More on care and affection

In talking about places worth caring for, Kunstler is basically asking the question, "What do we care about?"

While some people call him a doomer and someone that does not have the "expertise" of an oil economist, there is stil a tremendous amount of sense in what James Howard Kunstler says in his TED talk from 2004 (see previous post).  In making places worth caring about, we inherently forgo individual and community actions that degrade place; the built environment guides choices that cherish and nourish place instead.  This spirit of place can thus be incredibly empowering.

Care necessarily makes abstract concepts of urban planning and of daily choice more real, tangible, and concrete.  Care is not about numbers and statistics (although, I guess, care can be informed by them).  Rather than listening to news of ecological doom and gloom here and far away, building (not only materially) and living in places worth caring about actually empowers us to use an emotion so rarely put into action in our daily lives.  Today, many of us live in places where we do not know our neighbours or the local ecology, we work in places without sunshine and stare at screens.  The massive changes needed in all spheres of our civic and daily life grow from caring.

This care ties in intimately with the affection that Wendell Berry talks about so wonderfully in the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities) he delivered: 

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.

(Take the time to read the whole lecture.  It is worth absolutely every moment of your time.)

Places worth caring for are absolutely everywhere, and right outside our doorsteps (and inside, too).  They don't need to be a thousand square miles big or Glacier National Park.

Places worth caring about

I recently returned from a trip home to India.  These homecomings have been occurring every two to two-and-a-half years, and each time I have been back home over the last nine years, I have traveled to a new part of the country.  I have in time been to Darjeeling and West Bengal, Gangtok and Sikkim, the Golden Triangle (Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra), Goa, and now, Kerala, known more recently due to tourism advertising as “God’s Own Country.”

Kerala is truly magnificent.  Lying slender on the western coast of Southern India, it is shaped kind of like Chile.  The coasts are chock full of gorgeous beaches, and the hillside and mountains, just a few kilometers in, are the site of tea plantations that supply 20% of India’s tea production.  But perhaps the most beautiful parts of Kerala, I think, are the backwaters that hug the shoreline.  This is where coconut trees droop over marshy lands and freshwater making its way to the sea.  Here are some examples of what I am talking about.

But as I, and others more productively and prolifically, have written about, there is something that has invaded waters both in Kerala, the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, and the Pacific Ocean—trash, and in particular, plastic.  Plastic was abundant in the backwaters, and these are only larger fragments that I found at the surface.  

There has been a supposed campaign for a “plastic-free Kerala.” What this means is very unclear.  Does it mean no plastic at all?  Plastic bags were rare there, but account for just a fraction of all the plastic used and thrown.  What about bottles, like this one?  Here is my dad posing by a "Plastic-Free Zone" sign, with plastic calmly worshipping the posts.  In the backwaters, I actually saw a man clean some sort of plastic off of the propeller of his boat by nonchalantly throwing the plastic back into the water.  

In his TED talk from 2004, James Howard Kunstler, a wonderfully foul-mouthed urban planner and critic of suburban sprawl, spoke about places worth caring about.  He talks about how form and design of places influences people’s behaviour in these places, and how "public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good."  He contrasts public spaces and buildings and homes in America with the tight courtyards you find more commonly in Europe.  Indeed, places worth caring about make us want to protect them, to nurture them, and to make changes to them only so intentionally.  And I think his sentiments translate directly to man and caring for the spaces that nature has created. 

As I wrote about when I returned from India two-and-a-half years ago, does cleanliness mean anything to a country desensitized to public trash heaps?  Indeed, are these places worth caring for?  And if we do care, does that care result in us just hiding away trash as we do in the West, or asking deeper questions such as "Why trash?" or, as Kunstler makes us ask, "Where we are going?"

More on places worth caring for next time.

Money and good work

Listening to an episode of Being from a couple years ago, called The Soul in Depression, I thought about how the most meaningful parts of our life, the ones with the most visceral and emotional impact on us and those around us, have nothing to do with money. Rather, it is the things that are immeasurable that can truly shape and change our being in this world, whether it is family, friends, a nice conversation, a good piece of advice, a flower, helping someone in need, a nice meal in your backyard.

I cannot deny the importance of money in this particular culture, and I can understand the need to "work" for money, especially for those that have been oppressed in this culture. But "work", and what what this culture likes to equate work with - a "job" - are two totally different things, unfortunately. The "jobs" people have are more often than not a mindless slavery, wholly unsatisfying and undeniably degrading.  By work, I do not mean only what we do at our "jobs". I do not mean only what we do to earn monetary compensation that we can then trade for something else. I also mean are the things we choose to do with our time. Of course, I would hope that the jobs people have are of their choosing.

