The Overview Effect

Our capacity to switch back and forth between scales of time and place--to understand the global, to acutely observe the local; to learn from the past and act compassionately for the future--is what seems to be in short supply with coming to terms with burgeoning and intricate problems such as climate change and sustainability.  We constantly narrow our focus when the problems at hand are large, and we blame structures when it comes to changing what goes on in our households.  And so, on this Earth Day, I wanted to share a video with you (which I found posted on my friend's Facebook page a few weeks ago) that helps us make connections of scale, that helps inspire wonder in our minds and activism from the heart.  On this Earth day, Overview inspires the aerospace engineer in me, and, more importantly, provides all of us with boundless meaning to the word and the notion of our home, Earth.

Imagining the possibilities

On our way back from Detroit a few nights ago, Kristin, Ethan, Marwa and I got into a discussion about something that has come up time and again over the past two years: What does it matter whether or not individuals do anything about the problems we face? For, if things don't happen on a larger scale, nothing matters in the end.

I have written about this many, many times before, as have others on this blog, but each time I think about this particular issue, I feel as if I am thinking about it anew. It seems that with each passing day, the power of taking matters into our own, individual hands--not in the sense of doing whatever we want with our world to destroy it, but imagining new possibilities for our own lives--seems more and more complex, yet more and more compelling.

When it comes down to it, the only way in which possibilities of any kind are envisioned is if someone actually does something, if someone brings the possibility into the world. Take, for example, new technologies. Radically new technologies can have the capacity of outmoding older ones, depending on who backs them. We grant all sorts of protections to such "entrepreneurs" and "innovators" who "invent". They get intellectual property rights and patents. They can make money off of their ideas by selling them. They are seen as visionary, and they are seen as essential to creating a utopian world. It doesn't really matter, though, what one does as long as there are social structures and institutions that support what you do. Our social structures, as they stand, cheer and laud such people.

Many people would claim that the lives that we live are based on all that we know. I disagree. There are things we know that fundamentally question everything we do--from driving to work, to eating food that has travelled fifteen hundred miles before arriving on our tables, to being able to buy the latest electronics from China by clicking a mouse in Ann Arbor. So, what about imagining possibilities that are counter to the grain of culture? First of all, most social institutions that exist in this culture are not built to accept their demise. (Take, for example, corporations, which are social institutions and organisations that we think must grow ad infinitum.) But more fundamentally, my sense is that people are fearful of new possibilities because they will make outmoded what they have held on to dearly--we have built our entire lives on assumptions; on "experts" that know what is "best" for the economy, for the environment, for public policy; on stories and myths about industrialism, growth, and efficiency that we have to tell ourselves to make us feel good about what we are doing in our day-to-day lives. Therefore, for someone to come along and question all of these foundations will make most anyone throw up their guards.

The uncertainties of large scale policies on our daily lives make people uncomfortable with accepting them. What would it mean if everyone had to have health insurance? Well, there are a group of people that are scared of such possibilities because they think "government will take control of Medicare", that there will be loss of "freedom" and "liberty". Their opponents may think that these fears are unfounded, but actually, they are real, for they are felt and voiced. And so when it comes down to actually doing something new, in creating a fundamental change, it cannot start from anywhere else but our own lives. Understanding the scale at which new possibilities much be introduced is essential. The scale of individuals, of our daily lives make possibilities more tenable. Talking about possibilities and trying to live them openly allow others to be engaged in shaping these possibilities. For example, when Rowena said that learning primitive skills made her feel more peaceful, it was very easy to accept this, because I could feel and sense her peace. This made learning primitive skills more compelling to me, as I am sure it did to anyone that spent any amount of time around her. It was clear that she wasn't a "hippie" or "crazy". She was just doing something new. She was imagining new possibilities.

Filling our days

People that care about issues of the environment and social justice have a way of despairing over the dire state of affairs at our doorsteps. We hear constantly of oil spills and species going extinct and pipelines being built to carry crude from Alberta to Texas. People also continually ask, "What can I do to make a difference?" I will say that action is needed on all scales, spanning our individual lives and spirits, to our communities, regions, nations, and indeed, our cultures. But fundamentally, the change we wish to see in the world can come from nowhere else but our own lives. I wonder then, what do we choose to fill our day to day lives with?

