A market for everything

When I was in Montreal for the ICAO Sustainable Alternative Fuels in Aviation, I met man, who I will not name, who is very influential, especially in the financial world and the powerful (and old school) Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. He told me something that I believe is both arrogant and unimaginative at the same time: "Look, the world economy is at around $60 trillion right now, and it needs to be [emphasis added] at $300 trillion in fifty years. In order to achieve that, the concept of waste cannot exist in fifty years; waste will not exist in fifty years. Every output of one process will serve as an input to another process."

I can admire such a statement, and can be repulsed by it. On the one hand, who likes waste? No one, really, apart from those who make their earnings from waste. On the other hand, it is an argument for continued technologisation of our world (something that Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger would gladly accept), and it signifies something that I've been feeling for a long time--that in our control of nature, we have continually striven to recreate nature itself, or create our own "nature", as autonomously operating as possible. But, I digress. This isn't the main argument of this post. I want to go back to what this man said, that the concept of waste doesn't exist.

I can understand that cultures change, and that things that existed fifty years ago no longer exist today, and things that exist today might no longer exist fifty years from now. But I find the issue of waste (and trash) fascinating, especially because there is a market for something that we are all repulsed by. As I have said previously, regardless of your politics, trash and waste are things that most all of us want to be away from, and therefore, we do send it away. But at the same time, as Vanessa Baird has argued, maybe our economy is based around the generation of waste itself. This shouldn't come as a shock, for waste is big business in this country, and likely the same abroad.

It's true that we have made efforts to lessen "waste" and "trash" by doing something termed "recycling". But this doesn't fundamentally change the fact in our efforts to be less ecologically degrading (one can argue whether recycling is less harmful on the whole), we still have competition from landfills. When I visited the Ann Arbor materials recovery facility with Caroline, where recyclable materials from many neighbouring communities arrive to be processed, the good many that was giving us a tour of the facility said that because of the recently increased capacity of the facility, and because the facility started accepting #4, #5, and #6 plastics, that the amount of trash going to the landfills has now decreased, so much so that the fees associated with dumping trash at landfills has gone down, creating an "incentive" for communities and townships to send material to landfills, rather than paying more for recycling. There is indeed a market for trash, and a powerful one at that. How do we fight the market? Hope that "consumers will change their minds"?

When we create markets for something, we (at least for a while), accept the presence of something in the world. And with something has unwieldy, large-scale, and commonly produced as trash and waste, the larger the market, the larger the power. (A similar analogy can be made for oil and gas.) But I think that this points to something deeply fundamental and flawed in our thinking, and that is that if money can be made, even by doing something bad, someone will do it, create or coax a market for it, and then say, "Let the market dictate its presence in the world. If the market says that it shouldn't exist, then so be it." Such thinking fails to recognise that some things are inherently degrading. It is based off of the same secular, amoral thinking that has resulted in massive ecological crises and the possibilities of things degrading. We seem to confuse the possibilities of our mental capacities with real, actual, physical existence and implications in the world. The creation of options and possibilities (a market) is thought to be amoral an not value laden, and responsibility is quickly dumped on politics to messily figure out (or not) whether something is acceptable. For example, only because there is a "market" for acts like war do the possibilities of war exist. If the atomic bomb can be created, Why not it be created? many think. Why not then let the political decisions be made off of the actual presence of nuclear weapons in the world? The fact that nuclear weapons have been used "only" twice in the past sixty five years doesn't take away from the fact that nuclear weapons have been used twice, and that they have created an arms race the world over. Again, the same analogy can be made for most all of the possibilities that have been introduced into the our world because of such thinking.

I believe that such thinking can be extremely harmful. It implies a blind faith in "possibilities". People will always say that with the "good" of these possibilities comes with the "bad". But then again, this doesn't change the way we've been conducting ourselves in the world a single iota. Some things, some behaviours just do not exist in an ecologically sustainable, just world. For us to think otherwise, for us to be lead down the path of blind possibilities, means that we have not gained any wisdom from the knowledge we have; we do not learn from history and our mistakes.

On framing: consumption vs. trash

Having been involved in environmental activism on campus for years now, the issue of the framing of issues is never too far from my mind. Framing the issue in the right way without compromising on your values can lead to more persuasive arguments. Today's post is on the issue of framing. Case study: consumption vs. trash.