And those people that do the most valuable (not in a monetary sense, rather, in an immeasurable sense) work in this world, work that is founded on respect, care, nurturing, and kindness are those that are least compensated by money. Whether it is being a social worker or a psychological therapist, a good parent or an environmental advocate, this is the work that is most challenging - it allows us and forces us to expand our moral imaginations, while at the same time exposing the contradictions of this culture, its carelessness and ruthlessness. How can we structure this all-encompassing work, which includes our "jobs", such that it is founded on respect, care, nurturing, and kindness? Maybe such work will allow us to tread lightly enough on this earth so that our physical presence vanishes quickly, yet our emotional presence endures, while at the same time enriching the experience we have on this planet. Good work nurtures what nurtures us.

It is obvious that many of us are trapped in situations in which we feel the push and pull of life in this culture and society. Many do things, have "jobs", that they don't like to support what they like. But why have we structured an entire culture and society on this notion of unhealthy work? Even when we are unemployed, we are drawn back almost zombie-like to an economy and culture that is counter to good work. I've realised that we cannot buy back what we've lost, and so why lose it in the first place? Why not vigourously, ardently, steadfastly protect what we cannot afford to lose, like our environment? Why not expand our moral imaginations to encompass those people and places we don't know, now and in the future? This is radically different from the "work" we do nowadays - of fighting militarily, of extracting and pillaging and plundering.

Nature vs. necessity

As I was talking to Mike today at lunch, we talked about my research work, on chemical kinetics. I told him what I do is basically this: I take a single molecule, bring it to a certain temperature and pressure state, and see how it decomposes. As it decomposes, there are various intermediate chemical species that are formed, and I measure those species using various analytical techniques. I am primarily an experimentalist. I do all of this work physically. On the other hand, you have can have a computational chemical kineticist. The goal of the computationalist is to develop a mechanism that predicts how this single molecule breaks down. The computationalist comes up with intermediate chemical species, many of them radicals, 99% of which you can never measure, or even know whether or not they exist. In the end however, the mechanism is compared to my measurements of those measurable species. For example, I am about to pick up again the study of this large chain hydrocarbon, a single hydrocarbon molecule. With this actual molecule, I have been equipped with a mechanism that predicts its kinetics. This mechanism consists of 2200+ intermediate species and 8000+ reactions. Hmm...

I want to add a few words to several previous posts on the limits of the mind and research (of course inspired by a simple comment by Wendell Berry). Much of our current research work, we like to think, is done because we have to. There is an urgent necessity to know how exactly things happen in nature. In this process, we inquire, we spend, we invest, and we consume. In trying to recreate natural phenomena, we use natural resources. But the manner in which we use natural resources is not the same way it happens naturally, in nature. If something is done by nature, which means naturally, there is a most beautiful use of land, air and water, in just the right amount, to create something magical. Think of an orange. How does it create those delicately skinned juice clusters that are the surrounded by a delightful peel? The tree uses the nutrients in the land, the nutrients in the air, and the nutrients in the water, and magically converts them to thousands of complex sugars and acids and who knows what. It is the nature of the tree to do so. And it does so perfectly. It uses exactly what it needs, to produce exactly what it wants.

If humans tried to recreate this process, out of necessity, we would need lab gloves, petri dishes, pipettes and temperature baths. We would need lab coats and burners and paper and pencils and computers and plastic and metal and all of these other things that the tree doesn't need. We would need these things because it is not in our nature to produce oranges. It is not in our nature to travel five hundred miles per hour. It is in our nature, however, to walk and talk and think and love and respect and care and eat and drink and be happy and be sad. These are things that don't necessarily require mountaintops full of resources. These are things that don't require trash and waste. Because it is our nature.

How we undervalue

I am taking a break from writing about boycotts to make sure I can capture in words some fleeting thoughts. Much of what I have been writing about over the past eight months has been about value - how we value objects that have embodied in them tremendous amounts of effort and resources, how we value the resources that provide us the capacity to make these objects, and how we value social interactions (here, here, here, here for starters). Trash lies at the heart of each of these valuations; indeed, trash is the result of our undervaluation of these things. An undervaluation of these things allows us the liberty to treat people and nature as we please, without care and respect.

