Experience and possibilities

As an experienced engineer, one can easily look at a proposal for something, parse out the important details, and point out flaws and oversights in design. An experienced psychologist can recognise depression by looking at someone's face. An experienced cook will know just how much water to add to rice, not a drop more, not a drop less. It is with age, with awareness, with an openness to the world, that comes experience--experience that allows us to see the world as it is, experience to understand why, and hopefully, experience to change what is not working.

Yet, experience that is not a positive force can also close off possibilities, for many times, all that we know comes only from what we have experienced. Such experience can ward off imagination. If we cannot imagine, how do we move forward given many of the messes we've created? How can we get past the same old, same old (neoliberal economics, utilitarianism, capitalism, communism, socialism, competition, World Trade Organisation, World Bank, United Nations) that many elders are stuck in? How can we reclaim the possibilities of envisioning a fundamentally different world, and acting on those visions? It is clear then that experience and possibility share a complex relationship.

Grace Lee Boggs, the most youthful ninety-six year old philosopher and activist from Detroit, points out in a conversation with Krista Tippett (embedded in this post below) that first and foremost, we must recognise that,

[w]e have so much to rediscover. There are so many creative energies that are part of human history that have been lost because we've been pursuing the almighty dollar. We haven't recognized at what expense we've done that, expense not only of the earth, not only of people of color, but of our own selves. We no longer recognize that we have the capacity within us to create the world anew. We think we are only the victims.

What possibilities open up for us with this new mentality? Only experience can guide us, says Gloria Lowe of We Want Green, Too!:

Ms. Tippett: So I think, when you tell those stories of working with these guys who are so broken, right, I mean it's just layer on layer on layer of grief and loss and tragedy, it sounds debilitating to work with that, right? It sounds like you would lose hope.

Ms. Lowe: Oh, not at all, not at all. Part of my own personal transformation — I think it's probably the transformation that anyone who has a brain injury goes through — is that you lose contact with the things that you've been taught and, in doing so, you become like the birds. You start to do things instinctively. So you know about the human spirit. So all I did was transfer what I already knew and these guys did what was in their spirit to do. They rose up, they rose up, you know, just by, oh, yeah, I've been doing this for years...

...This floor is laid by a guy who had two head injuries in the military, two. I mean, he's lucky to be alive and just the perfection to see him pull a line all the way from the kitchen to the living room, he's so focused. In their art, in their creativity, and laughing, and they were like a family. So the big to-do is really upstairs. People need to see possibilities once you've begun creating them because then the questions come. What is the advantage of doing this? And it's a very real advantage if the law firm that I worked for did Social Security. If a person hasn't worked, their check is $674.

A house this size was roughly 2,000 square feet. The heating bill in this house, heating and light, was $510. So that leaves you $160? It's very difficult to survive off of that. The heating bill in this house now is like $272 after doing a lot of baking and stuff on the holidays. It's a big difference. That $300 allows me to do something else. I talked to Wayne and Myrtle because the field over here, we're going to take that and we're going to create a garden where kids have raspberries and some fruit they can eat and fruit trees and they'll create their own benches and we'll do things so that they can see a different kind of world, a different kind of life. These kids don't know butterflies. I mean, come on. That's kind of — you don't know butterflies? You know, so this was a part of rediscovering who we are as human beings.

Many, especially those that are so embedded in the way things are, might view these words as romantic and idealistic. They are right, for that is the goal. What comes before being able to see new visions of the world, though, is the ability to overcome the fear of leaving behind what we've created so far. And to do that...

More reflections on where I live

It has been a while since I traveled at home; I haven't had the directed attention that traveling at home requires. But even still, when I look around me, and I see amazing people doing amazing and creative things, things that are intended to bring communities together, intended to create dialogue and discussion and conversation. While many scenes that I see around Ann Arbor are suffused with privilege, there is more genuineness here than many places I have been to in this country.

It is hard to think that the place I live in is a part of a bigger "sovereign" place whose values don't necessarily align with mine, or many of the people I know in Ann Arbor and elsewhere. But that is okay, I guess, as long as we have the energy for more good work that will turn the tides of injustice, inequality, and ecological degradation, into those of community, kindness, a true acceptance, and a true appreciation for all that we have.

