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.

"...under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted."

I want to focus the next few posts on neoliberal economics--how skewed, despicable, and inhumane it is, how major media outlets and major political figures subscribe to it, and what steps need to be taken to bring it crashing down. Today, I will share with you a an old leaked memo, written by Lawrence Summers (ex-Harvard president, ex-chief economist at the World Bank, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, and, so sadly, a man that President Obama appointed to direct his National Economic Council), to his colleagues at the World Bank.

Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs)? I can think of three reasons:

(1) The measurement of the costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the forgone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

(2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world-welfare-enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

(3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income-elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one-in-a-million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-5 mortality is 200  per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmospheric discharge is about visibility-impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare-enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution is LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every bank proposal for liberalisation.

Some thoughts on inequality

We have equated the worth of people with the money they have. This materialistic, consumeristic society has done a tremendous job at equating the worth of a human being with the amount of money he or she has. Those with money get better public services, those with money are looked at more favourable under eyes of the law, those with money can get away with ecological catastrophes by paying the government or the people. Money opens doors to those that have it, and stands as an oppressive barrier to those that do not have it. For those caught in the vicious cycle of poverty, inequality, and discrimination, capitalism's lack of compassion provides no hope. This isn't the case only on an individual basis in "rich" countries like the US, but it is also the case between the "rich" global north and the "poor" global south.  Inequality furthers ecological degradation, particularly because of the vested interests of the powerful, and their unwillingness to deal with the impacts of their choices. The poverty created by industrialisation and globalisation leave only one option to the poor--either industrialise, or be left behind. And this industrialisation takes advantage of industrialising nations' willingness to participate in the game of globalisation, as well as the fear of retaliation from industrialised nations.

In a powerful episode of Speaking of Faith (now called On Being) titled Seeing poverty after Katrina, Krista Tippett talked to Dr. David Hilfiker, co-founder of Joseph's House in Washington, D.C., about urban poverty in the US--its causes and its rootedness in our economic system--in light of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina brought to the national spotlight the massive discrimination against the people that have borne the brunt of our economic system. The shocking treatment of the poor in New Orleans was followed by an even more shocking statement when then FEMA Director Mike Brown said, "Katrina has shown us people we didn't know existed." How people in national government didn't know the inequalities that the economic system creates is inexcusable. Many such elites are either sheltered, or are unwilling to admit the existence of such inequality, because they are the ones that have benefited most from the rigged system.

How might we deal with such inequality? Dr. Hilfiker provides guiding advice and wisdom on how to deal with the issues of inequality in our daily lives, which is the exact way in which we must understand and deal with ecological degradation. We must confront these issues head on by not denying their existence, and by accepting fully that our privileged lives contribute to their existence. If we confront their existence, we will be better suited to understand the causes behind their existence. Dr. Hilfiker explains this by talking about how he took his young daughter to a homeless shelter to meet and talk to a particular homeless person, after she was saddened by seeing a homeless person on the street. Realising that the homeless are those that have been left behind by the very same forces that offered her privilege made her less fearful of the homeless, first of all, while making her understand the unjust economic system we have founded our society on.

We must get real about inequality.

"Going green, but getting nowhere"

I borrowed today's post title from a New York Times op-ed contribution with the same title, written by Gernot Wagner, an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund. (Thank you, Colin, for sending this article to me.) The article makes for an interesting read, but it raises several issues of individualism and collective action that I do not agree with, since they stem from an old mindset of large-scale regulation driven by neoliberal economics, the same economics that has gotten us into this mess.

I agree with Wagner's sentiment on the importance and need for collective action. Of course we need collective action in the face of collectively-made problems. But Wagner almost belittles individual effort, because, it doesn't affect change. He writes,

"But, sadly, individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it doesn’t add up to enough. Self-interest, not self-sacrifice, is what induces noticeable change. Only the right economic policies will enable us as individuals to be guided by self-interest and still do the right thing for the planet."

