How you say it is as important as what you say.
We all want to live in a peaceful, ecologically conscious, thoughtful, and sustainable world. I do not think anyone would disagree with that. This means that we do not live in the world we envision; of course, all the evidence point in the opposite direction. Given all the massive challenges we face, it is difficult not to think that they are "too big" for each one of us as individuals or small communities to address. But we absolutely need to be doing something, anything at this point. Here are two ways we can use our words and our energy to encourage people.
First way:
Humans are altering the Earth's climate irreparably. Our energy sources are at the same time threatening national security, as well as causing global warming. We need to use less energy. We need to cut down on transportation. We need to eat less meat. We need to learn how to refuse, reduce, reuse, and recycle. The government is being blocked by corporations from regulating industry. Stop buying things. Stop doing things just because you can. Needs and wants are completely different. Stick with the needs.
Second way:
We must reimagine the world we live in. We can be neighbourly, build community, build resiliency, and build hope by eating locally. Get to know your farmer, and your neighbour. Growing your own food and vegetables, tending a garden is an act of kindness and care. It is proven that being outdoors, appreciating the space and time you are in can reduce the stresses of this culture. How might this kindness and care and compassion unfold into other parts of your life and world? How might a peaceable mind interact in situations of dissonance? If you find peace in yourself, how do you react to inequality and oppression? If you appreciate the space and time you are in, how does that affect your choices?
I agree completely with everything in the first way of saying things. But, I am getting at the exact same things with the second way--the way in which we live and interact with each other, and this Earth must fundamentally change. Of course evidence to support massive changes in our lives helps, and knowing what changes to make helps, too. But, can we empower people to make these changes themselves and see tangible changes in their lives? Or do we, in a sense, bully those that need to change the way they live into thinking that "we are right" and "they are wrong"?
The more and more I think about it, it is not as if I think that the powerful have acted innocently, or there is no blame to be put on us for continuing to feed the system and live beyond our means (case in point: debt). But what we advocate, what we say, what we encourage people to do in light of the evidence is in no way suffusing their lives with meaning, purpose, and place. Saying positive things is much better than a ban, although bans are necessary. But I would love it if things didn't come to a ban. So, can we act and advocate in a way that gives us confidence in the choices people make? A well-trained child needs not to be kept on a leash, but rather let free on the world with faith and trust that she will do well. Appreciating the here and now, and everything we have means that we are not compelled to constantly surround myself with new objects with planned obsolescence built into them.
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
A market for everything
When I was in Montreal for the ICAO Sustainable Alternative Fuels in Aviation, I met man, who I will not name, who is very influential, especially in the financial world and the powerful (and old school) Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. He told me something that I believe is both arrogant and unimaginative at the same time: "Look, the world economy is at around $60 trillion right now, and it needs to be [emphasis added] at $300 trillion in fifty years. In order to achieve that, the concept of waste cannot exist in fifty years; waste will not exist in fifty years. Every output of one process will serve as an input to another process."
I can admire such a statement, and can be repulsed by it. On the one hand, who likes waste? No one, really, apart from those who make their earnings from waste. On the other hand, it is an argument for continued technologisation of our world (something that Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger would gladly accept), and it signifies something that I've been feeling for a long time--that in our control of nature, we have continually striven to recreate nature itself, or create our own "nature", as autonomously operating as possible. But, I digress. This isn't the main argument of this post. I want to go back to what this man said, that the concept of waste doesn't exist.
I can understand that cultures change, and that things that existed fifty years ago no longer exist today, and things that exist today might no longer exist fifty years from now. But I find the issue of waste (and trash) fascinating, especially because there is a market for something that we are all repulsed by. As I have said previously, regardless of your politics, trash and waste are things that most all of us want to be away from, and therefore, we do send it away. But at the same time, as Vanessa Baird has argued, maybe our economy is based around the generation of waste itself. This shouldn't come as a shock, for waste is big business in this country, and likely the same abroad.
It's true that we have made efforts to lessen "waste" and "trash" by doing something termed "recycling". But this doesn't fundamentally change the fact in our efforts to be less ecologically degrading (one can argue whether recycling is less harmful on the whole), we still have competition from landfills. When I visited the Ann Arbor materials recovery facility with Caroline, where recyclable materials from many neighbouring communities arrive to be processed, the good many that was giving us a tour of the facility said that because of the recently increased capacity of the facility, and because the facility started accepting #4, #5, and #6 plastics, that the amount of trash going to the landfills has now decreased, so much so that the fees associated with dumping trash at landfills has gone down, creating an "incentive" for communities and townships to send material to landfills, rather than paying more for recycling. There is indeed a market for trash, and a powerful one at that. How do we fight the market? Hope that "consumers will change their minds"?
