Conscious abstraction

While I was sitting on the grass by some swings across from my home with Katie the other day, I noticed one of the cars on the road slow down. The driver was letting a squirrel pass. It was difficult for the driver of the car in the next lane to know why the car to its right was slowing down, and so, the driver maintained the car's speed. But just as the squirrel made it past the first car that had slowed, it got pummeled by the next one. It probably died on impact. But the impact unleashed a sound. It was the sound of a low pitched rumble you hear when a wheel passes quickly over a bump. It was the sound of a bass drum. And then the squirrel, already dead, got run over again...and again. Katie ran across the street, stopped before it, and cried, "I'm so sorry," as she picked it up by the tail and moved it off of the road.

I wonder what was going on through the squirrel's mind as it was crossing the road. Maybe it was on the way to eat something or hide it, or maybe it was about to climb up a tree it spotted. Maybe there was some other squirrel waiting on the other side for it. It is summer, after all. Maybe it was the one that casually walked up to me a few days ago while I was having dinner on the porch. I don't know. It is hard to tell with squirrels. Most of them look the same to my eyes. But I know that they are all individuals.

I had never seen any animal that large get killed in front of my eyes before. I thought to myself, "And this squirrel is another cost we accept as we drive cars that take us to where we need to be." That squirrel probably now forms part of some statistic somewhere. I can just see the title of the statistic. It is probably something like "Roadkill in the US." It probably has a breakdown of what kinds of animals are killed on the roads, and how many of them, every year...deer, chipmunks, and birds included. That statistic easily equates one squirrel is with another squirrel. A squirrel is a squirrel, and a squirrel killed on the road by a car is one of thousands, tens of thousands. In the end, their lives are boiled down to numbers, which we accept as a "cost" of our need to drive cars. It is a "cost" of our advances.

It made me think about the Herman Daly passage I quoted at length in a recent blog post. We are constantly fighting this battle of abstraction. We just don't seem to be able to grasp the abstract. Climate change happening slowly, unboundedly, over the next one hundred years? What does that mean? What does it mean if someone in Detroit is breathing toxic air? These things are far. They are abstract. And that abstractness seems to debilitate us from showing an inkling of remorse or care.

But, abstraction is an excuse, for we actively pursue abstraction when we need it to fit our goals. If I were to pick a squirrel out and tell you I was going to run it over, or if you saw a specific squirrel get run over--and had any inkling of emotion--you'd be horrified. I definitely was. But when we read a number or hear about squirrel roadkill in the US, we are less affected. The abstraction of a squirrel killed to a number takes away the essence of what the squirrel was, its entire life, and what it was on its way to doing when it was killed. The abstraction allows us to distance ourselves from our actions.

I can hear people thinking to themselves, "So is he really suggesting that we should we not drive cars just because squirrels and deer and chipmunks and flies and bees are killed by them?" The point is that most all of the choices we make we make with an understanding of the potential outcomes. Some outcomes are acceptable. The others--the violent, the distasteful--we abstract. Given that we are now being confronted with important choices that will affect our land, our water, our air, take fracking, for example, will we continue to make choices in the abstract? Or is there a way to bring our choices closer to home, to be aware of the squirrels that populate our land and the fish the water?

When specificity is a roadblock

For today, I will just quote a passage that I came across in the remarkable book, Steady -State Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth (1974), by the ecological economist Herman E. Daly. Please let me know what you think.

Why do we insist on ignoring the ethical character of so many major economic decisions? Why this compulsion to substitute mechanical calculation for responsible value judgment? Perhaps it's because our mechanistic paradigm has reduced values and ethics to mere matters of personal taste, about which it is useless to argue. Quality involves difficult judgments and imposes self-definition and responsibility. Quantity involves merely counting and arithmetical operations that give everyone the same answer and impose no responsibility. Thus university deans make promotion decisions by counting words published and number of citations rather than by attempting a qualitative judgment about the true worth of a scholar's work, which is bound to cause some disagreement. Counting is an easy way out--a retreat from the responsibility of thinking and evaluating quality.

An especially important role in the quantitative short-circuiting of responsibility is played by randomness. Randomness is, in fact, an excellent moral scapegoat. Consider that some 50,000 Americans are killed annually by the automobile. Suppose that the specific identities of these people were known in advance. To save 50,000 specific individuals, we might lower speed limits drastically and return to bicycles for local transportation. To save 50,000 unknown, randomly determined individuals, we do nothing. If a soldier kills specific women and children at close range with a rifle we are horrified; if a bomber pilot kills many more women and children, whose numbers are predictable but whose identities are unknown before the fact, we are only vaguely upset...'Thou shalt not kill thy specific identified brother, but mayest murder random persons at will, in order to achieve thy 'progress,' however shallowly defined.' How much economic growth is based on this expanded version of the shorter, less sophisticated commandment?...We cannot throw responsibility for such collective existential decisions on to the moral scapegoat of randomness with its phony numerical calculations.

