Openly speaking about norms and values

One of the most important things to come out of any experiment or project or different way of being is the conversation that is provoked because of actions that go in the face of social norms and values. Any project like living trash-free is provocative for several reasons. First, the tangibility of trash and waste and their embeddedness in our every day lives allow everyone to relate to the messages I am intending to elaborate on. Second, living trash-free just isn't the norm. If it was the norm, then it would say something differently about the society and culture we lived in, that social interactions are not dependent on trash and waste. This is definitely not the case. Third, it serves as a judgement of the norms. As Ethan, a sociologist, mentioned to me, what is most fascinating about such projects is the way they provoke people and at times make them uncomfortable.

Norms and values aren't talked about unless someone breaks them. Breaking them exposes underlying assumptions. But norms and values can be broken in our individual lives, secretly (like celibacy, maybe?), or they can be broken in public and criticise social construction more broadly (like trash and culture). To me, living trash-free has been a journey on many levels, spiritual and social. Again, the goal is to unearth and unpack individual and social values and norms, and to have a conversation.

But today, we see very little explicit talk about norms and values. Erik Reece writes in his essay, The Schools We Need, that

I suspect the hesitancy by many high school teachers to hold active class discussions about real moral and ethical dilemmas may be a byproduct of how contested and politicized the word values has become. No one wants to talk about them because someone might become offended, or someone might say the wrong thing, or the messiness of open debate might get exposed.

Although debates about ethics and behaviour are prevalent, they are more and more detached from our every day experiences, as Aidan Davison has written in Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability. More generally, however, as has been seen on this blog, as well as on other websites and media, resistance to the breaking of norms, and explicit voicing of values (having been provoked by doing something like living trash-free and writing about it openly) don't necessarily have to have a face to them. We can pass judgement against those that are indeed willing to be activist or change convention by saying whatever we want to anonymously.

This is also applicable to those who want to speak out and against social norms and values, going to show that many of us are scared to speak out, fearing that we will lose social standing and acceptance. Derrick Jensen writes about this self-censorship in a recent essay, This Culture is #/?*#-+, in Orion:

When I give talks, I routinely ask audiences: Do you fear the U.S. government? Do you censor yourself for fear of government reprisals? If you spoke honestly about the near corporate control of the United States government, and how so-called elected representatives better represent corporations than they do living, breathing human beings, and about what you believe is necessary to halt environmental degradation, do you believe you would be arrested or otherwise harmed by the United States government? Nearly everyone--and I'm talk about thousands of people over the years--says yes.

We can all say what we want, and be cast as lunatics. That is what many environmentalists and activists have been branded as - "extreme," "unrealistic," "treehugger," "job-killer," "soft on terrorism." Individual attempts to get anything done then are quickly silenced and quashed. What I believe Jensen is trying to get at is that any meaningful attempt at dismantling the environmentally and socially-degrading industrial complex will be met with a strong resistance from those in power. Okay. And what does Jensen say about social standing?

The truth is, we no longer need the government to censor us; we now preempt any such censorship by censoring ourselves. This self-censorship has become utterly routine...But fear of state repression or loss of funding are trivial, I think, compared to our primary reason for self-censorship: fear that we'll lose credibility. We are, after all, social creatures, to whom credibility  can be more important than finances or even safety (when global warming is threatening...the planet..., the weakness of our responses makes clear that safety has long since been left in the dust).

Cartoon along with Derrick Jensen's essay

I encourage each one of you to take on challenges, projects, experiments, and movements that challenge, question, criticise, and overturn social norms. These are the norms that keep people silent when they should be speaking out, the norms that keep massive industrial systems in place that wreak havoc on our environments, the norms that condone and accept violence as a means to end conflict or dominate this Earth. Take on these challenges, and develop the conversations. As Mark Slouka recently wrote, we need "men and women capable of furthering what's best about us and forestalling what's worst."

Every decision is moral

When one thinks of morality, generally one thinks of conduct with friends and family, and conduct within social constructs. One might think that the decision to steal something or not is a moral issue. It is; it is a deeply moral issue. But when it comes to buying fruit sprayed with pesticides, or deciding to invest in a car, or flicking on the light switch, are these decisions moral? I would argue that these decisions are as much about morality as they are about anything else. Indeed, most every decision we make in this world is a reflection of our morality and our values. Unfortunately, we've been told constantly (probably subconsciously) that when it comes to every day living and every day choices, morality can take a back seat. And given all we know about the massive problems that face us, it is this behaviour - a dichotomy between what we think is moral and our daily choices - that has perpetuated these problems. I want to write today a little bit about supposedly amoral or neutral aspects of our life - science and technology.

Many scientists and technologists practice their trade thinking that the results produced of their work are amoral or neutral - there is no moral baggage associated with the findings. Just because F = ma doesn't mean the result has moral implications. This is decidedly untrue. There are four reasons that come to my mind (and there are likely more):

• First, because we know, we can use. Laws of science can be used to do many tasteful and distasteful things (like cook a nice meal, or develop a chemical for war). 
• Second, data have import for people's lives, especially in cases like climate change. 
• Third, the processes of scientific and technological development rely on what is available. Technology is not possible without science, but science is also not possible without technology. Where does technology come from? Technology is not made out of thin air, but is rather constructed through the same violent processes that we like to blame for causing ecological and social degradation, like mining and burning fossil fuels. And is this technological development that further allows us to investigate science, and so on, and so on...
• Fourth, just because we cannot see or immediately feel the effects of many of our choices does not mean that the effects are not present. This culture has done a wonderful job of separating ends and means, with technology playing a key role. As Aidan Davison has written about in Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability, the flipping of a light switch just to illuminate a room invokes massive technological and social infrastructures that we cannot see, and therefore, it is difficult to assign a moral value to the action.