I do not agree with him. He is saying that the agency for change is not us, that individuals have no agency, but rather economic policies are what will free us from ourselves. Unfortunately, the economic system that is vague and murky, the policy of which is set by economic wonks in secrecy (look at the Federal Reserve). I agree that individual action doesn't add up when we are not communicative of our efforts, when we are not consciously trying to instill change in others. Of course it wouldn't work, because such individual action is almost selfish and elitist. I have mentioned this several times.

"And economics teaches us that humanity must have the right incentives if it is to stop this terrible trend."

Wagner implies with this statement that humans are "rational" actors, and act rationally when shown a price of their choices. Nothing could be further from the truth, because no one really acts rationally. Look at how many people smoke, and how many eat unhealthily, how many people continue to buy Hummers even when gas "prices" are so high. Furthermore, the costs for environmental compliance are terribly low. Many factories find it cheaper to pay fines for breaking regulations than upping their standards and complying. The boundaries between domestic law and transnational law further provide little incentive to think about cumulative impacts of choices. Law and economy are set up with loopholes - you can prove your case not to pay, or be luckily powerful, or just pay your way out of your problems.

Wagner raises how economic incentives allowed us to get rid of lead from gasoline. But the economy didn't stop us from creating another problem. The economy is not self-correcting, and our faith in it cannot be blind. The reason why all of these problems keep arising is because we have a structure in place that allows them to pop up. As soon as the "problem" of climate change is "solved," something else massive will come up. I know it. Because unless we change the foundation, the offspring are all rotten.

What such articles have the tendency to do is put the burden on the governing elite. But as President Obama said tonight, we all have responsibilities. I have continued to believe in the ability of human emotion and benevolence. Constantly we are surrounded by stories and images and media that tell us stories that are inspiring, not because a price is put on their actions, but because they speak to something deeper, something that is more powerful than rational action and choice. We are guided ethically and emotionally as individuals, so why should we be guided by "rational market principles" that in no way question the status quo? Aren't we more than that? I am not convinced that we are. We are animals, and we have a conscience. It is for that reason we find things beautiful, and some things despicable. Unfortunately, right now, such emotion shows up only when we are manifestly and tangibly distressed, when we actually see something going wrong in front of us.

As individuals, we cannot act in isolation. Rather, we must recognise that we are a part of a community - of people, of species, of ecosystems - forming this Earth. A restructuring of our lives, individual and collective, is in order.

Some more thoughts on responsibility

The notion of responsibility seems to go hand in hand with the notion of proxies, which I have written about previously. As this culture, this society has moved forward in time, we have continually given up responsibility and given proxies to others - we rely on others to make sure our water is safe to drink and that our food is safe to eat. Much of this responsibility has been delegated to large government, which has in turn relied on industry to maintain minimal standards of conscience and morality. In the end, our individual responsibilities have been boiled down to being "consumers" and "contributors to the economy."  Consequently, all of our daily activities, our actual being and the physical world have been interpreted within this ethereal economic framework. (Did you know that your life is worth around $8,000,000? I understand where such a number comes from, but I would never buy it.) These responsibilities are extremely passive - the basic premise of micro and macroeconomic theory is that we as individuals are unable to affect change. We are unable to act, even if it is in our best interests to act.

At the same time, the delegated responsibility (and the outcomes of this delegation) has diffused in many ways. When it comes down to actually taking action, we are unsure of where to apply pressure - is it better to get government to pass policy? Or do we get those CEOs fired? And as opposed to Fick's Fist Law of Diffusion, the influence of our behaviour -spatially and temporally - has only increased over time, even though you would think that a diffuse delegation of responsibility would lessen our influences. The point is, we need to assume responsibility, to take it back. We can no longer rely on "elected officials" to take care of what matters most in the world - the environment and everything that it represents. To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, even good government is no excuse for us not to practice self-government.

In the penultimate chapter of Derrick Jensen's book, What We Leave Behind, Jensen quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who said "...action comes from a readiness for responsibility." Most all of us know that action needs to be taken, here and now. We cannot wait. And we will only be driven to action if we are willing to assume responsibility for what this action represents - taking down of this ecologically and mentally destructive culture. If we are willing to take responsibility, action will flow.

