The conditions lived and worked in

I want to address a comment that I received on a previous post, On a lack of honesty. What I said in that post, and in most other posts, is the fact that our choices and this culture result in ecological degradation, and that this ecological degradation leads to living and working conditions for people that are hard and toxic. It is not only the production and mining that leads to toxic conditions, but also the things that happen to what we produce once we've rejected them. The comment suggested instead that today, working conditions are much better overall, and that ecological degradation and working conditions are "inversely related." I wanted to counter that by providing a few examples, and by reemphasising a point I made in another post - our attitudes toward people are reflected in our attitudes toward nature, and our attitudes towards nature are reflected in our attitudes toward people. The nature and people negatively affected may not be present in our immediacy, but they may be present elsewhere.

This blog started off by exploring trash, an outcome of our choices, and there's no better example of poor working conditions and living conditions than viewed through trash. Whether it is electronic waste being sent to Asia, or petrochemicals being dumped in Africa, or the landfills on the outskirts of cities, the working and living conditions produced because of what we reject are horrifying and degrading. In his book The Lake of Sleeping Children, Luis Alberto Urrea describes these conditions that people live in and work in at a Tijuana dump. On the production side, it is very easy for us to be unaware of poor working conditions that exist in far off countries. I am sure you heard of the exploitative conditions at Foxconn (here, here), the chip manufacturer in China.

This culture has been successful at exporting and externalising the negative outcomes of our choices. Wars aren't fought here, they are fought elsewhere. What does it mean to go to war? What does it mean for the land and air and water? What does it mean to live in a war zone? We don't really know. Similarly, what does it mean to export production and mining? What does it mean for the land and air and water? It may mean that the conditions here are pristine and clean, but there is no way that such conditions exist in the places the actual production and mining are taking place in. We may be able to mechanise most every job here in the West, and create "good working conditions," but there are actual people doing those jobs in the industrialising world, a world that this Western culture has created and exported.

On inequality, poverty, and ecological degradation

I have written just a little bit about the issues of poverty and inequality. My first foray into this issue was inspired by Vanessa Baird's piece Trash: Inside The Heap. Today, I would like to revisit these issues and promote a very interesting project. A couple of my friends, Lisa and Ingrid have started a blog called Half of The World. The blog is about how poverty and inequality are driven and perpetuated by neocolonialism and transnational organisations, but more fundamentally the way we in the most powerful nations on the Earth, each and every one of us, choose to behave. Our behaviour is deeply ingrained and self-serving, and results in calamities such as the dumping of petrochemical wastes in Africa, or the shipping of electronic wastes to Asia, or the degradation of environment in Delray, Africa, and Asia being far less financially and politically fortunate.  

The blog challenges people to live on $2/day for a week, and the purpose is threefold - 

• Highlight the disparity between the disparities between standards of living in industralised nations and unindustrialised nations - By forcing ourselves to make the sorts of calculations and sacrifices that are common for most people in the world, they wish to gain some understanding of how the Majority World lives, and how radically different our own lives are.

• By forcing ourselves to live with less, they hope to question our own taken-for-granted habits and think about the types of choices we have been making. They want to discover what we have become dependent upon, what we can actually live without, and what viable alternatives exist to reduce our daily consumption patterns. When making routine purchases, they desire to more frequently ask ourselves, “Do I really need this?”

• Most importantly, they wish to use this project as a springboard to share information and increase awareness about the nature of global poverty. They believe that one of the most decisive needs in the struggle against global poverty is a critical mass of people who are willing to substantially alter their lifestyle and work together to challenge the systems of inequality that both sustain their way of life and simultaneously produce mass starvation among the rest of the world.