In the end, there is no way one can deny the interconnectedness of oneself. It is true now that every choice one makes has had the hand of others in it, and will (unwillingly, at times) affect others, although unwillingly.

What does that mean for our daily lives? It means that we must try to take as much accountability as possible for our choices. It means that decisions cannot be made in isolation, but ought to be made with a full respect for forces at play. It means that we must question what is thrown at us, regardless of how "neutral" something may seem. Assigning moral values to our choices and decisions may allow us a much needed introspection.

On the scarcity argument for technology

One of the key arguments in favour of technological "progress" is the notion of scarcity. Over time, the concept of "progress" has become synonymous with technological advancement. Aidan Davision, in his book Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability, says, "...social stability [became] synonymous with dynamic progress, for stability is thought to be founded upon the ability of social activity to overcome external limits." Scarcity is an external limit, one which moved with us everywhere, all throughout time. Humans have continued to have a remarkable tendency to deplete what sustains them, more so than any other creature than I can think of. If we were to look at some of the negative manifestations of our behaviour, we would note overfishing, deforestation, soil erosion, nutrient depletion in soil, water table decline, and so on. What this favours is then a new look at the technologies that allow us to deplete and overextract, and we of course find out that there are "better" ways to deplete and extract, such that we can get the same amount out for less input. Davison writes, "...fear of scarcity becomes fuel for progress. Scarcity is the goad that stimulates the productive fervor necessary to prevent technological society from collapsing on itself."

Biofuel research is a great example in which the notion of scarcity is fueling technological advancement, without a deeper understanding of social and behavioural dimensions to the problems facing us. Biofuels are being investigated as alternatives for traditional fossil fuels in combustion applications, the reasons for doing so differ depending on who you talk to. One of the reasons is that biofuels may have the ability to have "net-zero" carbon dioxide emissions, that is, the carbon dioxide emissions that occur through burning the fuels will then be reabsorbed by those very plants, that will then be converted back into fuel, and so on. Yet what seems to me equally, if not more, fundamental drivers of biofuel research are 1) an inability to move away from technological systems already in place (cars, planes, etc.) and 2) the drive to overcome external limits, in this case, limited fossil fuel stocks. This second point leads to all sorts of national security arguments, which I talked about in a previous War and the Environment post. In fact, much of the work being done in biofuel research is being done by the Air Force and Department of Defense.

But as has been explored by myself and Dr. Jack Edelstein, Jevon's Paradox continues to rear its head in all technological applications. Now while there is nothing wrong with efficiency (shout out to Matthew L.=)), in many cases, we actually end up doing more harm trying to move away from scarcity by making something else more scarce, particularly because many engineering designs are not modular, and therefore not conducive to modification or reuse. With biofuels, while being a step away from fossil fuels, there have been increased tendencies to cut down trees to plant biofuel crops. We therefore deplete and make scarce trees, and consequently the ecology supported by those trees, let alone affect indigineous peoples and their homes.

I believe that something powerful that each and every one of us can do is consider more thoughtfully the impacts of our choices, because in today's world, many of our choices are technologically driven. Scarcity arguments will continue to be used to research and invest in ever more diverse, new technologies based off of extraction. Yet we continue to deplete and degrade with our quest for such technologies. It is important to realise that each one of us lends our patronage to this system if we choose to participate. Now while not participating in these systems may be difficult, as I wrote about yesterday, it is entirely feasible to limit our impacts and to continue to have discussions that will hopefully make those around you understand these points of view.

On change

I have tried to write over the past few weeks about the economy and its relationship to sustainability. My intention with this blog is to try to lay the foundation of understanding problems facing society and the Earth, with the hope that this rudimentary foundation will serve to guide introspection and action. Today's post is about both introspection and action. I want to talk about a word so incredibly overused in the recent past, and a word that is now bubbling to the surface again with the new election cycle - change.

In a recent episode on Being, Krista Tippett spoke with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Tippett articulated that we have placed incredible trust in something that we assumed was logical and rational, that is, the economy, which was in fact highly irrational. With the decline of the economy and staggering numbers of foreclosures across the country, people stood shocked that something like this could result from a free-market, deregulated financial sector. In fact, irrationality and unethical practices were paraded with the mask of profit and social good, especially with the mortgage crisis. With a declining economy, our government and financial institutions have tried to "reform" corporate behaviour to a certain extent, with significant backlash from those with vested interests in the economic system staying the way it is. Thus, the notion of change, the locus of President Obama's election campaign, has been highly tempered, such that dominant principles of conduct have gone largely unchanged. In this context, Tippett quoted Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist scholar and spiritual teacher, who said "Change and suffering are inevitable parts of life."

With ever increasing amounts of ecological degradation, change is at the very heart at the concept of sustainability. A true and radical change is necessarily at the opposite end of the status quo, and any tempering of the concept of sustainability means that meaningful and durable change will always lay beyond arm's reach. Unfortunately, the dominant discourse around sustainability has been around the concept of "sustainable development." In fact, "sustainability" has come to mean "sustainable development," especially within the circles of the governing elite, including the United Nations. The most commonly cited definition of "sustainability," the definition of the Brundtland Commission, is an elitist definition of "sustainable development." This definition in no way questions or changes current structures of governance and societal behaviour, but rather further embeds past behaviour in future visions of the world. Aidan Davison wonderfully critiques the notion of sustainable development, in his book Technology and The Contested Meanings of Sustainability. 

Do you have any thoughts on the concept of change?