Let it go

Barry Schwartz, in his book Paradox of Choice, talks about the confluence of freedom and choice.  He says (and you can see this in his TED talk, which I have added below) that one of the central ideologies of Western industrial society is that freedom is inherently good (well, it depends on what kind, right?), and that today this freedom is manifest in expanding choice for individuals.  Our supermarkets host hundreds of kinds of cookies and salad dressings (even though crop diversity has been on the decline), and electronics stores have every single combination of processor speed and physical memory and screen type you can hope for.  Yet, as Schwartz claims, increased choice doesn't lead to satisfaction or happiness.  Rather, we are crippled with regret or anticipated regret that we could have made another or better choice because we expect too much from our choices, and in the end we blame ourselves for our lack of satisfaction.

To be more specific, though, Schwartz's talk is broadly about how material choice relates to our happiness or satisfaction, and to extend Schwartz's thoughts, regret and anticipated regret and self-blame can make us continually buy things with the expectation and hope that we will feel better about ourselves.  This ties us into the bind of continually buying material products that are decidedly not socioecologically benign;  the new phones we buy are still made of heavy metals and rubber and plastic by people who are treated poorly.  

This is not to say that we should live non-material lives; cutting ourselves completely from this culture will do very little to change it.  We live in a material world and I hope that all of us want to do something about its socioecological destructiveness.  Finding that balance, that is, being able to participate in this culture while advocating for and acting toward change requires participation and engagement, not isolation.

Making a choice and being satisfied and/or happy with it requires letting go of the perceived benefits or costs of your choice.  Letting go is about making choices and not being affected by comparisons of what we have to what others do, and not being affected by imagining our lives had we made another choice.  Rather, we must stand by the choices we make to free our minds towards the positive, the constructive, rather than remorse, regret, and self-blame.  Letting it go opens up space to recentre and redouble our efforts on what must be done about social injustice and ecological degradation rather than tethering ourselves to choices that cause injustice and degradation.  A phone is a phone, and if my phone can't look up Wikipedia, big deal.

Freedom and the status quo

There is no better day to write a few words about freedom than on this most inspiring Martin Luther King Jr. Day (a day on which I had lunch with Michele Norris...you read that right!). MLK advocated for and engaged in activism that vehemently challenged the status quo, and envisioned a nation in which non-whites were freely accepted and integrated into the greater American community.


It is ironic then, that when viewed differently, freedom itself is the status quo and a small space around it. Freedom is comprised of the social and cultural norms that our lives are embedded in. It is the very average of our individual thoughts and opinions. Anything that falls outside of the bounds of this freedom is deemed "radical". And we all know what everyone thinks about "radicals"...


I find it extremely motivating then that Tim DeChristopher was able to find his freedom in committing an act that, under current laws, was illegal, and indeed radical. It was radical when viewed conventionally as outside the bounds of "normal", but more strikingly, it was radical in its originality. 


The most visionary acts are those that imagine a truly different world, and a truly different world must be guided by a completely different set of norms and moralities. Freedom then is the expression of discontent. This expression must come with the understanding of the brutal consequences one may face because of it. It is very true, though, that the nobility of an act of freedom, a freedom that is in the interests of all, not just a few, throws even more light on brutal repression. Such is what has transpired in Yemen and Syria, and such is what has transpired with Tim DeChristopher. 


Freedom manifests itself in different and contradictory ways in this culture. We have the "freedom" to consume, but not the freedom to change what drives ecological degradation. We are preached at, from young age, about the freedom we all have to determine the courses of our lives. We hear our politicians and leaders preaching to other countries about what freedom is to us, and what it ought to be to them. Freedom it seems, is about liberty and self-determination. However, it is as clear as the Michigan winter is long that the freedoms that have the largest effect on us as collectives are those that allow the almost free and limitless destruction of this world. They are the freedoms of free pollution, and the freedoms of the creation of a culture that has enslaved its people and left them in many ways bereft of the power to self-determination. (Many of the Republican candidates for president would think otherwise.)


On this MLK day, let's explore the faces of freedom from all angles. I am certain that once you scratch the surface, you will be shocked at what you find.