The way in which these phony calculations work is via "economies of ignorance and scale," as John U. G. Adams ("...And How Much For Your Grandmother?" Environment and Planning, Vol. 6, 1974) has scathingly illustrated. Consider what happens when we apply the concept of Pareto efficiency to the cost-benefit analysis of a project involving the predictable loss of life. Let Vj be te compensatory money payment to individual j to make him indifferent to the proposed project. That is, if j is to be hurt by the project, then Vj is what he must be paid to accept it, and it carries a minus sign.; if j is to be benefited, Vj is what he must be paid to forgo the project, and it carries a plus sign. If the algebraic sum for all individuals is positive, then there is a potential Pareto improvement; that is, the winners could compensate the loser and still be better off.

Suppose now that individual j would be killed as a result of the project. Consistency with the Pareto criterion requires that he be compensated for the loss of life according to his own valuation. Since most people would put a very high or even infinite cash value on the remaining years of lives, the result is that any project involving predictable loss of specific lives would fail the test of Pareto improvement and could not be justified by cost-benefit analysis. This is so even if more lives are saved than lost by the project, since there is no way for those saved to compensate those killed, and any cancelling out by the analyst of lives saved against lives lost violates the Pareto rule of no interpersonal comparisons.

It is obvious that many projects justified by cost-benefit analysis do result in the predictable loss of life. This is true for any projects that increase air or ground traffic, radiation exposure, or air pollution, for example. What allows cost-benefit analysts to "justify" such projects? It is essentially the fact that we never know in advance the identities of the specific people who will be killed. Th result is that we never have to compensate anyone for his certain loss of life but instead we must compensate everyone for the additional risk to which he is exposed as a result of the project (E. J. Mishan, "Evaluation of Life and Limb: A Theoretical Approach," Journal of Political Economy, July/August 1971). If the population is large, the individual risk becomes very small, perhaps below the minimum sensible, so that everyone is indifferent to such a negligible risk and no compensation at all is required, and the project passes with honors.

Note that in theory we have passes from a case requiring infinite compensation to a case requiring zero compensation, simply by throwing away information, that is, by remaining ignorant of the specific identities of the victims. This is odd, to say the least. In practice, of course, we never have the specific identities of victims beforehand, but that fact does not resolve the theoretical anomaly. The population subset most at risk could often be specified but usually is not, so that the risk often appears more diluted than it really is.

A response to Larry Summers from The Economist

Below is the response of The Economist magazine to Larry Summers's memo to his colleagues at the World Bank, which I posted yesterday. I will write my thoughts in response to both Larry Summers's memo and The Economist's response to the memo in my next post.

If Mr. Summers is wrong, why is he wrong? Many greens would say his premise is false. They appear to believe that the only acceptable amount of pollution is zero--or which looks more sensible, but almost as daft--that all pollution above some arbitrarily low threshold must be stopped. This cannot be right. Controlling pollution is expensive (and many third world countries can ill afford the expense), and the benefits (especially when levels of pollution are already low) may be small. Greens and eco-sceptics may disagree about these costs and benefits, and thus about where the proper balance should lie. But the notion that such a balance should in principle be struck--and that, as a result, the "right" level of pollution is greater than zero and varies according to circumstances--ought to be uncontroversial. Without that idea, intelligent discussion of environmental policy is impossible.

But then Mr. Summers makes a further, crucial assumption. He supposes that the value of a life, or of years of life-expectancy, can be measured by an objective observer in terms of incomes per head--in other words, that an Englishman's life is worth more than the lives of a hundred Indians. This is naive utilitarianism reduced to an absurdity. It is so outlandish that even a distinguished economist should see that it provides no basis for World Bank policy.

Suppose then, that the Bank of and the other multilateral institutions regard the life of an African peasant as equal in value to the life of a broker on Wall Street--as they self-evidently should. What remains of Mr. Summer's arguments? The answer still is: more than most environmentalists care to admit.

The greatest cause of misery in the third world is poverty. This must guide the priorities of poor-country governments and aid donors alike. If clean growth means slower growth, as it sometimes will, its human cost will be lives blighted by a poverty that would otherwise have been mitigated. That is why it would be wrong for the World Bank or anybody else to insist upon rich-country standards of environmental protection in developing countries. Often, policies that favour growth (such as setting world-market prices for energy and other resources) will lead to a cleaner environment, too; such policies should be vigourously promoted. But when a trade-off between cleaner air and less poverty has to be faced, most poor countries will rightly want to tolerate more pollution than rich countries do in return for more growth.

So the migration of industries, including "dirty" industries, to the third world is indeed desirable. Not because life there is cheap; if anything, for the opposite reason. Those who insist on "clean growth everywhere" must either deny that there is ever a trade-off between growth and pollution control--or else argue that imposing rich-country standards for clean air worldwide matters more than helping millions of people in the third world to escape their poverty.

Environmental policy is immensely complicated. The debate over Mr. Summers's memo is ignoring many issues altogether: global, as opposed to local, pollution; the links between trade policy and the environment; the opportunities to promote growth and a cleaner environment at the same time; and so on. In working through all this, economic method--the weighing of costs and benefits--is indispensable. Mr Summers's morally careless arguments, intended seriously or otherwise, must not be allowed to discredit it.