I can understand that many people are employed, and are at some level forced to be, to pay bills and support families. Yes, we are tired by the end of the day, and want nothing more than to not think about how messed up everything is. But the energy to create change must come from somewhere, and I believe that energy can come from paying adequate attention to our spirits that have been so crushed by the drudgery of daily routine.

Plant a tree. Tend a garden. Talk to your neighbour. Go to the market and cook a meal. Go on a bike ride. Understand why someone is homeless, and buy him a hot drink. Think about what each of these activities means. Planting a tree can maybe make up for some of the carbon dioxide emissions released through burning coal. Tending a garden teaches us how delicate life is, and that without proper consideration, we are bound to obliterate the capacities of this Earth. Do you even know who your neighbour is? Going to the market introduces you to people that care about the Earth as much as you do, and are doing their part of extricating themselves from industrialisation. Going on a bike ride allows you to explore where you live, and bond with your loved ones, as well as where you live. Talking to the homeless will hopefully make you think about this unjust, unequal system of benefits to some, costs for most. 

These activities are decidedly simple, yet extremely powerful. They make us realise that this world isn't only full of consumerism, planned obsolescence, corporate media, and tyrannical government, but also filled with beings that want to care and protect and preserve and conserve and live lightly on this world. Such activities invigorate our spirits and lend a hand to supporting our communities, care for our land and water and air and biophysical world. Maybe then these individual reflections unfold into grander and grander acts of activism, of subversion, of care, on larger and larger scales.

The other day, my mom told me that if we fill our lives with good, we will have no time for bad. A truer statement has not been said. (I don't want to get into discussions of what "good" and "bad" are, but if you are a regular reader of this blog, you can probably make out what good and bad mean to me.)

Adequate answers?

My contention is that the scale of the largest problems a social structure or culture can create is larger than the culture is able to deal with. Let's take the example of climate change. For years now, countries have done very little substantively to address the issue. Sure, there may be some countries that have adopted renewable energy standards, while some have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol and have made progress towards reducing their climate-changing emissions. But unfortunately, we can still wave many Small Island States like the Maldives bye bye--the levels of greenhouse gas emissions has steadily increased over time, and we are probably not going to keep surface temperatures below semi-acceptable levels:

“I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” [IEA chief economist] Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below two degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.”

The IEA says that for a two degree increase to be averted, global energy-related emissions in 2020 must not be greater than 32 Gt. This means that over the whole of the next decade, emissions must rise by less than they did between 2009 and 2010. (emphasis added)

The agency also estimates than 80 percent of projected emissions from the power sector in 2020 are “locked in” – that is, they will come from existing power plants or those currently under construction. This will make it even harder to meet the two degree target, Birol says.

For me, climate change has been caused because of a continued reliance of society on technology. Sure technologies have become more efficient, afforded people longer lives, increased mobility, the ability to talk to people from across the world, and so on; I cannot deny this. But it would be foolish to not think that many of those technologies have resulted in ecological degradation and climate change, be it electricity generation, mining, and transportation. Technology and society have a dynamic role--one shapes the other in an endless interplay. At the same time, however, our answers to the problems of technology have created more technologies...and more of them...and more of them, rather than ask deeper, more powerful questions.

What this represents is a mindset that is ingrained in the social structure. This ingraining takes away our ability to think about what is causing the problems we face. Instead, we try to forcibly bin or address the problems we've created using the structures in place. Add on top of this political processes and inequality of power, and we are mired in gridlocked decision-making, in which traditional forces of society are called upon to address problems it could not foresee. I can see how "internalising the externalities" (say by having a carbon tax) can alleviate problems of greenhouse gas emissions, how "efficiency" can lead to decreased extraction of materials from this Earth. But are the mindsets [a reliance on technology, "It really doesn't matter if I do anything to reduce my environmental impact, what we need is a large movement," etc.] and social structures [like large government, like "industry," like "free (ish, kinda, maybe sorta) markets," etc.] we have really adequate enough to deal with the problems we've created? I am not so sure.

What does this mean we do in our daily lives? It means that we continue to question what is thrown at us, that we continue to question the motives of large entities (for many governments and corporations advocate for "solutions" that do not hurt the bottom line), that we make choices here and now that would be obvious in a more sustainable world.

One step at a time

I want to revisit something I wrote back in May, in response to Matthew's comments on my post What does it mean to be a "pragmatist"?. Matthew's comment is bolded, and my response is below his comment.