We have a tendency, almost a knack, to undervalue almost everything that surrounds us - people, place, object, and nature. We undervalue the kindness and love of our parents, we undervalue the smile and eye contact of people we walk blindly by, we undervalue the beauty of a snowy morning, and we undervalue an untamed river. We think of everything in the world as fungible, people included (That is why people deem it fit to kill other people or put other people in harms way, especially in conflict. To such people, a person is just a person, and there is nothing more to him. Not all of the experiences that that person has been through, or the conversations and friendships that that person has had. Nothing. Especially in conflict, people are fungible.) That's the only way we can assign monetary value to all of these things - a well raised child can provide $X more for our economy than one that was raised in the inner city and grew up with gangs, a snowy morning (like the one recently in Seattle) probably caused us to lose a lot of economic value (gosh, if people can't go to work, then, then, gosh, we are losing money!), a mighty river, if tamed, can provide jobs to many hundreds or thousands of people, and generate economic gain. The only reason why Transocean did such a inept job at drilling the BP-Macondo well was because they (and the government) undervalued the impact a blowout would have on the ocean, the fish, the birds, and the people of the Gulf.

 

What is the value of this fish and the water around it? (Photo by Joel Sartore from here.)

Indeed, due to the complexities of systems around us, both natural and man-made, we will never be able to assign any accurate value to anything in this world - we will continue to undervalue everything, because no one is willing to say that a life, or a river, or a rock, or an experience is priceless. What if we had the humility to not assign monetary value to something? What if the only way we could value was through observation, feeling and emotion? I must admit, at times it is overwhelming to me now to see a neatly stacked pile of plastic containers, knowing full well that within the day, they will be on their way to a landfill.

(Speaking of value, here's an article about how much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless.)

Generating "knowledge," but gaining little wisdom

I had an absolutely wonderful time at Earthfest yesterday, where I talked with residents of Ann Arbor, students, administrators and staff about how trash speaks to larger environmental and social concerns. People were extremely curious about how to reduce trash generation, and were surprised to see how little trash I've created in the past six months. I am looking forward to more conversations and questions tomorrow on North Campus. Here is a picture of my table...


I met a truly fascinating man yesterday, Jason Bishop (picture below). He had absolutely fascinating stories of trash collection and recycling at the University Northern Texas, which is in Denton, TX. That's exactly where he's from. He was paid $75 per week, by a man who was interested in the plastics people threw away, to go through all the trash there and collect these plastics. He was allowed to keep the metals and cans, which added to his weekly wage. He also spent two years working on a garbage truck. Once when he was picking garbage up, he ran into a lady that was getting rid of a stereo, in mint condition, a brand new Sony system. She said that her daughter wanted a better brand, and so she was throwing this system away. Of course, Jason took the system...

Probably the most insightful comment of the day came from Graham, the outgoing (tears) head of the Student Sustainability Initiative. We were talking about whether our present state of environmental affairs was inevitable. We were also trying to think of decisive moments in our recent history that has led us to where we are. We both agreed that the development of the modern car and assembly line was one of these moments. Speaking to industrialisation more broadly, he said, "We've generated a lot of "knowledge" in the past two hundred years, but we've gained very little wisdom." This comment blew me away with its weight. We would hope our experiences, failures and accomplishments would define paths of greater wisdom. As time moves forward, so should our thoughtfulness, care and respect toward our world and its diversity grow. When we listen to the elders, we expect words filled with meaning defined through experience. Yet for all of the experiences of mankind in the past centuries, we behave as if every new problem we face has come from out of nowhere, and has no bearing on our future decisions. The Cuyahoga River catching fire, methyl isocyanate being released in Bhopal, petrochemicals being dumped in Cote d'Ivoire, birds being drowned alive in crude in the Gulf of Mexico, World War II...these are experiences we should have learned from, and should learn from. Where is wisdom? Does it only reside in the teachings of Confucius, Gautam Buddha and Mohammad, from centuries ago?

A day worth of trash from the Angell Hall complex being sorted.

A different view

My last post was about spoiling untarnished landscapes with our trash. Here are some thoughts from Lydia, about a landscape just miles away from Xidatan:

"It's really amazing to see how some people live, in other countries, with different lifestyles, and perhaps even different views on life. I know that the people in Northern China are, for the most part, very poor, and while many of them don't pay attention to the impact they have on their own surroundings, you can tell that some really do care about how beautiful the unspoiled landscape is. I'm sending another picture to you, this one taken mere kilometers away from Xidatan. It's from the Dongdatan Valley, where I didn't see a single piece of trash. You can see the yurt and tent where people live. All of Northern China has the potential to be so beautiful. The people who live there (mostly sheepherders/yak herders) clearly have access to the plastic bottled sodas and whatnot sold in Xidatan. The contrast between these two locations lies only in how the people who live there treat their landscape."

-Lydia