Thoughts on ecology, reductionism and capitalism

I have spent the last few days with my parents and submitting applications for different after-school positions. No, I'm never going to have a job...I hope. I haven't sat down to write recently, and I'm not sure why. But, I have been reading. Deep Routes: The Midwest In All Directions is a book I picked up recently, one that my friend, Sarah Lewison--an artist, activist, and professor at Southern Illinois University--has contributed to, along with other community organisers, academics, and artists from the Midwest. The book is about radical activism based in the Midwest, and a key theme of the book is territoriality and connection with place. Connection with place is something deeply lacking in a world in which we constantly seek upward mobility. While "settling down" is something I don't agree with, I wonder how our constant mobility obscures our ability to see connections between the our daily choices and their multidimensional outcomes. Indeed, what is the ecology of choice? 

Reductionism is the foundation of current expertise, education, and capitalism. Reductionist thinking gives us only thinly cut slices of complex pie. In a globalized world, we know very little about the roots of the products we buy, or the roots of the food we eat. Instead, we are made to think of dollars and cents, and when we valuate using the great reductionism of money, we tend to undervalue. Writes Claire Pentecost in Deep Routes,

Capitalism is deracinating: it must separate anything of value from its roots in order to convert it into a sign that can be efficiently circulated and exchanged. It reduces both needs and desires to a system in which the fungible and often proprietary signs of value trump the organic ecology of values. In this deracinated circular flow, the universal equivalent--the sign that makes all commodities exchangeable--is money. Whatever we need and love may have inherent value, but under capitalism, anything and everything is reducible to a monetary sign of value. This is efficiently paralleled by informationalism, a paradigm of knowledge in which value is reduced to an isolated register that can be exchanged as pure sign. In these ways capitalism and its companion informationalism are constitutionally deterritorializing. 

Ecological thinking is a powerful antidote to reductionism, even when not applied to the "environmental" reduction; it allows us to see connections and understand the roots of the choices available to us socially, politically, and economically, whether at the voting booth or in the aisles of supermarkets. Our capacity to think ecologically fully appreciates and takes advantage of our vision, foresight, and creativity. Yet we are stuck by constantly narrowing and reducing the scope of our questions and investigations into the failures of capitalism and public policy in public health and the environment. Pentecost continues by writing,

...our food paradigm reduces the value of a food to those elements that can be easily read as quantifiable information. We are trained to think of nutrition in terms of a handful of vitamins and minerals. So we grow acres of corn, which are deemed to be all the same in quality, process them to extract their exchange value as oils, starches, sugars, and materials that can be used industrially for glues and plastics, reconstitute some of those ingredients by adding certain readily identifiable vitamins and minerals--and voila! It serves a food. But it ignores the complex nuances of human digestion, and does so tragically in the light of the misery and disease propagated by the "American diet."

Indeed,

How can we pour millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into our environment and not think that we will be poisoning ourselves, as well as all that makes our existence possible and palatable?  

Money - Comparing apples and computers

I have been spending a lot of money recently, and realised that I haven't written much about it in several weeks. But I have been thinking about what money lends and affords me, and how it affects my choices, which inevitably have ecological and social consequences.

When we want or need something, we are always confronted with the choice of how to "pay" for it--we can exchange for it our services, count it as a favour or a gift or donation, or as is the case in most social transactions, exchange money for it. When we want to pay for something with money, we pay for it its "value"--apples are $1.69 a pound, a laptop computer is $699, getting a car repaired costs $40 an hour in labour fees, and so on. Money thus has the tendency (and ability) to assign numeric values of money to an object or service, and that's super convenient. But consider this, if apples are $1.69 a pound, and a laptop computer costs $699, is a laptop "worth" 413 pounds of apples? I am not so sure. What about if the price of apples sky rockets to $2.19 a pound? Then is the computer "less valuable"?

As you can see, the complexities that this presents are manifold, and one might question the reasonableness of making such comparisons. But, in the end, we are always making these decisions, and I want to unpack what such decisions mean for our environment. One might think that solving issues of hunger are more basic than issues of access to the internet. Many would argue that access to internet is now a "human right", but that aside, the impact of spending money on 413 pounds of locally grown, pesticide-free apples on the environment is likely far less than a computer. Yet, they are both "worth" the same amount of money.