Most of your specific criticisms seem to be condemnations of our society as a whole more than specific problems with the bridge (i.e. choose your battles wisely so you can be sure that you are addressing the main source of the problem). I think the best strategy for building momentum in the environmental movement is to attack the very worst offenders first. By choosing battles that most people can agree on we get to solve some of the most important problems without giving fuel to distracters who accuse us of being anti-progress. 

Absolutely. There are so many easy targets for this - polluting incinerators, mountaintop removers, fracking companies. The list goes on and on. There are so many targets, though, that rather than providing a hit-list of entities to take action against, we are overwhelmed by how ingrained ecological degradation is in our behaviour, and how our choices encourages and patronises their existence. We may also convince ourselves that we are trapped with their existence, that there is no way out. For example, many people probably don't like sitting in traffic for many hours each week along their fifteen-mile drive to work, but we have do bear it because work is fifteen miles away. Now, we can try to take down the very worst offenders, of course. As much as I support it and advocate for it, I feel that this won't adequately address the foundational problems that result in such industries. It will only allow others to come up with new ways to harm nature, and consequently people.

I still stand by what I said back in May, but I am seeing Matthew's point more and more, especially in light of the recent civil disobedience in Washington, D.C., in protest against the Keystone XL pipeline that might be built to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to Texas, something I wrote about a few days ago.

Everything is connected, and we cannot do one thing without affecting many things. A more holistic understanding of actions and outcomes is always a good thing. Yet, there are scales of action, there are scales of outcome, and there are scales of effort. The Keystone XL pipeline, while being a single pipeline, is representative of a vast system of decision-making that discounts ecological and social impacts. Action against one major offender is likely representative of our attitudes towards other major offenders (or at least I hope so). And in addressing the complicated issues facing us, as Matthew points out, taking down the major offenders hopefully brings down the foundation that many of the minor offenders operate on.

I think the important thing to remember is that in all we do our individual actions should not be ends in themselves, but rather steps towards something bigger. Refusing to use plastic bags must surely lead to driving less, which must surely lead to regulating your home temperature better, which must surely lead to a discussion with neighbours, which must lead to actions that ban plastic bags altogether, and so on and so forth.

Living trash free is only a step in a much larger journey with much larger outcomes. 

Shout out to Matthew L.

Engineering and sustainability ethics

One thing that I hope has become clear from this blog is that our decisions and choices have impacts far greater in scale, in space and time, than we think they do. This is of course quite obvious given global issues like climate change and biodiversity loss, but I have tried to link these global issues to our individual actions. With the added physicality of trash, which serves solely as a lens, I am hoping that people are encouraged to take actions themselves, not only for themselves, but for their neighbourhoods, their communities, their regions, our world.

To elaborate just a little bit more, with trash, for example (again, as a lens), much goes into making what we throw away (greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, mountaintop removal, fracking, processing), and then the trash itself is transported to places where those least (and not) capable of defending themselves - poor people, future generations, nature, etc. - are disrespected and treated unjustly (landfills, incinerators, their cities, etc.).This of course, calls for a new ethic, an ethic of a wider spatial and temporal scope, as Hans Jonas argues in The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age.

As an engineer, I am wholly aware that the engineering profession is complicit in this degradation of nature. We build bridges, missiles, cars, buildings, planes and nanoparticles, all of which have significant negative impacts on nature, regardless of whether they "serve the public" or not. The position of engineering in the society is an interesting and complicated one. As P. Aarne Vesilind and Alastair S. Gunn have written about in Engineering, Ethics, and the Environment, the public's perception of engineering is much different than engineer's perceptions of engineering. Engineers look at the net benefits of their actions, diminishing the importance of harm to the individual. Engineers tend to be utilitarians. That is the reason why cost-benefit analyses are frequently used in making engineering decisions. Yet engineers end up building things that do affect individual lives negatively. Engineers also tend to ignore or dismiss considerations that are unquantifiable. Engineers are positivists. Yet the objects that engineers build interact with people and groups of people. They consequently interact with minds and collections of minds, the emotions of which are unquantifiable. These interactions also might occur over long periods of time - bridges are built to last several decades.