In a previous post, I mentioned how this town provides each one of us the option of choosing to live experimentally and experientially, how this town makes it easy to live so. But while talking to Samantha about living trash-free on the Diag today, I came to a different realisation, one that I am going to go with from now on (until, of course, I have another realisation), and it is this--I realised that given this time, and given this town, living trash-free is the least I can do to fully appreciate where I live. Living trash-free isn't an experiment, and it isn't extreme either. Instead, it is something normal, it is a foundation on which to be more creative and more imaginative. It is the zeroth step on an individual and collective journey of reflection, introspection, and change.

I am very excited about the next steps.

On legacy and time

Time is several things. It can be a measure of experience. The more we go through, the more time we feel has passed. The two weeks my class and I spent in Detroit felt like two months, because the sum of the experiences was tremendous. On the other hand, time might mean something very different for the Hadza in Tanzania, who lead hunter-gatherer lives. Michael Finkel, a journalist who spent time with the Hadza, met up with them in the following way. (I love this story.)

"Merely getting this far, to a traditional Hadza encampment, is not an easy task. Year's aren't the only unit of time the Hadza do not keep close track of  - they also ignore hours and days and weeks and months.n The Hadza language (Hadzane) doesn't have numbers past three or four. Making an appointment can be a tricky matter. But I had contacted the owner of a tourist camp not far outside the Hadza territory to see if he could arrange for me to spend time with a remote Hadza group. While on a camping trip in the bush, the owner came across Onwas (the eldest member of the group) and asked him, in Swahili, if I might visit. The Hadza tend to be gregarious people, and Onwas readily agreed. He said I'd be the first foreigner to ever visit the camp. He promised to send this son to a particular tree at the edge of the bush to meet me when I was scheduled to arrive, in three weeks.


Sure enough, three weeks later, when my interpreter and I arrived by Land Rover in the bush, there was Onwas's son Ngoala waiting for us. Apparently, Onwas had noted stages of the moon, and when he felt enough time had past, he sent his son to the tree. I asked Ngoala if he'd waited for a long time for me. 'No,' he said. 'Only a few days.'"

The Hadza have been living in the same place for tens of thousands of years, and are successfully living there right now. Does this have anything to do with how they perceive time?

What about when we are gone, those of us embedded in this degrading culture? What do we leave behind? Will our time on this Earth have mattered? Will our individual lives have mattered? What does time mean in this case? There seem to be two components of our legacy - a physical component, and a less physical, but more emotional and spiritual component. The physical component is comprised of things like trash and non-degradables, buildings and art. The emotional and spiritual component is comprised of what we strove to do with our lives, the impacts of our words and deeds.

When it comes down to it, what do we want to leave behind? I would hope that once we are gone, our physical impacts on this Earth should be as little as possible. Any imprint of our physical existence should decay quickly, or just not be there at all. Trash then becomes a massive problem. And anthropogenic climate change is a physical legacy, too. I would hope that where we once tread, only flowers return year after year, no toxicity, no degradation. What about the emotional and spiritual legacy? I would hope that the good work we do on this Earth, our words and our deeds, have a longer decay time than our physical legacy. But first and foremost, our work must be good, our deeds must be good, our thoughts and actions must be good.

Experience it for yourself

I grew up in Mumbai, a mega-city if there ever was one. The pollution there wasn't as invisible as it is in many places here in the West. You could see the pollution every day, maybe barring the rainy days. This isn't like intermittent smog events because of temperature inversions that may envelope a city for a day or two. No. This is constant. If you haven't experienced this, it is hard to describe. And so it goes that our choices, our daily choices, here in the West, or anywhere else, are made without an understanding of their implications on places far away from us in this globalised world. In fact, one need not worry about a place far off like India. Just look around you. The implications of our choices are all around us, if we choose to look.

