Places worth caring about

I recently returned from a trip home to India.  These homecomings have been occurring every two to two-and-a-half years, and each time I have been back home over the last nine years, I have traveled to a new part of the country.  I have in time been to Darjeeling and West Bengal, Gangtok and Sikkim, the Golden Triangle (Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra), Goa, and now, Kerala, known more recently due to tourism advertising as “God’s Own Country.”

Kerala is truly magnificent.  Lying slender on the western coast of Southern India, it is shaped kind of like Chile.  The coasts are chock full of gorgeous beaches, and the hillside and mountains, just a few kilometers in, are the site of tea plantations that supply 20% of India’s tea production.  But perhaps the most beautiful parts of Kerala, I think, are the backwaters that hug the shoreline.  This is where coconut trees droop over marshy lands and freshwater making its way to the sea.  Here are some examples of what I am talking about.

But as I, and others more productively and prolifically, have written about, there is something that has invaded waters both in Kerala, the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, and the Pacific Ocean—trash, and in particular, plastic.  Plastic was abundant in the backwaters, and these are only larger fragments that I found at the surface.  

There has been a supposed campaign for a “plastic-free Kerala.” What this means is very unclear.  Does it mean no plastic at all?  Plastic bags were rare there, but account for just a fraction of all the plastic used and thrown.  What about bottles, like this one?  Here is my dad posing by a "Plastic-Free Zone" sign, with plastic calmly worshipping the posts.  In the backwaters, I actually saw a man clean some sort of plastic off of the propeller of his boat by nonchalantly throwing the plastic back into the water.  

In his TED talk from 2004, James Howard Kunstler, a wonderfully foul-mouthed urban planner and critic of suburban sprawl, spoke about places worth caring about.  He talks about how form and design of places influences people’s behaviour in these places, and how "public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good."  He contrasts public spaces and buildings and homes in America with the tight courtyards you find more commonly in Europe.  Indeed, places worth caring about make us want to protect them, to nurture them, and to make changes to them only so intentionally.  And I think his sentiments translate directly to man and caring for the spaces that nature has created. 

As I wrote about when I returned from India two-and-a-half years ago, does cleanliness mean anything to a country desensitized to public trash heaps?  Indeed, are these places worth caring for?  And if we do care, does that care result in us just hiding away trash as we do in the West, or asking deeper questions such as "Why trash?" or, as Kunstler makes us ask, "Where we are going?"

More on places worth caring for next time.

(unsuspecting) Guest blog #26: Eric Bumbalough in Vienna

This is the entirety of an email my friend and labmate Eric sent me from his first trip to Europe. His thoughts encapsulate so many themes that have emerged on the blog over the past two years, including memories, sentimentality, and consumerism. I love it.

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I'm writing this from Vienna because I have a story to tell you about trash.

My friend Louise and I took the subway away from the tourist center of Vienna to have dinner on the bank of the Danube River. I brought my plastic water bottle that I have been refilling for weeks. When we got back to the subway station, we realized I left my water bottle and backpack at the restaurant. We went back and retrieved it just fine.

As I was taking a drink on the walk back over the pedestrian bridge on the Danube River, I dropped the cap and it rolled into the river. Now I have this useless water bottle with no lid that reminds me of my time spent in Vienna. I think I might bring it back as my souvenir rather than some insignificant piece of trash from a tourist trap store.

Thanks,

Eric Bumbalough
Graduate Research Assistant
University of Michigan
2293 G.G. Brown Laboratory
2350 Hayward

Ann Arbor, MI 48109-4256

On bridging the macro and micro

One of the goals of this blog has been to explore the interconnectedness of the issues that face us, from war to medicine, food to poverty, law to nature. The problems facing us in each one of these "fields" or "bins" of thought are one and the same, they stem from the same trunk. They are branches connected to the same base, and the morality and ethics that feed any one of these branches are the same morality and ethics that feed the other. Indeed, we cannot tackle any one issue in isolation; that is the sort of reductionism that has lead to the issues and problems facing us. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, we cannot do one thing without doing many things, we cannot undo one thing without undoing many things.