Money is absolutely unable to account for all of the ecological costs of a product or service. The way in which a group of people, say, the West Papuans value a mountain is very different than the way Indonesians or Australians value a mountain. But when viewed under the lens of money, swept under the rug are these different valuations; what we are left with a number, and someone's "willingness to pay" for something.

As individuals, we prioritise our expenditures--the basics (food, clothing and shelter) generally come first, followed by gas for our cars, cable and internet, and so on and so forth. But, crucially, from a macroeconomic standpoint, our governments do not really care about what money is spent on, as long as money is spent. Indeed, ecological disasters such as oil spills can be viewed as "beneficial" to the economy because of the money spent on cleanup services and the like. What we are doing here is making apples to computers comparisons of the value of the biophysical world, and the importance of the biophysical world, to at times fictitious values presented to us by money.

I have heard the argument (way too many times) that degrading the biophysical world is no problem, as long as we leave the future with "enough money" (or "value", whatever that means) or a "large enough" "economy" to deal with the problems of environmental remediation. What I highlight in response to such inane arguments is that first of all, we do not know what the future is going to "value", but we do know (or hope) that the future still needs air, land, and water to survive. Secondly, the fads and fashions that prop up the economy are just that--ephemeral. The "value" of the existing housing in the US dropped vastly in the past years, resulting in many people's mortgages to be higher than the actual "value" of their homes. How sad this situation is, given that the house is still a house, able to provide shelter. What is the "value" of shelter?

And so, when we monetise the value of many objects and services, when we commodify nature and the environment, we end up many times comparing apples to computers. I can understand that different people value different things differently (ethically and morally), but what money does is allow, even for a split moment, comparisons that just do not make sense.

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.

Money and good work

Listening to an episode of Being from a couple years ago, called The Soul in Depression, I thought about how the most meaningful parts of our life, the ones with the most visceral and emotional impact on us and those around us, have nothing to do with money. Rather, it is the things that are immeasurable that can truly shape and change our being in this world, whether it is family, friends, a nice conversation, a good piece of advice, a flower, helping someone in need, a nice meal in your backyard.

I cannot deny the importance of money in this particular culture, and I can understand the need to "work" for money, especially for those that have been oppressed in this culture. But "work", and what what this culture likes to equate work with - a "job" - are two totally different things, unfortunately. The "jobs" people have are more often than not a mindless slavery, wholly unsatisfying and undeniably degrading.  By work, I do not mean only what we do at our "jobs". I do not mean only what we do to earn monetary compensation that we can then trade for something else. I also mean are the things we choose to do with our time. Of course, I would hope that the jobs people have are of their choosing.

And those people that do the most valuable (not in a monetary sense, rather, in an immeasurable sense) work in this world, work that is founded on respect, care, nurturing, and kindness are those that are least compensated by money. Whether it is being a social worker or a psychological therapist, a good parent or an environmental advocate, this is the work that is most challenging - it allows us and forces us to expand our moral imaginations, while at the same time exposing the contradictions of this culture, its carelessness and ruthlessness. How can we structure this all-encompassing work, which includes our "jobs", such that it is founded on respect, care, nurturing, and kindness? Maybe such work will allow us to tread lightly enough on this earth so that our physical presence vanishes quickly, yet our emotional presence endures, while at the same time enriching the experience we have on this planet. Good work nurtures what nurtures us.

It is obvious that many of us are trapped in situations in which we feel the push and pull of life in this culture and society. Many do things, have "jobs", that they don't like to support what they like. But why have we structured an entire culture and society on this notion of unhealthy work? Even when we are unemployed, we are drawn back almost zombie-like to an economy and culture that is counter to good work. I've realised that we cannot buy back what we've lost, and so why lose it in the first place? Why not vigourously, ardently, steadfastly protect what we cannot afford to lose, like our environment? Why not expand our moral imaginations to encompass those people and places we don't know, now and in the future? This is radically different from the "work" we do nowadays - of fighting militarily, of extracting and pillaging and plundering.

Money - What the rich cannot afford

We have a government that spends money on practically everything, including more than six hundred billion dollars each year on a military machine for "peace" and "democracy." We have a government that at some point decided that it could afford tax cuts on the richest and most powerful in the country, to the tune of two trillion dollars over the lifespan of the cuts. We continue to borrow money from other nations, and the citizens of this very country, to finance government spending. There seems then to be no dearth of money, or "value" more generally in this country. (The value I am talking about here is not what something means to you emotionally, but rather the hard currency value of a "good" or "service.") This country affords to do a lot, and chooses to do things that it thinks it can afford, especially in the name of economy.