If we are then made to talk about sustainability, dealing with climate change and social injustice, without an understanding of our choices or how we've gotten to this point, our vantage point is one of an unemotional elite, one of privilege. It is very easy to recommend that we need more efficient cars and computers to power our society, without seeing the destruction that is caused in the preparation of these cars and computers. And of course, those that have the power to make such policy decisions are generally those who are furthest away from the impacts of those decisions, while benefiting the most. It is unclear to these decision-makers the true "costs" of building a bridge, or deciding that a rainforest should be converted into a biofuel production facility. Have these decision makers lived a life of hardship? Have they cut down a tree that has supported native peoples? Furthermore, the scales of the decisions being made, with their environmental finality, with their centralisation and a lack of nuance, and at times downright arrogance, have the potential to further worsen the situation. And therefore, such decisions cannot be made in a vacuum, whether at an engineering firm, or the state capital, or the White House.

I'd like to end today's post with a quote from one of my student's journals, who was writing about his time in Delray, Detroit, for the class on neighbourhood sustainability I was helping teach last semester.

"This trip has made me realize, first hand, the pains of environmental hardship. You can be told things many times and still never understand fully what you are being told. It's not until my eyes burned, my throat was scratchy, my lungs were continually being vacated of air from the coughing that I could really understand. I smelled some of the foulest air I have ever inhaled, and it was all different varieties. I don't blame that lady who leaves two or three days a year because she just can't take the smell mixed with the heat. I wish they cold all get up and leave forever, but then again, I wish they didn't live in a situation where that was the best option."

The power and deficiencies of science and numbers

While I want to continue to motivate environmentally-related action as individuals and a collective, I want to spend a post or two laying out some of my values explicitly. Hopefully this will allow you to get a sense of where I am coming from, and where I stand. Where I stand is of course subject to change (I hope) as I try to be as open to ideas as I can be. I want to write a little bit about science and numbers today.

I am an engineer. I am an experimentalist studying combustion chemistry and air pollutant formation. I deal with physical chemistry on a regular basis, and am enamoured with physics. I believe in the power of science and numbers. Data are powerful, and a set of experiments well done, or measurements well made, considering assumptions and control parameters, can inform us greatly of physical processes; there is no doubt about that. Yet, I believe in the power of experience as much as science.

Science and technology have allowed for the betterment of some people's lives in various ways - many are now able to fly across the world to see glaciers and cultural artifacts of beauty. We are able to develop relationships with people we've never seen, and we can satisfy our urge to eat the exotic whenever we want to. Yet, I cannot deny, we cannot deny, that science and its application to technology has been used forcefully and violently against nature and the people that reside on this planet. We cannot deny that the power of science and technology has caused destruction on massive scales, has blocked rivers and submerged entire ecosystems, and has unleashed the power of the atom on the world, so much so we live in the fear of it "getting into the wrong hands" continually. Of course, once we have the power of science and technology, we are compelled to use it.

One of the necessary features of science and technology is to be able to measure things, whether it is magnetic fields, chemical concentrations, the flow of electrons. Therefore, if we are able to produce it, we are likely able to measure it, for measurement is a key component of production. But we can only measure to an extent. We cannot and will not be able to ever measure the entire impacts of our actions once the science and technology are let lose on the world. What do we do then? What is the power of science when our brains are so small, yet our collective actions are so vast, tremendous, and destructive?

In a comment on yesterday's post, it was argued that science is about "getting it right." However, with something like the climate change, for example, we're never going to "get it right," because it is impossible. But what science affords us is the ability of judgement, of experience. Many times, we are able to predict to a good degree of accuracy the impacts of something might be on the environment. I value numbers and data preciously, but getting them "right" is very rarely necessary; fairly accurate numbers are good enough for most legitimate purposes. The power of science then lies in allowing us an intuition from retrospective study that is forward-looking. Anyone can look at some data and see that something is wrong (or well, most people - again, climate change). But what science allows us to do is make judgements. This is more than the precautionary principle. It is experience. This experience is invaluable. We cannot allow ourselves to get bogged down into trying to get a number right on. We don't have the time for that.

And so my environmentalism is science-based. But as, if not more, importantly, it is experience-based. 

What role do science and numbers play in your life?