"Goods"

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

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

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

Guest blog #17: Laura Smith on durable change and rethinking incentives

"I should preface this post by saying that what you are about to read is 100% my interpretation on the writing and teaching of my adviser in the School of Natural Resources, Raymond De Young. He teaches a course on the Psychology of Environmental Stewardship, and has written articles with such titles as “Changing Behavior and Making it Stick.” So, in writing this post, I find myself in what I refer to as another “channeling Ray” moment.

When we talk of scaling up environmental behavior change, the question of incentives inevitably arises.  It is a commonly held belief that monetary incentive, in particular, is the only way to insight individual change on a massive scale. There is no doubt that financial payoff for do-gooding has magical powers. However, as a behavior change strategy, it has its pitfalls, not least of which is durability. But I will get to that in a moment.

Perhaps the first question regarding financial incentives or disincentives is this: who pays? Incentives for going green are often temporal in nature, and the kitty eventually runs out. Recent politics around budgetary issues suggest that these pots of money could be even more rare in the coming years.  Disincentives, on the other hand, force the consumer to pay up, which is perhaps a dicey proposition in "economic hard times."  From a purely economic standpoint, there are good reasons to rethink monetary incentives to drive environmental behavior change.

There is another compelling reason – behaviors driven by reward have a notorious “back to baseline” effect when the incentive is removed. In other words, materially incentivized behavior typically goes back to previous unsustainable levels when the rewards go away. Research has shown this effect time and again with a multitude of environmental and health-related behaviors. So, unless someone is willing to pay the price indefinitely, we can hardly expect durable change.

Disincentives are a slightly different story, since these can be put in place for lengthy periods of time, perhaps yielding the desired trend over time (think gas tax). Like incentives, this is a technique of coercion, and because of that, it poses some interesting challenges. Psychological reactance is a common one, and describes the behaviors of people who go out of their way to mess with the system.  

The driving law in Sao Paulo, Brazil illustrates well some of some issues with disincentives. To reduce its daunting pollution and traffic problems, the South American mega-city put a law into effect that allows license plates with odd numbers to drive on certain days of the week, and even numbers the other days. Unfortunately, the city did not simultaneously provide reasonable alternative transportation choices. As a result, many people ended up changing the times they drove to skirt hours of enforcement, and in some extreme cases, bought a second car so that they could legally drive every day. Neither behavior was an intended consequence of the law that was supposed to curb unnecessary driving and encourage carpooling.

So, the behavior change goal can’t conflict with needs basic to one’s livelihood. But say we are dealing with behaviors more benign.  How do we encourage durable change?

Change from within

One alternative to techniques of coercion (change from the outside) is helping people to construct their own internal motivations for the behavior in question (change on the inside). This can be spurred through our relationships with inspiring people, time in nature, time spent learning about environmental issues, and the list goes on. Personal change is ideally bolstered with a supportive social network. So, in some ways, the strategy implies an incentive program that is individually tailored, and maintained, by each person…in their own heads…and supported by a loving community. 

Durable change, in this light, may take effort to get people started, but becomes self-maintaining over time. 

Now, if you need to change behaviors of a lot of people and fast, and you don’t necessarily need the behavior to stick, get out your wallet! There is no doubt that incentives and disincentives have a valid role to play in environmental behavior change. But isn’t it nice to know that they’re not the only way?"

~Laura "Smitty" Smith

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This post on durable change dovetails wonderfully with some of the thoughts from a recent post. I have written about durable change a few times (here, here, here), too. Laura raises some very interesting points, some of which I have been trying to articulate over the past year. The notions of "incentive" and "disincentive" in our world almost always seems to boil down to a monetary issue, and money viewed under the economic structures of today has different powers than maybe another framework you might conjure up. I personally believe that when it comes down to it, the talk about things being "economical" and "efficient" must be moved away from, particularly when viewed under our current framework, and especially because of the nature of the compromises that this framework results in. 

