Jeremy Rifkin and the empathic civilisation

A quick thought today based off of my recent conversations with Nick in Illinois, Scott and Mohammad here in Ann Arbor, as well as the above talk by Jeremy Rifkin. The manner in which we valuate our world--through money and materials--does nothing to satisfy deep human urges to belong, to be. "Competition," vague and destructive notions of "progress" and capitalism allow very little room for empathy and compassion. More in the next post. For now, enjoy the video.

Guest blog #23: Adrianna Bojrab on GoodGuide and choice

While making any sort of transaction in the American marketplace, everyone must inevitably make decisions between competitor companies and products. There are so many elements to consider! I consider energy efficiency, whether or not the manufacturing company supports the American economy and labor force, whether environmentally sustainable practices are employed, the content of ingredients--organic and non-toxic...etc. These make up a portion of the criteria I use to evaluate competitor products and companies while making a purchase, ensuring that my purchases reflects my ethical concerns, preferences and values, specifically health and environmental impact. These are also the elements that make up my personal filter on GoodGuide.com. 

GoodGuide is a relatively new (it started in 2008) online database that aids consumers in making more informed decisions in the marketplace, providing an easy, comprehensive and novel approach to product review. University of California-Berkeley Professor Dara O’Rourke, the co-founder and chief sustainability officer of the company, has said that his mission is to make it “easier to find products that are safe, healthy, green and socially responsible.” GoodGuide is funded by social venture investors, traditional venture capitalists and partnered with an extensive network of NGOs, academics and largely traded companies.

How does GoodGuide work? Researching products and their origin can be an incredibly lengthy and time-consuming process. GoodGuide employs a crew composed of chemists, nutritionists, environmental life cycle assessment experts and toxicologists, who have analyzed over one hundred and twenty thousand products (household, personal, food, etc…), and the companies behind the product. They also use information based on over a thousand different sources--the companies themselves, governmental databases about the policies and practices of big publicly traded firms, private research firms, NGOs, policy practices, political partisan endorsement, media sources, and academics.  

Once analyzed, the product analysis is broken down into three main sub-scores: 

1. Human health impact (how the product affects the physical body)
2. Environmental impact (how the product is produced, manufactured, supply chain, potential consequences, raw material origin, distribution, sale and disposal of product), and
3. Social responsibility (impact on society the product or company has).    

The product is then assigned a rating ranging from 0-10, the highest score indicates superb performance, and the lowest indicates subpar performance.

GoodGuide doesn’t stop there; now available is a transparency toolbar that you can install onto your browser free of charge, and utilize your personal filter and GoodGuide ratings on e-commerce sites in the online marketplace. Thus, when you are browsing, the bottom portion of your screen will show how the product matches up to your personalized filter, the GoodGuide rating, and a suggestion of alternative products that can better meet your standards, along with pricing and consumer ratings. Additionally, the new, cost-free Smartphone app (iPhone and Android) scans the barcode of a product, and retrieves all of the online information straight to your phone. Your preferences and filter can virtually be used wherever you go.

Impact.  GoodGuide empowers consumers by showing exactly what their capital is supporting, leading to smarter, healthier and more environmentally friendly purchases.  Why does this matter? Essentially, as more and more consumers start to employ GoodGuide into their daily lifestyles, we will see a gradual change in the marketplace. Consumers’ preferences will become more defined, and large retail and manufacturing companies will feel the pressure and incentive to supply and meet the standards of this new market demand, by “making more environmentally sustainable [products] and producing them using ethical sourcing of raw materials and labors,” say's O'Rourke. O’Rourke sees GoodGuide as “a more transparent and sustainable marketplace that cuts through marketing and advertising,” revealing the truths through the multilayer process and numerous players that go into the raw material, production, labor, politics, supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, marketing and sale of a product. O’Rourke hopes to see GoodGuide send a signal to companies to “business as usual means business as sustainable."

~Adrianna

 ---

Click here for more thoughts on choice, and here and here for more thoughts on the political consumption that Adrianna writes about. You can find previous guest blog posts from Adrianna here and here. Also, she writes wonderfully for The Michigan Daily.  

Against the tide

As you may have come to realise, one of the main reasons why we face such dire ecological crises is because contemporary societies have designed themselves to be "outside of nature" with the desire to control our experiences. Our interactions with it have been minimised, and our bubble has been built around extracting energy and material from nature and the environment around us, and depositing degraded materials and energy back outside of our bubble, into nature. Our ethic is defined by doing what we want "in here," and not worrying about what happens "out there," as long as the flow of materials and energy in continues, and as long we can continue dumping what we want out there. We have created this disconnect in order to shirk responsibility in dealing with shortcomings of our philosophies and mental capacities, and in our humility.


I am reading this fascinating book by Alan Weisman, called The World Without Us, in which he envisions how nature might take over human structures and landscapes such as houses and cities. We have many times fought against nature in creating spaces for us to live, eat, and sleep. In having done so, we constantly struggle to maintain what it is we've invested in. For example, in having "reclaimed" land, like in The Netherlands, we are compelled to keep the forces of water at bay by constructing something like Maeslantkering.

Weisman describes the fascinating case of what it takes to keep the New York subway system running smoothly. Everyday, those running the subway must keep 13 million gallons of water from overpowering the tunnels. Because there is little soil and vegetation to absorb rainwater and groundwater, subway tunnels funnel the water into themselves. There are 753 pumps, maintained by crews, that have to pump water uphill constantly, because of the depth of the subway tunnels, and natural groundwater that gushes up from bedrock. Weisman writes, "Following the World Trade Center attack, an emergency pump train bearing a jumbo portable diesel generator pumped out 27 times the volume of Shea Stadium. Had the Hudson River actually burst through the PATH train tunnels that connect New York's subways to New Jersey, as was greatly feared, the pump train-and possibly much of the city-would simple have been overwhelmed." Pat Schuber, superintendent of Hydraulics for New York City Transit continues, "When this pump facility shuts down [because of no electricity], in half an hour water reaches a level where trains can't pass anymore."

