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?

On the deficiencies of the law

I continue to seek to motivate individual action. Yesterday, I came across the notion of proactive law, which is a growing school of thought, particularly in the European Union. Proactive law is "a future-oriented approach where the goal is to promote what is desirable and ex ante maximise opportunities while minimising problems and risks." This philosophy of law has, it seems, primarily been applied to creating a better business environment for people, such that "an optimal mix of regulatory means...best promote(s) societal objectives..." But it may not be terribly difficult to think about proactive law in the context of environmental law - given that we know there are environmental problems created by the way society functions, we may be able to pass enforceable legislation such that environmental harm is minimised through future societal actions. (There are of course issues with developing a dialogue with nature itself, unless people try to represent the views of nature.) Most environmental laws have been retrospective, setting legal boundaries of action because of past environmental harm. However, these laws do potentially grant authority to regulate future behaviour of people and businesses, just like the Clean Air Act (first adopted in 1970) was judged to be applicable to regulate greenhouse gas emissions a couple of years ago.

There seems to be an inherent contradiction between future-oriented law and the way humans have been behaving so far, because humans will likely continue to behave in the same way in the future. But with our behaviour, we have created over the past few hundred years a society whose understanding of its actions cannot be fully comprehended right now, and may never be. For example, what does it mean for our human relationships that we now have new forms communication that inherently limit time with other people? Such a question is hard to wrap our minds around, and we will not know the full consequences of such a change in momentum until many years have gone by. So how might we be able to create laws that bind us to a desired future outcome? Furthermore, the interesting thing about law is that it is made in the context of its time, given our sensibility of the issues facing us - the US Constitution was drafted in the late 18th century, and many of us know that there are significant issues surrounding the interpretation and validity of the Second Amendment today, which was adopted in 1791.

I write about this, because as I mentioned previously, the sentiments behind the law come out of the weaving of our collective moralities - in the end, the law may lose the force that a few of us might want it to have. But it is clear that personal actions now, in the present, can guarantee that at least our individual exoneration from the behaviour that may degrade the environment or trample on social justice now and in the future. We may never understand the outcomes of our actions given the complex web of interconnectedness today, but choosing not to participate in such behaviour guarantees that at least for us, such proactive law is superfluous and unnecessary.

We have everything we need

One of my messages so far has been the following - (related to physical objects) let us appreciate of all what we have before we think about investing ourselves in more. I believe that when this thought is adequately applied to our lives, we may move from being a forward-looking society to one that observes and learns from the present, and hopefully, learns from the past. We will start noticing the vast amounts of human effort that have gone into building what we have today, as well as the vast tolls that this effort has inflicted on other humans, our environment, our Earth. What this may also mean is that instead of trying to "answer" questions, through research, of complicated systems, let us take a step back and fully internalise and understand what we've learned so far. Many arguments can be made for the continued investment of vast sums of money for more research, but I truly believe that we know all that we need to know to make huge strides towards "treading lightly" on this planet (thank you Jackie for that phrase), and leading less impactful, yet completely meaningful and happy lives. Not only can we be happy, but we can also reduce the huge stresses that we put on our ecosystems. For example, we've known about climate change since the 1960s, and developed a very mature understanding of it since the 1980s. In fact, Arrhenius, in the late 19th century, calculated the rise in global temperatures from a doubling of carbon dioxide emissions, and his estimate falls squarely within the bounds of what sophisticated climate models today predict.

I went to a talk today from a prominent scientist. She has been all over the world, and spent her life immersed in the learning of oceans. She gave a very thoughtful and eloquent talk about our impact on water systems of the world, but one message of hers bugged me - she said that humans need to further explore the depths of oceans and find new forms of life, so that we can know fully what our impacts on them are. She said, "How can we know what the solution is if we don't know what the problem is?" This thought gave me a strange feeling. To a certain extent, I understand why she would make a statement like that. Maybe knowing the plight of a species allows us to develop sympathy towards it, and maybe that will help us come together and stop what we are doing. But there are very few examples, if any, of humans doing something like this. On the other hand, as Wendell Berry points out in Life is a Miracle, learning about a new form of life will only drive us to find ways to use it, and therefore it will consequently lose its freedom. Interrogating it, rather than allowing us to be more mindful, in fact leads to its degradation and decimation. I struggle with this, being a "graduate student" myself, doing "research." How much more do we really need to know? How much will we continue to invest in things we may never know?

Rather than continuously looking for a new answer, why don't we raise what we know into consciousness, and actually let that act affect our decisions and choices?

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.

Guest Blog #6: Jason Lai - What does a sustainable future mean to you? (with added commentary from me)

"The struggle in trying to integrate sustainable practices into an entrenched social paradigm is that to most, thinking about sustainability is like reading a Salman Rushdie novel, filled with both dubious prophecies of environmental doom and fantastical technologies that promise to save the world. The problem of sustainability, like a work of fiction, is inherently open to a multitude of interpretations. We don’t know definitively how the global environment is going to change, nor do we know how our actions will shape the future. Varying perceptions of this uncertainty leads to, in the most extreme case, conflict between those who prefer to turn a blind eye to increasingly hazardous environmental consequences, and those who champion ostensibly ‘sustainable’ alternatives. Environmentalists may appear as arrogant and pedantic, while conservatives may appear as obstinate and short-sighted. Both parties have legitimate beliefs and have important roles to play in an open discussion of our society’s future.

