Monday, June 21, 2010

Centralisation and trash

As I mentioned in a previous post, our communities have been giving proxies to outside entities to "take care of what we need to take care of." We have been on a mission of centralisation - centralisation of money, centralisation of data, centralisation of power, centralisation of production, centralisation of energy production, and centralisation of water-treatment. This has resulted in families, communities and regions relying on foreign communities and regions to provide essential basics such as food. We have also ended up creating hubs of even those things that make us human, such as "culture" and "entertainment." For example, we rely on agro-business interests to provide us foods (wherefrom, we don't know), we rely on Hollywood to make us movies, and we think that culture resides in New York. In the end, we have "specialised" in some thing, and have therefore willingly given up to ability to know and learn and do other things. This specialisation and these proxies have not, however, decreased our appetite for things we can't do for ourselves. We have thus resorted transporting items, products, goods, foods and culture from one place to the next. Our products and toys come in cardboard boxes, with styrofoam peanuts, wrapped in bubble-wrap, taped up in tape, and enclosed in more cardboard. Our food comes in boxes and hermetically-sealed plastic bags with little plastic containers enclosed. What do you do with all of this when you've taken out what you wanted?

1 comment:

  1. Hahaaa! So true, man! Society seems to have been operating under the agenda of making life easier for the human race. I think it's about that time we start moving toward what's BEST for the human race...ya know, so we can survive on this planet.

    A couple topics you may want to cover:

    1.) The shipping industry. (The boxes/packaging used to get things by truck/ship/plane from one place to another). How to transport things without trash, AND without damage? This perplexes me.

    2.) Electronics Waste. A large percentage of electronics waste goes to Asia where who-knows-what happens to it. Also, if your laptop stops working Darshan, what will you do with it?

    3.) The tradeoff between making a large impact to society with making a large impact on the environment. To reach the masses with a message, is one doomed to sacrifice his/her own environmental footprint?

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    A few more things:

    There is this author of a book I saw on TV, named Spencer Wells, and the book is called Pandora's Seed. On the TV show, he talked exactly about what we talked about - if we've really progressed since the hunter/gatherer times. Sounded fitting and intriguing.

    OK, later man!

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