The eternal question

Does it really matter why we do things as long as they get done?

I am attending a conference on issues of communicating climate change to those who don't believe or accept it. Leaders from all areas of the debate, including academia, activism, non-profits, conflict resolution, and corporations have convened in Ann Arbor in an event co-sponsored by the Erb Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Nancy Jackson, a community organiser, and executive director for the Climate+Energy Project in Kansas. She said that to the atmosphere, all that really matters it the amount of carbon dioxide in it. Therefore, it doesn't matter what people think, it matters what people do.

While I find this argument compelling for a second, I am quickly led to think about the greater umbrella that guides our behaviours. Say that we are able to fully "solve" or "address" the issues of climate change through energy efficiency, "smart growth", "green" consumerism, and eating away at the carbon stabilisation wedges. Say we are able to steer the world away from the worst-case scenarios of climate change and sea-level rise. Say we are able to have our cake and eat it too. I wonder then, say one hundred years from now, or one hundred and fifty years from now, will the world be faced with some other massive existential problem? I wonder, if people aren't made to really think about their choices and the consequences of their choices, are we setting ourselves up for an even bigger challenge and hurdle (if that is fathomable) in the future?

Several questions then abound. What sort of legacy do we leave people with? How do we educate and train the next generation? What values do we instill in them? How might we best equip them with the capacities to think through issues facing them and the collectives they are embedded in? Are we making the next generation more resilient than ours? Or are we setting them up for problems that they, too, will kick down the road, if possible?

I think it is powerful to play this out in our own lives. Most all of us would agree that the ends do not always justify the means. For those of us that are not in desperate situations, we would think that selling drugs to pay for the monthly electricity bills is not acceptable. We might start making due with less or cutting costs by being inventive and creative about our electricity use. Many of us would think it unacceptable to leave our very children unprepared for the world by not equipping them with an understanding of human relationships and how to treat other people.

For some reason, we continue to want a better world for future generations, while at the same time undermining their abilities to address the challenges they will face, while at the same time creating even larger problems. So, does it matter what people think? Absolutely.

To landfill

The world faces environmental issues, environmental justice included, because of a disconnect between how we humans think we live our lives, and how we actually live our lives. There is a disconnect between what we think is important, and what actually sustains us, allowing us "prosperity" and peace of mind. We think, in the West (and more so now in many other countries), that our streets are clean and that it is unseemly to have it any other way, of course, we are a "developed country." We condone and encourage the purchasing of new products, cutting edge and faster than ever before. We think that this signifies progress; we think that the future is always better than the past. We think that it is important to support policies, economic systems and actions that promote ways of making a living that we have come to accept as essential and necessary. Yet we actually are sweeping great harms under the rug and stuffing them underground. We actually are depleting our Earth's capacity to renew itself, to sustain plants, animals, watersheds, prairies and humans. We actually are continuing a legacy a recklessness, carelessness, unthoughtfulness, and disrespect towards land, rocks, water, air, animals and humans.

As I've mentioned previously, we have structured our communities around how we can dispose of our trash. The fact that trash in the West is invisible makes us feel that we are doing small amounts of harm to our environment. Yet there is a disconnect between what we think happens to the trash, and what actually happens to the trash. Have you ever considered that the trash does not just vanish into thin air? Much of our trash ends up in landfills, or in our air after it is burned. I'll ask you again, have you considered that the plastic cup you are drinking from, once thrown away, will just sit somewhere else, for a long, long time?

Poonam, one of the heads of the Student Sustainability Initiative at the University of Michigan, had a wonderfully simple idea: what would happen if we changed the labels on our trash bins from "Trash" to "To landfill"? How would that change our perceptions of trash? How would that challenge us reduce trash? A meeting with the head of recycling and waste management at the University yesterday shed some light on how disconnected we are from the fate of the trash we produce. She said that "this would only confuse people, and encourage them, in a rush, put a non-recyclable into a recycling bin, consequently contaminating the recyclables." Do we actually accept the fact that trash goes to landfills?