When we create markets for something, we (at least for a while), accept the presence of something in the world. And with something has unwieldy, large-scale, and commonly produced as trash and waste, the larger the market, the larger the power. (A similar analogy can be made for oil and gas.) But I think that this points to something deeply fundamental and flawed in our thinking, and that is that if money can be made, even by doing something bad, someone will do it, create or coax a market for it, and then say, "Let the market dictate its presence in the world. If the market says that it shouldn't exist, then so be it." Such thinking fails to recognise that some things are inherently degrading. It is based off of the same secular, amoral thinking that has resulted in massive ecological crises and the possibilities of things degrading. We seem to confuse the possibilities of our mental capacities with real, actual, physical existence and implications in the world. The creation of options and possibilities (a market) is thought to be amoral an not value laden, and responsibility is quickly dumped on politics to messily figure out (or not) whether something is acceptable. For example, only because there is a "market" for acts like war do the possibilities of war exist. If the atomic bomb can be created, Why not it be created? many think. Why not then let the political decisions be made off of the actual presence of nuclear weapons in the world? The fact that nuclear weapons have been used "only" twice in the past sixty five years doesn't take away from the fact that nuclear weapons have been used twice, and that they have created an arms race the world over. Again, the same analogy can be made for most all of the possibilities that have been introduced into the our world because of such thinking.
I believe that such thinking can be extremely harmful. It implies a blind faith in "possibilities". People will always say that with the "good" of these possibilities comes with the "bad". But then again, this doesn't change the way we've been conducting ourselves in the world a single iota. Some things, some behaviours just do not exist in an ecologically sustainable, just world. For us to think otherwise, for us to be lead down the path of blind possibilities, means that we have not gained any wisdom from the knowledge we have; we do not learn from history and our mistakes.
I can admire such a statement, and can be repulsed by it. On the one hand, who likes waste? No one, really, apart from those who make their earnings from waste. On the other hand, it is an argument for continued technologisation of our world (something that Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger would gladly accept), and it signifies something that I've been feeling for a long time--that in our control of nature, we have continually striven to recreate nature itself, or create our own "nature", as autonomously operating as possible. But, I digress. This isn't the main argument of this post. I want to go back to what this man said, that the concept of waste doesn't exist.
I can understand that cultures change, and that things that existed fifty years ago no longer exist today, and things that exist today might no longer exist fifty years from now. But I find the issue of waste (and trash) fascinating, especially because there is a market for something that we are all repulsed by. As I have said previously, regardless of your politics, trash and waste are things that most all of us want to be away from, and therefore, we do send it away. But at the same time, as Vanessa Baird has argued, maybe our economy is based around the generation of waste itself. This shouldn't come as a shock, for waste is big business in this country, and likely the same abroad.
It's true that we have made efforts to lessen "waste" and "trash" by doing something termed "recycling". But this doesn't fundamentally change the fact in our efforts to be less ecologically degrading (one can argue whether recycling is less harmful on the whole), we still have competition from landfills. When I visited the Ann Arbor materials recovery facility with Caroline, where recyclable materials from many neighbouring communities arrive to be processed, the good many that was giving us a tour of the facility said that because of the recently increased capacity of the facility, and because the facility started accepting #4, #5, and #6 plastics, that the amount of trash going to the landfills has now decreased, so much so that the fees associated with dumping trash at landfills has gone down, creating an "incentive" for communities and townships to send material to landfills, rather than paying more for recycling. There is indeed a market for trash, and a powerful one at that. How do we fight the market? Hope that "consumers will change their minds"?
When we create markets for something, we (at least for a while), accept the presence of something in the world. And with something has unwieldy, large-scale, and commonly produced as trash and waste, the larger the market, the larger the power. (A similar analogy can be made for oil and gas.) But I think that this points to something deeply fundamental and flawed in our thinking, and that is that if money can be made, even by doing something bad, someone will do it, create or coax a market for it, and then say, "Let the market dictate its presence in the world. If the market says that it shouldn't exist, then so be it." Such thinking fails to recognise that some things are inherently degrading. It is based off of the same secular, amoral thinking that has resulted in massive ecological crises and the possibilities of things degrading. We seem to confuse the possibilities of our mental capacities with real, actual, physical existence and implications in the world. The creation of options and possibilities (a market) is thought to be amoral an not value laden, and responsibility is quickly dumped on politics to messily figure out (or not) whether something is acceptable. For example, only because there is a "market" for acts like war do the possibilities of war exist. If the atomic bomb can be created, Why not it be created? many think. Why not then let the political decisions be made off of the actual presence of nuclear weapons in the world? The fact that nuclear weapons have been used "only" twice in the past sixty five years doesn't take away from the fact that nuclear weapons have been used twice, and that they have created an arms race the world over. Again, the same analogy can be made for most all of the possibilities that have been introduced into the our world because of such thinking.