Consumption is complicated. As defining a feature as it is in our behaviour, consumption is vague in its physicality. Consumption is solely an action. It is not something that we can touch or smell. The fact that we can't feel consumption, but rather that its existence is conveyed through the exchange of physical objects, makes it more of a mental and emotional characteristic. At the same time there is indeed a spectrum of consumption, and some consumption must occur to stay alive - with each breath I am taking I am consuming oxygen. Furthermore, many of us think that consuming leads to a happier and more meaningful life, and maybe it does - I can buy a cell phone so that I can keep in touch with my family. At the same time, we live in a society in which people are judged by their consumption habits such that they have physical objects to show for them. Therefore, it may seem very difficult to persuade people to stop consuming.

Yet the dire state of our environment is plain for all to see, and consumption has played an all too heavy hand in this state. There has been ever-increasing talk about how we live in a "materialistic" and "consumerist" world, and that we need to "consume" less if there is any hope that we avoid catastrophic climate change, or if there is any hope that we move to a more sustainable world. Probably more often than not though, we have been told that we need to consume "differently" - we are now being persuaded to buy "green" cars and "environmentally friendly" computers, which are, of course, purely oxymorons. The issue of consumption has been skirted to make us feel less guilty about what we buy. All of this increased consumption is to aid "progress" and "development;" I've written about previously, the concept of sustainability has been consciously morphed into that of "sustainable development," or in a sense, "sustainable consumption."

On the other hand, we have the problems that are borne of consumption, trash being on of them. "Trash" is both an action and an object. Trash isn't something vague or unnoticeable; it is not emotional or mental (although for me it has become so). Rather, trash is a physical manifestation of a mental and emotional construct - consumption - just like the objects we consume are physical manifestations. The objects we consume may be adding some "value" into our lives, but unless you are dealing in the business of trash, trash adds no value to what it is you consume. Instead, trash is a nuisance. Trash is felt and experienced viscerally; the fact that trash is visceral therefore makes it a wonderful metaphor of ecological degradation perpetrated by humans.

To me, the problems of trash, consumption, climate change and unsustainability are one and the same. Yet in order to have a broader impact, and in order to motivate individual action to aid the environment, what may be the appropriate framework to help guide more people? The connotations of consumption may not be wholly negative. In a sense, there is no way I can stop consuming physical things in existence in nature, particularly air, water, and food. But trash has only negative connotations associated with it. More importantly, adequately addressing trash necessarily addresses the issue of consumption - minimizing trash and waste minimizes consumption automatically. Gone are the issues of deciding whether or not to buy product X because it may be greener than product Y. The fact that trash is the result of that consumption choice obviates any need for further thought.

(Thank you to Professor Johnson and Dr. Shriberg for planting these ideas in me.)

The commodification of trash and a four day sabbatical

Our societies revolve around natural resource extraction. The only way to generate any "monetary" value in this world is to produce something, from materials that were at one time in our Earth. It doesn't seem to me that just being good people and doing any good generates any monetary value. Even if you are a high school teacher, the money you receive was "brought" into the world because somewhere, at some time, alumina was extracted from the earth, or an oil rig was set up. Currently, there is no way for us to value something untouched, unharmed, and unviolated.

Laura (Smith) raised an interesting point during our discussion at Crazy Wisdom Tea Room about commodification of resources. The commodification of resources makes someone money, because of the demand that they create for it. The fact that someone is currently making money on a resource, and currently paying an overspending government taxes on the money that they make creates a vested interest in being irresponsible about that resource. Conservation is instantly booted out of the door when people want to make as much money as possible in the shortest time possible and people of the future can deal with the depleted resources with the "knowledge" we will have gained through the resource depletion. Trust me, some people think in this way.

I wrote recently about the vested interests in trash; trash is big business. People want there to be trash, so that they can make money and support their families by dealing with it. Trash is commodified, and the more we produce, the more money landfill owners make through tipping fees. The commodification of trash allows us to be irresponsible about its generation. We don't see landfill owners coming out and saying, "Geez, these trucks just keep coming. This can't be good for our air, water or soil. STOP THE TRASH!" Indeed, that would be a strong criticism of our society. Instead, as long as the cash is flowing in, landfill owners, petroleum companies and utilities would love to satisfy your commodity needs.

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I am going to Sameer and Christy's wedding in Ohio, and will not be able to blog for the next few days. Expect an update on Sunday evening. Please keep the thoughts rolling in.