The "entitlement" of having children?

In any talk or discussion about climate change, the issue population is like the dark energy of the room. You know the issue is there, and despite its invisibility--some fail to recognise it, others don't want to recognise it-- everyone knows it is affecting every single policy, every single outcome of these talks. Countries such as China and India would likely not even be at the table in climate discussions if one of the discussion points was the issue of their populations. (Let's not forget that the US has the third highest population in the world, and considering the ecological footprint of every single American, as well as how the US chooses to conduct itself internationally, the US's ecological impacts probably far outweigh those of India and China.)

Let's even leave aside "environmental" issues of climate change. Costs of "social" welfare programs like social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as the outcomes of "political" tussles like gerrymandering and redistricting are all affected by changes in population and their values. Costs of all kinds can soar if populations soar; how can you keep everyone that is living now, and that will live in the future, happy?

Population is clearly a massive issue in sustainability, and for some reason(s), we cannot seem to address it. I cannot claim to have a cogent argument apart from the standard, "Population increase is leading to unsustainability." I have to think about it. But a reader of this blog believes having children is a matter of entitlement. In a previous post, On entitlement, I wrote about how there is an entitlement that pervades this culture, an entitlement that allows us to conflate our rights and our wants. In response, Paris said one of the most provocative things I've heard:

[Y]ou forgot a slightly older entitlement, the most controversial one: living children.

Once upon a time most children died in young age, only the strongest, fittest, and most lucky survived, but today we feel entitled to have all our children alive.

And it results in population surpluses that stresses the environment. [A] "scarce future" might mean fewer people, which means (sadly) more deaths. 

Lisa Hymas, an editor for the Guardian Environment Network and a writer for Grist.org has "decided not to have children for environmental reasons." She calls herself GINK: green inclinations, no kids. She writes:

Population isn't just about counting heads. The impact of humanity on the environment is not determined solely by how many of us are around, but by how much stuff we use and how much room we take up. And as a financially comfortable American, I use a lot of stuff and take up a lot of room. My carbon footprint is more than 200 times bigger than an average Ethiopian's, and more than 12 times bigger than an average Indian's, and twice as big as an average Brit's.

When a poor woman in Uganda has another child--too often because she lacks access to family-planning services, economic opportunity, or self-determination--she might dampen her family's prospects for climbing out of poverty or add to her community's challenges in providing everyone with clean water and safe food, but she certainly isn't placing a big burden on the global environment.

When someone like me has a child--watch out, world! Gear, gadgets, gewgaws, bigger house, bigger car, oil from the Mideast, coal from Colombia, coltan from the Congo, rare earths from China, pesticide-laden cotton from Egypt, genetically modified soy from Brazil. And then when that child has children, wash, rinse, and repeat (in hot water, of course). Without even trying, we Americans slurp up resources from every corner of the globe and then spit 99 percent of them back out again as pollution.

Conscientious people try to limit that consumption, of course. I'm one of them. I get around largely by bus and on foot, eat low on the food chain, buy used rather than new, keep the heat low, rein in my gadget lust. But even putting aside my remaining carbon sins (see: flying), the fact is that just by virtue of living in America, enjoying some small portion of its massive material infrastructure, my carbon footprint is at unsustainable levels.

Far and away the biggest contribution I can make to a cleaner environment is to not bring any mini-me's into the world. A 2009 study by statisticians at Oregon State University found that the climate impact of having one fewer child in America is almost 20 times greater than the impact of adopting a series of eco-friendly practices for your entire lifetime, things like driving a high-mileage car, recycling, and using efficient appliances and CFLs.

What do you think?

Contradictions of "progress"

I feel as if I always return to thinking about what "progress" means. I have written about this concept in many forms, explicitly (here, too) and implicitly, over the past months. It is a notion that has caught on almost everywhere in the world - that we must "progress" from the dark ages of yesterday and today, and seek the future.

Yet this progress is an unsettling one, in many ways. It is unsettling in its current scope, and it is unsettling in its outcomes. The scope of progress is clear when you can have massive institutions and organisations such as the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund dictating the rules of engagement in a globalised world, with real, tangible consequences for people not in the global North. The outcomes of progress, unfortunately, have led to massive ecological disaster and climate change, and an acceptance of trade-offs in decision-making that puts costs on those people and places that have borne the most. This is in no way denying the gains that have been made for many, but at what cost and to who? I still can't get past the mess we have gotten ourselves into.

And so, I am constantly struck by the inherent contradictions that exist in this culture - we have "freedom", but we are constrained by the rules of a violent capitalism, we have "progress", but we are undermining what it is that allows us that progress. What has been missing from all of this, therefore, is introspection. No one in their right mind would think that we can constantly degrade what it is that sustains us. Leaving money to future generations in no way brings back clean air and water and land, things that people will need regardless of how big their pockets are.

