Change without change

I have always been asked what the most difficult thing about living trash-free has been. From a day-to-day standpoint, it has not been difficult at all; rather, living trash free is the least I could do to appreciate where I am living. I would be doing Ann Arbor a disservice by not living trash-free. If I live within walking distance of an amazing food cooperative and second hand store, what more could I ask for? But then again, I was raised in India in a vastly different culture. My life was admittedly simple--we had what we needed, like good food, and a soccer ball, but not much else. Discontinuing that way of life here in the US was a not up for debate. Simplicity is as important to me now as it was to my upbringing in India.

Honestly, by far the most challenging thing about living trash-free has been openly communicating and talking about it, and figuring out how different people understand what I am trying to do. And I have come to realise that many people's notions of environmentally-responsible living (which I do not claim to be living) are unfortunately simplistic. I cannot blame people for this, for the information and encouragement that is given to them through media makes it seem that small acts in isolation can make big differences. While I think small acts, individual lives of change are important, as I have said before, these small acts must lead down a path of deeper thinking and action--small acts must unfold into larger ones. Small acts that are viewed as ends themselves will do little to move us toward sustainability.

But for the outsider, it is not obvious that I am living trash-free. Unless he or she is involved in some trash-generating social interaction with me, one would never know. And so here is the dilemma: How do you send a strong message to someone about something important, something that must change in our individual and collective lives, without scaring them away? How "normally" should one behave? Again, communication is the key. We cannot leave people with the understanding that living trash-free (or whatever else you are doing) is about stuff going into a landfill. The message of living trash-free (again, as an example) is lost if it does not lead to people thinking about materialism, consumerism, capitalism, globalisation, social and environmental injustice, water pollution, chemicals, plastics, and so on.

Many people think that we can reduce our burden on the world without changing anything fundamentally about ourselves and our culture. Many think that buying "green" products, recycling, and investing in newer, more efficient technologies are natural steps towards environmentally-responsible living. These things are important, but only go so far. On the whole, I think that such behaviour dilutes environmentalism, and does little to respect the Earth deeply. Such behaviour implies that this culture itself is moving in a direction of deepening environmental concern, that if we just buy into it and trust it and still live consumerist and materially-laden lives, that things will be fine. I disagree with such thinking. I think that the changes we need to make are deep and fundamental, so much so that the culture we ought to be living in may look so different than the culture we currently operate in that it is unrecognisable.

Unfortunately, just to gain acceptance, it seems that you have to make changes look as "normal" as possible.

Guest blog #20: Jason Lai breaking it down

"I’ve written before about and alluded to the problems that the inherent complexity of the issue of a sustainable future presents to society (in some ways, this current post will be redundant in that context). In the context of environmental activism, those dedicated to sustainability often propose action with uncertainty. When we promote, for example, action to combat climate change, the effects are largely uncertain. This uncertainty allows those with antithetical agendas to easily create resistance (in this context, we remain stuck at identifying climate change as a problem). The most successful environmental campaigns (in my admittedly uninformed opinion) are those that have tangible goals and clear solutions, for example utilizing CFL light bulbs, or phasing out CFCs. These examples also have the advantage of minimally disturbing the status quo.

Ultimately, this is a long way of stating that small gradual changes are an effective means of affecting change towards sustainability. Of course, this statement is likely obvious, but perhaps important to keep in mind in the context of breaking large paradigm-altering shifts down into smaller bite-sized chunks, fit for public consumption."

~Jason


I do believe that steps, at times baby steps, are necessary in moving us towards a less ecologically degrading future, which is diametrically opposite to the current status quo, indeed a paradigm shift. It is important, however, to realise that these are steps, steps towards a goal, and not ends in themselves. While we can be satisfied with what we've done, we cannot let that make us lose sight of where we need to be.