$2/day - On knowing what's out there

Brett asked me the other day if I wanted to go to a Phish concert this weekend. "They put on a really good show, I hear!" he said. In reply, I said that I couldn't, because I couldn't afford to (this week, at least) as I am living on two dollars a day. I realised that this was probably the first time I said no to something because I couldn't afford to go. As I mentioned previously, I have never felt the shortage of money. In our world today, what that means is that I haven't felt the shortage of the opportunity to experience something. It is clear to me that money provides opportunities. If you are wealthy, you can have a summer home in the British Virgin Islands. One of the primary reasons you are able to have that home is because of the doors opened to you, the access granted to you, because of the money you have. What that means is that money opens doors, and a lack of money tends to keep them shut.

I thought about this experience with Brett, knowing all well that the concert was actually going on, yet I couldn't go. I didn't feel bad about it, because I know I'll get the opportunity to go to a concert next week, when I'm not living on two dollars a day. But what if that opportunity to go to a concert never came back to me because I just didn't have the money to go to it? I started to wonder what it must be like then to know everything that is going on around you, yet being unable to access those experiences. I thought about what it must be like to be a homeless person sitting outside the Michigan Theatre, or Hill Auditorium, seeing people all dressed up going in, after eating at Silvio's or some other nice place. There are a couple of things you might be feeling at that point, I assume (I assume, because I don't really know.) - 1) you might have previously been able to afford to go to a concert and dinner, you know what doing that is like like, and you maybe miss doing so and/or feel bad about the fact that you can no longer afford to do so, or 2) you may never have been able to afford to do so, and so maybe you don't know what it is really like, but you know that it probably feels good to be able to afford to do so.

(Spoiler alert!) One of the most fascinating scenes of the movie Waste Land, which I wrote about previously, is the discussion that Vik, his wife, and his colleague are having when the time comes to decide whether or not someone that works as a picker at a landfill should be flown out to London for an auction, since the piece that is being auctioned (made by Vik) features the picker. Vik's wife is initially opposed to taking the picker to London. "How do you think it would feel to go to into this glamourous world for just a couple of days, and then end up going back to a landfill in Rio?" she asks. Vik then raises the valid point that if he was poor, and someone came to him with an offer to move out of poverty for a week, knowing all well that you'll end up back where you came from, that he would of course take up the offer. The picker does end up going to London, and sees the art piece featuring him fetch fifty thousand dollars at auction. In the same way, I suspect that some people that have been disenfranchised and have ended up living on very little money have actually had experiences they wish they could continue to have, yet are not empowered by money. (That is not to say that these people are not happy, because I don't really know. Maybe they are.)

This week has been a fascinating experience, and has given me much to think about.

I am not extreme

(I want to apologise for some heat of the moment typing in yesterday's post.)

I have had several people say that what I am doing is "extreme." Many think that what I am doing is "impractical" for them to do, that it isn't having much of an impact, that I should spend more effort in trying to get systems to change. (With that last point, I agree, and I'm trying.) I can see how how this last year is different than what people are used to seeing and being told, but I believe that that is the extent to which adjectives can be used. I am not extreme. I am trying to be normal.

As any linguist will tell you, words shape and define our experiences and what we make of them. They also shape and limit and expand our imagination. Much of this blog has been devoted to language - the language of defining the problems that face us, and the language that can help us move away from ways of thinking that have caused those problems. I believe that we need to be using new words, or different words, to describe the actions that need to be taken, individually and collectively, to move us to an ecologically sustainable world. I think we can all agree that the world we live in, influenced by society, is not that world. There would be no oil spills or hydrofracking in an ecologically sustainable world. There would be no rape of animals and land and mountains in an ecologically sustainable world. The ecologically sustainable world in which we want to live in is in fact radically and extremely different than the world we currently live in. In an ecologically sustainable world, trash wouldn't exist, and behaviours that would lead to trash would be unacceptable. This project, in an ecologically sustainable world, would not be "extreme," it would be the normal.

What I am trying to say is that for us to live in an ecologically sustainable world, we must act in the ways that would be normal in that world. My actions now are moving me closer to those less devastating behaviours.