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?

On the human scale

The way our society is structured is such that we try to maximise "efficiency." (I, as well as a guest blogger, have written about this concept of efficiency, and what we lose because of it, here, here, here, here, here and here.) What this leads to, under current notions of economics ("free-market" capitalism with its baseless assumptions of perfect competition, no barriers to entry, perfect information, etc. etc.) and building, is called economies of scale. What this basically results in is the ability to produce the most amount of something for the maximised possible monetary profit. What this also ends up doing, however, is something that is a shared story across the country, and most of the world - the conglomeration of smaller entities into bigger and bigger and bigger and meaner entities - corporate takeovers, industrial farms, massive financial companies too big to fail, etc. We have "globalised" almost everything imaginable - companies, manufacturing, growing, and disease. What we end up creating are entities with "lives" of their own, so big and powerful that smaller humans can get trampled along the way, without redress and remorse. In many places across the country, our buildings have shown similar trends over time. Take a look at this picture of the built environment in downtown Detroit, and how it has changed over time.

 

Apart from the obvious increase in vacant land, we observe that the size of structures, in general, has increased over time. We have ended up building bigger and bigger structures that have a tendency to make one walking through it or standing beside it insignificant. Of course, many of these structures are visual manifestations of institutions and organisations I just described. What this tells me is that we value the lives of careless institutions and organisations over the lives of the humans, plants, animals and nature that guarantee their existence.

Such scales are seen in landfills, too. Here are some pictures and numbers about some of the largest landfills in the nation (you can read the articles here and here).

What I think is necessary to address when talking about issues of our impact on the environment is a look at scale. It is absolutely not possible to tread lightly with big things. Big tractors compact soil, oxen do not. Big power plants require massive amounts of fossil fuels, while living with less energy wouldn't necessitate the rape of mountains. Big buildings take a lot to erect, while smaller ones recognise our place in the world and the grander scheme of things.

On the fallacy "economic" sustainability

Thoughts on the notion of sustainability have grown exponentially it seems. Everyone is talking about it, whether they mean it or not. As you may have found odd, massive resource extraction companies talk about it and promote it, when their very existence is in opposition to it. In all honesty, I am not really sure what "sustainability" means fully, and probably no one can really put it fully into words without writing a tome. My notions of it are challenged day by day. What I do know is that such companies mentioned above do not practice it at all, whatever sustainability truly is, apart from "economic" sustainability - they are making absolutely sure that their viability and legitimacy as entities stays intact, and they are "sustained." They have all too easily kidnapped the word, and made it mean what they want it to mean.

If you know a little bit about "sustainability," you'll know that the world has basically defined three pillars of it - environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. The way the problem of sustainability is currently set up is such that goals and targets must be met for all three pillars - environmental, social, and economic. A "sustainable" outcome is some sort of optimisation of the three pillars. What this means is that there are some compromises that need to be made, and one or two of the pillars will be compromised more so than the others; there are conflicts and tensions between these pillars. Our world has a tendency to compromise on the pillars of environmental and social sustainability, because there is very little willingness to change the economic foundations of how we live our lives, the foundations that have gotten us into this mess in the first place.

The way sustainability is currently defined involves the considerations of economic structures that are counter to the notion of sustainability, just like the economics practiced by corporations. The economic structures I am talking about are those such as capitalism, communism, or any mix of anything of that sort. Such economics are by their very definition destructive to both the environment and people. In fact, there is no way you can have equality in any capitalist or communist framework - there are losers, human and non-human, always. There is never a Pareto-optimal decision if you also consider the environment and justice.

The issue is this: the problem is over-constrained, because we have decided that our current economic structure trumps people and the environment. We have limited our conceptualisation and imagination of sustainability by limiting the options we have available to us, because we are unwilling to change our economies. (In order to maintain the economic viability of our nation, jobs are being created in sectors that necessarily involve violence against the land, air and water. Such jobs are clearly not sustainable.) There is no way you can be remotely sustainable unless you define a new economics. Economics should in fact not be its own pillar at all, but should rather be a fluid, moving and dynamic outcome of our definitions of society and the environment. Such economies might better be able to address chronic problems that face our society today, such as bad food, homelessness and poverty. The goal of any social structure should involve justice and equality. In this light, society itself should be dynamically defined based on environmental constraints and environmental sustainability. There is no getting around it - we live on Earth.

