"Goods"

(There may be some economic jargon in this post.) In a world full of products and gadgets and materials extracted from nature, we use the word "goods" to describe anything and everything that can be moved around for personal profit or utility - food, fabric, metals, and electronics. There are of course public goods (say, something like clean air) and private goods (say, a car). Public goods are those things that we all need (and now want), the existence of which we hope will be taken care of by large organisations we've created, like governments. Private goods are those that are available primarily to those who have the ability to buy them. Generally, like in the US, depending on what you think the right approach is to deal with large scale problems is, you might think that the problem should be privatised, or should be made public. We can make things private goods, or public goods. There are of course several issues that arise because of this, but I don't want to delve too much into them. What I do want to focus on is the word "goods."

As you can tell, we have used the word "goods" to describe those objects we've become so accustomed to in our lives, many of which we feel are indispensable. Yet, it is hard to deny that in the creation of "goods," we've done significant harms to everything that allowed us to produce the "goods" in the first place. I think it is particularly ironic that we use that word, because it obscures what actually happens to make those objects. In fact, many bads, by most everyone's standards, have to happen to make these "goods" for us. We may trample on the grounds of indigenous peoples to extract metals, we may dam their rivers to produce power, and we may cut down rainforests to produce timber for furniture. The military is a wonderful oxymoron that typifies this issue - we want "security" and therefore we must produce weapons that necessarily make others insecure.

There may have been times when the "goods" were produced at a scale that didn't disturb nature and culture locally that much, let alone globally. But given the ever-increasing production of "goods," we of course step over limits of nature and ecosystems and the abilities of people to cope with these interventions. We have overstepped limits to such an extent that it is indeed ironic to say that some gadget is a "good." How might we be able to redefine what a "good" means? Is there another word that we can use that adequately captures the essence of our choice? Clearly, "commodity" does no better. Rather, it encourages us to view objects and nature as things to be "consumed."

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.