If you were to ask someone what is meaningful to them on a small scale, in general, they would inherently say that well-being of their family, their community, their friends, their surroundings is what they are most concerned about. So then why does the "progress" we subscribe to on a larger scale inherently undermine all of these for others? Why is it that we strive for an increasingly interconnected world, in which we can interact with people of different cultures, but are unaware of the potential impacts of our actions on them are?

On a lack of honesty

We always talk up the benefits of the way of life we preach, our economy - people will become richer, they will lead lives with more choice, they will grow the economy, they will make our country strong and powerful. Wonderful. That sounds hunky dory. Sign me up. What isn't said much, or what end up being treated as anomalies, are the costs of this way of life. We always act surprised when something goes wrong egregiously - "A massive oil spill happened?! Oh, my gosh!" "Sweatshops in Indonesia?! Oh, my gosh!" "Millions of people displaced because of the damming of a river?! Oh, my gosh!" (While massive and tremendous, climate change maybe doesn't count as something egregious.)

This has been going on for a while now, while all along there has been a continual, and exponentially rising degradation of our environment, and a continued and exponential rising of the injustices that come along with such behaviour. It seems that we have now accumulated enough data now that we can be honest to ourselves, and to others about what our way of life entails.

But we have blinders on our eyes and our psyches. We are still bound by our immediacy.

There is a lack of honesty about how we conduct ourselves. And so when we export our way of life to other places, our rhetoric is mired in dishonesty. We are dishonest about what it actually means to continually extract from the environment, and what this means for lives and communities of people that have survived without this way of life that we are imposing on them. But what does this dishonesty mean for those who are being dishonest? It means that we think that this is the only way things can be, this is the only way things should be. And so the bounds of our imagination are fixed on the status quo.

I propose something simple, yet powerful. The next time we make a choice in our lives, the next time we tell someone else to make a choice for themselves, or the next time we try to sell someone on an idea, be honest about the outcomes of those choices. If I decide to buy another computer, will it help me now? Yup. Will it help me grow my business? Totally. What will it mean to where the computer came from? Hard labour conditions and strip mining? Hmmm...okay. On the other hand, what does it mean to love and care for the environment? It will mean a preservation of what sustains us. Are we doing that now? Not really. What will that entail for you, me, our families, our communities? It will mean an upheaval, a change in our attitudes, and it will be difficult. To be honest seems to more difficult than being dishonest, then. But anything of true import is always difficult.

On the unsustainability of tradeoffs

We're always faced with situations in which we have to choose one or the other. Many times, especially in politics in the US, we choose between two politicians. More often than not, these choices are between two options that are both terrible, and we end up in a bind in which we guarantee a bad outcome, no matter what.

It seems to me that when culture existed in a much different state (say, groups of thirty or forty humans truly living off of the land and in tune with nature), tradeoffs were likely not a problem at all. I may be completely ignorant to the tradeoffs that they were making, but the scale of tradeoffs they were making were nothing like the tradeoffs we deal with today - going to school at a large public university or a small liberal arts college, building a publicly-owned bridge across the Detroit River by displacing many residents or having another privately-owned bridge that won't displace residents. I wonder what the first tradeoff that was ever made was. The most ecologically-impactful tradeoffs probably began when man sought to modify nature in ways that would make things "efficient" for himself. Tradeoffs are complicated issues, and are, to me, one of the fundamental features of decision-making today that leads to unsustainability.

When we say tradeoff, what we are really saying is we are willing to make the choice of doing one thing at the expense of another thing. Take mountaintop removal, for example. Many people have decided that coal is the way we want to power ourselves. What we are doing is powering ourselves, our lives, at the expense of the mountain, the river, the atmosphere. We do this because, to put it in neoclassical (cartoon) economic terms, the "benefits" of powering ourselves through coal are much "higher" than the "costs" of ecological harm. What this necessarily entails, however, are costs, regardless, and someone, some nature, somewhere, is going to feel the negative effects of this choice. There is no skirting this issue, I think we can all agree with that. 

As I have continually written about in the blog, what we do then is we address the "costs," the negative outcomes of our choices, with the very same tradeoff mentality, which results in other "costs." Indeed, it seems like the costs of every decision then have some sort of asymptotic character (basically, the costs are never fully addressed), in which any proposed remedy to those costs has its own asymptotic character. 

How can we live in a world in which the decisions we make don't require tradeoffs? I want to live in a world in which spending time with my friends or family doesn't require nature to be harmed. Here and now, I can make choices in which I respect the existence of nature and the people around me. I feel as though rather than exclude things like trees and rivers from my ethic, my bubble of stakeholders in my decisions, it is easy to include them in my ethic, and make decisions accordingly. What this translates to is meaningful, impactful choices that respect both nature and people. If I want to spend some time with my friend, I can choose to drive out of town with that person, or choose to walk along the river right outside of my home with that person. What I would do in the first instance is pollute the atmosphere, at bare minimum, while spending time with my friend. I will have chosen to spend time with my friend at the expense of the atmosphere. What I would do in the second instance is respect the atmosphere, not pollute it, while at the same time spending time with my friend. These are small choices that each one of us can make, that are easily expanded in scope, easily extrapolated, that truly do have immeasurable, yet profound implications for our world.

