Some paradoxical juggernauts

Our fast lives are causing slow violence. If we slow our lives down, how do we still quickly spread the word?

Collective and social change is needed, but getting yourself to change can be the most difficult.

If people do want to change, they don't want to do anything.

We need to be intentional about now. Appreciating the present, and making good decisions now will save us much trouble in the future. But this world is already all about now, in the form of instant gratification.

Small, medium, or large coffee? Room for cream? Skim milk, 2%, or heavy? White sugar or demerara? Splenda or Equal? For here or to go? Coozie or not? Choices can be paralysing to those who have too many (not to mention ecologically degrading), but limited choices keep those oppressed from breaking away from their past.

Make things more efficient, and we just use more.

Leaving negative cycles and entering positive ones

A cycle is something that perpetuates itself, when one action or thought leads to the next, which leads one back to their original thoughts and actions, making one act on them again, differently or otherwise. David Trombley, who I met a few days ago at Occupy Ann Arbor while traveling at home, said that there are two such cycles--positive and negative. David described a positive cycle in his life, poetry, like so:

My advocation, however, is poetry. I have been writing for five or six years now and also teach with the Ann Arbor Free Skool. I write about my experiences, my worldview. You can do what you want with poetry. It helps me stay centred in the here and now. It is about creative ways of approaching life. It is a positive cycle, an inspiration cycle, an exercise in mindfulness. If you are mindful, you open yourself to inspiration. Once inspiration comes, you can get poetry out of it. Poetry leads to more inspiration, making you stay more mindful.

Mindfulness, inspiration, an appreciation of the here and now are powerful things we should all be thinking about and acting on to tread more lightly on this planet. Negative cycles, though, are those that not only harbor ill-will and ruthlessness and violence in our daily lives, but also when scaled up can cause us to be burdens on other people and the world. David talked about how greed, the violence perpetrated because of greed, and the personal gains because of greed lead to more greed, in a never-ending spiral towards inequality, injustice, and unsustainability. The negative cycles of the world result in some people making a lot of money, resulting in them wielding enormous power and influence, and then setting the system up such that it continues to benefit them at the expense of human dignity and the environment.

At the same time, whether we like it or not, many of us as individuals are stuck in negative cycles that now are social norms. We are compelled to spend our lives working on things that do not interest us, just so that we can pay for a car and a home that will provide us a roof over our heads just so that we can get back into the car, be stuck in traffic, to earn money so that we can pay for gas when we have to next. We are stuck in a mindless drudgery, in an economy that does not care about our feelings, emotions and effort, bur rather about how much time you can spend trying to prop it up, so that it can perpetuate itself, get ever larger, and ever more unstable. We are stuck in negative cycles of inadequacy, in which what we have is never "good enough," compelling us to trash what we have just so that for a while, we can have something that will in a few months be "not good enough" again. The pressures to stay within such a negative cycle is enormous, for everyone we are surrounded by, everyone we see on TV is participating in it.

Positive cycles are those (which on the surface may not seem related to sustainability and the environment, but in all actuality are deeply related to them) that lead to contentment, appreciation, introspection, and then an outward manifestation of those thoughts into actions that will allow us to tread lightly on this planet. Once we start down a line of thinking and doing, like David talks about, we inspire ourselves, pushing ourselves to do more to try to break the negative cycles of existence and replace them with positive ones. We inspire others around us to think for themselves, to rid themselves of the shackles of this mindless drudgery of "the economy," to do something more meaningful for ourselves, our communities, our neighbourhoods, for our world. Positive cycles are exemplified by features that do not need laws or regulations to keep them in check. Rather, they can be let lose in the world without restraint. Who could ever say that inspiration and appreciation and mindfulness should be tamed and regulated? On the other hand, violence, a negative cycle, must be tamed, curbed, enforced.

Reflections on the year: Time and the contradictory "now"

Over the last year, I have realised that trash has much to do with the notion of time. Because of its physicality, and because of the nature of the materials that constitute trash, trash can make time stand still for many centuries. Indeed, I have wondered what it is we would like to be remembered for - trash is a time capsule. It provides an archaeological record for those that will come along generations for now. They will be able to see how we indulged ourselves, what we thought was important, and what we thought wasn't important. They will soon realise that what we thought was important was gratification through the degradation of and violence against nature. They will realise that what we thought was unimportant was nature itself, the very land upon which our feet rest, the very air we inhale and the very water that permeates our body.

I have mentioned how trash can transcend space and time. Trash is a result of our wanting to be somewhere else (1, 2), spatially and temporally. Eating Indian mangoes grown in summer in Ann Arbor during Michigan fall will absolutely result in trash and ecological degradation, and there is just no way around it.

We also live in a world of now - we want the future now. We always look forward to the next, the new, the untouched. There is a deep dislike of what it is we have now. These ideas are not my own, but have been influenced by the writings of people like Wendell Berry and Derrick Jensen and Jay Griffiths.

