How appreciation is activist

It is not hard to see that there is much that is not working around us--everything from government's continuing failures to a lack of community resiliency and a reliance on others to make decisions for our personal lives. Much of these failures arise from our continual cultural want for more. We want better infrastructure, cheaper access to things made around the world, continued materialism. And the providers of our wants can't keep up with our demands. Furthermore, there is a differential access to provisions, further exacerbating inequalities that currently exist. I will be the first to admit that this power dynamic must change, but maybe the way we are going about creating the change is futile. Are there ways in which we don't have to directly feed the system and cause these changes? Might appreciation be activist?

Activism as we currently think about it is about taking a stand for something, generally with political motives and outcomes. That something could be promoting firearms legislation allowing everyone easy access to guns. Activism can also be about taking a stand against something, like trying to block firearms legislation that allows such easy access to guns, again, with political motives and outcomes. But I also think that activism can also be about doing something we are not culturally programmed to do, and to appreciate is one of those things. And that's what turns appreciation from an acceptance of the way things are to something that is political.
 
This is a system, a culture, that is driven by a decided unappreciation of everything--of our bodies, of the land beneath our feet, the air we breath, and the water we drink. We cherish and respect the things we appreciate. We seem to violently demolish everything that we don't. And because this is a kind of activism, a way of being that this culture does not know, it does not know how to deal with it. If we are to change "the system" fundamentally, I think that we must act in activist ways that don't lend legitimacy to the system, but rather in ways that destabilise it. Appreciate what you have. This appreciation then opens up our lives to more positivity, and more control over ourselves, rather than continually giving proxies to others.

Taking matters into their own hands

(A little tired to type much, but I wanted to share with you some inspirational things going on in Haiti.)

Peter Wenz writes in his essay Environmentalism and Human Oppression, that 

[s]pecialization and the division of labor make people more interdependent, as they depend on others to meet needs outside their own specialties. Carpenters, for example, depend on farmers and butchers, as they in turn depend on carpenters.

Vulnerability is the other face of interdependence. People on whom we depend for life's necessities are people who have power over us. Foragers, for example, depend on others in their group for cooperation in life's basic tasks. But because everyone has similar skills and available natural resources are adequate, no subgroup can control or limit the rest of the group's ability to accomplish their goals. Dependence does not make individuals vulnerable when cooperation and needed resources are so widely available. In addition, foragers know personally and individually the people on whom they depend. This fosters interpersonal bonds and builds confidence that needed cooperation will be forthcoming.

Our culture has tended to specialise more and more, brand us, bin us, reduce us to numbers and statistics. Indeed, our economies are based on specialisation. And when we specialise, we give proxies--we rely on others to fulfill needs. As soon as we give proxies, we lose our ability to have adequate control over what is done with our confidence. (Bruce had some interesting comments on specialisation that you can read here.)

We can all agree that Haiti has been thoroughly screwed over by colonialism and imperialism and the resulting poverty. Haiti has had to rely on foreign "aid" for a long time now. But, in places that are destitute are found the most inspirational individuals and collectives--individuals and collectives that need no charity, individuals and collectives that are taking matters into their own hands. It is us that should be learning from them. Watch this slideshow, narrated by photographer Bear Guerra, about the essay Peasant Bounty by Ruxandra Guidi, from the July/August 2011 issue of Orion, which is about a communitarian peasant movement in rural Haiti, called the Mouvman Peyizan Papay, in which farmers address issues of food sovereignty in addition to food security. (You ought to read the essay, too.)

Bear Guerra — "Peasant Bounty" narrated slide show from Orion Magazine on Vimeo.

What if you don't live in Ann Arbor?

While many of us do appreciate living on Earth, enjoying and wondering about its beauty and mysticism, what concerns us mostly is what surrounds us--it is our immediacy that is most important to us. As Wendell Berry has said in The Long-Legged House (an absolutely exquisite book of essays), he cares more for Port Royal than he does for the State of Kentucky, more for Kentucky than for the US, more for the US than for some other country, but he cares as much about the Earth as he does for Port Royal. The trick is reconciling your behaviour in your place with what your hopes are for the world.

I have written and said several times, including in my last post, that living trash-free is purely an expression of my appreciation for where I live, for it is the least I can do to fully appreciate where I live. But such an appreciation can be difficult given how communities are set up in other parts of this state and this country. While talking to Will yesterday morning, he asked me what I would do if I wasn't in Ann Arbor? Now while this question is purely speculative, it is an extremely important one, for Ann Arbor isn't the only place on Earth contributing to ecological degradation.

Honestly, I don't know what I would do if I lived elsewhere, because I don't know what those other places are like. But there are some key features of society and culture that I have been able to assimilate in the past year and a half, and if one was to do anything about social and environmental injustice, ecological degradation, living in a way that treads more softly on the Earth, it would be to think about and act on these cultural phenomena.