Trying to buy back what we've lost

I had trouble deciding on what the title of this post should be. I will try to articulate why.

There is a model of environmental thought (of course, Western) which basically says that in the "development" of countries or communities, ecological harm necessarily grows, up to a point at which they have "developed enough" that they are somehow "satisfied" and can now start "caring" for the environment. What this explicitly means is that no matter where in the world you may be, ecological harm is necessary for you to be "prosperous," and for the citizens of that place to have a "high standard of living."

As I mentioned in my last post, there is a prevailing ethic that something is valuable only if it is assigned a dollar value. Something can be cared for only if we can quantify to ourselves what it is worth. Of course, such quantification is impossible and reckless in nature. Such quantification leaves in its wake uncountable losses to the wholesomeness of nature and the spirits of the people living there. What we do is the following - we convert the most important thing, our environment, into something expendable and movable (money), through degradation, and then use that expendable thing we've created to buy back the most important thing. Or at least we expect to. Speaking of entropy, there are losses here. There is something so profound about this second law of thermodynamics. In most every physical act, we can never fully realise a full potential, but rather a potential less than full. What this consequently means is that there is no way to fully recover the original conditions of a state by investing the same amount of effort we used in disturbing it. We have to invest more, and more, and more, and more.

Now, the people of Delray have been struggling with this very issue for a very long time - they have been surrounded by industry which has propelled the US as a leading superpower. This means that they have been surrounded by the effects of that industry - pollution and a degraded environment. As counter-intuitive as the second paragraph actually is, you might think that the people of Delray were then pretty well off...industry = money = clean environment. You would be sorely wrong for thinking so. The people of Delray have no other choice but to bear the consequences of such careless thought, and to be exploited by heretofore not being provided any sort of remediation, reparation or compensation, money, or anything else.

Now, I wondered about what the title of this post should be. Should it have been 'Trying to buy back what we've given away,' or 'Trying to buy back what has been taken from us'? Of course, it is a matter of perspective and of introspection. Maybe we haven't done enough to protect nature, and maybe we've faltered and disagreed, and we've just given it away, or in some sense allowed that. Or, on the other hand, maybe we've been oppressed into being subservient, into having absolutely no power in opposing the powerful forces of capitalism and economy from taking pristine nature away from under our feet, around our skin, and in our lungs. I would speculate that people from the past allowed it to happen, and that the people of today, say of Delray, feel that it was taken from them a long time ago, that this is a legacy that cannot be moved away from, that it is a legacy that will influence all decisions now and into the future. They might feel that there is no other choice but to live in a degraded environment.


There is a "community benefits agreement" (CBA) that is being proposed to compensate the people of Delray for the massive new bridge that is likely going to be built there. (...a joke, to me. "Benefits" is a cozy term to hide all of the costs of such violent behaviour.) They are contracts between citizens and those proposing to change their environment to ensure that some of the "positive" outcomes of change be passed along to the citizens. CBAs have only been a recent phenomenon, as Caleb told me last night. Yet in no way does the list of benefits, which I went over over the last week, fully address the dire state of affairs in Delray.

It is a matter of perspective. We can focus our attentions on the "state" or "country" as a whole and see that it is doing "well," or we can zoom in and focus our attention on the little parcels of the country and see that some of them are fine, while some of them are being exploited at the benefit of the "country." What we forget is that people, yes people, live in these small parcels, and they are the ones breathing in the noxious air, living on toxic soil, and cutting their limbs off for the "benefit" of the "state" and "country."

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. 

The recycling conundrum

Back to the flaws of our neoclassical economy and its detrimental impacts on the environment.

A few years ago, I learned that recycling is a business. To be honest, it really shocked me then, and still at times I cannot wrap my mind around this fact. Many people recycle out of the goodness of their hearts, and take the time and effort to be responsible recyclers because they think they are truly being lighter on the environment. And so it might be shocking to them to comprehend this fact. But giving this fact a little more thought, I understand why it may be a business - in a consumerist world, we always need materials to make things. You can of course extract virgin materials or synthesise them, which requires its share of energy, water, fuel, human, time and other spendable resources. All of these resources are then assigned a money value. On the other hand, you can take already existing materials and reform them into the same, or similar materials (likely downcycled, not recycled). This, too, required its share of spendable resources. A money value is assigned to these resources. If the cost of the virgin material is cheaper than the recycled material, people may just choose to use the virgin material. People will only use the recycled materials if the cost of using them is competitive with the cost of the virgin material. Recycling is probably (?) less bad for the environment, but cost triumphs, always.