If you've spent even an ounce of time reading the news over the past two or three years, you cannot go once without hearing some talking-head or reading some headline about how this nation's, and the world's economy is in peril, that we are in a "recession," and that "investor confidence is low." But it is very difficult to get away from the fact that even in a recession, this country generated on the order of a fourteen trillion dollar gross domestic product (GDP), a quarter of the world's total. Hard to argue with data from one of the very defining institutions of this economy, the World Bank.

The GDP is an indicator of the "value" of goods and services in the economy, and you are right in thinking that this is a "money" value. Of course, the GDP isn't measured in smiles or hugs or quality of the land, but rather dollar or currency terms. Looking at equations used to calculate the GDP, I do not think I am incorrect (I am no expert, of course.) in assuming that the value of these goods and services are tradeable, which is basically what money is an indicator of - the tradeability of value. So, there's a lot that this country can afford to do. I mean, fourteen trillion dollars...

What the numbers tell me is that the economy doesn't care about you or me or your neighbour. It does not care about what is happening in Ann Arbor, or in Detroit. It does not care about the quality of water you are drinking. The way we've structured the economy, especially in our minds, is that it is endless, and that the only way for it to exist is for it to consume itself, for the furtherance of itself. And so what is tossed at the wayside are the air we breathe, the water we drink, and everything that sustains us. But when it actually comes to thinking about life and the environment, we cannot get past the monetary value of the "services we are provided." It seems as if this is the only language we understand. Whether it is a cost put on your life in the cost-benefit analysis done by some government agency, or the monetary value of "ecosystem services," a Pigouvian tax that necessarily results in a degraded environment, or just plain old Pareto-optimality, a monetary value is essential in determining the fate of the environment.

And yet, at every climate change negotiation, at every mention of the phrase "protection of the environment," we are told that this country just cannot afford to value the environment. "We promise we'll protect the environment voluntarily. We'll agree to this accord! We'll also come up with the best new technologies that will not only save the environment, but will spur innovation, grow the economy! Win-win-win!"

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Money - Skewing value

While many may feel that a monetary value assigned to something is an accurate reflection of its worth, especially in relation to other things, it is not difficult to see that this is patently untrue. Until recently, our society placed little value on those features of our world that provide us sustenance, all in the name of a mythological progress. And when we do try to value, we have a tendency to undervalue.

On the other hand, the values that different people attain through the same monetary value are very different. A one thousand dollar diamond is worth close to nothing (if not having a negative "value") to some, while the prestige of having such a rock on your finger is worth those one thousand dollars and even more. It is not difficult to see then that people can resort to unseemly acts for prestige and power. Money, as a recent comment on a previous post suggested, turns hegemonic, wielding an influence over our lives that is intoxicating.

Furthermore, as is mentioned in this episode of This American Life, and in the essay by Scott Russell Sanders in Orion, money itself hinges on a social compact of its value. How we've allowed something fictional such as money guide our behaviour, rule our emotions, and physically affect the real world is puzzling. We have allowed it to dictate environmental and social outcomes, rather than allowing the reality of our existence, and that of the world, to temper its value.

I wonder about scenarios in which we decide whether or not money is able to be used as a medium of exchange. Rather than predicate our behaviour on the guarantee that money will transfer hands, could we  predicate our behaviour on the guarantee that we preserve and nurture what sustains us, and relegate money to being a token of appreciation?

Money - Scott Russell Sanders on the paradoxical nature of money

For today, I wanted to share with you a paragraph of an essay I just read by Scott Russell Sanders, called Breaking The Spell Of Money, in Orion Magazine. I encourage you to read the whole essay, eloquently and thoughtfully written, by clicking here.

