"Why would you want to do jury duty?!"

My sister was selected for jury duty a few weeks ago.  The case, it turns out, was going to be a massive one--one about companies withholding information on the risks of asbestos exposure.  Due to some improper questioning by a prosecuting attorney, my sister and a few other people, who were close to being the final jury members, were dismissed.  But the jury selection process itself lasted a couple weeks, and could have lasted potentially longer, followed by six weeks of testimony.  But that is besides the point.  My sister was going to be given a massive responsibility.  She could have been part of deciding whether there was corporate misinformation and whether workers deserved massive amounts of compensation for their mesothelioma.  And all anybody asked her was, "Why would you want to do jury duty?!"

We tend to think that we have a right to almost everything, and that if something goes wrong, it is someone, somewhere who is not doing their job.  All that we, as individuals, are responsible for are our lives, our paychecks, our homes.  We want the right to vote, but not the responsibility that comes with voting.  We want clean water to flow from our faucets, but not the responsibility to make sure that our water is not polluted.  We want free access to information, but not the responsibility of action that comes from knowing.

Our family watched Twelve Angry Men the other night, a tremendous movie from 1957, and what is depicted in that movie rings true to my sister's experience with the reactions she faced.  Jury duty is an inconvenience because "I'm going to miss the baseball game!" When it comes to a fair trial, being selected for jury duty is something that is an inconvenience.  How could anyone even suggest that jury duty is inconvenient?  As flawed as the legal and justice system is, isn't it our responsibility to make sure that we are ready to serve to make sure that people aren't wrongly convicted?  Now, people can have very important reasons why they would not want to do jury duty, especially if a day's labor is essential to feed your family.  But these are not the people that expressed their surprise that my sister was not lying to get out of jury duty.  No.  It was the well-off...and not just one person...several people.  Indeed, a quick search online will elucidate you on the thousand ways to get yourself out of jury duty.

We live in a world in which responsibility is so distributed that it is difficult to point fingers or make certain claims.  Is a particular chemical in his water that caused his cancer?  Is China causing climate change?  Not sure.  I mean, they are contributing heavily now, but what about all the decades and centuries of ecological degradation and greenhouse gas emissions caused by the America and the West?  Hmmm.  Let's avoid responsibility for that.

Responsibility ties in intimately to our daily choices, whether we agree to it or not.  Thinking that small things don't matter is, in essence, a shirking of personal responsibility.  What if we were responsible for our daily choices?  Not in the sense that one shouldn't do anything "illegal" so as to not get thrown into prison.  But I mean really responsible for every choice.  Is it responsible towards the Earth to want to be highly materialistic?  Is it responsible to my neighborhood to not get to know my neighbors?  Is it responsible of someone who is well off to lie just to get off of jury duty?  When we are all responsible, we have much to gain.  When we want our rights and act irresponsibly, we have much to lose.

An honest effort

This post is inspired by my mother's thoughts on my last post, We all start at different places, hopefully to end up somewhere together. She said,

"It's when we recognise the problem, that we have to do something about it. Thats the reason most people don't see or address the problem. It requires effort to change something. Most people don't want to make any effort. It is easier to ignore the problem, and live, than make an effort to change it. So people will always complain about things but rarely will try to find a solution. Effort is the key." 

For the privileged, there are few worries. Yes, everyone has their "stuff" that they worry about, but never do we think that we won't have enough food to eat, water to drink, or a place to sleep. The stresses that we face are of a different kind - will I get the particular job I want? Will I be able to get on the very flight I want to be on? What section will I be seated in for Michigan American football games? For many of us that are privileged, it is easy to get through life with few worries then.

Most people do not want to make any effort. By effort I don't mean going to the ticket office to get your tickets (although nowadays everything can be delivered right to your doorstep, including groceries.) What I think this culture has done has allowed many things to be a black box for us. We are able to flip the switch in our living rooms and get light. But what we fail to recognise is that we invoke a massive infrastructure of power lines, engineers, operators, fossil fuel combustion or nuclear fission when we flip the switch. We are unappreciative of the light, but complain when the light fails to turn on. As Aidan Davison has written, in Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability, there is a dichotomy between means and ends.

We have done then is forsaken effort for convenience. I recognise the "effort" (or subtle slavery) that we put in to earn money so that our lives are convenient. But this isn't the effort that I am talking about. The effort I am talking about is the one that is required in response to doing something that is required to lessen our burden on the world, to demolish walls of inequality, to march ardently on the path to sustainability.