Tim DeChristopher on "freedom"

For the next couple of posts, I want to elaborate on the word "freedom". For today's short post, I want to share with you some powerful words from Tim DeChristopher during a conversation with Terry Tempest Williams.

Tim DeChristopher is an inspiring climate activist and leader. Better known as Bidder #70, on 19 December 2008, after having taken a final exam in an economics course at the University of Utah, Tim took the train to observe and protest a Bureau of Land Management auction that was leasing land to oil and gas companies. He ended up bidding on vast tracts of land, for which he owed  two million dollars, just to keep the land out of the hands of the oil and gas companies. Of course, he didn't have the money to pay for the land. On 2 March 2011, Tim was found guilty of violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act on two felony charges, and later sentenced to two years in federal prison and ordered to pay a ten thousand dollar fine. Writes Terry Tempest Williams, "Minutes before receiving his sentence, Tim DeChristopher delivered an impassioned speech from the courtroom floor. At the end of the speech, he turned toward Judge Dee Benson, who presided over his trial, looked him in the eye, and said, 'This is what love looks like.'"

We might think that Tim gave up his freedom to protect land from oil and gas corporations, our atmosphere from greenhouse gas emissions, and our future from climate change. But what Tim now thinks about freedom is a challenge and call to all of us wanting to envision and create a fundamentally different culture.

TIM: If you look at the worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of our industrial civilization. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything. It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’re going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could very easily be a better world. I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.

TERRY: How has this experience—these past two years—changed you?

TIM: [Sighing.] It’s made me worry less.

TERRY: Why?

TIM: It’s somewhat comforting knowing that things are going to fall apart, because it does give us that opportunity to drastically change things.

TERRY: I’ve watched you, you know, from afar. And when we were at the Glen Canyon Institute’s David Brower celebration in 2010, I looked at you, and I was so happy because it was like there was a lightness about you. Before, I felt like you were carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders—and you have broad shoulders—but there was something in your eyes, there was a light in your eyes I had not seen before. And I remember saying, “Something’s different.” And you were saying that rather than being the one who was inspiring, you were being inspired. And rather than being the one who was carrying this cause, it was carrying you. Can you talk about that? Because I think that’s instructive for all of us.

TIM: I think letting go of that burden had a lot to do with embracing how good this whole thing has felt. It’s been so liberating and empowering.

TERRY: To you, personally?

TIM: Yeah. I went into this thinking, It’s worth sacrificing my freedom for this.

TERRY: And you did it alone. It’s not like you had a movement behind you, or the support group that you have now.

TIM: Right. But I feel like I did the opposite. I thought I was sacrificing my freedom, but instead I was grabbing onto my freedom and refusing to let go of it for the first time, you know? Finally accepting that I wasn’t this helpless victim of society, and couldn’t do anything to shape my own future, you know, that I didn’t have that freedom to steer the course of my life. Finally I said, “I have the freedom to change this situation. I’m that powerful.” And that’s been a wonderful feeling that I’ve held onto since then.

On entitlement

A couple of days ago, I was listening to an episode of On Being. The guest was Barbara Kingsolver, and she was talking to Krista Tippett about the ethics of eating. Barbara Kingsolver used to live in Phoenix along with her husband and two children, but then decided to move her family to a farm in Virginia, which they had been regularly going to for several years. The reason why she moved was because she realised that the food that her family was eating was coming from very far away, and that from an ecological perspective, this was terribly damaging. She is right, of course. And so over the next year, she and her family grew their own food, prepared everything themselves, ate seasonally, and so on. What struck me most, though, was the fact that rather than staying in the Sun Belt of the US in Arizona, (which has the second fastest growth rate of all states in the US...consider the fact that between 1990 and 2000, the population of the Phoenix metropolitan area grew by 45%) she moved away from it, recognising its role in the unsustainable society we've created for ourselves.

