Peace and the deficiencies of anthropocentrism

I was struck by this painting by David Ward, a prisoner here in the State of Michigan, whose work Ode to a dying ideal was showcased along with the art and writing of many other prisoners in Michigan at one of the best events that comes through this University. The Prison Creative Arts Project does wonderful things.

 

I was struck so much that I put a bid on it (click on the photo to see the detail of the border), and won, without even thinking once about my "not buying anything" policy...different issue, one that we can talk about later. What I wanted to write about today was exactly what Ward is getting at with his painting. We cannot go a minute now without listening to people being killed, either people in Iraq or Afghanistan (where it is almost certain that more people have been killed than has been reported in the media here), or people that are being killed so that their voices can be silenced, i.e. in places like Yemen and Libya. People are being silenced here, too. 

I have written at length about peace and the environment, initially provoked by a discussion about Just War Theory with Professor Richard Tucker (more here, here, here), and then subsequently by a piece written by Hendrik Hertzberg about Gabrielle Giffords' shooting. I re-read what I wrote a few months ago, and my mind has not changed. 

It is interesting how all ecological degradation has stemmed from our anthropocentric ethical structure, which dictates that we will do whatever it takes in the interest of humans, more likely than not at the expense of the environment. There are a couple of deficiencies of this ethical framework that I can think of off the top of my head, which I want to discuss. Firstly, I find it amazing that we think humans are the greatest thing in the world, but when it comes down to our differences, we will resort to violence to make sure that power stays concentrated with certain people. There is a clear discrepancy, it seems then, between doing all that we can to keep humanity alive (anthropocentrism), and then resorting to violence to kill humans when we don't agree. Of course, someone that has power might say then that it is in the interest of the broader humanity that their power is being used as violence against others, but that is unjustifiable. In this case, we don't act anthropocentrically.

Secondly, although it may be more manageable for us to think that we should act in the best interest of humans, particularly from an "evolutionary" standpoint, we inevitable degrade what it is that sustains us. We want to protect our own, and if that means that we need to blow off the top of a mountain to get coal so that our homes can be heated in winter, so be it. But if we think about the longevity of humanity, certainly blowing off of the top of a mountain and consequently polluting streams and rivers is in no way protecting our ability to further ourselves. Anthropocentrism, in this case, just has the ability to cave in on itself, particularly when it comes down to an ever-burgeoning population and the struggle to keep ourselves alive in the future. The future that we have envisioned for ourselves, full of batteries and gizmos and computers, is no less violent toward nature than our present society.

The very act of war itself is unsustainable in the truest sense of the word, while at the same time flying in the face of anthropocentrism. Peace does seem to be a dying ideal.

The recycling conundrum

Back to the flaws of our neoclassical economy and its detrimental impacts on the environment.

A few years ago, I learned that recycling is a business. To be honest, it really shocked me then, and still at times I cannot wrap my mind around this fact. Many people recycle out of the goodness of their hearts, and take the time and effort to be responsible recyclers because they think they are truly being lighter on the environment. And so it might be shocking to them to comprehend this fact. But giving this fact a little more thought, I understand why it may be a business - in a consumerist world, we always need materials to make things. You can of course extract virgin materials or synthesise them, which requires its share of energy, water, fuel, human, time and other spendable resources. All of these resources are then assigned a money value. On the other hand, you can take already existing materials and reform them into the same, or similar materials (likely downcycled, not recycled). This, too, required its share of spendable resources. A money value is assigned to these resources. If the cost of the virgin material is cheaper than the recycled material, people may just choose to use the virgin material. People will only use the recycled materials if the cost of using them is competitive with the cost of the virgin material. Recycling is probably (?) less bad for the environment, but cost triumphs, always.

It was a wonderful experience to go to the recycling plant just south of Ann Arbor with Caroline. A complication about the future of recycling in the region was raised by our tour guide. He said that recently, the contracts that allowed Ontario's trash to be imported into Michigan expired. This may likely reduce demand for landfill space, and landfills may decrease the fees it costs to actually dump something in the landfills (called "tipping fees"). It may therefore make it cheaper for cities and municipalities to just pay the tipping fees rather than the City of Ann Arbor to accept their recycling refuse. This could cut down on recycling. But Caroline raises an even more salient issues in her post from a few days ago. She said,

"...we forget that recycling is actually a business, and the Ann Arbor plant is run by a corporation.  Ann Arbor is unique in her recycling ways.  Due to the fact that the city owns the plant, and that it is in close proximity to the city and the other locales that feed it materials, it is actually more profitable to recycle than trash our waste.  But would the city really try to motivate us if it wasn’t earning a profit?  Sadly, probably not.  Instead of dwelling on a pessimistic view, it does say something that A2 creates an environment conducive to recycling.  However, if we used less resources all together, there would be less to recycle, and profits would fall.  So even though the idea of recycling is usually linked with consuming less, a revenue threshold exists that needs to be maintained.  What I therefore struggle with is the contradiction between business and the environment.  From a recycling plant perspective, are we supposed to stop consuming?"

