash trucks, each costing approximately $250,000.
• The budget for the garbage section of the New York City Sanitation Department is $1.3 billion per year.
• New York's landfills are close to being full. Trash is therefore sent to sites in Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, and New Jersey. This trash is called "traveling trash."
• Apex Landfill outside of Las Vegas is the largest landfill in the US with a size of 2000 football fields. It earns $160,000 a day in "tipping fees," the cost for a dump truck to "tip" its load into the landfill.
• There are 2300 landfills in the US.
• China produces the most garbage in the world.
• Beijing produces 36 million pounds of trash per day.
• By 2014, all 10 of Beijing's landfills will be filled to capacity.
• There are more than 461 illegal landfills in Beijing.
• 80% of what Americans throw away is actually recyclable; only 28% is recycled.
• Americans use 51 billion plastic bottles per year, with only about 20% being recycled.
• There is approximately 7 billion pounds of trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

One conspicuous word that the workers in New York used continuously was "sanitation." Taking trash away is an issue of sanitation for them. As long as from a public health standpoint the trash is being dealt with, the entire issue of trash is being dealt with. Indeed, in the US, trash is not generally considered a public nuisance, or a public health worry. However, trash and toxins may be leaching into the water and soil (the most expensive part of a landfill is its lining, made of plastic, clay and dirt, and they are technically meant to last forever), but maybe too small to be a public health worry, yet.

A man from Fox Township, PA was interviewed about the Veolia (a French company) landfill site that is literally a mountain. This man protested, many decades ago, against the issuing of permits to start the landfill in Fox Township. Now, Veolia pays the township $2.5 million per year to stay running in the township, half of the annual budget of the township. Veolia has tried on two occasions to dump low-level radioactive ash waste in the landfill. What was necessary to avoid this dumping was in his words, "constant vigilance."

Over the next few days, I will be highlighting issues of trash in China. the toxins produced when waste is incinerated, and plastics that have entered the food chain.