It is interesting how the perceptions of our actions depend on who or what those actions affect. I am going to use a stark example here, because it is in fact what we're doing. If I was a serial criminal, say a rapist, I would be an "extreme" of sorts. For me to be "normal" and not be a rapist, I would have to make an extreme change. In our ideal world, there would be no rapists. There would be no war. There would be no violent acts. Well, we are raping we are violent, and we are warring...right now...we're doing that to the Earth. (It's just that maybe using the example of raping people is something we can relate to more than raping the Earth.)

We live in a world where other people - advertisers, marketers, corporations - tell us what is good for us. Those who stand to fill their pockets are the ones defining the current "normal." Yet, given all that we know about the state of the natural world, we know that our current behaviour cannot be the normal. And so what I am doing is not extreme. I won't accept that adjective to describe me, and I won't let it deter me, and you shouldn't let such adjectives deter yourself from making bold choices, either.

New adventures: Traveling at home

With a year coming up next week, I was hoping to embark on adventures that will get me thinking about different things over the next year. I read Wendell Berry's Traveling at Home a while ago, and the concept of exactly that has very much intrigued me and affected this last year's project. It has shaped my thoughts about the at times contradictory notion of now. We want to live in the future now (1, 2, 3), yet such pining has led to incredible ecological devastation. At the same time, this past year's experiences has made me think that maybe a good way of combating ecological degradation is to let now affect our behaviour, such that the future will be a good world for everything that constitutes it. I will write more about "now" tomorrow. =) Today, I want to tell you about something I am thinking of adding to the blog, something that everyone can partake in, something that can allow truly significant strides towards treading lightly on this planet, and something that will hopefully open our senses in such a way that we can be affected meaningfully.

We live in a society that seems to value upward mobility as defined through having been everywhere, and having had "interesting" experiences elsewhere. But we fail to recognise everything it is that surrounds us that subconsciously and viscerally shapes us. Many times, we fail to recognise beauty that exists outside of our windows and just down the street. What I am proposing is this - each week, I will go to a different part of the place I live in, Ann Arbor, and talk to people there, observe those spaces, and tell you about my experiences. I am hoping to appreciate much more fully this unique place, the only place like it in the world.

Each place we live in is unique. Rather than look to exploring places far away, maybe we can all explore the places we are in and appreciate them. Along the way, maybe we'll realise that meaningful action can be taken here and now, in the places we are in. We'll save some money along the way, too...that's always a good thing, right?

Reflections on the year: Who I am surrounded by

Experiences come in two forms, shared and personal. Yet it seems to me that unless you live in solitude, even the most personal experiences are necessarily shared. There is no way to stop all of the external forces that influence your thoughts and your actions. There is also no way to stop your influence on those around you. In some sense, no experience is personal. To me, the only experiences worth having are those that are common, shared and mutual.

I started this project close to a year ago with little idea of what it might mean to me. I undertook it solely as a way to see how far I could go in walking my talk, or to see how much further I needed to go; I thought this a personal project. But the credit for the birth of this blog goes to others - Andrew and Margo, who convinced me to start writing late last spring during a conversation on a beautiful day on the Diag. Furthermore, most of what has been written about has in some way been sparked by conversations with other people about at times seemingly unrelated things. I can therefore in no way take credit for everything that you may have read - the people that surround me that have provided constant encouragement and meaning and provocation. Clearly, there is much further to go in though and action, because I realised things and learned about things that I didn't think existed. Writing about this project has really made me more aware of my surroundings, and the ways in which humans influence their environment.

If you are thinking of a project of your own, don't hesitate to get it underway. You will be surprised by the enthusiasm others will share with you.

I am hoping that you will continue to share your thoughts with me and with others. And thanks.

Reflections on the year: Where I live

It is coming up on a year now since this project started, and I want to reflect on what has made this project possible. I have had the continued support of friends and family and colleagues, and discussions with them have been the largest source of content for these writings. Yet I cannot help but wonder what it would have been like had I been living in another part of the country, or even five miles away from where I live right now. I live in a place where a river flows one hundred yards from my room window, where the farmers' market and the food coop are just a good golf drive away, where I can walk to go out with friends, where accessibility is not an issue. Everything caters to living such a life; the options have been all around me since I moved here seven years ago, I just had to choose to make the leap into this project. I live in Ann Arbor.  How I am so lucky to be here, I do not know.

