On choice, poverty, and sustainability

I have written about choice a few times before, and I've tried to explore the issue in the context of tradeoffs, political consumption, and the choices that may (or should?) be available to us in an ecologically sustainable world. For the past few days, I have continually thought about the issues of choice in light of living on two dollars a day recently (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). I have realised how lucky I am that I can make choices for myself in many regards, while recognising of course that I am still embedded in an ecologically degrading society.

I would like to write a little bit about the linkages between poverty and sustainability through the lens of choice. I pulled the following graphic from the Unhappy Planet Index 2.0 website. What you see for each country is the number of planets that would be required if everyone lived a certain way. For example, if everyone in the world lived as they do in India, what this planet, our Earth, provides for us would be "enough," so to speak. If everyone, however, lived like we do here in the US, well, then we'd need more than four planets worth of provisions to fulfill everyone's lifestyles.

What is not difficult to realise is that all of the countries that are in red are the highly industrialised countries, countries with a lot of choice, and those in yellow and green are the unindustrialised or industrialising countries, countries with limited choice, or growing choice. It is clear that an increase in choice defined through natural resource extraction is unsustainable ecologically. I realised that when I lived (symbolically) on two dollars a day, I made even more sure that my hedonism and profligacy was kept in check, which I am certain reduced my burden on the world. What this meant, however, was that my choices were limited, no doubt. Yet what the above graphic shows me, given the dominant and hegemonic trends of capitalism and natural resource extraction, is that increasing choices that do not take into account ecological burdens, such as choices that have been made for the past couple hundred years in the West, is unsustainable. This is of course clear with ever new technologies and fads. But what a paradox - the countries with the most "choice" (or "freedom" as many would say) are the "richest" yet at the same time the most degrading. The poorest countries are less degrading, with lifestyles being more sustainable.

What the problem of sustainability throws in our way is the issue of limits, which necessarily will limit the choices available to people. I concede that I do not have the answer to what the choices we have should be pared down to, but I do know that this is probably not the right direction to look in, macro to micro. Rather, we should look at ourselves first, and see what it is that we think constitutes a happy and meaningful life, given the constraints the natural world puts on us. I think this is a more tractable approach.

"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."

What will we use it for if we don't understand what it means?

I want to follow up on my post from November, Ethics in research design and longevity of interest. I want to do so because I have been thinking about technology constantly over the past weeks - I am interested in understanding why humans are compelled to find technological "solutions" to social problems, especially ecological crises. Over the past few weeks, I have been reflecting on what it means for me to be studying chemistry, and why I am doing it, and what it may really mean for the world, if anything at all. But I have been further contemplative about technology after listening to Krista Tippett's conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn on Being, as well as looking forward to tonight's upcoming Jeopardy! episode, in which Watson, a computer developed by IBM, will be competing against humans.

I have been trying to understand the unique position of humans to the environment, and this has allowed a great deal of introspection, both of my relationship to the world, and my responsibility to my neighbourhood and community and family and myself in living in a less destructive manner. What this has entailed has been to boil down my life to what matters to me the most, and what matters involves only in some small sense the technology I am surrounded by. Of course, you wouldn't be reading this if technology didn't exist. But I do feel that I have been allowed time to reflect through a purging of things, including technology. Kabat-Zinn made one of the most insightful remarks on our very rudimentary understanding of the influences of technology in an increasingly connected world. He said that, "...technology is becoming more sophisticated than our understanding of ourselves as human beings without technology." With our technologies, we are able to have our phones ring in the middle of the night with the arrival of an e-mail, and we are able to ship apples from New Zealand to the US with just the burden of customs. Technology has become so second-nature to us that we now cannot envision a world without it. If we cannot envision a world without it, how does that affect our moral selves, and how does that affect answers to increasingly complex problems? Potential answers to questions of what it means to be human, and what it means to be good, and what it means to live in an ecologically sustainable world still feel as far as they have for millennia. By adding more complexity in the picture through technology, we obfuscate an already complex understanding of ourselves. At the same time, I am in no way taking a position in which I am saying technology is unequivocally bad.

Dale Jamieson and Wendell Berry write at length at the compulsion of applying what we know, even though we don't have a full understanding of the impacts. A great example of this is nuclear waste being used as ammunition in Iraq. But what might the motives be for developing the Watson? How does having developed the Watson answer pressing questions? How does this move us forward morally and ethically?

Why focus on trash and waste?

Katie asked me a pointed question on Thursday, while we were talking about nuclear waste - "Some people say focusing on a problem like trash takes away from devoting energy to more significant environmental problems. What do you think?"