First, our individual and collective behaviours stem from a deep-rooted unappreciation materially for where we live, in time and space. For those of us who are privileged, why do we want more material? While physical things are limited, as any conservation law would say so, and while physical things have the potential to scar the Earth, the spiritual journeys that we can all take can lead to emotional growth unbounded. This growth, this learning, does have significant physical impact, but hopefully in a good way.

Second, this culture erects barriers between those that are privileged, and those that are not. These are physical barriers, political barriers, and emotional barriers. We build highways and box stores using eminent domain only in places that cannot afford monetarily to put up a fight. We cite landfills and incinerators in places already downtrodden. When a homeless person approaches us, we don't seek to understand why this person is homeless.

Third, this culture has continually centralised decision-making, and we have given away much responsibility such that we are reliant on others for many of our basic needs. While this can be fruitful to a certain extent, claiming back that responsibility, and being able to live without being impacted or influenced by major corporations and corrupt governments becomes more and more difficult. Goodwill and compassion seems to be rare with these elites. We lose our power as individuals and small collectives of people.

All of these thoughts will most certainly play out in different ways depending on where we live and who we are surrounded by. And so while it may be difficult to live trash-free in some other places, there is so much more that can be done, given an understanding and appreciation of place.

Government, industry, and proxies

In a recent comment on a previous post, it was argued that with the US Environmental Protection Agency, the government is on our side. This may be true to a certain extent; indeed, the US EPA has jurisdiction over some of the most important pieces of legislation to ever come out of Congress - the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act (part of it). It is also clear that there are employees of the US EPA that truly do care about the environment, and value the data and numbers that science provide, and want to see those data and numbers effectively understood and acted upon. (I know of one personally.) Yet a government agency that works within a government-industry system of violence towards nature can in no way put a halt to environmental destruction; it may only serve to quell it at times.

As I have written about previously, we have surrounded ourselves with proxies of all sorts - we rely on others to grow our food, we rely on others to make sure we are drinking safe water, we rely on others to make shoes for us, we rely on old white men sitting in rooms making decisions about where our money is spent, whether for education or war. As soon as we give proxies, we lose our ability to have adequate control over what is done with our confidence. So, we end up with genetically-modified foods whose impacts are uncertain, we end up with potentially toxic chemicals in our water because of a 'risk-based' approach to chemicals, we end up with sweatshops in foreign nations, we end up with perpetual war. And when I see permits continually granted for fracking in eastern US and mountaintop removal continuing unabated, I conclude from these data that however we've structured our society and government so far just isn't working. How is it that our land can be allowed to be scarred permanently? Any moderately concerned individual would think that such behaviour just isn't right, even if you can't scientifically prove it (because you probably don't have the ability and access to do so). Our best interests, yours and mine, are not in mind, particularly if you have a government and industry adopting a utilitarian approach to promotion of "welfare."

If there is any hope to move away from a continuing destruction of nature, it is this paradigm itself that must be changed. This is the paradigm that allows pollution of air and water and degradation of land. And this is the very paradigm that is being perpetuated elsewhere - we now have "industrialising" countries, where environmental and ecological norms are blindsided by the euphoria of "growth" and "development." This paradigm shift needs to happen first and foremost in our minds. If we delegitimise industrial capitalism, violent extraction of what nature provides, and the social norms that constrain our actions in our minds, we may be on the road to a meaningful collective action that respects nature and its people.

Some thoughts on control

One of the central themes that has come up to the surface in thinking about trash, waste, and ecological harm is the notion of control. Control comes in many flavours and shades, and operates (or not) at scales ranging from extremely macroscopic (large government, transnational organisations), to extremely microscopic (the self, our being).

At times we feel as if we are in control of our lives, and at times we feel like we must move with the macroscopic flow of our societies, regardless of how we feel. At the largest level, control operates at the scale of government and industry - laws and policies dictate what is acceptable and what isn't, what will be mass produced and what will not. In this situation, there is very little that each one of us can do. It is as if decisions are made for us; for example, the electricity we use will come from coal, and there is very little I can do to stop that. Either I can choose to be a part of it and use electricity, or I can somehow choose to opt out. (This I explored in a previous post a few days ago.) Another example is that of the large economy - if the "economy is down," society is down, people lose their jobs, and that means we as individuals are down. Many people feel that there is little that we can do individually to change the situation, apart from debate with people, and hope that the imaginary forces of the market do their thing. They feel that we have to wait and hope so that the "economy is up," and so that we can resume the normalcy of their daily lives. Indeed, it seems to them that we are in control of our lives when the collective we are in, our communities, neighbourhoods, and societies, are "stable" as defined through neoliberal economics.