It was a wonderful experience to go to the recycling plant just south of Ann Arbor with Caroline. A complication about the future of recycling in the region was raised by our tour guide. He said that recently, the contracts that allowed Ontario's trash to be imported into Michigan expired. This may likely reduce demand for landfill space, and landfills may decrease the fees it costs to actually dump something in the landfills (called "tipping fees"). It may therefore make it cheaper for cities and municipalities to just pay the tipping fees rather than the City of Ann Arbor to accept their recycling refuse. This could cut down on recycling. But Caroline raises an even more salient issues in her post from a few days ago. She said,

"...we forget that recycling is actually a business, and the Ann Arbor plant is run by a corporation.  Ann Arbor is unique in her recycling ways.  Due to the fact that the city owns the plant, and that it is in close proximity to the city and the other locales that feed it materials, it is actually more profitable to recycle than trash our waste.  But would the city really try to motivate us if it wasn’t earning a profit?  Sadly, probably not.  Instead of dwelling on a pessimistic view, it does say something that A2 creates an environment conducive to recycling.  However, if we used less resources all together, there would be less to recycle, and profits would fall.  So even though the idea of recycling is usually linked with consuming less, a revenue threshold exists that needs to be maintained.  What I therefore struggle with is the contradiction between business and the environment.  From a recycling plant perspective, are we supposed to stop consuming?"

  

I wonder what the ideal world for the people that actually process the recyclables is. As an environmentalist, the ideal world would be one in which recycling the way we do just doesn't exist - we just wouldn't have so many products in the first place. In that case, the very need for recycling is nil. Yet it doesn't seem to me that the recycling plant is run out of the goodness of a corporation's heart. (Of course corporations are people and are living...right?!) If they can't make money, who cares about the environment?

Objects and materials: On cost and value (quasi-guest blogger #14 Marco Ceze)

Back to how we perceive the physical objects that we choose to interact with and buy. Marco called me today about some thoughts, and this post reflects his thoughts, with a sprinkling of mine. Actually, Marco and I had a wonderful conversation a couple of weeks ago that led to the Objects and materials series of posts. This post is (kind of) about costs and benefits/value, but as you can probably tell, I am in no way a proponent of cost-benefit analysis, particularly when carried out using neoclassical and utilitarian approaches. I tend to align with the thoughts of someone like Doug Kysar...but then again, make a convincing argument and I'll side with you =)

Life in today's world is full of trade-offs and making choices with a dearth of information. We never know fully the impacts of our choices given a complicated world. Under these circumstances, it is somewhat natural to think about the benefits or value of doing something compared to the costs. (When I say "costs" I am talking about the price you'll face at a store.) This is probably the simplest way to boil down tons of considerations, making choices potentially more tractable. (I do not necessarily advocate this) Furthermore, many people especially in the West tend to think about the short to near term, and so the benefits of making a particular choice need to be realised sooner rather than later.

Let's focus on the glass versus plastic debate. Imagine you are going to throw a party. Of course, a plastic cup costs you much less than one made of glass, especially when you go to a party store and buy a hundred of them. The value that those plastic cups provides you and the people coming to the party is immediate, as would the value of using glass cups - everyone will drink and enjoy themselves (but hopefully have a DD to take them home). The cost of a hundred glass cups, of course, would be much higher than the cost of a hundred plastic cups. Glass cups, however, will more likely be reused, because we don't think of glass cups as "disposable." (Glass bottles on the other hand would be considered "disposable" by most.) But there is constant uncertainty about the future? What are you going to do with all of these glass cups? Your lease is ending in three months and then you're going to have to move all of these cups, or donate them! What a hassle...A glass cup over its lifetime will probably provide much more value than a plastic cup, making its cost-to-value ratio smaller than that for a plastic cup. However, the issue is the lifetime. As soon as a benefit or value is realised, many times we don't think it worth keeping something to see added benefits, and who knows what those benefits may look like. Throwing plastic cups away is generally much easier than continually washing glass cups. This is also the point where the social learning about materials seems to kick in, and lend its hand in this cost-to-value valuation. Since the monetary cost is less (and we know that by looking at the price tag), and the benefits and values have been realised immediately and future benefits are uncertain and since the material is "disposable," people will likely choose plastic SOLO cups over nice glass cups. Hmmm...does this make sense?

Guest blog #11 - Dr. Jack Edelstein's thoughts on conservation and entropy

"What do we mean by the term ‘energy conservation’ or more generally ‘resource conservation?’  At first thought, the answer seems obvious:  conservation means using less stuff, thereby making a smaller environmental footprint than would have otherwise been made, and avoiding a certain disruption to the resource base (e.g. biodiversity) that would have otherwise occurred.  What, exactly, is it that needs to be conserved, and how does conservation actually work?

From a practical point of view, absolute conservation would completely preserve the current status of the earth’s biodiversity -- by neither depleting any natural resource (e.g. wildlife, trees, water), nor by depositing any man-made matter onto the environment (e.g. trash, smog, and carbon).

There are four ways that we can conserve energy, and any other [non-renewable] resource -- 1) consume less, 2) eliminate waste, 3) increase efficiency, 4) substitute renewable.  We will describe each of these four conservation methods through the simple example of a shower. 

The first way to conserve is to actually consume less water by reducing the shower time, and/or by reducing the flow of the showerhead.  Another way to consume less is to lower the water temperature, thereby reducing the amount of energy used (in heating the water).