Reality is what we make of what surrounds us. One can choose to look at a tree and think, "Oh, that will make a nice table to replace the one I have already." Or one can think, "This tree is the home for the woodpeckers and the sparrows, and even though its leaves have graced the soil, they will come back next spring harboring new life." Many people have mentioned to me about how the town is too small, how there isn't anything going on, how they can't wait to leave to a bigger city like Chicago or New York. Yet in my experience, this town is full of vibrancy and vigour. Natural beauty is embedded in it, just as Ann Arbor is embedded in the natural beauty of Southeast Michigan, and is surrounded by the Great Lakes of the world. (Okay, the first colonisers clearly messed up a lot...but let's forget about that for now.) At the same time, this town provides each one of us the option of choosing to live experimentally and experientially. This town makes it easy to live so. Undertaking this project has been incredibly easy. This is the reality that Ann Arbor has shown me.

Yet other places just down the road are not like this. I don't know how I would live in such a place, and only my embedding in those places will allow me to make my reality there. I would hope to learn about those places from others. I am not in those other places. For now, I am here. Given what Ann Arbor offers, I can have no excuse to live any differently, and any encouragement that I may provide is grounded in my being here and having experienced here. But most importantly, it is essential to believe you can undertake a project mentally. If you do, the reality you create for yourself instantly changes its nature.

What we lose through "efficiency" - feedback

Tim told me this morning that in yesterday's post, I have confused industrialisation with efficiency. He says that we choose and want to be efficient in everything, including non-industrial agriculture and food production. I see what he is saying, and I agree with him. Maybe I have confused or not delineated between the two concepts thoroughly enough. What I am trying to get at is the notion of trying to get more for less (or more for the same amount of input), which is exactly what industrialisation is, and which is exactly what efficiency is. When we choose to apply fossil-fuel based energy and chemicals to agriculture, we think that we may be able to increase "yield," or the amount of output per area of land (which, I emphasise, is not true in practice). But the concept of "efficiency" is also the foundation behind genetic modification and the development of seeds and crops that are better able to survive given inputs of industrialisation. Through this process of increasing "efficiency," we deplete the natural balances of nutrients in soil and water, resulting in poorer tasting food. What is then lost is the experience of food - no one can deny that better tasting food makes you feel better, mentally and physically. If the notion of "efficiency" is to be applied to non-industrial agriculture, it would entail treating the land and what feeds it in a way that doesn't overburden it (exactly the opposite of industrial agriculture), and respecting the land enough so as to get the best tasting food.

To Eleanor's point that efficiency and industrialisation has allowed us to taste foods that only exist in other parts of the world, and that industrialisation feeds the world. There is a grain of truth in what she says, but I think what industrialisation is good at doing is underestimating the costs of itself. "Economies of scale" applied to industrialisation are good at providing "low-cost" food to people, but the costs, especially environmental and social, are completely neglected. When we go to Wal-Mart or Kroger, we do not pay for the costs of petroleum or lost livelihoods of small farmers. (Those costs are indeed covered by subsidies.) Furthermore, even though Americans have continued to spend less and less on food, and it is possible to get entire "meals" at fast-food restaurants for $2, the number of people going hungry locally and globally is still remarkable, and nothing that industrialisation "promises" can address that. It is also undeniable that industrialisation leads to a decrease in the quality of food, and it is debatable whether you can call industrial, fast food "food."

With the issue of flavour, I am speaking to the mental and social impacts that good tasting food can have. Maybe people will eat bad-tasting food if a gun was put to their head, or that was all that was available on a particular day. But once you have tasted good food, the smell, flavour and experience stay with you lifelong. I do not believe we have to sacrifice the quality of food for quantity - Cuba has resisted this sacrifice since petrochemical exports to the country stopped with the fall of the Soviet Union, through innovative approaches of biodynamism and organic urban agriculture.