As an aerospace engineer studying biofuels and air pollution, these thoughts are constantly on my mind. Therefore, part of my doctoral work will focus on sustainability ethics and decision-making using biofuels in aviation as a case study. While I am interested in why we choose to have technological solutions to social problems, I will specifically focus on how different ethical frameworks guide and change decision-making. And here is where I need your help. My advisors, Professor Wooldridge and Professor Princen, are interested in having this work open-source, easily relatable, easily understandable, and directed toward both younger and older audiences. Ideas of having this be a part of my blog, of being a magazine piece, of being an editorial piece, of being a Wikipedia page, etc. have been thrown around. What do you think would be an interesting and modular venue for this work? What do you think are important questions to be addressed? Please send me your thoughts. I really appreciate it.

Scales of trash

It is wonderful to be constantly challenged and provoked by thoughtful people around you. Melissa is one such person that challenges me, and makes me think more about what I do. A couple of days ago, I raised the issue of becoming a social outcast/recluse if you did not generate trash. Melissa had a wonderful comment on this, which she thought of while having a coffee at Intelligentsia in Chicago -

"How do you account/control for trash generated by dining out or even getting a cup of coffee in a mug? Every business we patronize creates trash directly, meaning we are creating trash indirectly by even buying things like food and drinks. This gets me back to my original contention that it's impossible to live 100 percent trash-free and not become a social outcast. And if you start thinking about the life cycle analysis of everything you consume (even bulk food products), the equation gets even tougher."

Trash has so many dimensions, and it is generated at so many levels. Is trash a natural outcome of our society? Thermodynamically, it is likely. The flow of materials in our society on average, based on current social structures, takes into account only the extraction through throw away stages of the life of the material. In general, society does not care about what happens to the materials once they are thrown away. Yet unless all of the energy or mass stored in the material is fully consumed and reduced to heat, there will remain degraded forms of these materials in the form of matter. Regardless, in the end, trash generation increases entropy - i.e. it is a degradation of natural resources and nice, well contained forms of energy and raw materials. Further, we are constantly synthesizing and converting natural raw materials into forms that don't necessarily exist in nature (apart from all natural wood, water, gems, foods untreated with artificial pesticides, etc...Can you think of more?). Yet, generating say one plastic bag of trash is not as bad as generating two, or a million. Nature may (and does) have ways of dynamically responding to these forcings...

These incoherent thoughts lead me to some issues that I think I would like to elaborate on in future posts...

1) the view that nature exists "out there," and that we are somehow separate from it, and that we can somehow remove from our circles these degraded materials and assume that they won't affect us...
2) trash and the commons problem...
3) trash and its scales and dimensions - time, location, and amount (thanks Meg and Tim)...
4) trash and its potential inevitability...

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Jennifer's sister-in-law Monica had a recent post (28 April) on her blog about how the reduced impact of her saving two plastic bags was instantaneously undone by the man behind her while checking out at a grocery store. Monica expressed her dismay - will we ever get enough people starting to do little things that will lead to bigger things? Who knows. Yet, my mother attested to me today that tides are changing in Bloomsburg, PA, where the cashier will no longer think you are a lunatic for having brought your own bag. So I guess that is a step in the right direction.

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In my accounting of trash from the first month, I neglected to recount (and account for trash generated by me) an episode that Jennifer and I had at the Motor City Casino during her last visit to the great State of Michigan. I had won a pass to the Best of Detroit Party thrown by the Metrotimes. Jennifer and I had also gone to this party last year, and it was wonderful. The food was great, and there was an open bar for both desserts and drinks. Yet, we both recalled the amount of trash that we generated. So, in preparation, we took our own silverware (and now I regret not having taken my own plate, and cup). Our beer was served to us in these really nice thick plastic cups, and our food was served in paper. Jennifer and I used one paper plate each, and one cup each. We were wholly intending on saving my one plate and cup and bringing it home. We had to guard it with our lives. As soon as you were done with your food, someone would come by and whisk away your trash, and so people would constantly get new plates. Jennifer and I valiantly guarded our plates, but when we were both looking away and talking to a friend there, the plate was taken. On our way out, I was told that I could not take the cup out because the name of the casino was on it, and they didn't want to be responsible for irresponsible people drinking out of that cup post-party. Basically, I did not account for one paper plate and one plastic cup. Thank you to Jennifer for pointing out this egregious oversight.

On a similar note, when Marco, Anna, Jennifer and I went to Neehee's in Canton, I took a stack of glass plates and told them to prepare the food on these plates (because I knew that they served in paper). They did, gladly.