~Darshan

Reductionism and trash

If you look at the titles of Ph.D. theses today, you wouldn't be admonished for thinking that a lot of the work academics do can have no bearing on things outside of their sub-discipline. We have created walls and artificial boundaries between fields of study, and created specialised languages that we within specific disciplines use to communicate with others in "our" field. Also, we have given proxies to invisible companies and men in suits to provide us with essential services such as food, clothing and shelter. We have centralised the production and distribution of the necessities of life. Although we would like to think our world is "globalised" and "flat," I believe the world we inhabit is highly specialised and centralised. This specialisation is at some level (obviously from a neoconservative economic standpoint) semi-defensible given assumptions of "economies of scale," but arguments cannot hold water from a moral and ethical perspective.Wendell Berry likes to call this phenomenon "reductionism."

We have defined these boundaries for two reasons...

• It is impossible for us to know all of the variables of a given system or problem, and so in order for us to stand any chance of coming up with an elegant solution or number, we need to reduce the number of variables; we need to define limited boundaries so that we can still capture the basic dynamics of interactions between various parts of a system, without overburdening our computers and calculating gadgets.
• We seem to think that we can know how complex systems work, and that given enough time and resources, the outcomes of such endeavours are believable. 

The latter point can be defended, but only within the context of an individual discipline or sub-discipline. When we try to optimise a system or try to maximise some outcome of a system, we can continuously tinker with the variables we choose to work with. However, what we fail to recognise sometimes is that just because a system is optimised for one particular situation, it isn't necessarily optimised for another situation or system. The output of our narrowly defined system will always have an impact on the variables that were left outside of its boundaries. A great example of this is trash. Trash is the result of an "optimum" solution to a very narrowly and myopically defined system, and that system is our pleasure and convenience. The variables that can play a role in our pleasure and convenience are time, money and place. The boundaries of the system are defined as such, and we consciously or subconsciously defend the definition of those boundaries when we accept the formation of trash. If I am in a rush to grab a bite to eat, the optimum solution is for me to microwave a microwave meal that came in a box with a plastic bowl and thin plastic cover, or to run to Jimmy John's and buy a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, along with a drink in a wax/paper cup with a plastic lid and straw. However, this is not the optimum solution for the Earth that provided the resources to produce the plastics, papers and boxes. The outputs of our pleasure and convenience are too much for nature to handle.

We cannot continually overlook the impacts of our actions on nature by defining the boundaries of our systems for our "ease" and "convenience."

Addressing complexity with more complexity

We lead such complicated lives today - You have to start saving for your retirement. What pension plan do you choose? A 401(k)? Is your employer offering you the best possible options? We need insurance for health, but you can't afford it. You pay out of your pocket to treat an injury, and you're bankrupt. You have a device that updates you on your friend's statuses on Facebook. You can travel to India, but because of heightened security reasons, all of your shampoo and lotion must be in containers no larger than 3 fl. oz., kept in a clear plastic bag. Schooling in America is "broken" and your child sees drugs and violence daily at school. There are chemicals of all sorts in your processed foods, chemicals that have never been tested for any human or environmental health impacts. Complicated problems we face daily. What is our approach to solving these problems? More complexity.

Let's make sure that people have health insurance by having the government create a competitive market for insurance providers. Let's create a variety of different school types and have states make up plans of how they'll improve over the next five years so they'll get money, and let's provide incentives for teachers so that they do their job, and if not, fire them. Let's create legislation to make sure that chemicals used in our foods, for cleaning up oil spills, for treating medical waste, can somehow be tested for their impacts on our earth. What unfortunately we do when we try to address problems in such a manner is that we add even more complexity to our lives, and to our problems. Then, when we realise that there are problems with our so-called "solutions," we address those problems, not the original problems, to make sure that we don't further dig ourselves into a hole. We lose sight and track of what we actually have to deal with - deep-rooted cultural, social, economic, ethical, moral and environmental discrepancies and problems in how we interact with ourselves, animals, non-sentient beings, and our earth.