"The accumulation of money gives the richest individuals and corporations godlike power over the rest of us. Yet money itself has no intrinsic value; it is a medium of exchange, a token that we have tacitly agreed to recognize and swap for thins that do possess intrinsic value, such as potatoes or poetry, salmon or surgery. Money is a symbolic tool, wholly dependent for its usefulness on an underlying social compact [emphasis added]. It is paradoxical, therefore, that those who have benefited the most financially from the existence of this compact have been the most aggressive in seeking to undermine it, by attacking unions, cooperatives, public education, independent media, social welfare programs, non-profits that serve the poor, land-use planning, and every aspect of government that doesn't directly serve the rich. For the social compact to hold, ordinary people must feel that they are participating in a common enterprise that benefits everyone fairly, and not a pyramid scheme designed to benefit a few at the very top. While the superrich often pretend to oppose government as an imposition on their freedom, they are usually great fans of government contracts, crop subsidies, oil depletion allowances, and other forms of corporate welfare, and ever greater fans of military spending."

Money - Donald Worster on commodification

"The most fundamental characteristic of the latest irrigation mode is its behavior toward nature and the underlying attitudes on which it is based. Water in the capitalist state has no intrinsic value, no integrity that must be respected. Water is no longer valued as a divinely appointed means for survival, for producing and reproducing human life, as it was in local subsistence communities. Nor is water an awe-inspiring, animistic ally in a quest for political empire, as it was in the agrarian states. It has now become a commodity that is bought and sold and used to make other commodities that can be bought and sold and carried to the marketplace. It is, in other words, purely and abstractly a commercial instrument. All mystery disappears from its depths, all gods depart, all contemplation of its flow ceases. It becomes so many "acre-feet" banked in an account, so many "kilowatt-hours" of generating capacity to be spent, so many bales of cotton or carloads of oranges to be traded around the globe. And in that new language of market calculation lies an assertion of ultimate power over nature - of domination that is absolute, total, and free from all restraint."

Donald Worster in Rivers of Empire, page 52

What I believe Worster is talking about is an inherent devaluation of something when we try to value it for commodification, especially if that something as essential as water. Such commodification seems to be possible only if a money value is assigned to it. At the same time, just because something costs the same amount as something else doens't mean both of them are of the same value. This is particularly true for the valuation of the basic necessities of life - food, water - compared to those that are comparatively non-essential - say nail polish, or a computer.

Money - An exploration

I have been told time and time again that economic arguments to action are those that are most convincing to people of all sorts - individuals, neighbourhoods, cities, governments, and corporations. In the end, and in the beginning, the economy we talk about ends up representing our values through amounts of money. Much of this blog has been devoted to the choices we make in our lives, and what drives those choices. Money is a key determinant of our choices, and therefore, I will be exploring the notion of money - what it means, how it functions, how it shapes our thinking and collective action, and what this means for the air we breath, the water we drink, the food we eat, the land we stand on, and all sentience and non-sentience on this Earth.


I started writing down some of my thoughts about money last night, and I realised that just like my other threads of thought, my thoughts on money are rudimentary. I am no economist, but I do use money, as do most people around me, and therefore, each and every one of us is in the position to think about what it represents to our lives. I will start off this series with just a few thoughts, which I hope to build upon in the coming weeks.

We feel that money is a good representation of our value to society, and the value of society. The government feels that as long as the pot of money in our country continues to grow, this is good thing. But while those that earn a lot of money may be nice people, just because money exists somewhere out there, and is continuing to grow, doesn’t mean anything for those that are continuing to face continued degradation – the poor, the environment. What has Wall Street done for you lately? On the other hand, what has the ever-present volunteer added to your life? Maybe with time and compassion, the impact of the volunteer is much more meaningful to you than an investment banker that is trying to add to the country’s GDP. In the end, maybe the most valuable experiences we have are dictated more so by the true connections we make with people and place, not by a dollar value we can assign to them. The notion of traveling at home is just one example of this. Many of us can spend a few hundred dollars to constantly go somewhere, and be a stranger. But we can also choose not to spend the money, and instead be a neighbor, a community member, a volunteer, an organizer. Of course, these choices don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but you know what I mean.

I hope to hear your thoughts on this series.

$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.

Trying to buy back what we've lost

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

"In being forced to do what is right...

men lose the dignity of being right." ~Wendell Berry

Laura Smith and I were talking last night after a long and thoughtful day in Detroit. Laura is a PhD student in architecture and environmental psychology, and is an interior designer, too. We talked about environmentalism, ethics, and personal motivation. Laura knows a lot about personal motivators for action related to the environment. She said that the two biggest drivers for positive environmental feelings are time in nature, and having a role model to look up to. Of course, what are not motivators for people to change their behaviour are policies, governmental or private, that are enforced top-down, particularly because most all of these policies are based on incentives (here, here, here, here), which don't convince people that the flaw is something deeper than where they choose to spend money, or something like that.