What this does is make us think that many things are available without effort. At most the effort that is required for light is the flipping of a switch (and paying the bill), but no more. This then translates seamlessly into thinking that others will solve the problems for us, if they ever arise, and that no effort is required on our part. We hope that the ethereal, murky worlds of politics and policy will result in concrete and tangible outcomes. We then think that effort is not for us. We forget what effort looks like, and what it entails. And then we end up becoming blind to problems, or unwilling to recognise them.

This effort required is more than the convenient and easy, like changing light bulbs and taking cloth bags to stores. These are stepping stones. An honest effort is required of us to stand up to the problems we've created - a moral, ethical, behavioural, spiritual, rhetorical effort.

The American Dream?

This is a picture from outside the Delray Community House in southwest Detroit. In the foreground you see a new playground. In the near background, you see the incinerator at the Detroit Wastewater Treatment Plant. Notice the brown coloured effluent coming out from the smoke stacks. That effluent made the entire neighbourhood smell noxious, so much so that many residents leave the neighbourhood for a few days every year because the heat mixed with the smell are just too much to handle. Add to this the pollution of thousands of semi-trucks, an oil refinery, a cement factory, a steel factory, and what you have is a full-blown environmental disaster.

This is Detroit, the very definition, the soul, the beginning of The American Dream.

The people of Delray (see posts under the theme "Sustainable neighbourhoods in Detroit"), and many of those still residing in Detroit and other parts of the Rust Belt, have borne the brunt, the downside of The American Dream. The American Dream - of convenience, luxury, independence (as expressed through the automobile), and disposability - was envisioned when the world was thought to be abundant and plentiful for all. As has been explored throughout this blog, however, this dream was founded most fundamentally on a materialism that has required, and continues to require, a violent disturbance of nature. And as has been reiterated again and again, any violence towards nature is automatically translated into a degraded place for life. What follows are the very worst sorts of injustices and behaviour - of discrimination, of abandonment, of negligence.

The people that haven't been able to escape the so called "decline" of the Rust Belt have been those least able to leave, because of that invisible yet profoundly tangible hand holding one back - oppression. The people of Delray know this all too well. My students and I witnessed this first-hand. It is these people (and of course, the environment) that have borne the costs of the benefits we so glibly accept as our natural rights; they continue to do so day after day. They deal with corrupt government officials, they deal with inhumane corporate officials, and most sadly, they deal with our negligence of them. Think about it. This isn't some "Third World, developing country", this is Detroit, the heart of the US, thirty-five miles from Ann Arbor, the elite college city. This is happening right under our noses, within biking distance of our homes. And we are contributing to this situation.

We like to think that it is the "developing" world that needs "sustainable development", but first, let's look in our backyards. Let's see what we are a part of that is causing such injustice towards the world, in our backyards. If we all strive to make where we live a better place by not taking advantage of other places, I believe we will be on a path towards sustainability.

On rights, conveniences and obligations

I want to continue my thoughts from my last post on obligation. I particularly want to focus on the obligations that we must assume given our rights and conveniences in this world.

I am no expert of history, and no expert of international affairs. I know little of the governance structures that exist in many parts of the world. Yet it is is undeniable, to me at least, that as time has moved on in our societies, the rights granted to people by their governments have on the whole increased. (Libertarians may not think so.) Women have the right to vote in most parts of the world now, and much of the world has adopted some form of democracy. The list of human rights has increased over time, it seems, and for good reason. I find it difficult to comprehend and swallow the many violations against the sanctity of the world propagated through war and similar crimes. Increasingly, rights have the character such that they are applicable to all people living in a jurisdiction, and that is an absolutely wonderful thing. These are rights that confer upon all of us the access and ability to partake governance, which affects our daily lives. (Many of us do not exercise these rights, but that is a different story.) At the same time, we have had a proliferation of "convenience" in our lives. We have made it a priority for ourselves to make convenience more convenient, to give more and more people more and more access to more and more things. We have become so accustomed to convenience that we think it a human right to have access to these conveniences. In fact, many people have said that access to the the internet has become a fundamental human right. 

The right to open a business that violently extracts natural resources exists for all of us, and although there are laws such as NEPA that do require us to "consider" the environmental impacts, the environment has been continuously degraded over time. In fact, as long as there is a "just" compensation to the affected people for pollution and environmental harm, such activities can go on. Our legal system is set up such that we have obligations to people, but no obligations to the water they drink, or to the land they stand on, or to the air they breathe. As long as the impacts of our actions can be monetised to a value that other people accept, those impacts can be made to occur. Given extremely toxic amounts of pollution, people may reach a settlement and leave to find a new home. But what about the old home? What about the river in which was dumped PCBs? Our right to compensation has come at the expense of the environment. Many of our rights and conveniences have come with increasing detriment to the environment.