Places like Arizona and the arid West have bloomed from damming of rivers, there is no doubt about this. Yet while people have been moving in droves to these places, their expectations have remained the same. Wherever we go, we want what we've had in other places, and if this comes at the detriment of the environment, then so be it. Take a look at this picture of suburbia in the Phoenix area, which shows parts of Ahwatukee, Chandler, Gilbert West Valley, SW Valley, Scottsdale, and Mesa. You see most every house accompanied with a lawn, maybe with some desert vegetation. And so even when we move to an arid region, we expect our physical landscape to look like that from the water-rich Midwest. In places like Phoenix, outdoor water use for things like lawn account for two-thirds of resident's water use. As Chris Martin, a horticulture professor at Arizona State University mentions, "If you withhold water, desert plants do use less water, but your yard looks like a desert. So there's this big paradox. People say,' Well, I'll plant desert vegetation, but I want it to look green and healthy, so I'll irrigate it so it grows like crazy.'"

There is an entitlement that pervades this culture, an entitlement that allows us to conflate our rights and our wants. Clearly, having a green lawn in Phoenix is a want. But the fact that water from the Colorado River is being channeled to Phoenix under the facade of abundance allows us to demand, almost righteously, that the water be available for whatever we want to use it for. This is the same entitlement that allows us to not think twice before eating a strawberry in winter. It is the entitlement that allows a continued export of a materialistic "development" philosophy to other parts of the world, in the expectation of course that it will benefit us more than it will benefit them. In the end, however, we all lose with this philosophy. Our right to freedom does not allow us to freely destroy. Further, our entitlement to this freedom doesn't mean that the way we've behaved so far is the only way we should behave. What we must do is break from this entitled, abundant past, and accept and embrace a scarce future. We cannot continue to expect that we can have both ecological protection and rejuvenation and a continuation of the lifestyle we've grown accustomed to, indeed, entitled to.

Contradictions of "progress"

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

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

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

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

More thoughts on ownership and "development"

I have been hearing the word "development" more and more recently, not only because I have been reading how the concept of "sustainable development" has co-opted more deeper understandings of sustainability, but also in class and in various discussions I've been having. When I say "development," I mean the human undertaking of modifying the environment, building buildings, constructing colonies, and producing products, necessarily involving the violent use of nature. I feel that many people my age also think about sustainability and environmentalism in terms of "development" - how might we be able to continue along trends historically dictated, but more efficiently? This of course is a natural tendency of our society, and does nothing to stem the environmental onslaught we've been undertaking for centuries now. I want to focus this post on human modifications of the environment, particularly by people who "own" that environment.

It seems to me that notions of ownership stem from notions of freedom, which allow us to do potentially ecologically degrading things, in general for personal, i.e. monetary benefit. While getting dressed yesterday morning, I heard a little story about Aubrey McClendon, the Chairman and CEO of Chesapeake Energy. A billionaire, McClendon owns several hundred acres of fragile dunes on Lake Michigan, in the postcard town of Saugatuck. (This is where the Kalamazoo River feeds Lake Michigan.) As I heard on the Environment Report, McClendon is planning a "development" of a marina, condos, houses, and a golf course. I don't know about the politics of this ordeal; there are people better equipped to understand the environment around Lake Michigan than I. But in all of the news stories I've read, McClendon is called a "developer," and Singapore Dunes is called a "development." 


As I have written about previously, it is fascinating how we feel like we can "own" things that have existed long before we walked the surface of the Earth. The political boundaries we have drawn for our communities and states and nations follow no particular boundaries of nature, except in the cases of mountains and rivers. Maybe more thoughtful boundaries may be watersheds. Regardless, the boundaries we define also bind us to place such that we can "own." But ownership is one thing, and doesn't necessarily imply ecological degradation. Ownership can in fact be leveraged to protect tracts of land and water from human influence. But when ownership is coupled with "development," the coupling necessarily involves modifications to the environment, which imply monetary gain. Very few people are interested in "developing" anything if it doesn't make them money. "Development" itself is a very anthropocentric concept. It implies that everything the "development" takes place on is useless and worthless, and bears no mark of complexity and time. It also presumes that humans know what is better than an undisturbed dune formation, or old growth forests. Yet, Lake Michigan existed long before Michigan was colonised, and the forces that have resulted in each grain of sand on those dunes of the Lake have been acting for much longer than we can comprehend, in ways we will never be able to know fully. Notions of ownership have in fact produced just the opposite of what we would want - what we would want is for our nature to sustain us for as long as possible, but in our quest to own, we have degraded. Just the reverse of how we think is what might be more logical - we are owned by this land, this air and this water, and our fate is tied to our respect to those forces.