I believe that such thinking can be extremely harmful. It implies a blind faith in "possibilities". People will always say that with the "good" of these possibilities comes with the "bad". But then again, this doesn't change the way we've been conducting ourselves in the world a single iota. Some things, some behaviours just do not exist in an ecologically sustainable, just world. For us to think otherwise, for us to be lead down the path of blind possibilities, means that we have not gained any wisdom from the knowledge we have; we do not learn from history and our mistakes.
Friday, February 4, 2011
On risk
After a wonderful discussion about food in class last night, Lydia and Samantha stayed after class to keep me company while I ate (the students brought in wonderful food for a potluck). After Samantha left, Lydia and I talked for an hour about, of course, the environment and government, she being in the School of Public Policy. She used a term that was insightful, and one that we don't necessarily think about in our daily lives, and one that I have not used at all in the last year - risk.
We take risks all day, every day. Many of us don't realise that some actions are risky, but that doesn't stop us from doing them. Some of us decide to get into cars, and drive ourselves around. We put our complete faith in other people, hoping that they won't drive, from the other oncoming lane, into your lane, at fifty miles per hour. As a cyclist, you are even more vulnerable, and several people I know have been hit by cars. When we decide to heat food up in the microwave in plastic containers, we accept, whether we want to or not, the risks of plastics and plasticisers leeching into our food. When we decide to pass through a full-body scanner at the airport, there are risks to developing some complication, no matter how small those risks may be. In fact, the standards that are set by the government, be they for car crash safety, whether or not a plastic is microwavable, or for X-ray imaging, are set by evaluating the risks for all of these actions. There is nothing that is not risky with these sorts of standards. Someone, somewhere, will experience side effects of medication - we run that risk. Risk is inherent and calculated into whether or not an oil exploration company will decide to drill into an exploratory oil well - I am absolutely sure those at BP, Halliburton and Transocean had some conversation about the risk. Whether they decided to do something about it or not, that is a different story.
But in our daily lives, how much do we think about the risks of our actions ruining the environment? There almost seems to be a tacit acceptance of those risks in favour of "progress" (1, 2, 3) and "development" (1, 2). Any acceptance of how we have behaved so far only legitimises the acceptance of these risks. On the other hand, what do we risk if we change our behaviour? What do we risk if we did choose to live under the paradigm of sufficiency, rather than efficiency (1, 2, 3) and neoliberal economic growth? We risk the staggering and unquantifiable - we risk living with and within the limits and capacity of Earth rather than forcefully and violently against those boundaries. We risk being better to other people and animals. We risk not filling up landfills to their created capacity. We risk preservation and conservation. Are we willing to take that risk?
We take risks all day, every day. Many of us don't realise that some actions are risky, but that doesn't stop us from doing them. Some of us decide to get into cars, and drive ourselves around. We put our complete faith in other people, hoping that they won't drive, from the other oncoming lane, into your lane, at fifty miles per hour. As a cyclist, you are even more vulnerable, and several people I know have been hit by cars. When we decide to heat food up in the microwave in plastic containers, we accept, whether we want to or not, the risks of plastics and plasticisers leeching into our food. When we decide to pass through a full-body scanner at the airport, there are risks to developing some complication, no matter how small those risks may be. In fact, the standards that are set by the government, be they for car crash safety, whether or not a plastic is microwavable, or for X-ray imaging, are set by evaluating the risks for all of these actions. There is nothing that is not risky with these sorts of standards. Someone, somewhere, will experience side effects of medication - we run that risk. Risk is inherent and calculated into whether or not an oil exploration company will decide to drill into an exploratory oil well - I am absolutely sure those at BP, Halliburton and Transocean had some conversation about the risk. Whether they decided to do something about it or not, that is a different story.
But in our daily lives, how much do we think about the risks of our actions ruining the environment? There almost seems to be a tacit acceptance of those risks in favour of "progress" (1, 2, 3) and "development" (1, 2). Any acceptance of how we have behaved so far only legitimises the acceptance of these risks. On the other hand, what do we risk if we change our behaviour? What do we risk if we did choose to live under the paradigm of sufficiency, rather than efficiency (1, 2, 3) and neoliberal economic growth? We risk the staggering and unquantifiable - we risk living with and within the limits and capacity of Earth rather than forcefully and violently against those boundaries. We risk being better to other people and animals. We risk not filling up landfills to their created capacity. We risk preservation and conservation. Are we willing to take that risk?
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