There are striking parallels between what I have been writing about for the past year, and the motivations that have guided Lisa and Ingrid. Trash had provided a wonderful, although not fully adequate, lens through which to view the impacts of our choices. Although poverty may be a little more difficult to grasp, images of poverty surround us, even here in Ann Arbor, or just forty miles away, and this poverty results from the exact same choices that we make that result in trash, and ecological degradation more broadly. Rather than frame the issues through trash, they choose the lens of consumption, the differences I have written about here. This further reinforces to me that issues such as poverty, inequality, greenhouse gas emission, toxins in water, fracking, and trash are just different manifestations of more fundamental problems plaguing our societies. We cannot, and should not, think that we can address one without addressing them all; this is something we all need to accept.

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Gap Between Rich And Poor Named 8th Wonder Of The World

Some more thoughts on the definition of the problem

In my last post, I talked about the ever-growing amount of "e-waste" being shipped overseas. I can attribute this growing amount of e-waste to a few things:

1) Electronics are intentionally made to not last more than a couple of years.
2) Everything is being "upgraded" - you might be perfectly happy to use your old computer (which works well), but other people, companies, organisations, etc. use new versions of various software that require newer versions of hardware to process. In the end, you have to "upgrade" if you want to be a part of the majority of society.
3) There is a social pressure for people, especially the young, to have newer versions of perfect functional products, take for example the new iPhone.
4) We think that what is new is better than what is old, not only from a functional standpoint, but also from the standpoint of materials, efficiency and "environment."

The fourth point is what I would like to elaborate on in this post. I previously have elaborated on what is embodied in products that we have already. When we purchase something, we have agreed to all that has gone on to make that product (whether we like to think about it or not), including the societal, cultural, ecological and economic impacts. Materials are permanently extracted, from the earth, and tons of energy and freshwater are used to morph and shape these elements and compounds into something "useful" and "usable." When we buy something "more efficient," you also agree to all that has gone on to make that product. There is a certain amount of "life" that you purchase, and it is up to us to make sure we make full use of the products while they still function. I like to take the example of buying a new Toyota Prius as opposed to buying an older, used car. This article from Wired makes it very clear - you will be doing less harm to the environment by either keeping your old car, or buying another used car, than by purchasing a new Prius. Here is another article to think about...

In the end, it is up to us to decide whether to buy into the fads, fashions and branding. But hopefully we can make our decisions using some common sense and thoughtfulness.

Trash in India - Let's import trash!

I had written recently about how Trafigura had illegally dumped tons of petrochemical wastes in Abidjan, the capital of Cote d'Ivoire. Indeed, the so-called "developing nations" have turned into dumping grounds for the so-called "developed nations." Well, here are a few more examples of this, in particular, dealing with India.

The Times of India reported in April about how a port in Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu (a state in India) accepts huge shipments of trash from "developed nations," which contain not only recyclables, but more toxic and hazardous wastes as well. Just as in the case of Trafigura, it is cheaper for companies and nations to "export" their trash (and problems) elsewhere than to deal with them at home, because of "stricter" environmental standards, less corruption or what have you:

"But why are the developed nations dumping their garbage on Indian soil? Simply because shipping municipal waste to India is about four times cheaper than recycling it in their own land. While it costs Rs 12,000 to recycle a tonne of rubbish after segregation in Britain, shipping the rubbish to India costs just about Rs 2,800."

What do you think happens when you "recycle" your electronic goods (your e-waste) in the West? You might think that "socially and environmentally responsible companies" that you bought your products from or send your products to will carefully dismantle the products, make sure heavy elements aren't leaked out, and somehow reform the plastics, semiconductor materials, etc. into "new" products. Not really. A lot of e-waste actually ends up being shipped to "developing nations" where "informal" recycling takes place - computers will be smashed, releasing heavy and toxic elements into the ground, air and water, wires will be removed, and the insulation will be melted off by boiling the wires in pots and pans (that people use to cook). This exposes the wires, which will then be recycled or sold for little value. More sadly, however, is that people, men, children and women, sit over these pots and pans, breathing in the noxious fumes. I listened to one story that said that there are more than 20,000 people in the outskirts of Delhi that deal with such waste - informally and dangerously. All of this is in the name of "progress," "style," and "fashion," constantly "needing to upgrade" what we have and leaving behind things we've used. I will be commenting more on this in my next post.