Broad concerns on the bridge in Detroit

I want to address some very broad and very specific and fantastic questions that were raised by Matthew in response to my previous post on the new bridge being proposed between the US and Canada, the focus of our time here in Detroit. Matthew and I generally agree on most things, yet there are differences in approach that makes discussion with him great...

His broader concerns are the following:

Most of your specific criticisms seem to be condemnations of our society as a whole more than specific problems with the bridge (i.e. choose your battles wisely so you can be sure that you are addressing the main source of the problem). 

Agreed. My criticisms are condemnations of our society as a whole. The main source of the problem as I see it is the very foundation of society that leads us to make choices that do result in injustice towards the environment, and consequently towards people. Ours is a society of tradeoffs and compromises, in which those that lose lose, and those that gain gain. What I mean is that many times, regardless of how you might do the accounting of "costs" and "benefits," the costs are born by people who have no other choice. What the bridge is is a manifestation of such an ethic.

I think the best strategy for building momentum in the environmental movement is to attack the very worst offenders first. By choosing battles that most people can agree on we get to solve some of the most important problems without giving fuel to distracters who accuse us of being anti-progress. 
Absolutely. There are so many easy targets for this - polluting incinerators, mountaintop removers, fracking companies. The list goes on and on. There are so many targets, though, that rather than providing a hit-list of entities to take action against, we are overwhelmed by how ingrained ecological degradation is in our behaviour, and how our choices encourages and patronises their existence. We may also convince ourselves that we are trapped with their existence, that there is no way out. For example, many people probably don't like sitting in traffic for many hours each week along their fifteen-mile drive to work, but we have do bear it because work is fifteen miles away. Now, we can try to take down the very worst offenders, of course. As much as I support it and advocate for it, I feel that this won't adequately address the foundational problems that result in such industries. It will only allow others to come up with new ways to harm nature, and consequently people. I agree with Matthew that maybe my writing can serve as fuel to distracters who accuse us of being anti-progress; I am hoping that by trying to address his concerns, I may be able to straddle this line a little bit better than I do.


I will address more specific concerns of his in my next post, with some very interesting material from a discussion with Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision and Southwest Detroit Business Association today. 

Further thoughts on choice

I have written about the issue of choice in a couple of contexts, including "political consumption" (here, here, inspired by Ethan), doing things just because we can, Pareto optimality, and just the choices available to us in an ecologically sustainable world. I would like to expand a little bit more on these choices that may (should) or may not (should not) be available to us in an ecologically sustainable world.

As with everything, I want to bring this down from a macro-scale issue to a micro-scale issue. At yesterday's Student Sustainability Initiative Roundtable, the last one of the year, Ryan talked about the successes in reducing waste and trash from athletic events on campus. There is hope then that these successes will be built on, and maybe a day will come in which people may be able to bring their own water bottles to Michigan American football games, because plastic bottles of water will just not be allowed to be sold there. In response, someone said that she would rather allow people the option of bringing in their own bottles, rather than banning outright plastic bottles. She felt that limiting choice is not the right approach; rather, we should add choices.

I can see what she is trying to say, but I would have to totally disagree with her. Some things just don't exist in an ecologically sustainable University of Michigan campus. Plastic bottled water is one of those things. The only way to make that happen is through either phasing them out, or banning them. If we think about this issue a little more broadly, it isn't as if we have all of the choices available to us right now.

Much of the clutter of the world has come through a continual expansion of choice, as I've elaborated on previously; at the same time, many choices just are not available to us. Whether I like it or not, if I live in Michigan, when I charge my phone, electricity that has been generated by using coal is something I have to deal with and accept. If you don't live next to a Farmers' Market, and don't have a way of growing your own food and don't have a place where you can buy things with minimal packaging, highly packaged food or fast food may be your only options. This raises some complicated issues of how we've invested so much in making sure that we degrade our environment and health, but I don't want that thought to distract me here.

I believe that our current choices need to be replaced, and current choices just should not be available to us if we want to tread lightly on this planet. If you think in terms of "free-market capitalism," that would mean that the price of doing something ecologically degrading would just be so high that you wouldn't be compelled to do it. But say you did have enough money to do something bad to the environment. Well, we can make it a "criminal activity" of sorts to do something like that, i.e. the social norm encourages us to think otherwise. The choices for us to have Hummers, to degrade the health of individuals and water and air by citing an incinerator next to where they live, and to be able to freely trash the environment just don't exist in an ecologically sustainable world. No amount of "monetary compensation" can be used to justify those actions. Those choices must be taken away.