It is rather interesting though that even though we want to be in the future, even though we want to "progress," we are always unsure of what the future looks like, and we can be indecisive now because of uncertainty. Many times, we are unwilling to make essential decisions now because we don't know how those decisions might affect the future. Government policies are a prime example of this. Such indecisiveness now can lead to dire outcomes later. Many of our actions we will never know the outcomes of, but many we will. As I wrote about at length a few days ago, now is easier to comprehend than the future, and we can all be making important decisions now such that the future is not mired in political and environmental mess.

Having given up the ability to do many of the things we think are important to our lives, we have put ourselves in the position of reliance. The best example of this is food. We rely on others to provide food for us now, and we will continue to rely on them into the future. This has the potential to result in trash and degradation, as I've written about here. Trash is borne out a lack of preparedness to deal with its generation. I have dealt with this project by trying to constantly think about what I may encounter, and being able to express to people my thoughts to people. At the same time, it is also easy to see that trash can be borne of preparedness. Many of us may think that we will need an afternoon snack, and will therefore pack a packaged granola bar. The difficult thing is to reconcile preparedness with what we choose to be prepared for, and with what. I can be prepared for the afternoon hunger pang, but with something other than a packaged granola bar. It is not difficult, but there is always room for improvement and a heightened preparedness. In a world of now, it is important for us to consider the future.

New adventures: Traveling at home

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

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

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

Now

Probably the biggest obstacle that people face when trying to address environmental issues, and sustainability in general, is the sheer magnitude of the problems. We have billions of people, trillions of dollars and countless quantities of time and energy that are invested in the status quo and the continuance of unsustainability. The powers of those people and corporations are much greater than you as an individual; a sense of hopelessness is not surprising. Furthermore, the timescales over which the issues have developed, and over which they may be resolved, are enormous compared to the length of human lives. It may take several decades for any change to be realised, culturally and ecologically. This is also bound to generate a sense of hopelessness. At the same time, there is a limit to our comprehension of our actions - we may not know how harmful the effects of what we are doing are. But also, we do things in the present that we know are bad, for our health, and for the health of ecosystems in the future. We have a tendency to say, "I'll deal with it later," or, "I know this is bad (for me or for the environment). Whatever."  Eating unhealthily is a wonderful example of this. Access and availability of good food aside, many people know that such eating is bad for them, in general, yet satisfaction now supersedes degraded health later - diabetes, cancer, obesity, etc. Maybe we don't want those future ill effects to affect us, but out of habit we accept the ill effects and live in a state of fear knowing that the day will come that bad diagnoses loom.

It is really hard to imagine what the future is going to be like - Will our efforts pay off? Who will be the next President? When will the next oil spill happen? Which will be the next fish species to go extinct because of overfishing? How might we be able to deal with the fear of living in such a state, knowing that we are degrading what it is that sustains us, but are so invested in the way it is that we kick the stone down the road? Rather than think and worry about the future, we can all make decisions here and now such that tomorrow will be a good day. We all want to live in a world in which what we cherish is alive, healthy and sustained. To live in that world, we must act in such a way that we cherish, respect and sustain now, today. It is not complicated. If I respect the tree or the river today, it will be healthy and full of life and love tomorrow. If I respect and cherish my relationship with my friends and family today, those relationships will grow stronger and more resilient; tomorrow those people will still love me, and I will still love them. I do not have to live in the fear of a grudge or a toxic conversation. Now is easier to comprehend and experience and think about. Acting well now will save us much trouble tomorrow.

On preparedness

I have come to realise that in order to try to live trash-free, a constant vigilance is of utmost importance. What that means is that with trash being such a dominant status quo, there is no way of avoiding trash if you are not paying attention to the fact that trash is going to be generated unless you make conscious efforts to reduce it. In addition to the fact that trash comes out of un-self-sufficiency and our having given up the ability to do things ourselves, I have been thinking that trash is also borne out of a general lack of preparedness to deal with its generation. For example, many of us do cringe when we see piles of trash at a fast food restaurant, and we acknowledge our role in it, but we are always in a hurry, in between class, or in between appointments. We end up telling ourselves that we won't do it again, or we will try to be more conscious next time, which, of course, we seldom are. (It is kind of like trying to sip hot tea and burning your tongue, or eating hot pizza. Yes, we burn our tongues and the roofs of our mouths peel, and we tell ourselves, "Never again. I'll wait next time." But the next time you see a hot pizza, it is hard to resist the temptation to dig into it.) I have dealt with this project by trying to constantly think about what I may encounter, and being able to express to people my thoughts to people. Once I am prepared, mentally and physically (with objects), producing no trash has been not difficult at all. In cases where I have not been prepared, it has been easy to see the inconvenience I may have been on others around me. At the same time, it is also easy to see that trash can be borne of preparedness. Many of us may think that we will need an afternoon snack, and will therefore pack a packaged granola bar. The difficult thing is to reconcile preparedness with what we choose to be prepared for, and with what. I can be prepared for the afternoon hunger pang, but with something other than a packaged granola bar. It is not difficult, but there is always room for improvement and a heightened preparedness. In a world of now, it is important for us to consider the future.