I personally believe that we are on the right track, and can approach a more environmentally sound future systematically, by continually making sustainable choices that affect individuals in palpable ways. Being from Toronto, I have lived through many garbage strikes and watched massive piles of trash build up on baseball diamonds and playgrounds throughout the city. I have watched traffic build up on highways in spite of skyrocketing gas prices. We may not know how to live sustainably from a holistic standpoint, but we can try to make the problem more tractable by addressing specific issues.

Before action though, we must make sense of the problem. Both overzealous environmentalists as well as obstinate conservatives push their respective agendas. Moreover, to many people, the overwhelming and grandiose nature of these issues may lead to confusion, apathy and inaction. Ultimately, the first step in overcoming this inertia is the collective answer to this question: What does a sustainable future mean to you?"

~Jason 

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Jason speaks to the issue of problem definition and conceptualisation. Clearly, issues of environmentalism, social justice and sustainability cannot be addressed by people focused on their individual disciplines alone. However, we live in a reductionist world, where most of us are trained to think of breaking problems down to smaller components and attacking each one systematically. This is how many of us are trained as engineers, too. (Jason and I have backgrounds in engineering) Yet this is the sort of thinking that has created such multi-dimensional problems. Any sort of criticism of reductionism leads people to become defensive, and to some extent, it is understandable. Their livelihoods are founded on reductionism. It is definitely worth starting to approach sustainability from a reductionist perspective (we are still starting from scratch), but it concerns me that this is will just delay much needed holism. It is unfortunate that even at progressive places like the University of Michigan, there are significant institutional and organisational barriers to such holism, as Kate was mentioning today.

I think Jason's question is deep and thoughtfully stated. It states the the present is clearly not sustainable, and that the future is not necessarily a rosy place. It is not a given that the future will be better than the present or the past. Each one of us will be affected differently, and any change is an analysis and criticism of the legacies of our families, communities and neighbourhoods. Please comment on this post and answer the question Jason posed:  

What does a sustainable future mean to you?

Defining ourselves, ourselves

(Disclaimer: I am just using high fructose corn syrup as an example in this post.)

Did you know that the corn industry is trying to rebrand high-fructose corn syrup as corn sugar? Nutritionally, HFCS may not be too different from sugar, but environmentally, it may be.

It is easy to find comfort in the branding and marketing ploys of today. We don't necessarily have to think for ourselves. Someone else can define what is good for me, my family, and my community. Someone else can make the tough decisions of what ingredients to include in our foods, soaps, toothpastes and lives. These outsiders make it seem that if I don't own what it is they want me to own, I am just not a cool person. I mean, going for a jog without an iPod? Lame.

It is much more difficult to be vigilant and aware and conscious and present. If we are not, we can be fooled into thinking that corn sugar is something completely different than what it is, or used to be called. We can be fooled into buying a product that caused significant environmental harm in its production, and trash that will not go away. We cannot be fooled by companies, like Coca Cola, that use this product to tell us to be conscious of our environment. It is important to realise that outsiders and people in boardrooms cannot understand the issues around Midland, MI, and they shouldn't be allowed to define the outcomes of our lives.

The ecologically noble savage

The Hadza appeared in the December 2009 issue of the National Geographic. In the wonderfully scripted article, Michael Finkel writes about one of the surviving hunter-gatherer tribes in Tanzania, the Hadza. This is a group that lives in the present. They do not have words for numbers greater than three, they "work" (i.e. hunt for food) four to six hours a day, and sleep when they want to. Finkel contends that they haven't adopted agriculture because it is so contrary to their present state of mind. Agriculture requires planning, and is inherently future-oriented. Yet, this group has survived for tens of thousands of years, and the Hadza speak an "isolated" language, Hadzane, one that has no relationship to any other language that exists in the world. Everyone eats the catch, and so the group can support no more than thirty or so members. The group is non-hierarchical. Members are free to leave and join other groups, and members of other groups are free to join theirs, but there seems to be population control as a function of the catch. Below are photos (by Martin Schoeller) I grabbed from the National Geographic's website. First is Onwas, the eldest member of the group. Next are some women working with baobab fruit, more important than the catch that men get. Last is Sangu, a young girl in the group. It seems to me that if these so-called "living fossils" are still surviving, tens of thousands of years on, eating bountifully and diversely (more so than say the average American), they have an understanding of their landscape, not only ecologically, but also as conservationists. The Hadza seem to fit almost all of the characteristics of a non-impactful people, or should I say a "non-trashing" people. Without a worry in the world, they don't have control over tomorrow, and don't want to think about tomorrow. If they want honey, they get honey from the beehives. If they want to eat a baboon, they find one, and make full use of it. They have resisted attempts by the government to "educate" them, and give them housing and "normal" jobs. Indeed, people from outside the bush have come to spend time with them during times of famine in Tanzania.

While having a conversation with Melissa last summer, I wondered out loud whether people of the past (or even of the present, like the Hadza) conserve the nature around them. Melissa mentioned that these people, that are potentially a figment of our imaginations, are termed "noble savages." Of course, it is clear these noble savages are/were more in tune with a particular landscape than a non-native, but does this understanding of their complex ecosystem compel them to make sure future generations enjoy the same bounty? We would all like to think so, and think of days when humans were one with nature. However, in the case of Native Americans, it seems like there is no evidence that they were any more conscious of conservation than the Europeans that killed them off. Krech claims that Native Americans were ecologists, but not conservationists. Indeed, the only conservation that did happen was "epiphenomenal," or conservation because people didn't have the means to not conserve. Since natives know (or knew) more about their surroundings, they used less of more, while non-natives used more of less. Yet once technologies from Europe, including guns, were introduced to Native Americans, they started over-harvesting, decimating local animal species, excluding beavers.

What do you think?