More important to me, however, has been trying to articulate our role and our complicity in the creation of these problems, and to hopefully allow us to be more introspective about our positions in the world, and the power that each and everyone one of our choices, individually, have in either patronising systems of oppression and dominance over nature (and consequently people), or in taking a stand against these systems, and taking them down. Meaningful change can come from nowhere else but from within one's own life. Furthermore, the change on larger scales that we advocate for is a reflection of our willingness to be the models of that change. For example, it is entirely plausible that someone that is willing to give up something like plastic out of sacrifice and respect for the environment cannot envision the world without the existence of plastic. Consequently, when it comes to thinking about what this world ought to look like for everyone, we may have limited our imagination to a world with plastic as a given.

Now, as I recognised in a previous post, these issues are complicated, as we are stuck in systems that necessitate ecological degration. These systems are ingrained in our culture and act on scales much larger than our individual lives. Yet, each one of our lives serves as a microcosm for these systems. We form the DNA and RNA of the system, and it is our choices that determine what is commonly accepted and what isn't. In a cell, the DNA and RNA dictate the responses of the cell to stimuli. These cells in turn form the complexity that is our body. While our bodies operate at a scale much larger than our individual cells, it is the choices of the individual cells that determine the overall health of the body. In the same manner, if we, as individuals, lead lives that are healthful and respectful, caring and kind to the environment, there is no way these systems of oppression cannot be taken down. After having talked with a friend yesterday at length about the nature of the writing on the blog, I can see that I haven't continually addressed the "micro" side of issues, which to me is of utmost importance. Introspection on the micro scale is the goal, and I will try to write more consciously toward that end.

Guest blog #19: Ashwin Salvi at the airport

Foreword
Here is a little piece that Ashwin wrote the other day, which goes in line with previous posts on the issues of travel and choice. He talks about the issues of waste in airports and in planes, aside from the considerable atmospheric, and consequently climate and ecological, impacts of air travel.

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"The issue of trash and waste really didn't sink in until I was at the airport the other day and was sipping on my coffee (of course, from a disposable cup).  I took a look around, people watching, when I realized almost everyone at my gate had at least one, if not more, disposable items with them.  Items ranged from coffee cups, plastic bottles, plastic food containers, wrappers, etc., all things we have become accustomed to expect when shopping at the food/drink stalls.

If this is what I experienced just at my gate, I can only imagine it is approximately the same at other gates. And other terminals.  And other times through out the day.  And at multiple other airports.  

I did some research into the trash airports generate, and although many trash reducing steps like recycling (though some still consider that waste) have been implemented, the data presented in a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council is startling.  In 2004, the U.S. airline industry discarded enough aluminum cans each year to build 58 Boeing 747 jets! (A Boeing 747-400 is made of 147,000 lbs of high-strength aluminum.) In addition, 18,000,000 lbs of plastic were also discarded and enough newspaper and magazines thrown away to fill a football field to a depth of more than 230 feet.  The report also stated that from the 10 airports reporting, 1.28 lbs of waste was created per passenger, about 1/3 the total amount of waste Americans generate in one day.  Considering that an empty 20 fl oz plastic bottle weighs approximately 2 oz, 1.28 pounds is considerable.

While these numbers are seven years old and many measures have been implemented to reduce waste from airport, it still highlights the severity of the problem.  There will be a point soon that this drastically high rate of waste production is going to directly impact the liberties and comforts we enjoy in life.  While airports have become stricter with what you can bring through security, there are still ways to reduce your waste generation. For example, bring a reusable empty water bottle and fill it up with water/tasty beverage of choice after security.  Instead of purchasing food with lots of packaging or getting food to go, get something freshly made (pizza comes to mind) or eat at the store if that replaces the use of boxes/styrofoam with a reusable plate.  

I encourage everyone to think about all the things you throw away and how you can reduce your waste footprint.  Simple changes like replacing paper towels with a cloth towel can go a long way to reduce waste, energy consumption and the factors that contribute to larger problems like climate change."

~Ashwin

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Post script

More on aviation and ethics as part of my dissertation...it's going to be exciting!   

Further thoughts on choice

I have written about the issue of choice in a couple of contexts, including "political consumption" (here, here, inspired by Ethan), doing things just because we can, Pareto optimality, and just the choices available to us in an ecologically sustainable world. I would like to expand a little bit more on these choices that may (should) or may not (should not) be available to us in an ecologically sustainable world.