On the law and being retrospective

This post ties back to my post from yesterday about risk. I found out today that the US EPA is going to now try to write regulations for new toxic chemicals, such as perchlorate, that have now been found in water supplies around the nation. (I never really knew how toxic rocket propellants were until I learned about them in my propulsion classes, and a few classes on explosions, explosives, propellants and pyrotechnics. I guess we are all naive to varying degrees.) Much has been made of the "precautionary principle," which basically states that if we don't know what the effects of doing something will be, we shouldn't do it. It is likely that there are always negative impacts of our actions, especially when scaled to millions or billions of people. With climate change, it has been argued that since we don't know what positive radiative forcing feedbacks may kick in with increasing greenhouse gas emissions, we should avoid pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The precautionary principle makes sense to me, but it does not to many other people. (Similar arguments can be made for food and healthcare initiatives of the recent past.)


We live in a world where "freedom" of action is valued, especially if that "freedom" leads to job creation and profit for people. What this inevitably leads to is the acceptance of actions whose impacts are ill-defined and unknown. Once we grant this "freedom," it is hard to take that "freedom" back, or to regulate it, or temper it. (I can imagine how hard it must be to be a parent.) The "freedom" grows in magnitude like a chain reaction, rooting itself in our sensibilities and communities. Such rooting makes it difficult to move away the behaviour, just as it is difficult to break a bad habit. But we always realise that there are negative impacts to these "free" actions, and so we may therefore seek to regulate them, to temper them, through law. Such laws are by their nature retrospective, and not proactive. The goals of the regulators are then themselves tempered by the will of industry, and indeed we end up with weaker, retrospective law. Almost all of the environmental laws I can think of, including major pieces of legislation such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, were all put in place retrospectively. I wonder what it would be like if we had proactive law more widely practiced. (Definitely read this document - various legal facets are very well articulated, and not in incomprehensible legalese.)


I think there are issues with such forward-looking approaches that may be far-reaching. I truly question whether it is biologically possible for human mentality to have evolved to fully comprehend the long-term impacts of our actions. Not long a time, on an evolutionary scale, has passed since we were hunter-gatherers. Our ability to think and envision may in fact be limited to such short time scales that we are in fact still mentally hunter-gatherers - shooting from the hip and making decisions that are "good" in the short term, but are inherently against the tide of nature in the long term. 

Intentional climate change, procedural justice and the case for individual action

I shall try to continue to make the case for individual action in this post, particularly in relation to trash and the effects of our consumerist decisions. I have written about the issue of personal responsibility and individual action here, here, here and here, each with slightly different emphases.

I just re-read a thoughtfully written article by Dale Jamieson on Ethics and Intentional Climate Change. He describes the current lack of ethical accountability for geo-engineering the climate, whether it be by large-scale reforestation using a single, fast-growing tree species, or putting up mirrors in space to reflect the downwelling incoming solar radiation by a certain amount. He also describes issues of unintentional consequences, which abound in engineering and technofixes that have been implemented in the past. For example, he describes the evolution of superbugs because of excessive use of pesticides and medicines in today's world. One of the most interesting things he talks about is the issue of procedural justice. We cannot argue against the fact that the current negative state of the world's environment is primarily due to a Western ethic of domination over nature, and that such an ethic promulgated to others in the East and "under-polluted" South without a full understanding of its consequences leads to even more environmental and social destruction. In response to growing concerns about climate change, you may know that that the United Nations has tried to facilitate talks to have a global agreement on the reduction of greenhouse gases under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. What has come out of such talks are ineffective "protocols" like Kyoto, and "declarations of goodwill" like that out of Copenhagen last year. If you are following climate change negotiations, you may be pessimistic about what may come out of Cancun in the next round of climate talks. Regardless, such approaches to solving global environmental issues, although coming out of the confluence of actions of institutions, organisations and people, are inherently dominated by the voices and money of a few actors. Nothing came out of the Copenhagen round of talks because of stalling on the part of the US and China. In the end, those most affected are those whose voices are silenced. It is the "freedom" and "sovereignty" of the US and China to stall important talks and agreements, but there is an inherent domination of sub-Saharan Africa that comes along with it. The same goes with geo-engineering and climate change. There are significant hurdles of procedural justice. Whose voices will be considered when making monumental decisions such as intentionally altering the Earth's climate to fight against "unintentional" climate change? Indeed, many of the ideas that are floating around for geo-engineering are much cheaper to implement than say providing "less fortunate" countries with resources and money for adaptation. The unintended consequences of changing large physical systems are most likely not reversible - climate change is likely irreversible, too. Jamieson lays the case that some serious ethical foundations must be laid before we can even think about implementing any large-scale geo-engineering scheme like seeding the world's oceans with iron so that large algal blooms can soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But how are we to find common ground with such a diversity of moral philosophies and traditions in the world? Many decades may pass before the US will see eye-to-eye with China. Indeed, the US is probably more concerned about cyber espionage and warfare with China than about dealing with climate change.