What we've done then is given up the power of decision-making to people that work in government buildings and boardrooms. We have given them proxies to provide us with the only choices from which we must choose. We have become reliant on others. For example, if you are fortunate enough to have enough money to go grocery shopping, you have a large variety of things to choose from. Yet what is provided to you is defined by the proxies we (the collective) have given to others to make decisions for us. You are thus provided with foods sprayed with toxic chemicals, uber-processed, and full of empty calories. This outcome not only negatively impacts our bodies, but also negatively impacts the environment. Unfortunately, the choices we are being presented are those which will continue to degrade our land, our air, our water. (This is obvious with continued expansion of something like oil exploration.) What is left then is a very small space within we can operate and exercise control. We are left with only unpalatable choices. Now, while I cannot expect everyone to be an activist (that would be awesome, though), I can encourage people to make responsible choices for themselves and the environment in the small space in which they can exercise control. Most all of us, especially those who are able to access this blog, are completely and totally empowered to exercise more responsibility toward the environment in our daily lives, and serve as role models moving forward.

On the relationship between adaptability and what we have

With a changing climate and growing scarcity, I wonder how adaptable we may be to what nature throws in our way. In the future, maybe we will have more hurricanes of more and more power. Maybe precipitation will increase, and the banks of the Mississippi will burst with more frequency, with more exuberance. As I mentioned in a previous post, much of what we have done to nature has been against its tide. We have held back waters that want to flow. Furthermore, we have invested much of our energies, time, and spirit into creating objects that constantly seek our attention to be maintained, while also changing our present such that we can imagine no future without them.

I cannot speak for the past, and would not know how different the past was, but I think that today, the man-made, physical objects that surround us have become so much a part of our existence that our fate is inextricably tied to their fate, not to mention to the complexities of increasing unwieldy social structures such as large government. We have created for ourselves a world of dependencies and proxies. What is not difficult to notice, however, is that with large government, important actions that do need to be taken are almost always held back by inertia. With physical objects we cannot comprehend how life was possible without them. We have become less adaptable to change, in a sense, or to a world without those objects. (This is not to deny the changes that we've experienced in the past few months because of things, dependent on physical objects such as computers and power lines, like Facebook and Twitter.) But it is fair to say that these physical objects are the cause of much ecological degradation, and our continued dependence on them will continue to degrade nature, especially because of a lack of durability. More fundamentally, however, I believe that we must face up to the challenges of a scarce future by changing our decisions today.

I wonder how adaptable we are given all that surrounds us. If we had to live with fewer hours of electricity, could we? Of course, many do not want to envision such a scenario, and then of course prepare for the scarcity by trying to invent something new. While this is possibly an argument for minimalism, I believe more fundamentally that we need an understanding and mindfulness that the more we invest in static, stationary, physical objects, the less and less adaptable we become to our lives without them. For example, the more reliant we are on GPS, the less aware we become of direction such that we may lose our way without GPS. I raise the issue so because what we have today is what we present to tomorrow, yet it is hard to deny that the future is full of scarcity, of fights over water, of fights over minerals. We can avoid this, I have no doubt.

On rights, conveniences and obligations

I want to continue my thoughts from my last post on obligation. I particularly want to focus on the obligations that we must assume given our rights and conveniences in this world.

I am no expert of history, and no expert of international affairs. I know little of the governance structures that exist in many parts of the world. Yet it is is undeniable, to me at least, that as time has moved on in our societies, the rights granted to people by their governments have on the whole increased. (Libertarians may not think so.) Women have the right to vote in most parts of the world now, and much of the world has adopted some form of democracy. The list of human rights has increased over time, it seems, and for good reason. I find it difficult to comprehend and swallow the many violations against the sanctity of the world propagated through war and similar crimes. Increasingly, rights have the character such that they are applicable to all people living in a jurisdiction, and that is an absolutely wonderful thing. These are rights that confer upon all of us the access and ability to partake governance, which affects our daily lives. (Many of us do not exercise these rights, but that is a different story.) At the same time, we have had a proliferation of "convenience" in our lives. We have made it a priority for ourselves to make convenience more convenient, to give more and more people more and more access to more and more things. We have become so accustomed to convenience that we think it a human right to have access to these conveniences. In fact, many people have said that access to the the internet has become a fundamental human right. 

The right to open a business that violently extracts natural resources exists for all of us, and although there are laws such as NEPA that do require us to "consider" the environmental impacts, the environment has been continuously degraded over time. In fact, as long as there is a "just" compensation to the affected people for pollution and environmental harm, such activities can go on. Our legal system is set up such that we have obligations to people, but no obligations to the water they drink, or to the land they stand on, or to the air they breathe. As long as the impacts of our actions can be monetised to a value that other people accept, those impacts can be made to occur. Given extremely toxic amounts of pollution, people may reach a settlement and leave to find a new home. But what about the old home? What about the river in which was dumped PCBs? Our right to compensation has come at the expense of the environment. Many of our rights and conveniences have come with increasing detriment to the environment.