As with everything, I want to bring this down from a macro-scale issue to a micro-scale issue. At yesterday's Student Sustainability Initiative Roundtable, the last one of the year, Ryan talked about the successes in reducing waste and trash from athletic events on campus. There is hope then that these successes will be built on, and maybe a day will come in which people may be able to bring their own water bottles to Michigan American football games, because plastic bottles of water will just not be allowed to be sold there. In response, someone said that she would rather allow people the option of bringing in their own bottles, rather than banning outright plastic bottles. She felt that limiting choice is not the right approach; rather, we should add choices.

I can see what she is trying to say, but I would have to totally disagree with her. Some things just don't exist in an ecologically sustainable University of Michigan campus. Plastic bottled water is one of those things. The only way to make that happen is through either phasing them out, or banning them. If we think about this issue a little more broadly, it isn't as if we have all of the choices available to us right now.

Much of the clutter of the world has come through a continual expansion of choice, as I've elaborated on previously; at the same time, many choices just are not available to us. Whether I like it or not, if I live in Michigan, when I charge my phone, electricity that has been generated by using coal is something I have to deal with and accept. If you don't live next to a Farmers' Market, and don't have a way of growing your own food and don't have a place where you can buy things with minimal packaging, highly packaged food or fast food may be your only options. This raises some complicated issues of how we've invested so much in making sure that we degrade our environment and health, but I don't want that thought to distract me here.

I believe that our current choices need to be replaced, and current choices just should not be available to us if we want to tread lightly on this planet. If you think in terms of "free-market capitalism," that would mean that the price of doing something ecologically degrading would just be so high that you wouldn't be compelled to do it. But say you did have enough money to do something bad to the environment. Well, we can make it a "criminal activity" of sorts to do something like that, i.e. the social norm encourages us to think otherwise. The choices for us to have Hummers, to degrade the health of individuals and water and air by citing an incinerator next to where they live, and to be able to freely trash the environment just don't exist in an ecologically sustainable world. No amount of "monetary compensation" can be used to justify those actions. Those choices must be taken away.

Objects and materials: On cost and value (quasi-guest blogger #14 Marco Ceze)

Back to how we perceive the physical objects that we choose to interact with and buy. Marco called me today about some thoughts, and this post reflects his thoughts, with a sprinkling of mine. Actually, Marco and I had a wonderful conversation a couple of weeks ago that led to the Objects and materials series of posts. This post is (kind of) about costs and benefits/value, but as you can probably tell, I am in no way a proponent of cost-benefit analysis, particularly when carried out using neoclassical and utilitarian approaches. I tend to align with the thoughts of someone like Doug Kysar...but then again, make a convincing argument and I'll side with you =)

Life in today's world is full of trade-offs and making choices with a dearth of information. We never know fully the impacts of our choices given a complicated world. Under these circumstances, it is somewhat natural to think about the benefits or value of doing something compared to the costs. (When I say "costs" I am talking about the price you'll face at a store.) This is probably the simplest way to boil down tons of considerations, making choices potentially more tractable. (I do not necessarily advocate this) Furthermore, many people especially in the West tend to think about the short to near term, and so the benefits of making a particular choice need to be realised sooner rather than later.

Let's focus on the glass versus plastic debate. Imagine you are going to throw a party. Of course, a plastic cup costs you much less than one made of glass, especially when you go to a party store and buy a hundred of them. The value that those plastic cups provides you and the people coming to the party is immediate, as would the value of using glass cups - everyone will drink and enjoy themselves (but hopefully have a DD to take them home). The cost of a hundred glass cups, of course, would be much higher than the cost of a hundred plastic cups. Glass cups, however, will more likely be reused, because we don't think of glass cups as "disposable." (Glass bottles on the other hand would be considered "disposable" by most.) But there is constant uncertainty about the future? What are you going to do with all of these glass cups? Your lease is ending in three months and then you're going to have to move all of these cups, or donate them! What a hassle...A glass cup over its lifetime will probably provide much more value than a plastic cup, making its cost-to-value ratio smaller than that for a plastic cup. However, the issue is the lifetime. As soon as a benefit or value is realised, many times we don't think it worth keeping something to see added benefits, and who knows what those benefits may look like. Throwing plastic cups away is generally much easier than continually washing glass cups. This is also the point where the social learning about materials seems to kick in, and lend its hand in this cost-to-value valuation. Since the monetary cost is less (and we know that by looking at the price tag), and the benefits and values have been realised immediately and future benefits are uncertain and since the material is "disposable," people will likely choose plastic SOLO cups over nice glass cups. Hmmm...does this make sense?