As we have moved through time, we have continued to provide others with proxies to provide us the basic necessities of life - our rights and increasingly our conveniences. As the number of these proxies has increased, we have lost our connections with the elements that provide for us and sustain us. These proxies have been provided to the government and companies, and we feel that their only job is to serve us and to secure our rights and conveniences. Yet I do not believe that the list of our obligations, as citizens, has grown in proportion with the list of our rights and our conveniences. The right to vote has not come with the obligation to vote, at least in the US. No one can deny that the convenience of a new laptop is benign on the environment, regardless of whether or not we feel it is a human right to have access to the internet, and still we have no obligation to make sure it isn't harming people before we buy it, or after we are done using it. As I wrote a couple of days ago, our increased mental and emotional capacities place on us the burden of obligation. We must expand the scope of our obligations with every increasing right, with every increasing convenience. Rights exists only because there is land beneath our feet, water to drink and air to breath. Conveniences only exist because nature provides us the materials for them. Obligations will allow us to fully realise the impacts of these rights and conveniences.

More thoughts on political consumption

At our monthly Graham Fellows meeting today, we further discussed Ethan's dissertation research on political consumption. What Ethan defines as "political consumption" is any consumption that is done with not only yourself or your immediate friends and family in mind, but also people outside of your immediate circle. Examples of political consumption include buying sweat-free clothing to support workers rights, buying organically grown bananas so that labourers don't go sterile by using dibromochloropropane to spray the crop, or going out to eat at a restaurant that is locally owned and run rather than a Denny's. In all of these cases, although the individual consuming their good of choice might as well have done so without taking others into account, the act of thinking beyond themselves is a political choice.

There were several threads of thought that were raised in today's discussion, and all are pertinent to social change, environmental justice, trash and sustainability. I would like to pose these threads as food for thought, not only for myself and for future blog posts, but also for you to think about and send me your thoughts on.

• Many people consume politically because of the perceived benefits of doing so. These benefits may range from social to environmental and economic, and many times, people will make the same choice for different reasons. For example, some people may choose to buy food from the local farmer's market because they would like to keep their money within a certain locale, while others may go to the farmer's market because the other large grocery chain doesn't have a big selection of organic products. What are motivating factors for political consumption?
• It is interesting to see how far people are willing to go to act politically. The most explicit example of this is the price of consumption. Say the organic apple costs $1 more than the conventionally grown apple, would you buy it? Some would say yes. How about if it was $2 more expensive? Would you buy it now? How about $5 more expensive? I think this plays a lot into people's need for convenience for doing anything environmentally related ("The recycling bin was too far away, so I just decided to throw away this aluminium can in the garbage."). How much are you willing to spend to do the right thing?
• People's emotions play a significant role in political consumption. Their choices depend on whether or not they think their choice can make a difference. What communities are people capable of benefiting through their choices?
• One of the most interesting points that came up today was the effect of consuming politically vs. not consuming at all. I would argue that not consuming at all is a political choice, too. But what is the effectiveness of not consuming vs. consuming politically? Maybe political consumption will drive people, companies and governments to adopt new standards that you think should be the norm. Also, money plays no role in not consuming. It doesn't matter whether you are rich or you are poor, you can choose not to buy. What about boycotts? How effective are they in making political statements?
• How much does people's disposable income affect whether or not they consume politically? Preliminary results from Ethan's work show that the emotional mechanisms behind political consumption are the same for those with and those without money. 
• Somewhat tangentially, how does a company's reputation change if they are found to violate social and environmental norms and standards? Apparently, GAP has been in a lot of trouble over the years because many of their suppliers had terrible working conditions. But always, their reputation bounces back...

Reductionism and trash

If you look at the titles of Ph.D. theses today, you wouldn't be admonished for thinking that a lot of the work academics do can have no bearing on things outside of their sub-discipline. We have created walls and artificial boundaries between fields of study, and created specialised languages that we within specific disciplines use to communicate with others in "our" field. Also, we have given proxies to invisible companies and men in suits to provide us with essential services such as food, clothing and shelter. We have centralised the production and distribution of the necessities of life. Although we would like to think our world is "globalised" and "flat," I believe the world we inhabit is highly specialised and centralised. This specialisation is at some level (obviously from a neoconservative economic standpoint) semi-defensible given assumptions of "economies of scale," but arguments cannot hold water from a moral and ethical perspective.Wendell Berry likes to call this phenomenon "reductionism."

We have defined these boundaries for two reasons...