But what may be more of a barrier is the forcefulness associated with policies and law. In no way am I saying that environmental law is not necessary, but the pride of individuals rests in their ability to make choices for themselves. An apt example is the raising of kids, particularly in their teenage years. Deep down, most parents do know what is best for their kids, and they do tell their kids what to do and what not to do. But in being told what to do, there is almost an automatic reaction on the teenager's part not to listen to advice or orders, even though it is in their best interest to listen. That begs the question, How is it that we may have a world in what people choose to do themselves is what is the right thing to do? I know some might think that "right" is a subjective word, and there may be many "rights." Yet, it is clear that most all ecological and social harm has arisen from people doing the "right" thing, be it for themselves or their families. When I say "right" choices, I mean choices that respect and dignify not only people's immediate families (other people), but others (including nature), too.

This drives at a fundamental ethic in which tradeoffs, something I will write about in a day or two, are a thing of the past. Of course, a changed education stemming from a changed ethic seems like a way in which minds can be shaped from the very beginning. There would be no need for laws governing the sanctity of a river or of the air. What this necessarily results in is a reduced goverment, a reduced oversight, and a reduced need to be forced to do something. These are all things that all of us can agree are good.

Put yourself in their shoes

This project isn't just about trash, yet trash is a most visceral manifestation of the fundamental problems our societies have created. I just re-read Vanessa Baird's fantastic piece from the New Internationalist, "Trash: inside the heap." Baird articulates the social injustice of the world as viewed through trash and waste. She writes, "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.'" How true.

Visiting the recycling plant a few weeks ago provided me with the most up-close view of the world of trash processing. The plant accepts materials from all over the region, and the material keeps coming in waves. Entire warehouses are filled with the materials, and as soon as those materials are sorted through, the next roomfull of materials is waiting to be sorted. To me, those materials have lives of their own (in a sense) and stories associated with them. Those materials are other than the air that we breathe and the land we stand on. This means that those materials have human lives associated with them, too. Not just the lives of the people that used those materials, but the lives of people that were involved in both material creation and fate after use.

After the tour of the facility, Caroline and I were wondering about the stories of the people that worked at the recycling plant. We wondered how they might be feeling given the cold day, the loud noise, the putrid smell, and spending their time in the constancy of refuse. We wondered if they were appreciated at all, and whether or not they even wanted to be there. Are they there because they could find nothing else to do? Do they have the choice not to be there? The founding documents of our nations proclaim how people are born equal, yet nothing could be further from the truth. This world has always been a world of haves and have nots, and most every material thing in our lives depends on this inequality, whether it is diamonds, oil, plastic, rare earth minerals, recyclables, trash or wood. We have founded our lives, the lives of those people with choice and power and money, on the bodies, hearts, minds and souls of those less fortunate.

I wonder whether we are willing to do what it takes to provide ourselves with what we want. How wonderful it would be if each one of us, in our upbringing, was made to fully carry out the tasks, at least once, of the people who really make our societies functional. I am not talking about investment bankers or engineers or doctors (the "clean" people), but rather farmers, sanitation men, electricians, plumbers, and people in countries less powerful than the US (the "dirty" people). Maybe if we put ourselves in their shoes, we'll see that not only are we degrading the environment, but we are devaluing the existence of these fellow humans.

Objects and materials: Who worked for it?

It should come as no surprise to you that a majority, if not most, of the objects and materials that we use daily have required that someone or something has expended effort and energy and time to make those objects and materials. Effort is expended not only in actually making those objects and materials, but also in purchasing them for home or for someone. I believe that our tendency to think of some things as "disposable" stems from who expends the effort in finally getting those objects and materials to you. It seems like the last exchange of resources (generally monetary) tells us to a great extent whether or not we would be okay with throwing something away.