  

I wonder what the ideal world for the people that actually process the recyclables is. As an environmentalist, the ideal world would be one in which recycling the way we do just doesn't exist - we just wouldn't have so many products in the first place. In that case, the very need for recycling is nil. Yet it doesn't seem to me that the recycling plant is run out of the goodness of a corporation's heart. (Of course corporations are people and are living...right?!) If they can't make money, who cares about the environment?

More thoughts on ownership and "development"

I have been hearing the word "development" more and more recently, not only because I have been reading how the concept of "sustainable development" has co-opted more deeper understandings of sustainability, but also in class and in various discussions I've been having. When I say "development," I mean the human undertaking of modifying the environment, building buildings, constructing colonies, and producing products, necessarily involving the violent use of nature. I feel that many people my age also think about sustainability and environmentalism in terms of "development" - how might we be able to continue along trends historically dictated, but more efficiently? This of course is a natural tendency of our society, and does nothing to stem the environmental onslaught we've been undertaking for centuries now. I want to focus this post on human modifications of the environment, particularly by people who "own" that environment.

It seems to me that notions of ownership stem from notions of freedom, which allow us to do potentially ecologically degrading things, in general for personal, i.e. monetary benefit. While getting dressed yesterday morning, I heard a little story about Aubrey McClendon, the Chairman and CEO of Chesapeake Energy. A billionaire, McClendon owns several hundred acres of fragile dunes on Lake Michigan, in the postcard town of Saugatuck. (This is where the Kalamazoo River feeds Lake Michigan.) As I heard on the Environment Report, McClendon is planning a "development" of a marina, condos, houses, and a golf course. I don't know about the politics of this ordeal; there are people better equipped to understand the environment around Lake Michigan than I. But in all of the news stories I've read, McClendon is called a "developer," and Singapore Dunes is called a "development." 


As I have written about previously, it is fascinating how we feel like we can "own" things that have existed long before we walked the surface of the Earth. The political boundaries we have drawn for our communities and states and nations follow no particular boundaries of nature, except in the cases of mountains and rivers. Maybe more thoughtful boundaries may be watersheds. Regardless, the boundaries we define also bind us to place such that we can "own." But ownership is one thing, and doesn't necessarily imply ecological degradation. Ownership can in fact be leveraged to protect tracts of land and water from human influence. But when ownership is coupled with "development," the coupling necessarily involves modifications to the environment, which imply monetary gain. Very few people are interested in "developing" anything if it doesn't make them money. "Development" itself is a very anthropocentric concept. It implies that everything the "development" takes place on is useless and worthless, and bears no mark of complexity and time. It also presumes that humans know what is better than an undisturbed dune formation, or old growth forests. Yet, Lake Michigan existed long before Michigan was colonised, and the forces that have resulted in each grain of sand on those dunes of the Lake have been acting for much longer than we can comprehend, in ways we will never be able to know fully. Notions of ownership have in fact produced just the opposite of what we would want - what we would want is for our nature to sustain us for as long as possible, but in our quest to own, we have degraded. Just the reverse of how we think is what might be more logical - we are owned by this land, this air and this water, and our fate is tied to our respect to those forces.

Short term vs. long term, and "economic" sustainability

If you heard President Obama's State of the Union address last week, you probably heard him talk about "winning the future." His talk was primarily focused around jobs, unemployment, and American "competitiveness." Apart from his mention of jobs needed in the "clean energy" sector, you would have not been able to conclude, however, that there are issues of much greater import that will throw major hurdles in the way of American "competitiveness," notwithstanding water and soil and rare earth metal issues. Obama centered his discussion about the need to get people back to work, and back to producing things and consuming those things, clearly a short term approach to addressing larger scale issues.