The second way to conserve is to eliminate or reduce waste.  We distinguish waste from excess by defining the former as the act of consuming resources without deriving any value -- as in the case of a dripping showerhead. Excess is much more subjective than waste -- e.g. taking a very long shower is not wasteful in the strictest sense (since some marginal benefit or utility is being derived), but at some point it becomes excessive in that the derived benefit is miniscule.

The third way to conserve is to increase efficiency by utilizing less resources in the creation of a given unit of output.  In the case of a shower, improved efficiency can be a low-flow showerhead, or a more energy-efficient water heater.  However, efficiency by itself does not lead to conservation, due to the Jevon's paradox (as explained in an earlier post by Darshan).

The fourth way to conserve is to substitute renewable resources for non-renewable ones.  An example is utilizing solar collectors to heat the water (instead of fossil fuel), and harvesting rainwater instead of drawing water from an underground aquifer.


                    Reduce         Eliminate     Maximize      Substitute   
               consumption        waste         efficiency      renewables   
Cost               Zero             Low       High          ???    

The expenses associated with these four conservation strategies range from zero to high cost -- depending on the level of technology required. Reducing consumption costs nothing since it is entirely a behavioral strategy.  Similarly, eliminating waste generally entails a behavioral approach augmented by a low input of technology. The ‘efficiency’ approach is generally technology-intensive and therefore expensive, and often risky.  Finally, the cost of substituting renewable for non-renewables is quite variable.  It is generally high in that it usually involves an advanced technology component, but it can also be low, as in the case of rain-water collection discussed above. 

A review of the academic literature as well as the general media reveals a strong bias toward energy conservation strategies that are based on the efficiency and renewable options -- the two more expensive options.  In other words, the two conservation approaches that cost the least and could have the most immediate impact -- i.e. to use less and to eliminate waste -- are the ones that are least supported, and often outright ignored. (There are a number of reasons for this, which will be addressed in a future post)

The power of Darshan’s project is that it represents by far the most cost-effective approach to conservation --  simply using less (though it may not actually be that simple to do).  By using absolutely less matter, Darshan is impacting the entire production chain associated with the consumption of physical goods.

Perhaps that’s why the name of this project is “Entropy”. If I understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics, one of the ideas it posits is that the physical world is constantly seeking a state of equilibrium, through a process defined as entropy.  As an outcome of the forces of entropy, the planet attained a state of equilibrium many millions of years ago, and this equilibrium was maintained until homo sapiens started roaming the earth.  The activities of humanity are increasingly disturbing this equilibrium, and the newly resultant equilibrium may become (or already is) inhospitable to sustained life.

The essence of conservation, then, is to understand that the equilibrium into which humanity entered was ideally suited to the evolution of homo sapiens and all other life.  Conservation entails respecting that equilibrium, and reduces our interference with it. Using less is the most powerful way we as individuals can conserve the planet."

~Dr. Jack Edelstein.


----
I love his last paragraph.

Why Michigan? A portrait of a landfill town and state

I wrote previously about the waste and trash imported by Michigan from Canada. Much of this waste is taken to landfills around Detroit, but there are other landfill sites in the state, too! The State of Michigan has approximately 80 landfill sites, spread almost uniformly across the Upper and Lower Peninsulas, but with a slightly higher density around the Metro Detroit area. You can find here the map I'm looking at right now. Red circles show places where "Type II municipal solid waste (MSW)" is taken, and blue triangles show where "Type III MSW" is taken. Type II waste sites take household wastes and friable asbestos, and Type III sites take construction and demolition wastes.

Of the places that Canadian, specifically from Ontario, waste is shipped to, it seems like a lot of it goes to Carleton Farms Landfill, in New Boston, MI, just west of Detroit in Sumpter Township. According to this website, which is a collaboration between the Michigan Canadian Studies Roundtable, the Michigan State University Canadian Studies Center, and the MSU Libraries, Carleton Farms ranks high in trash volume taken in (at least until 2005). I decided to look into Carleton Farms, the company that runs the landfill site, and Sumpter Township.

Carleton Farms Landfill has an area of 664 acres with a solid waste boundary of 388 acres. It is owned by Republic Services Inc., and holds about 10% of Michigan's total waste, and at least until 2007, 100% of the waste of the City of Toronto. It is located right next to Crosswinds Marsh Preserve. The landfill accepts waste from several counties in the State of Michigan, as well as the States of Florida, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania. The landfill is run by Republic Services, Inc., which is the second largest waste management company in the US, behind Waste Management, Inc.
It is interesting to note that Bill Gates owns a 15% stake in Republic Services, Inc., and Warren Buffet owns about 3%. It seems like the company has a pretty poor environmental track record, with several high-profile fines being levied against it by the US EPA. In 2003, Sumpter Township got paid $2-3 million of the $39 million that the City of Toronto paid Republic Services to haul all of its trash away. Apparently, the rest is split down the middle between Republic Services and the trash haulers. This $2-3 million forms (or formed) approximately 40% of the budget of Sumpter Township, making the Township totally reliant on the existence and operation of the landfill.