I want to illustrate this tendency with the example of a plastic trinket. The hydrocarbons used in the plastic trinket were probably extracted from some oil field by several workers, then shipped or transported by several workers, then processed and made into the plastic trinket by several workers, then brought to a store by a driver, then stocked by a store employee. This trinket can finally be purchased by you for yourself or your family. On the other hand, you may purchase the trinket for someone else. If that person knows you, she might keep the trinket, at least for a while, recognising that your money (earned through hopefully "legitimate" ways) went into the trinket. There is a sentimentality that comes along with the trinket. If that person doesn't know you, she might not mind throwing it away if it is cluttering their lives. On the other hand, imagine yourself as the recipient of an object, say a plastic cup. You've chosen to use this plastic cup to drink water from, say during a talk or a seminar, or at a random fraternity party. Clearly, you have not worked for the cup. All you've done is pretty much shown up to the event, and there sat an unused plastic cup perfect for quenching your thirst. Now, I know people have a tendency to use "disposable" objects in their homes that they themselves have purchased, and have no qualms of throwing them away. I could of course go through the various permutations and combinations of scenarios, but that really isn't the point of this post. If you've sweat for something, you just won't feel as compelled to throw it away as compared to the case when someone else, especially someone unknown to you, has sweat for it.

We have the tendency to only think of immediacy - who was the last person that I associate this object with? We don't seem to think of everything done along the way by other people to make it possible to have the objects that surround us. These people are in no way different than you are. Their effort is every much as important to the object as is the last person's money. How might we better value these efforts? I guess this is the cause of most problems that face us - we only think of ourselves and our immediate ones in a world that is clearly a web of interactions.

On appreciation

It's that time of year when the past, present, and future surround us and when many of us are around our family and old friends. These are people that we've known all of our lives, and have influenced significantly who we are today. It is important we appreciate their efforts, past, present and future. Our lives are a summation of past experiences, emotions and thoughts that have made us who we are in the present, and primed us for the future. The future beckons, and this time of year is also marked with new - a New Year, new commitments and resolutions, and importantly (from an environmental, emotional and economic standpoint), new things - toys, phones, electronics and appliances. (And along with the new objects come old tales - of injustice, of environmental degradation, and of trash from wrapping and packaging.) But as Lia mentioned in her post last week, what can be lost in the excitement of the new, of the untouched, of the virgin, of the forthcoming, is a reflection on what we have already, and an appreciation for it. The emotion of this time of year can help us here; it easy to take a look - inward and outward - at the accumulation that has put us, our families, our communities and our environment, in the positions they are in today. It is important to be grateful for and appreciate the investments of time, money, effort, love and natural resouces that have gone into the many objects we take for granted, and to make full use of them before we look to the new. I do believe that we can continue to develop mentally, emotionally and ethically with these objects, before needing to move on to the next fad. It is time to reflect, and it is time to appreciate.

Why not trash Yellowstone?

It is fair to say that most of us think that trash is worthless; trash is indiscriminately thrown “away” and banished. It is rare to see someone adorn spaces with trash, the objects in our lives we choose to discard. Landfills are located in remote areas (both geographically and from those with the most power - instead they are located closest to people who are treated as worthless). Our society have become desensitised to the existence of trash, and have condoned its production for the sole aim of “moving forward.” Fully extending this line of thought, however, leads us down paths our society refuses to consider. When we say trash is worthless to us, that means that the places that the trash ends up are also worthless to us. This means that land, air and water are worthless to us, or can be minimally respected, as long as they can continue to provide services to us unimpeded, or through human intervention and “ingenuity.” A second thought will not be given to a piece of land, any piece of land, as long as industrial agriculture can produce monocultures of crops that can provide people with “food.” As long as it continues to rain, we are fine with trash ending up in our oceans. As long as we can breathe, incinerators can continue to spew toxic chemicals into our air. 