As we have moved through time, we have continued to provide others with proxies to provide us the basic necessities of life - our rights and increasingly our conveniences. As the number of these proxies has increased, we have lost our connections with the elements that provide for us and sustain us. These proxies have been provided to the government and companies, and we feel that their only job is to serve us and to secure our rights and conveniences. Yet I do not believe that the list of our obligations, as citizens, has grown in proportion with the list of our rights and our conveniences. The right to vote has not come with the obligation to vote, at least in the US. No one can deny that the convenience of a new laptop is benign on the environment, regardless of whether or not we feel it is a human right to have access to the internet, and still we have no obligation to make sure it isn't harming people before we buy it, or after we are done using it. As I wrote a couple of days ago, our increased mental and emotional capacities place on us the burden of obligation. We must expand the scope of our obligations with every increasing right, with every increasing convenience. Rights exists only because there is land beneath our feet, water to drink and air to breath. Conveniences only exist because nature provides us the materials for them. Obligations will allow us to fully realise the impacts of these rights and conveniences.

On preparedness

I have come to realise that in order to try to live trash-free, a constant vigilance is of utmost importance. What that means is that with trash being such a dominant status quo, there is no way of avoiding trash if you are not paying attention to the fact that trash is going to be generated unless you make conscious efforts to reduce it. In addition to the fact that trash comes out of un-self-sufficiency and our having given up the ability to do things ourselves, I have been thinking that trash is also borne out of a general lack of preparedness to deal with its generation. For example, many of us do cringe when we see piles of trash at a fast food restaurant, and we acknowledge our role in it, but we are always in a hurry, in between class, or in between appointments. We end up telling ourselves that we won't do it again, or we will try to be more conscious next time, which, of course, we seldom are. (It is kind of like trying to sip hot tea and burning your tongue, or eating hot pizza. Yes, we burn our tongues and the roofs of our mouths peel, and we tell ourselves, "Never again. I'll wait next time." But the next time you see a hot pizza, it is hard to resist the temptation to dig into it.) I have dealt with this project by trying to constantly think about what I may encounter, and being able to express to people my thoughts to people. Once I am prepared, mentally and physically (with objects), producing no trash has been not difficult at all. In cases where I have not been prepared, it has been easy to see the inconvenience I may have been on others around me. At the same time, it is also easy to see that trash can be borne of preparedness. Many of us may think that we will need an afternoon snack, and will therefore pack a packaged granola bar. The difficult thing is to reconcile preparedness with what we choose to be prepared for, and with what. I can be prepared for the afternoon hunger pang, but with something other than a packaged granola bar. It is not difficult, but there is always room for improvement and a heightened preparedness. In a world of now, it is important for us to consider the future.

The Self-Repair Manifesto and proxies

I have written a few times (here, here and here) on the notion of proxies, i.e. how we manage to have other people do for us many of the things that either we should know to do ourselves (What does it take to grow the food we eat? What does it take to mend a torn shirt?), or how we manage to have other people take care of things in such a way that we lose sensitivity to them (Where does our trash go? What happens to it?). What ends up happening is that we lose control over things that should be under our control, because the people and entities we give proxies to (many times) don't make decisions for our (and our planet's) well-being. They make decisions for their well-being (Who thought it would be a good idea to plant monocultures? Why can't we stop other people's trash coming into our backyards?). It is time to take back these proxies, so that we can live knowing confidently that no carcinogenic chemicals are applied to our foods and that no e-waste has to dealt with by poor people.

One way of doing this is knowing how to fix things ourselves. Indeed, if we know how to fix things, we don't have to rely on mechanics and companies to do the jobs for us, with at times exorbitant costs that make it cheaper (monetarily) in some sense to buy a new item. Arnab introduced me to the Self-Repair Manifesto, which is a free repair manual anyone can edit. There are instructions on how to repair computers, game consoles, phones, vehicles, cameras, and household appliances. Here is what the website says:

• Repair is better than recycling - making our things last longer is both more efficient and more cost-effective than mining them from raw materials.
• Repair saves the planet - Earth has limited resources and we can't run a linear manufacturing process forever. The best way to be efficient is to reuse what we already have!
• Repair saves you money - fixing things is often free, and usually cheaper than replacing them. Doing the repair yourself saves you serious dough.
• Repair teaches engineering - the best way to find out how something works is to take it apart.
• If you can't fix it, you don't own it - repair connects people with devices, creating bonds that transcend consumption. Self-repair is sustainable.

The point of this Manifesto is self-empowerment and encouragement. We can do things ourselves, avoiding waste and trash and environmental and social harm. Furthermore, as the last bullet item states, investing in something connects you to it, and makes it less likely that you will trash something, which may increase in value to you the more you invest in it. (Lia will be writing more about this soon - objects, sentimentality and trash.) 

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.