How did Sumpter Township end up with a lot of trash, in particular Canadian trash? Pierre Bélanger discusses this in his article here, which is fascinating enough that I want to copy-paste what he wrote:

"In December 31, 2002, Canada's largest municipal solid waste facility, the Keele Valley Landfill, received its last shipment of garbage from the city of Toronto. After 20 years of contentious operation, the closure of the site was celebrated by the town of Vaughan with a big party where thousands of locals turned up for fireworks, and for what would become a new picturesque park and an 18-hole Scottish-style golf course. After a decade of site studies, community consultations and conservative environmental politics that failed to find a solution to the GTA's waste disposal problem (think about the Adams Mine site near Kirkland Lake for example), garbage eventually began flowing south across the Canada-US border. In fact, America's third-largest importer of trash in the US next to Pennsylvania and Virginia was more than happy to pick up the slack. Recalibrating the laws of supply and demand, Michigan capitalized on the huge capacity of its landfills to essentially become a magnet for all the solid waste in the Great Lakes Region.

By the early 1990s, America's largest waste handlers were, not surprisingly, totally prepared for the imminent garbage crisis in big cities. When strict new environmental standards--such as the infamous Subtitle D Regulations--were enacted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1991, small landfill operators were unable to sustain the capital investment required for engineering upgrades and simply shut down. The impact of this legislative vise-grip was so significant that from 1990 to 2000, the number of landfills in the US plummeted from over 10,000 to under 2,600. Exacerbated by the closure of the world's largest dump in 2002, New York City's Fresh Kills Landfill, the drop immediately created the perception that there was a lack of airspace--a logistical term that defines the maximum filling capacity of a site--throughout the country catalyzing an unprecedented reorganization of the municipal solid waste industry, especially on the Eastern Seaboard. Forced to radically consolidate their operations, large waste management corporations (Allied, Onyx, WMI and Republic known as the "Big Four") created supersize landfills to essentially achieve greater economies of scale. Seeking solid waste disposal contracts from neighbouring municipalities, most companies look beyond their borders for new waste streams to offset the rising costs of capital infrastructure. Like New York, Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois, Ontario suddenly became Michigan's best friend. At the centre of this wasteshed--the region defined by garbage flows--are two of the largest waste handlers in North America that opened their gates to Ontario's waste with two megasize landfills ironically named Carleton Farms and Pine Tree Acres. From the air, the sheer magnitude of their operations is staggering: receiving approximately one tractor trailer every three minutes thanks to rapid-fire turnaround times and GPS-guided bulldozers, every single part of the process is optimized on a time-cost basis; nothing is wasted. By 2025, the size of these two landfills alone will cover an equivalent area of two square miles under a perfectly graded, 300-foot pyramid of garbage.

The rise of Michigan to the top of the garbage empire is both natural and predictable. Five advantages underlie its supremacy. The first is geology: Michigan is endowed with a thick, practically impervious layer of Devonian clay that covers almost the entire state, an advantage its northern and eastern neighbours, with their fractured bedrock, do not share. The second is location: Michigan is at the geographic centre of the Great Lakes Region, bordering on four states and the province of Ontario. Operators throughout the state capitalize on this proximity by situating large landfills as close as possible to the state borders. The third is scale: an abundance of airspace and the streamlining of operations have given the state a competitive edge, with rock-bottom landfilling prices. Dumping in Ontario was about US$100 a ton in 2006, compared to a cost in Michigan of about US$10. The fourth is NAFTA: like the 50,000 tons of hazardous waste (combustible fuels, bio-medical waste and low-level radioactive waste) exported from the US to Canada every year, garbage is considered a primary commodity and is protected by the North American Free Trade Agreement: state governments do not have the authority to halt the stream of garbage. The fifth advantage is the law concerning future use: operators in Michigan are only required to maintain landfills for 30 years after closure whereas in Canada, landfills must be maintained and monitored for at least a century, and in some cases, forever. All told, two-thirds of the more than 5 million cubic metres of waste that were shipped to the Midwestern United States in 2002--enough to fill a football stadium--originated from the province of Ontario. Compounded by a blaze that shut down the new pelletization plant at Toronto's Ashbridge's Bay Treatment Plant on August 22, 2003, the total figure has now jumped to over 11 million cubic metres of waste plus a 150,000-ton sludge surplus exported annually to a variety of landfills across the US-Canada border, en route to the Great Lake State."

Despite Michigan's predisposition to landfilling, the transboundary movement of waste along what is recognized as the longest, most undisputed border in the world has its opponents. Responding to public pressure, Michigan Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow have joined forces with Congressman John D. Dingell to end the legacy of what they call "Michigan as the dumping ground for ever-increasing amounts of Canadian trash," putting into question the foundations of the North American Free Trade Agreement. But for landfill operators like Norm Folson, site manager at the Pine Tree Acres Landfill in northeast Detroit, living in a state with the second-highest rate of unemployment next to Mississippi, yields a radically different view: 'We love Canadian garbage. Tipping fees pay our salaries and pave our roads. Besides, Canadian garbage is really easy to compact because it's really dry. It's dry because Canadians compost almost everything. To us, Canadian garbage is like gold.'" 

 

An aerial view of Carleton Farms Landfill