There seems to be an ethic, prevalent throughout our interactions amongst ourselves, and with nature, of domination and competition. We want to dominate other people and their principles (leading to armed conflict), and we want to dominate the forces of nature by creating structures that nature wants to topple, and by demolishing violently natural areas for things of monetary "value." What if we were to live our lives not forcefully against the tide of nature, but rather with it?

How much choice should we have in a sustainable world?

What our "competitive" economy has done has offered people a lot of choice. If someone is making a product or a good for a certain amount of money, other people may try to enter that business and try to produce the product for cheaper, thereby taking business away from the other producer. The first producer may then try to cut their costs, and drive their prices down. Once their prices are fairly equal, you end up with two businesses making similar products. Then they might get into the business of differentiating their products, and sometimes this differentiation may make the price of one of the products go up. What we end up with then are two businesses, making two slightly different products, that may offer you slightly different services. Regardless, we now have two enterprises making two things. We have now two choices. It is not so difficult to see how this may result in several choices. All the while, resources are extracted, in higher and higher amounts, at higher and higher rates, resulting in environmental degradation. (Of course, at the other end of the spectrum, we have a monopoly, that of course, has its negative social implications, too.)

We live in a world in which we can choose between modes of transportation. I can fly to Chicago, drive there, or fly there. We feel (and it is justifiable) that it is important to give people the choice of these options. We now have the choice of eating tomatoes in the middle of winter, and oranges thousands of miles away from where they were grown. But what I think is that it is very easy to take choice to an extreme, and we end up doing things just because we can (you can read more thoughts about this here, here and here). This results in trash, waste, degradation and downright violence, against other people and the environment. What the problem of sustainability throws in our way is the issue of limits to consumption, which necessarily will limit the choices available to people. I concede that I do not have the answer to what the choices we have should be pared down to, but I do know that this is probably not the right direction to look in, macro to micro. Rather, we should look at ourselves first, and see what it is that we think constitutes a happy and meaningful life, given the constraints the natural world puts on us. I think this is a more tractable approach.

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?

On my declining faith in government

I was at the EPA National Vehicle Emissions Testing Facility the other day when it was announced that there would be a new "public-private" partnership between the EPA and Chrysler to develop hydraulic hybrid technology for light duty vehicles such as minivans. The EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, was there along with Chrysler Chairman Sergio Marchionne introducing a "new model relationship" between the government and corporations - one in which the government and industry will work hand-in-hand. I was particularly surprised at how many times Jackson called residents of the US "consumers." The newly elected Lieutenant Governor, Brian Calley, was there as well, speaking about how his "family of five consumers" would benefit greatly with this new product. I got the feeling, along with my friends who agreed, that the tone of the government, represented through Jackson and the EPA, was markedly subservient to Chrysler and "other corporate partners." That seemed to rub us the wrong way, given that the EPA is a regulatory agency, whose job it is not to compromise and work with industry, but to set "acceptable" (yes, a loaded word that I will talk about in another post) standards within which industry can operate. Jackson also said the following: "Hydraulic hybrid vehicles represent the cutting edge of fuel-efficiency technology and are one of many approaches we’re taking to save money for drivers, clean up the air we breathe and cut the greenhouse gases that jeopardize our health and prosperity. The EPA and Chrysler are working together to explore the possibilities for making this technology affordable and accessible to drivers everywhere. This partnership is further proof that we can preserve our climate, protect our health and strengthen our economy all at the same time.” (emphasis added by me)

President Obama, in his weekly radio address to the nation, today declared that the United States can "outcompete any other nation on Earth," in what The New York Times called a "pro-growth, pro-trade message that is likely to be at the heart of the State of the Union speech he gives to the Congress on Tuesday." Obama went on the say (with emphases added by me), "We’re living in a new and challenging time, in which technology has made competition easier and fiercer than ever before. Countries around the world are upping their game and giving their workers and companies every advantage possible. But that shouldn’t discourage us, because I know we can win that competition. I know we can outcompete any other nation on earth. We just have to make sure we’re doing everything we can to unlock the productivity of American workers, unleash the ingenuity of American businesses and harness the dynamism of America’s economy." He went on to say, about his trip to Schenectady's GE steam-turbine plant, “This plant is manufacturing steam turbines and generators for a big project in India that resulted from a deal we announced around that trip — a project that’s helping support more than 1,200 manufacturing jobs and more than 400 engineering jobs in Schenectady,” Mr. Obama said. “Good jobs at good wages, producing American products for the world.”

(I will stop short and not talk about new Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's announcement during his State of the State speech this past week about the new bridge between Canada and the US.) I have written at length in other posts about how the government has been as complicit in environmental harm and degradation in the past; these recent announcements do not change my viewpoint, but rather lend evidence that indeed, the government is as short-sighted as corporations are. The government views us, people, people with thoughts, emotions and feelings, as consumers. We are viewed as consumers that only do our rightful duty when we consume and produce and grow, not thoughts, emotions and ethics, but physical products whose presence almost inevitably degrades the Earth's capacity to sustain those very governments. We are at a point in time when simplicity of thought and rhetoric and broad brush strokes cannot allow us to comprehend the full impacts of our actions. More fuel-efficient cars do not mean lesser environmental impact. The economy, the way it is currently defined, cannot protect our health and climate if it grows. There may have been a time when we could have used simple equations such as "more = good." Unfortunately, ecology, the environment, people, emotions and spirit cannot be reduced to an equation.