But what is reversible?  Human behaviour is reversible, even though it is difficult to get people to change their behaviour. We cannot wait for top-down, "global consensus" strategies to be implemented to solve such a dynamic, divisive problem. Individual action and choices have profound effects for our localities, economies and environment. When we take individual action to refuse, reduce and reuse we concretely address issues of greenhouse gas emissions, landfilling trash, burning toxic wastes, and shipping electronics to China and India for "recycling." No one can deny this. These actions do have an effect on those in contact with us. I can attest to that. There are no questions of procedural justice, distributive justice, or consensus that need to be addressed.

On Freedom and Progress

One of the important concerns I have with large-scale, broad, and fundamental concepts is the problem of defining what these mean. "Sustainability" has come to mean so many things to so many people. For example, companies like BP and Anglo-American have kidnapped the word to mean things that legitimise what they do to consumers of their products. People may think that simply changing their incandescents to compact fluorescents makes them "sustainable." As I mentioned in the last post, it seems imperative that we have some common notions of what these issues, sentiments, and values mean, in order to have more than adequate solutions to them.

I have read some wonderful articles in Orion recently, one talking about freedom (by Jay Griffiths), and one about progress (Derrick Jensen). Griffiths elaborates on human freedoms, and how freedom has become a justification for opposing any sort of environmental restrictions. Freedom is defined as the rich and powerful people and corporations define it; they are free to throw punches, but freedom is not the freedom of the powerless to protect themselves from being hurt by those punches. Further, our current notions of what is good, i.e. values like ambition, pride, speed, and success are what Griffiths calls unfettered traits or emotions. These are contrasted with fettered emotions - "...in honesty you are bound to tell the truth. You are tied by respect, you are linked by love, you are tethered by kindness to kinship with nature, and restrained by a sense of justice and law." Further, what are the rights and freedoms of our rivers, watersheds, trees, air and rocks? They indeed have the freedom to exist. They have the right to not be treated violently by humans. Our unfettered emotions and traits fall squarely against these rights and freedoms. Yet, progress is defined by our unfettered emotions and traits. The current notion of progress is beautifully articulated by Jensen. He asks, "Why have we come to assume that "progress" is always good?" There are always at least two sides that judge whether progress is good. Those that think the progress is good, and those whose rights and wishes and culture and history may be trampled upon by those who think progress is good. Example given: "For the perpetrators of the United States Holocaust, the development of railroads to move men and his machines was "good" and "useful" and "helpful." From the perspective of the Dakota, Naajo, Hopi, Modoc, Squamish, and others, not so good. From the perspective of bison, prarie dogs, timber wolves, redwoods, Douglas firs and others, not so good." Wendell Berry contends that the notion of progress necessarily implies a hatred of where we are - we need to be somewhere else. Furthermore, progress (of science, technology, and "knowledge") takes away the freedom of the thing we study and learn about, from the perspective of that thing. In the end, we will just find a way to categorize it, and possibly exploit it. Jensen cites Lewis Mumford (1970) - "The chief premise common to both technology and science is the notion that there are no desirable limits to the increase of knowledge, of material goods, of environmental control; that quantitative productivity is an end in itself, and that every means should be used to further expansion."

What do you think?