More to come.

The rich create it, the poor deal with it

I found this wonderfully written article by Vanessa Baird, who writes for the New Internationalist, called "Trash: inside the heap." In the article, she argues that creating trash is big business, and it is the rich who create it, for the poor to deal with (although cities in "poorer" nations are pretty badly trashed and polluted). The rich who make trash are generally considered "clean," and the poor who deal with it are considered "dirty." This seems true of most environmental justice related problems. The rich create it by their want of products and goods, and it is the poor who are left with dealing with poor water quality, exposure to chemicals and the like. This article is so interesting, I'll have you read it by posting parts of it here. Everything posted below is by Vanessa Baird (keep in mind that the article was written in 1997, but nothing has really changed since then). Take the time to read it - it is totally worth your time.
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One could wax lyrical about the rubbish pickers and scavengers of this world. How they are pioneer recyclers, the greenest of the green. And in a sense it's true. But such romanticism obscures other truths.

The people who build their lives and homes out of other people's refuse are not viewed as eco-heroes by the societies they live in - no more than people who rummage in dustbins are in the West. They are, for the most part, regarded as little better than the trash they handle.

They don't do this work because they want to, or because like middle-class Californian "dumpster divers' they `believe in recycling'. They do it because poverty and social inequality has given them a pitifully narrow range of options.

The sociology of trash is simple: the rich make it, the poor deal with it. The rich who make it are generally considered `clean'; the poor who deal with it are considered `dirty'.

It's a topsy-turvy sociology.

But then the whole issue of trash is pretty much upside-down and back-to-front.

For a start, there's the economics of waste.

We tend to think of industrial production as being mainly about manufacturers making things we need - or just want - which we then buy. This is what keeps money circulating and the economic roundabout going round.

Think again.

What if, for instance, it weren't production that led to economic growth, but waste? Garbage. Trash. Pollution.

Now that seems crazy.

Not so crazy though, if you take the example of the United States.

For every 100 kilograms of products manufactured, 3,200 kilograms of waste is created. `We are far better at making waste than at making products,' concludes Paul Hawken, author, business person and environmentalist.

Meanwhile the US economy appears to be growing. According to GDP or Gross Domestic Product - the conventional means of measuring growth - it has grown at 2.5 per cent per year since 1973. Yet there is little evidence of improved lives, better infrastructure, higher wages, more leisure or greater economic security. Quite the contrary.

This is because GDP doesn't really measure growth in any meaningful sense. It measures money transactions and calls them economic growth. It is blind to whether this is harmful or beneficial to people and their environment.

So we end up with an insane situation, exemplified by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, where a disaster that causes long-term suffering to people, animals and the natural environment shows up as highly profitable because the clean-up and the insurance pay-outs involve lots of money changing hands.

If GDP were to exclude keeping people in prison, pollution and every bit of litter on the streets, then it's quite conceivable that the US economy would be shown not to be growing at all. What's growing is its production of waste - and its capacity to lay waste.

Hawken proposes that, to remedy this, governments need to subtract such negative impacts from revenue. But, he says, `unfortunately where economic growth is concerned, the Government uses a calculator with no minus sign'.

What happens to it all?

A trip to a major landfill site is not everyone's idea of an excursion. But what you see there are the most amazing mountains of the stuff, much of it plastic-seeming, but still a veritable picnic for scavenging birds. Moving ominously and noisily around the heat and stench, like strange prehistoric beasts, are bulldozers, headlights glaring like eyes.

This is where most waste goes in the industrial world - holes in the ground that no-one wants in their backyard. With reason: landfills are fraught with danger. They emit methane, they overheat, they leak - which becomes increasingly ominous as the quantity of chemical products dumped into landfills in the industrial world is expected to double between 1990 and 2005.