Trash is visceral. We feel trash. We smell it, touch it, and hear it, sometimes every day, several times a day. When we go out to dinner, we use napkins to wipe our hands. When we crack open a bottle of wine, we rip off the wrapping hiding the cork. As soon as we're done with a plastic bottle of orange juice, some of us lift lift the lid of the trash can in our kitchen and throw the bottle out. The yard of a college fraternity house is littered with plastic cups on game day. We hear the early trash collectors with their huge truck at the crack of dawn, lifting and crushing pounds of trash. A trash bin filled to the brim releases a putrid smell that just makes us want to walk away. Indeed, trash, when we are near it, suffers way less from a problem of perception than do our other friends, such as greenhouse gases. Take carbon dioxide for example. When we flip on the light switch, the light appears here, but the odorless, colourless carbon dioxide is emitted elsewhere. How many of us can visualise such an invisible threat? What does 385 parts per million mean? That means that out of a million, there are 999,615 parts of other gases. Greenhouse gases suffer from a perception problem.

But that doesn't mean that trash and greenhouse gases aren't related. The social, economic and philosophical structures in place that cause the formation of trash and greenhouse gases are the same. Trash is just a different manifestation of the same problem - consumption without limits, carelessness about the future and disrespect for the ecosystems of the present.

Limits, of another kind

I have mentioned in a few posts that there are limits to the human mind. There are limits on cognition, understanding, complexity, interconnectedness, scale and intricacy. Nature is truly complex, truly interconnected, truly intricate and of a magnitude of scales. We cannot comprehend everything, and we will never understand everything. At some level, it isn't worth trying to. We want to know things so we can control them. We want to know various laws of physics and chemistry such that when we want to make a computer or atomic weapon, we'll know how to do it. But there is also a loss of freedom, as Wendell Berry states, of the living species we try to know and understand. Knowing more species of plants and animals, although will give us a clearer understanding of our negative impacts on the planet, can lead to exploitation of their skins and bones, blood and enzymes.

But there is a limit of another kind I'd like to talk about. I started thinking about this after my friend Lydia sent me this picture:

Lydia is a Geology PhD student, and her work takes her to Tibet and Western China. This photo was taken in town of Xidatan in the Qinghai Province of China. She said to me, "This, I would say, is probably one of the cleaner towns we saw. I'm not sure if that truck actually dumped a pile of trash in the middle of the town, but that's kind of what it looks like." Well, Lydia, I think you're right. That looks like a pile of trash to me, in the middle of pristine Earth.

Clearly, our ethic for living on this Earth has been dominion, domination and anthropocentrism. This has left us with no where on Earth that is untouched, unscathed, unchanged or unmodified. Wherever we go, we must leave our mark - our mark through trash. Is there a way to define our limits to dominion? Is there a way to say we will leave a pristine patch of creation (for the religious readers out there), Earth, soil, water and air to itself and the forces of nature? The problem with our communities and societies is that we don't live in a place anymore. We are on the move, always looking for something new, something different, something to change, something to extract. Indeed, if we defined our boundaries, we would have to have greater moral, ethical, social and cultural imagination to make sure our Earth in a particular place can sustain us, the frogs, the fish, the birds and the trees of that place.

Limits of the mind, science and society

Why is it we feel that we can "solve" all of the problems before us? I am sure you know about Einstein's saying that basically states that we can't solve problems with the same mindset and capacities that have created those very problems. How much and what do we need to know before we have all of our problems solved? We continue to feel that by just gathering more data, by investing just a few hundred million dollars in some technology, we will see breakthroughs that will allow us to continue our lifestyles, and will encourage others to change how they live so they can be more like us. Unfortunately, we cannot "solve" all of our problems through research.

Most problems are created because, given our limited capacities to envision and know what effects and side-effects, we just have no way of knowing how something that is being implemented or introduced into our world (consumer products, for example) will necessarily change and affect it. The scales of complexity explode when we start to factor in how a certain chemical will not only affect humans, but also how that might affect the fish and algae downstream, or the bear that eats the fish.

There was a wonderful episode of Radiolab (actually, they are all wonderful. Listen to them all.) on limits - limits of the body, mind and science. One segment of the show talks about a computer program developed by a couple of people from Cornell (Dr. Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt) that can deduce mathematical relationships in nature, through simple observation. But the answers to the problems we tell it to evaluate are to questions that we haven't even asked yet, or don't have the mental capacity to understand.

I contend that we know all we need to know to address the issues facing us. What are needed, more importantly, are the humility and responsibility to accept that we are wrong, and that we are letting precious time slip by in trying to find "solutions," which will introduce their own problems. We must reduce our dependence on data and live with an understanding that the data don't help, that what is needed is more compassion for everything around us (for example, we've known all we needed to know about issues like climate change many years ago; but we can wave goodbye to Mauritius.), that we live with an understanding that whatever we do given our current ways of living has a negative impact on our air, water, relationships, land, sentient beings and non-sentient beings.