Experience it for yourself

I grew up in Mumbai, a mega-city if there ever was one. The pollution there wasn't as invisible as it is in many places here in the West. You could see the pollution every day, maybe barring the rainy days. This isn't like intermittent smog events because of temperature inversions that may envelope a city for a day or two. No. This is constant. If you haven't experienced this, it is hard to describe. And so it goes that our choices, our daily choices, here in the West, or anywhere else, are made without an understanding of their implications on places far away from us in this globalised world. In fact, one need not worry about a place far off like India. Just look around you. The implications of our choices are all around us, if we choose to look.

If we are then made to talk about sustainability, dealing with climate change and social injustice, without an understanding of our choices or how we've gotten to this point, our vantage point is one of an unemotional elite, one of privilege. It is very easy to recommend that we need more efficient cars and computers to power our society, without seeing the destruction that is caused in the preparation of these cars and computers. And of course, those that have the power to make such policy decisions are generally those who are furthest away from the impacts of those decisions, while benefiting the most. It is unclear to these decision-makers the true "costs" of building a bridge, or deciding that a rainforest should be converted into a biofuel production facility. Have these decision makers lived a life of hardship? Have they cut down a tree that has supported native peoples? Furthermore, the scales of the decisions being made, with their environmental finality, with their centralisation and a lack of nuance, and at times downright arrogance, have the potential to further worsen the situation. And therefore, such decisions cannot be made in a vacuum, whether at an engineering firm, or the state capital, or the White House.

I'd like to end today's post with a quote from one of my student's journals, who was writing about his time in Delray, Detroit, for the class on neighbourhood sustainability I was helping teach last semester.

"This trip has made me realize, first hand, the pains of environmental hardship. You can be told things many times and still never understand fully what you are being told. It's not until my eyes burned, my throat was scratchy, my lungs were continually being vacated of air from the coughing that I could really understand. I smelled some of the foulest air I have ever inhaled, and it was all different varieties. I don't blame that lady who leaves two or three days a year because she just can't take the smell mixed with the heat. I wish they cold all get up and leave forever, but then again, I wish they didn't live in a situation where that was the best option."

To landfill

The world faces environmental issues, environmental justice included, because of a disconnect between how we humans think we live our lives, and how we actually live our lives. There is a disconnect between what we think is important, and what actually sustains us, allowing us "prosperity" and peace of mind. We think, in the West (and more so now in many other countries), that our streets are clean and that it is unseemly to have it any other way, of course, we are a "developed country." We condone and encourage the purchasing of new products, cutting edge and faster than ever before. We think that this signifies progress; we think that the future is always better than the past. We think that it is important to support policies, economic systems and actions that promote ways of making a living that we have come to accept as essential and necessary. Yet we actually are sweeping great harms under the rug and stuffing them underground. We actually are depleting our Earth's capacity to renew itself, to sustain plants, animals, watersheds, prairies and humans. We actually are continuing a legacy a recklessness, carelessness, unthoughtfulness, and disrespect towards land, rocks, water, air, animals and humans.

As I've mentioned previously, we have structured our communities around how we can dispose of our trash. The fact that trash in the West is invisible makes us feel that we are doing small amounts of harm to our environment. Yet there is a disconnect between what we think happens to the trash, and what actually happens to the trash. Have you ever considered that the trash does not just vanish into thin air? Much of our trash ends up in landfills, or in our air after it is burned. I'll ask you again, have you considered that the plastic cup you are drinking from, once thrown away, will just sit somewhere else, for a long, long time?

Poonam, one of the heads of the Student Sustainability Initiative at the University of Michigan, had a wonderfully simple idea: what would happen if we changed the labels on our trash bins from "Trash" to "To landfill"? How would that change our perceptions of trash? How would that challenge us reduce trash? A meeting with the head of recycling and waste management at the University yesterday shed some light on how disconnected we are from the fate of the trash we produce. She said that "this would only confuse people, and encourage them, in a rush, put a non-recyclable into a recycling bin, consequently contaminating the recyclables." Do we actually accept the fact that trash goes to landfills?

Bubbles, proxies, responsibility and invisibility

Our societal bubble has been built around extracting energy and material from nature and the environment around us, and depositing degraded materials and energy back outside of our bubble, into nature. Our ethic is defined by doing what we want "in here," and not worrying about what happens "out there," as long as the flow of materials and energy in continues, and as long we can continue dumping what we want out there. We have created this disconnect in order to shirk responsibility in dealing with shortcomings of our philosophies and mental capacities, and in our humility. As Wendell Berry describes in his essay Total Economy, we have at the same time created proxies for the provision of essential goods and services - food, clean water, clean air - to people and corporations who have no connection to us. If we don't know where these essentials are coming from, who is providing them, and who is ensuring their existence, we are putting our faith in believing that no harm is being done to the nature, the outside bubble, the provider, along the way.

Trash is a telling example something we have created that we do not want to take responsibility for. Indeed, we have created a proxy for dealing with it. You just put your trash outside once a week, or every other week, and it goes away. Where? Who knows? (Do you know where your nearest landfill is? Who is incinerating your trash?) Since we cannot see where the trash is going, we lose the capacity to see how much of it is being produced (from yesterday's post, what does 4.5 lbs/person/day times 365 days times 300 million people look like? What does it feel like? What does it smell like?). We have faith that once the trash is out of the house, it has magically disappeared, and has no impact on nature. What if each one of us was responsible for our own trash? This American Life had a show a few years ago, "Garbage," in which garbagemen (or san men) in NYC describe our trash. I remember one worker mentioning how people have no respect for the san men who take their trash away, leaving boards with nails sticking out of them and shards of glass waiting to hurt someone. Hmm. Since trash doesn't have a name on it, we don't need to be responsible to the people that magically make the trash invisible, either.

Maybe you've heard of the trash crisis in Naples. Here's what it looks like if trash isn't collected.