Countries which are short of land, like Japan or Belgium, favour incinerating rubbish. This is no better; many experts say it's a lot worse. It creates air pollution, releasing toxins and dioxins into the atmosphere. More sophisticated incinerators have filters, but still leave residues of toxic ash that need to be buried somewhere.

A few years ago the US raised the alert. The big country had run out of landfill sites. This was in spite of its exporting waste to Canada and Mexico and, of course, many parts of the South. In this the US is not alone. Most developed countries export their waste.

What's more serious is that the North now produces more hazardous and toxic waste than it can accommodate on its own territory.

Lawrence Summers, World Bank Chief Economist, gained notoriety in 1991 when he suggested that Africa was under-populated and `under-polluted' and so the West should send toxic waste there. But he was only reflecting on what was already happening. Since then the former countries of the Soviet Union have been added to the list of favoured dumping grounds.

Most serious of all is something that was brought home to me recently in quite a trivial way when my nephew opened the back of my defunct smoke-alarm to find a label saying: `Contains radioactive material'. `Why?' he innocently asked. I could not answer. The label did not indicate how one was to dispose of the thing.

The reason is, nobody knows. Today the total accumulation of used nuclear fuels in the world stands at 130,000 tonnes - more than twice as much as in 1987. Most of this will be buried hundreds of metres below the earth's crust, although scientists recognize it will make its way back to the surface at some point.

The Basel Convention, which with some success is trying to stop exports of toxic and hazardous waste from rich countries to those of the developing world, does not, significantly, cover nuclear waste. It's too big a problem for the nuclear countries. They want to keep their options open, which is very bad news indeed for people living in impoverished countries like North Korea.

The "under-polluted" South

Lawrence Summers got it wrong, though, when he suggested that the countries of the South were `under-polluted'. Visit any big city in the South and you can see it, feel it, smell it. The piles of garbage in Dar Es Salaam have become a major health hazard. Shanghai, Lagos and Mumbai aren't much better. Air quality in Taipei and Bangkok is the pits. In such industrializing countries of the South, water is rendered undrinkable due to chemical pollutants.

It's not just the North's rubbish that is being dumped on the South but also its dirtiest industrial production. With globalization, more and more companies have their goods made in the South where wages are lower and environmental controls are more lax.

And this is the rotten core of the matter.

For the main problem with trash is not its `back end', as it were. It's not so much what we as individuals throw away, but the waste that has been incurred making the things we so abundantly consume. The focus is almost always on what we see - the garbage cans, the refuse heaps. Not what we don't see.

According to Robert Ayres, an expert on industrial metabolism, about 94 per cent of materials extracted for use in manufacturing become waste before the product is even made. More waste still is generated during manufacture. Overall, he claims, US industry uses as much as 100 times more material and energy than is theoretically required to deliver the goods.

One way of tackling this criminal inefficiency is to bring in tougher legislation that encourages cleaner production and penalizes the waster and the polluter. Sometimes this works even before the laws come into force, as happened in certain parts of German industry. The idea of `extending producer responsibility' is also gaining ground in other parts of Northern Europe.

Another way is to try to convince business that it can save money by being more efficient and creating less waste. This is the line taken by Amory Lovins, L Hunter Lovins and Ernst von Weizsacker in their new study called Factor 4: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use. It tells us how we can live twice as well, using half as much. If that doesn't sell the idea nothing will.

Either way, something is going to have to happen. According to the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, arresting global warming and environmental degradation will require a 50-per-cent reduction in worldwide material consumption, and to do that industrial countries need to aim for a 90-per-cent reduction in their throughput of materials.

The main part we, as individuals, can play is as consumers.

The world's ecological class system

The world's poor - some 1.1 billion people - includes all those households that earn less than $700 a year per member. They are mostly rural Africans, Indians and other South Asians.

The 3.3 billion people in the world's middle-income class earn between $700 and $7,500 per member and live mostly in Latin America, the Middle East, China and East Asia. This class also includes the low-income families of the former Soviet bloc and of Western industrial nations.