Trash continues to flow as a fluid, down paths of least resistance, ending up degrading the sources of our existence – land, air and water. Let us focus on trash and the land and landfills. Trash continues to fill landfills unabated, with complex politics and policies now surrounding their operation. But what is forgotten, or not considered in these politics and behaviour, is that a landfill is actually a piece of land. This land, unfortunately, has been so "undervalue" that people have chosen to take some of our most "worthless" objects, our trash, and store it there. Some may say that the land we use as landfills wouldn’t have been used any other way. That land would be a "waste" of space; indeed, given our ethic of man over nature, this space must be used to take full advantage of what we as humans have been granted by nature – ample space to spread our influence. Such a space, desolate and uninhabitable in some cases, now can bear scars of our humanity, and become a place that is no longer left untouched. Yet, just because a tract of land is not being used by man, or cannot be used by man does not mean that it is of no value. Now one might ask, "What is the difference between this land, converted to a landfill, and another tract of land, say Yellowstone National Park?" I would say there is no difference in their values as pieces of land that make up this Earth. Each is mystical, each cannot be comprehended fully through science, numbers and technocratic, money-minded thought. The only difference is the difference in human perception through the assigning of monetary value to something purely aesthetic to human senses – we have monetarily valued one piece of land to be much greater than the other. Some may argue that, actually, Yellowstone is invaluable culturally and represents the pinnacle of human conservation of nature, that it represents the grandiosity of nature, its rugged, uncompromising terrain, and the complexity of ecosystems and the geological activity the Earth can support. (Yet this thought has not stopped people from blowing up the tops of beautiful mountains to reach coal laying below the surface; land is "valued" monetarily. If rare earth elements were to be discovered below Yellowstone, Krishna/Allah/Buddha/Science forbid, I am positive the mining industry would line up outside a Congressman’s office seeking approval for mining plans.) But I argue that this land being used as a landfill is as valuable as any other space on Earth, including Yellowstone. A landfill is a piece of land that is made of Earth. It is a piece of land that has been exposed to the weathering elements of rain and wind, that supports complex ecosystems of organisms and the magnificent creations of nature that we barely comprehend. Each piece of land is unlike any other piece of land on Earth, and has been exposed to the forces of nature in a different way than any other place on Earth. 

Now we have two vastly differently valued pieces of land before us - a storied national park, where people from all over the world come to see, to experience and to feel connected to nature, and a landfill, a place valued by humanity so insignificantly that we have no qualms with sending what we value the least, the trash of our culture, to sit there. But if we were to value the uniqueness of each piece of land (as well as each square mile of ocean, each parcel of air), there is no reason that we should send our trash many miles away. Indeed, if we were to produce trash anyway, why not trash Yellowstone, or our backyard?

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Here is a post about experiencing nature, and the trash borne of it.
Also, here are two links (1, 2) that Arnab shared with me regarding the trashing of Mt. Everest.

We are not materialistic enough

Wendell Berry argues in Home Economics that our Western culture is not over- "materialistic," but rather not materialistic enough. This is because materials, "the stuff of creation," are cheap, and therefore, we don't value them. He argues that the way our economies are set up, we cannot afford to take care of things, because labour is expensive, time is expensive and money is expensive. But because materials are cheap, they are disposable and fungible, and it is not worth labour, time, and money to take care of them. Furthermore, in a capitalistic economy, an economy of transience, there is an inherent drive to make more money by selling more. Consequently, there emerges two kinds of materialism, one which values materials (cultures built and centred around low to middle-class income earners), and the other that does not (the world's rich and elite, which includes us, in the US). Indeed, we can think of cultures and communities that don't have that much, and therefore are more likely to take care of objects, respect them, and repair them to prolong their use and existence, as more materialistic. The world's middle income class, which earns between $700-$7500 per family member, like the poor, are frugal, use many objects that are antiquated by Western standards, and continue to use them through repair and recycling.

To serve our desire for new things, products that companies and manufacturers make are diseased with planned obsolescence. Tim Hunkin cites an anecdote of Henry Ford, who noticed that the crankshaft of his Model T was the only part that remained very much intact after the car had died. He therefore told his workers the make the crankshaft not as sturdy, therefore beginning the practice of planned obsolescence. However, thoughts on planned obsolescence date as far back as the mid 1800's. By reducing the time between repeated purchases, long-term sales can be somewhat guaranteed. The additional sales more than offset the additional costs of research and development, opportunity costs, and the labour required to maintain and service broken objects.

Alan Durning, in How Much is Enough?, argues for an economy of permanence, a throwback to the 1940's and 1950's, in which objects and products are created with durability in mind. Although sales will drop, and consequently the flow of physical resources and materials through the economy, the money value  of the services that people enjoy may fall little. Indeed, we don't buy cars just for the sake of having a car, but rather for the service that the car provides - mobility and accessibility. Indeed, a car then can be made a durable good. Furthermore, Durning argues that the total amount of work in such an economy is not likely to decrease at all. That's because the most ecologically damaging products and forms of consumption also usually generate the fewest jobs. In fact, high labour intensity goes hand in hand with low environmental impact. (One simple example is industrial agriculture versus community-based agriculture.) Repairing and servicing don't generally necessitate exorbitant amounts new natural resources, but they do require people to be employed. Of course, you can argue that such low-impact industries would "grow" less than high-impact ones. But you can't argue that continual growth is good. It is a matter of perspective - how do you generate value?