Generating "knowledge," but gaining little wisdom

I had an absolutely wonderful time at Earthfest yesterday, where I talked with residents of Ann Arbor, students, administrators and staff about how trash speaks to larger environmental and social concerns. People were extremely curious about how to reduce trash generation, and were surprised to see how little trash I've created in the past six months. I am looking forward to more conversations and questions tomorrow on North Campus. Here is a picture of my table...


I met a truly fascinating man yesterday, Jason Bishop (picture below). He had absolutely fascinating stories of trash collection and recycling at the University Northern Texas, which is in Denton, TX. That's exactly where he's from. He was paid $75 per week, by a man who was interested in the plastics people threw away, to go through all the trash there and collect these plastics. He was allowed to keep the metals and cans, which added to his weekly wage. He also spent two years working on a garbage truck. Once when he was picking garbage up, he ran into a lady that was getting rid of a stereo, in mint condition, a brand new Sony system. She said that her daughter wanted a better brand, and so she was throwing this system away. Of course, Jason took the system...

Probably the most insightful comment of the day came from Graham, the outgoing (tears) head of the Student Sustainability Initiative. We were talking about whether our present state of environmental affairs was inevitable. We were also trying to think of decisive moments in our recent history that has led us to where we are. We both agreed that the development of the modern car and assembly line was one of these moments. Speaking to industrialisation more broadly, he said, "We've generated a lot of "knowledge" in the past two hundred years, but we've gained very little wisdom." This comment blew me away with its weight. We would hope our experiences, failures and accomplishments would define paths of greater wisdom. As time moves forward, so should our thoughtfulness, care and respect toward our world and its diversity grow. When we listen to the elders, we expect words filled with meaning defined through experience. Yet for all of the experiences of mankind in the past centuries, we behave as if every new problem we face has come from out of nowhere, and has no bearing on our future decisions. The Cuyahoga River catching fire, methyl isocyanate being released in Bhopal, petrochemicals being dumped in Cote d'Ivoire, birds being drowned alive in crude in the Gulf of Mexico, World War II...these are experiences we should have learned from, and should learn from. Where is wisdom? Does it only reside in the teachings of Confucius, Gautam Buddha and Mohammad, from centuries ago?

A day worth of trash from the Angell Hall complex being sorted.

Experiencing beauty, and the trash borne of it

Trash is borne out of, and is a byproduct of, our desire to control what we experience. Humans are the only animal species I can think of that want to control what happens to them. We build our homes such that air conditioning will keep the air temperature at 70 degrees Fahrenheit year round, we set our alarms to wake us up at predetermined times, and we cook food to our tastes. One consequence of this is that we've lost our abilities to cope with situations we were able to cope with in the past - living off of what we find, for example. But our ability to control what we experience has also led us to places where humans cannot survive, and yet are incredibly beautiful places - the depths of oceans, space, and the peaks of mountains. These places instill in us a sense of wonder and amazement, but to a degree only if someone knows about it, experiences it, and shares the experience. I didn't know about Bahamian blue holes until I read about them, but once I realised what they were, I thought they were beautiful, and it would be a wonderful experience to see them in person. Unfortunately, the only way we can control what we experience is to have something, a man-made product with us. Furthermore, these products, once they have served their purposes, become excess baggage on our voyages. What we do in the end is taint these pristine environments with our presence by leaving behind what is essentially trash.

For example, we have turned Mount Everest into the world's highest garbage dump. There are more than 100 tons of trash lying on Mount Everest. "The government of Nepal has taken steps toward protecting Mt. Everest. Thanks to a 1992 law, if climbers leave any nonbiodegradable trash such as plastic containers on the mountain, they lose a $4,000 pre-expedition deposit. A Sherpa incentive program, instituted in 1994, pays Sherpas for every discarded oxygen bottle they retrieve from the mountain. Glass bottles were banned on Everest in 1998."

But also think about the Clif bar you take on your trip into the woods, or the canister of propane you carry to make some soup while camping, or the band-aid you keep just in case you cut yourself rock-climbing. In our quest to observe beauty, we taint it.