Objects and materials: On creativity

My posts for the last few days have tried to explore some of the issues surrounding our interactions with objects that populate the world, and the materials they are made out of. Again, I am no expert on these issues, and it would be wonderful if I can get a designer to write about the psychology of objects and materials. But until then, I'll continue to muse and surmise.

There seems to be a massive social learning and association component to materials. It seems like when you are growing up, someone (say, a parent) may tell you, "That is a disposable plate." On asking why so, that person may say, "Because it is plastic." (or whatever...Styrofoam). Maybe the connections between materials and their fate are thus made, never mind the actual potential use of the object after its initial use. The next time you may come across something made of a particular material, you may not feel bad about throwing it in a trash can. And if you don't know otherwise, why would you feel bad? Everyone around you is doing so, and maybe your mum or dad, someone you trust and learn from, tells you that it is okay. What I am trying to say that is maybe the compulsion or tendency to throw something away has more to do with material than it does with the functionality of the object. Maybe...What do you think?

Maybe it is a lack of creativity, though, that plays a significant role in why we feel something can be thrown away, or gotten rid of. I can absolutely see this in the West, having grown up in India, where when I was growing up at least, you would see people make use of objects until they are able to be blown away and disintegrated by the wind (just like how men, me included, will wear underwear until each and every underwear molecule can't retain the properties of a solid...it turns into underwear vapour). Books are continuously handed down from older students to younger ones, as are school uniforms and shoes. Every morning, a "plastic bucket repair man" comes on his bike to your home to see if your plastic buckets need repairing. Once we eat a watermelon, we peel the skin of the watermelon off, thinly, and cut up the white part and curry it and eat it. Old flat breads are given to the cows that stand outside of the temple. There is a creativity of use. I guess that may be an outcome of the heretofore lack of abundance of objects, and it is actually sad to see how India has changed since I've moved to the US.

Creativity is something we lack in almost all aspects of our communities. A reductionist world necessarily devolves and doesn't consider things outside of the well-defined topical areas. A reductionist world can make us think that a bottle can't be used as a cup, because it just isn't a cup. But what exactly are we trying to do? If you're trying to drink something, a bottle can serve as a cup, and a cup serves as a bottle.

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.

Objects and materials: On availability

Marco came over to my home on Friday night after we went to a wonderful birthday party for Mariko. Marco is one of the smartest, most intelligent and thoughtful people I know; he is my friend. We were talking about my experience at Professor Michael Griffin's talk, and we were trying to think about why it is we are fine with throwing things away, and what compels us to do so. We came up with a list of issues, and I will write about them one at a time. Today, I want to write about availability, and I will focus on plastic, and compare and contrast it with rarer materials, like glass and diamond, but I do believe any of these arguments can be easily extrapolated to think about other materials, and other issues. Availability I mean as the way in which objects and materials surround us, ubiquitously or rarely, especially in ways in which we physically interact with them.

I am sitting in the Fish Bowl right now, and the keyboard I am typing with is made of plastic. The frame of the screen is plastic, as is the case for the CPU of the computer. There is a plastic bottle of alcoholic hand sanitiser near the Helpdesk, and the recycling bins are made of plastic. My cell phone is made of plastic, as are the interiors of passenger aircraft. Plastic has physical properties that make it incredibly "friendly" for things like computers or bottles. Furthermore since it is made from petrochemicals, I wouldn't doubt that plastic production is subsidised, although this is purely speculation. This allows plastic to be monetarily cheap (although it is far from environmentally cheap). Consequently, plastic is highly available. We have structured our world around plastic, and in fact the world we live in would not be remotely possible without plastic. During my day, I will probably come in more physical contact with plastic than I will with something like glass, even though I absolutely love glass. It seems though that the raw materials to make glass are as abundant as petrochemicals (have so far been). So, if we really wanted to make glass more available, it probably wouldn't be that difficult. Glass has its own advantages compared to plastic, and of course, is aesthetically much more pleasing. But since it is rare to go to a fraternity party and have them serve you beer in a pint glass, the decreased availability makes us feel as if it is more valuable, in whatever way you may define value.