The commodification of trash and a four day sabbatical

Our societies revolve around natural resource extraction. The only way to generate any "monetary" value in this world is to produce something, from materials that were at one time in our Earth. It doesn't seem to me that just being good people and doing any good generates any monetary value. Even if you are a high school teacher, the money you receive was "brought" into the world because somewhere, at some time, alumina was extracted from the earth, or an oil rig was set up. Currently, there is no way for us to value something untouched, unharmed, and unviolated.

Laura (Smith) raised an interesting point during our discussion at Crazy Wisdom Tea Room about commodification of resources. The commodification of resources makes someone money, because of the demand that they create for it. The fact that someone is currently making money on a resource, and currently paying an overspending government taxes on the money that they make creates a vested interest in being irresponsible about that resource. Conservation is instantly booted out of the door when people want to make as much money as possible in the shortest time possible and people of the future can deal with the depleted resources with the "knowledge" we will have gained through the resource depletion. Trust me, some people think in this way.

I wrote recently about the vested interests in trash; trash is big business. People want there to be trash, so that they can make money and support their families by dealing with it. Trash is commodified, and the more we produce, the more money landfill owners make through tipping fees. The commodification of trash allows us to be irresponsible about its generation. We don't see landfill owners coming out and saying, "Geez, these trucks just keep coming. This can't be good for our air, water or soil. STOP THE TRASH!" Indeed, that would be a strong criticism of our society. Instead, as long as the cash is flowing in, landfill owners, petroleum companies and utilities would love to satisfy your commodity needs.

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I am going to Sameer and Christy's wedding in Ohio, and will not be able to blog for the next few days. Expect an update on Sunday evening. Please keep the thoughts rolling in.

Reductionism and trash

If you look at the titles of Ph.D. theses today, you wouldn't be admonished for thinking that a lot of the work academics do can have no bearing on things outside of their sub-discipline. We have created walls and artificial boundaries between fields of study, and created specialised languages that we within specific disciplines use to communicate with others in "our" field. Also, we have given proxies to invisible companies and men in suits to provide us with essential services such as food, clothing and shelter. We have centralised the production and distribution of the necessities of life. Although we would like to think our world is "globalised" and "flat," I believe the world we inhabit is highly specialised and centralised. This specialisation is at some level (obviously from a neoconservative economic standpoint) semi-defensible given assumptions of "economies of scale," but arguments cannot hold water from a moral and ethical perspective.Wendell Berry likes to call this phenomenon "reductionism."

We have defined these boundaries for two reasons...

• It is impossible for us to know all of the variables of a given system or problem, and so in order for us to stand any chance of coming up with an elegant solution or number, we need to reduce the number of variables; we need to define limited boundaries so that we can still capture the basic dynamics of interactions between various parts of a system, without overburdening our computers and calculating gadgets.
• We seem to think that we can know how complex systems work, and that given enough time and resources, the outcomes of such endeavours are believable. 

The latter point can be defended, but only within the context of an individual discipline or sub-discipline. When we try to optimise a system or try to maximise some outcome of a system, we can continuously tinker with the variables we choose to work with. However, what we fail to recognise sometimes is that just because a system is optimised for one particular situation, it isn't necessarily optimised for another situation or system. The output of our narrowly defined system will always have an impact on the variables that were left outside of its boundaries. A great example of this is trash. Trash is the result of an "optimum" solution to a very narrowly and myopically defined system, and that system is our pleasure and convenience. The variables that can play a role in our pleasure and convenience are time, money and place. The boundaries of the system are defined as such, and we consciously or subconsciously defend the definition of those boundaries when we accept the formation of trash. If I am in a rush to grab a bite to eat, the optimum solution is for me to microwave a microwave meal that came in a box with a plastic bowl and thin plastic cover, or to run to Jimmy John's and buy a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, along with a drink in a wax/paper cup with a plastic lid and straw. However, this is not the optimum solution for the Earth that provided the resources to produce the plastics, papers and boxes. The outputs of our pleasure and convenience are too much for nature to handle.

We cannot continually overlook the impacts of our actions on nature by defining the boundaries of our systems for our "ease" and "convenience."