If you heard Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's State of the State address the week before that, you would have heard a similar message - a message of jobs and turning Michigan into a "global commerce hub." He also announced that the State would be fully being the Detroit River International Crossing, the second, but publicly-owned bridge to Canada, that will serve to compete with Matty Maroun and his goons at the Detroit International Bridge Company.What this bridge is likely going to do is provide construction jobs in the short term to the State.

Both of these speeches assume that short term jobs are more important than long term vision. What Obama's speech assumes is that we will be able to continually produce and consume, and what Snyder's speech assumes is that making a long term investment, such as a bridge, will make the State of Michigan economically viable, and will hopefully allow the trickling down of money to the poorest of the poor in Southwest Detroit.

One, masterfully trained in capitalism or what have you, might say, that well of course such competitiveness and projects are needed - they provide people with employment, and people employed serve to grow the economy. Such a state is "economically" sustainable under these conditions. But how much longer can we use short term thinking to tackle long term problems such as poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation? These short term approaches, while putting money in the pockets of people today, necessarily puts in peril the ability of future generations of people and animals and plants (and non-living things) to fulfill their needs, or at least puts more pressure on them for them to survive. So in fact, what Obama and Snyder have done here have defined the constraints and bounds within which environmental and social sustainability can be addressed, by constraining the economic aspect of sustainability. As I tried to elaborate yesterday, this is rather the opposite approach that needs to be taken to ensure the long-term viability and resilience of communities, as well as the governments who collect taxes from these communities. How do you transition and balance between short term thinking and long term thinking? Any thoughts?

Canadian waste in Michigan, and Michigan's waste infrastructure

Maybe you have heard that Canada ships a lot of solid waste to Michigan. According to this Congressional Research Service report, the entire city of Toronto ships its waste to Michigan. Here are some excerpts of the report.

Private waste haulers and Canadian cities — including the city of Toronto — ship large quantities of waste to the United States. About four million tons (as many as 400 truckloads a day) have been shipped annually since 2004, according to receiving states. Nearly three-quarters of this waste has gone to two large landfills near Detroit. The influx of waste has been highly controversial, in part because the ability of state and local governments to restrict it is limited. Under court rulings concerning the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause, only Congress can authorize restrictions that discriminate against foreign waste.

it appears that more than 90% of the solid waste that Canada ships to the United States has gone to Michigan. The remainder has generally gone to the states of New York and Washington.

While somewhat controversial throughout the 1990s, Canadian waste imports have received much greater attention since late 2002, when the city of Toronto — Canada’s largest city — announced that it would close its last landfill and begin shipping all of its waste to Michigan. Canada’s shipments of waste to Michigan increased 83% between then and fiscal year 2006. In FY2006, Michigan reported that it received 12,084,907 cubic yards (an estimated 4.03 million tons) of nonhazardous waste from Canada. Canada accounted for 19.5% of all the waste disposed in Michigan landfills in that year. Canadian waste imports decreased 9% in FY2007, to 10,982,984 cubic yards (about 3.66 million tons), but still accounted for 18.9% of the waste disposed in Michigan landfills.

As always, there is a trade group, representing some interest, having a vested interest in importing trash and waste generation. It seems to me that the Michigan Waste Industries Association this this state trade/lobbying group. Here is some Q&A from their website.

Q: How many landfills are there in Michigan?
A: There are 53 regional solid waste landfills in the State of Michigan.

Q: How much waste is landfilled each year?
A: Each year, more than 57 million cubic yards of solid waste is added to landfills in Michigan. In 2003, approximately 11.5 million cubic yards, or 20 percent of all solid waste, was imported from other states and Canada.

Q: Why is waste moved in or out of other states or Canada?
A: Different state regulations, varying landfill capacities, and financial considerations often encourage the import and export of different types of solid waste. This practice has been ongoing for decades with no negative environmental or safety impact.

Q: Does Michigan export any waste?
A: The state sends about 106 million pounds (53 thousand tons) of hazardous waste to facilities in Canada. Michigan also ships significant quantities of hazardous, low-level radioactive and medical waste to other states and relies on Canada to process all types of electronic scrap and a large percentage of recycled paper collected in Michigan is sent to Canada for processing and re-use. Solid waste from Michigan is sent to Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin from areas in Michigan that border those states. This raises an important point. If Michigan were to close its borders to Canada’s municipal waste, Canada might retaliate by closing its borders to hazardous waste and, electronic scrap from Michigan. Michigan hazardous waste generators would be forced to find more expensive alternatives, an unintended and undesired consequence during this tough economic period.

If you want to feel good about the trash we produce, check out this video, also from the Michigan Waste Industries Association.