• It is impossible for us to know all of the variables of a given system or problem, and so in order for us to stand any chance of coming up with an elegant solution or number, we need to reduce the number of variables; we need to define limited boundaries so that we can still capture the basic dynamics of interactions between various parts of a system, without overburdening our computers and calculating gadgets.
• We seem to think that we can know how complex systems work, and that given enough time and resources, the outcomes of such endeavours are believable. 

The latter point can be defended, but only within the context of an individual discipline or sub-discipline. When we try to optimise a system or try to maximise some outcome of a system, we can continuously tinker with the variables we choose to work with. However, what we fail to recognise sometimes is that just because a system is optimised for one particular situation, it isn't necessarily optimised for another situation or system. The output of our narrowly defined system will always have an impact on the variables that were left outside of its boundaries. A great example of this is trash. Trash is the result of an "optimum" solution to a very narrowly and myopically defined system, and that system is our pleasure and convenience. The variables that can play a role in our pleasure and convenience are time, money and place. The boundaries of the system are defined as such, and we consciously or subconsciously defend the definition of those boundaries when we accept the formation of trash. If I am in a rush to grab a bite to eat, the optimum solution is for me to microwave a microwave meal that came in a box with a plastic bowl and thin plastic cover, or to run to Jimmy John's and buy a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, along with a drink in a wax/paper cup with a plastic lid and straw. However, this is not the optimum solution for the Earth that provided the resources to produce the plastics, papers and boxes. The outputs of our pleasure and convenience are too much for nature to handle.

We cannot continually overlook the impacts of our actions on nature by defining the boundaries of our systems for our "ease" and "convenience."

What plastic bags say about how we live

Sarang sent me an article from the NYTimes, about how California is increasingly looking to ban the use of plastic bags, encouraging people to bring their own bags. That's terrific. But why have we come to a point where it is necessary to legislate common sense? I mean, doesn't it make complete sense to have a bag made out of cloth (say, an old dress) that you can use for years, rather than have some paper or plastic bag that tears, the handle of which may break at inopportune times, rendering the bag useless? No, convenience trumps all! A plastic bag represents something new, untouched, just for us to use once, maybe twice. It represents where we'd like to be - not here. It represents a sort of detachment from where we are, and what we are doing. It represents our obsession with cleanliness - totally sterile. It represents a sort of cavalier mentality, in which we can use what we need, get what we want out of it, and move on to the next thing. A plastic bag? Who knows where it came from? It looks like all of the other plastic bags that were produced from some oil from somewhere. No, these bags represent what else is out there. Why save one? Can a plastic bag have any sentimental value to anyone? Can it age with you? Can you pass it on to your child? Move on to the next frontier, lest we be left behind. Left behind with an old piece of cloth, a school uniform that performed its duty, until its master grew out of it. A piece of cloth that can be washed and reused, many a time, and be folded, without making irritating sounds and crunchy noises.

Un-self-sufficiency and convenience

We are constantly pushed to be "learning" and "consuming" and "doing something" nowadays. Further, our higher education system has created boundaries between disciplines, and created people that specialise and super-specialise in some topical area. We are being made to draw artificial boundaries in our interactions with people that are engaged in "other disciplines." Although there has been a growing voice around "interdisciplinary" and "multidisciplinary" research and education recently, by and large, higher education is teaching people to define themselves with single identifiers - "engineer," "doctor," "musician." We live in a divided, and un-self-sufficient society, in which time is of the essence - gone are the days of regular long dinners.

What does this mean for our day-to-day lives, resource use and trash? I take the example of food, because it is an easy one. Very few of us grow our own food, and very few of us take time to "make things from scratch." Indeed, we are constrained by spending most of our time in our "specialisation." You hear people say, "Oh, I don't have time to cook," or "I'd rather spend my time working." But say we want to make something simple - say pasta and sauce, the staple diet of most graduate students. If we wanted to make it "from scratch," we would need but a few ingredients - flour, water, salt, tomatoes, oil, garlic, maybe an onion, and some herbs. You can grow or buy most of these ingredients without packaging, and can re-use packaging for some if you are lucky enough. In the end, you have a little trash. But we are rushed for time, of course. What we resort to is premade pasta in its plastic wrapper, with tomato sauce from a can, which in general, you cannot reuse. The strive for convenience has resulted in trash. More broadly, we have made others do work for us, and that work is transported to you through trash.

Say you can't cook. How many of us would rather go to Jimmy John's regularly and buy a sandwich that is wrapped in waxed paper and tape (even though we may eat it right there) versus go to Sava's Cafe and "sit down and take time" to eat food that is served on a plate? Convenience generally supercedes.

Theses for this post:
1) Making others do work that you can do yourself is likely to result in trash.
2) Convenience and time constraints generally result in trash.