At the same time, maybe plastic's incredible flexibility of use and consequent ubiquity has allowed us to view it as a limitless resource, just like forests and trees may have seemed before man started plowing through them. Ubiquity and high availability seem to drive down the value of this material, rather than allowing us to appreciate it for its properties. (I know plastic has its bad sides, too. Of course, I would never warm something up in the microwave in a plastic container.) I think this is an interesting contradiction of sorts - plastic is so amazing that so many things can be made of it, and for some reason, this inherent value of it allows us to devalue it.

Objects and materials: What compels us to throw away?

The other day, Steve and I went to see Professor Michael Griffin, the NASA Administrator under President Bush from 2005 to 2009, give a talk about complex systems on North Campus. Although he is has made some quite naive statements about climate change as you probably know, the talk was nonetheless fascinating and story-like. I can write about his talk, which focused on the interfaces between engineering disciplines, at a later time. But I want to write a bit about something that stuck me particularly strongly during the whole experience.

Generally, when someone as important as him gives a talk, there are refreshments - grilled vegetables, dips, cookies, and drinks. In this case, the drinks could be had in these really nice plastic cups (I didn't use one, of course, but I did see others use them). They were thick and solid, unlike those SOLO cups you might have had your last frat beer in. The plastic was clear and the plastic was fully transparent. I wondered, "Why would someone throw this away?" It seemed to me that if you decided to keep this plastic cup, it would probably last you a while, until it cracked or got crushed. You could have not one, but several drinks from this cup. You could keep the cup at your desk, and when you wanted a drink, you could fill it up and drink from it. In all senses, the cup was such that it made me want to keep the cups, and it made me want to tell others to keep their cups. But the cups were inevitably thrown away, after single uses.

Here are two pictures of cups. Which cup do you think is the plastic cup, and which one is the glass cup? I have cropped the bottoms, because the bottoms will give the answer away.

I guess it is still easy to figure out which one is plastic and which one is glass, but if you closely look at the cups, they have similar thicknesses, they function in the same way - both have the capacity and ability to hold liquids such that they don't leak. But it seems like there is something within us, likely socially defined, that makes us think that throwing away one of them is okay - people might call that one "disposable" - while throwing the other one away just doesn't make sense. I will try to think about why over the next few days.

On risk

After a wonderful discussion about food in class last night, Lydia and Samantha stayed after class to keep me company while I ate (the students brought in wonderful food for a potluck). After Samantha left, Lydia and I talked for an hour about, of course, the environment and government, she being in the School of Public Policy. She used a term that was insightful, and one that we don't necessarily think about in our daily lives, and one that I have not used at all in the last year - risk.

We take risks all day, every day. Many of us don't realise that some actions are risky, but that doesn't stop us from doing them. Some of us decide to get into cars, and drive ourselves around. We put our complete faith in other people, hoping that they won't drive, from the other oncoming lane, into your lane, at fifty miles per hour. As a cyclist, you are even more vulnerable, and several people I know have been hit by cars. When we decide to heat food up in the microwave in plastic containers, we accept, whether we want to or not, the risks of plastics and plasticisers leeching into our food. When we decide to pass through a full-body scanner at the airport, there are risks to developing some complication, no matter how small those risks may be. In fact, the standards that are set by the government, be they for car crash safety, whether or not a plastic is microwavable, or for X-ray imaging, are set by evaluating the risks for all of these actions. There is nothing that is not risky with these sorts of standards. Someone, somewhere, will experience side effects of medication - we run that risk. Risk is inherent and calculated into whether or not an oil exploration company will decide to drill into an exploratory oil well - I am absolutely sure those at BP, Halliburton and Transocean had some conversation about the risk. Whether they decided to do something about it or not, that is a different story.

But in our daily lives, how much do we think about the risks of our actions ruining the environment? There almost seems to be a tacit acceptance of those risks in favour of "progress" (1, 2, 3) and "development" (1, 2). Any acceptance of how we have behaved so far only legitimises the acceptance of these risks. On the other hand, what do we risk if we change our behaviour? What do we risk if we did choose to live under the paradigm of sufficiency, rather than efficiency (1, 2, 3) and neoliberal economic growth? We risk the staggering and unquantifiable - we risk living with and within the limits and capacity of Earth rather than forcefully and violently against those boundaries. We risk being better to other people and animals. We risk not filling up landfills to their created capacity. We risk preservation and conservation. Are we willing to take that risk?