The consumer class - the 1.1 billion members of the global consumer society - includes all households whose income per member is above $7,500. They live mainly in North America, Europe and Australasia.

Category of    Consumers       Middle             Poor
Consumption  (1.1 billion)  (3.3 billion)     (1.1 billion)


Diet         meat,          grain, clean   insufficient grain,
           packaged       water          unsafe water
           food, soft
           drinks

Transport    private cars   bicycles,      walking
                          buses

Materials    throwaways     durables       local biomass

Source: Worldwatch Institute

It's not a comfortable role to face up to. When environmental thinker and writer Alan Thein Durning split the world into three ecological classes - 1.1 billion poor, 3.3 billion middle-income class, and 1.1 billion consuming class - he caused quite a stir in some quarters. People who did not consider themselves rich by their own standards were miffed to find themselves defined as part of a global consuming elite (see box). But there's no avoiding it. If you live in the rich, industrialized part of the world your consumption - and the polluting wake you leave behind - is tremendous. A person living in the industrial world will consume 19 times more aluminium, 14 times more paper, 13 times more iron and steel, 10 times more energy, 6 times more meat and 3 times more fresh water than their fellow humans living in the developing world.

The question Alan Durning asks, in his book of the same title, is one we need to keep asking: `How much is enough?' The majority of people living in the South manage with limited resources. They use and re-use many of the things that people in the North and Australasia would automatically throw away. Bottles, bags, cans, rags, old rubber tyres.

People living in the North have limited resources too, though we don't recognize it half the time and certainly don't behave accordingly. As economist Herman Daly has pointed out, we are facing an historic juncture in which, for the first time, the limits to increased prosperity are not the lack of human-made capital but the lack of natural resources, or what is now sometimes called `natural capital'. Plenty of sawmills, not enough trees, in other words.

Many people are responding by trying to alter their personal habits. Recycling is on the increase - though it varies widely from region to region. In parts of Britain recycling has crept up to 5 per cent of household waste; in parts of Australia it's 15 per cent. But in some areas in Canada it's closer to 80 per cent. The greening of politicians and local authorities in some countries - and Britain is a case in point - is happening at a painfully slow rate. Other countries, like Germany, have galloped ahead and made mistakes, but there is at least a commitment to trying to create a different, more sustainable kind of economy.

Throwaway world

The British dump 2.5 billion nappies/diapers a year.

The Japanese use 30 million `disposable' single-roll cameras annually.

North Americans annually discard 183 million razors, 2.7 billion batteries, 140 million cubic metres of Styrofoam packing, 350 million pressurized spray-paint cans, plus enough paper and plastic ware to feed the world a picnic every other month.

(Source: Alan Thein Durning, How much is enough?)

Inevitably, when you look at trash you end up talking about values. Currently most industrial economies are still geared up to using as few people as possible, and thereby creating as little employment as possible to produce as much stuff as possible, much of which is trash or soon becomes it.

In other words, we have been trashing what is really of value - people and their natural environment - in the pursuit of things that have little real value: consumer items we mainly don't need.

There are practical things that we, as individuals, can do - like recycle, re-use, consume carefully and generally consume a lot less. But there also needs to be quite a major mind-shift in the way our economies and our societies operate. We need, metaphorically speaking, to take the lid off the trash-can and turn it on its head. Only then will we get down to grappling with the beast in the bin.

References:

(1) Paul Hawken, Natural Capital, article in Mother Jones, San Francisco, March/April 1997.

(2) Michael Redclift, Wasted, Earthscan, 1996.

(3) Lester Brown, Nicholas Lenssen, Hal Kane/Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs 1995/96, Earthscan, 1995.

(4) Ernst von Weizsacker, Amory Lovins and L Hunter Lovins, Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use, Earthscan, London, 1997.

(5) People and the Planet magazine, Vol 4, No 1, 1995.

(6) Alan Thein Durning, How much is enough? Earthscan, 1992.