It is spring. It is St. Patrick's Day. Don't just wear green.

Did you smell the air today in Ann Arbor? Did you hear the birds going absolutely nuts? For those of you who are not in this area, the air smelled sweet of mud and grass and melting snow and evaporating water. The birds are back in full force, ready to grace a new spring in song and energy. It is spring, the time when white and shades of gray give way to the spectrum of colours, from red to green. It is also St. Patrick's day, a day in which the only right colour for beer is green (eww), and the only right colour for clothing is green, too. Let's unpack this colour, this word. (Shout out to red-head Smitty!)

Much of this blog has been devoted to the understanding of words that we use to describe the environment, our interactions with it, and our interactions amongst ourselves. There are several important ethical assumptions we make when we use words like "developed countries" and "developing countries." I believe in the importance of using words only if you mean them, particularly if there are non-negligible implications of those words. (I hope I don't sound like a sour guy.) The more freely we use words, the more chance we give people to usurp the word to make it mean what they want to. This can lead to very tough situations in which you may be talking to somebody about something, and they may be understanding something completely different. "Green" is one more such word. It has been now used to describe cars and computers, air travel and tourism, extractive industries and new clothes. "Green" has been turned into a fad, just like "sustainable" has. To me, the true essence of the word in normal communication has now been lost. Call me masochistic (A very thoughtful and cool person has called me that. You know who you are =)), but many of the things people advocate aren't green, but are less brown.

I sometimes wonder whether the motive behind action really matters, as long as the desired outcome is achieved. People can decide not to pollute because they don't have to pay clean-up costs, or they may not pollute because they love the environment. But when push comes to shove, what are we willing to compromise on? Well, if something is going to cost money, many people will shy away from it, even though it may be less brown...just like Krista feels. Is the environment something we can compromise on to make the other kind of green?

I hope we can all think about this difficult issues, and not just use words (or dress a certain way, on a certain day) to make ourselves look good or feel good. Let's mean what we say. Maybe then we will mean what we do.

On compromise and the environment

(I have changed the Comments settings so you don't have to register to post comments...)

Compromise is a part of daily life for most of us - we compromise on where to go to get a beer with friends, we compromise on what experiments to try in the lab, we compromise on who cleans what room of the house. These are not compromises on values and ethics and approaches to life, per se, rather these are personal compromises, the effects of which really don't extend beyond a few people, are not consequential for a long period of time. On the other hand, there are compromises at the other end of the size-of-the-effect spectrum - government decisions and international relations decisions. Such compromises sometimes throw competing cultural norms and values at each other, and can lead to sanctions and war, or peace and resilience. Such decisions can lead to lasting peace, bringing to an end years of conflict, or can lead to lasting war, bringing to end years of threadbare stability. Our governments are founded around the notion of compromise and inherently affect the lives of broad swaths of people - just take a look at the health insurance debates over the last two years. We can all agree that health insurance, and health care in general, is important. But there are vastly different approaches to how people think such large problems can be or should be addressed. What is interesting about compromising is that in general, one side gets more of what they want than the other side. Say there are two competing sides, one that argues that mountaintops should not be blown up to mine coal (zero units of removal, the no side), and other side that does advocate for mountaintop removal (say, 100 units of removal, the yes side). If one were to adjudicate a debate like this looking for a compromise, they may recommend 50 units of removal, or maybe even 25 units of removal, maybe even 10. (This is the sort of adjudication that has been happening in Appalachia for many decades now...) But the true outcome of such a compromise is that the no is lost completely, and even though the yes side gets less than what it wants. The yes side still gets what it wants, and the no side gets nothing at all. (It is sort of like the riddle from La Vita e Bella, where a patron at the restaurant asks the protagonist of the movie, "If you say my name, I am no longer there. What am I?" The answer is 'silence.' As soon as anything said, no matter how softly, the silence is lost completely and totally.) Such have been compromises with the environment. As Matt has been telling me over the past few days about regulation of emissions from aviation and shipping, even though companies would prefer no compromise over regulation, any regulation sets them a non-zero limit to do exactly what they want, and the side that loses out is the one that pushes for a zero limit. Such a compromise is vastly different than a compromise on how high to set interest rates given long-term economic performance, because a compromise on the environment necessarily compromises the long-term ability of our planet to provide for our society. Compromises on mountaintop removal in Appalachia have led to significant and extremely sad environmental and cultural degradation.