Guest blog #10: Mrs. McMullen-Laird's three-year journey

"In April of 2008, I read an article about the North Pacific Gyres and the floating continent of plastic formed there.  I felt so ashamed of us all that we could damage the ocean in this way by our heedless disposal of trash.  The fact that plastic never goes away and that the trash hurts animals gave me even more shame.  I decided at that moment that my family would purchase all of our food in non-plastic containers or wrappers.  (Of course, I wouldn't let my family starve.)  I felt like that was the least I could do.  My family had mixed reactions to this declaration!  One felt like it was spitting in the wind and would do nothing in the face of the mountains of plastic water bottles in landfills and in the plastic continent.  Another one was angry that he could not buy a yogurt or a bag of chips or breakfast cereal.  Off I went armed with determination and several bags of plastic bags (saved from the prior purchases and washed), glass containers and my reusable shopping bags.  Over the years I have learned all about the bulk sections in our local stores.  I reuse even the paper bags, crossing out the number and adding the new one.  I bet I use them twelve times!  Accidents were expected - once, farina got through a hole in a paper bag and dusted my broccoli.  Sometimes it is hard to get things you are so accustomed to having. For me, yogurt is a good example. Yogurt always comes in plastic packaging, and so I couldn't buy it.  I wanted yogurt, and after three months of not having yogurt, I decided to start making it myself. Now I routinely make my own yogurt.  Bread is available from the bakery shelf, most pasta and grains can be purchased in the bulk section, produce is easy, and the stuff we shouldn't eat like snacks and prepared foods are no longer in the running for us.  It has actually made my shopping easier since I eliminate about ninety percent of the offerings in a typical grocery store.  Cheese has been difficult because even if I ask them to wrap it in paper for me the paper they use often  has a plastic lining!  Cheese just doesn't do well in paper I have discovered. So, it has been almost three years, it is more work.  Sometimes the cashier notices that nothing in my order is in plastic.  Then we have a little conversation about it and they always say, 'more people should do what you are doing.'"

 

~Mrs. McMullen-Laird

 

We should be incredibly proud of what Mrs. McMullen-Laird doing, but not let her be the only example. (And I like the way she made the executive decision for the family.) I believe it is incredibly important to address issues of environment, justice, and ethics in family life, with parents serving as role models. We may be in for some kind of generational change, but who knows to what extent...

Guest blogger Jennifer: BBQ in Florida

My co-workers are BBQ afficionados. We traveled to a fabled spot yesterday - a local favorite sporting homemade sauce, super-sweet iced tea, and walls covered in gator (UF) memorabilia interspersed with signed photographs of homegrown politicians. Unfortunately no BBQ place I know of down here is like Slow’s in Detroit with its spectacular veggie options. My lunch choices were limited: coleslaw, potato salad, and key lime pie. What struck me as I stood in line, thanks to Darshan’s influence, was that every single food item involved a piece of trash: styrofoam trays for sandwiches, plastic containers with lids for salads, boxes for dessert, and plastic cups and tableware. Paper napkins are a given. Our group of 27 was fixin’ to use about 170 pieces of trash, of which I contributed 6.

The dark hilarity of it all was that nestled in between the two trash cans was another container, above which was a sign: "Please be green and recycle your soda cans!"

The rest of the day I pondered what would have to happen to wake up everyone (myself included) to our constant use and abuse of our surroundings and make a drastic change. Will we ever stop doing things just because they are easy and stop using things just because they are supplied to us by those profiting from their use?

These questions are also relevant to the episode of The Story I listened to this morning that spoke of the horrid exploitation of sharks for their fins. By some accounts, 90% of the world’s shark population has been depleted for this very reason (about 100 million sharks killed per year), in order for rising middle and upper classes to feel secure in themselves slurping as kings once did the tasteless cartilage. As a wise person once said, money is the root of all kinds of evil. The pursuit of it certainly has been the main destroyer of the world.

~Jennifer