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.

Wait a while

One question that I am asked frequently is something along the lines of, "Well, what if you want to buy something?" or "What if you need to buy something?" My answer to these questions, which seems a little Buddhist, is that I just wait a while: "I wait a week, and I think about whether I still need to buy it. If I still feel that I want to buy something, I wait another week."

Time is one metaphysical concept that has been at the forefront of everything I have written over the past few years, whether in the shape of legacy, compulsiveness, convenience, instantaneousness, longevity, seasons, and cycles, or contradictions. And it is a form of time again that is at play with materialism and purchasing, too.

Our fast-paced lives and the ever-quickening pace of technology make it very difficult to wrap our minds around how ecological degradation itself is quickening because of our choices. The steps we take in our daily lives are taken faster and faster. We used to saunter, now we are constantly out of breath. If we need to relax to bring our minds at ease, why not also relax before we impulsively acquire?

Waiting is not an exercise in austerity or abstinence, but rather an investigation of need and want. Waiting opens up the mental space to more fully evaluate the impacts of choices on our wallets, on this culture, on our Earth. It also gives us more time to understand and appreciate what we have already. Waiting to get something automatically makes you appreciate it more than if you bought it on a whim. How do you know the importance of something if you don't really understand what it is like being without something? And if you have been without something until now, have you fully appreciated your life without it? Thinking about these questions and acting on the answers is a form of slowing down our fast lives. It is a form of cultural criticism and self-reflection that has very real and tangible consequences. 

I admit to buying two new things in the last year--two pairs of football/soccer shoes, one for turf, and one for outdoor use--and I bought them after about a year of waiting to buy them. Of course, it is unreasonable to ask people to stop buying. But it is wholly reasonable to ask them to wait, and to see what happens.

See what Jason has to say about waiting.

Slowing down fast lives

Until recently, I used to like to always be on the move. I would try to do as many things as possible in a day...coffee with a friend at eight am...work from nine am to six pm...play football from six to eight..shower and dinner until nine-thirty...beer at ABC until eleven...Fleetwood after that...

I would like to think, though, that what I was indulging in was innocent and not materialistic, but rather just because I wanted (and I still do) to spend my time with as many people as possible. But viewed differently, maybe I just wasn't spending enough time with those that really mattered to me. Things have changed over the past couple of years. I feel as if this experiment-turned-way-of-being has made me more aware of everything around me, made me more present, made me happier.

Then again, I see the same sort of attention deficit all around in this culture. But this deficit, this lack of appreciation, is one that has significant negative ramifications on those around us now, and those far away from us, in space and in time. We are leading fast lives, now, as Professor Rob Nixon calls them, fast lives that are "outsourcing the costs" to the "never-will-haves" and future generations.

Over the past couple of days, I was fortunate to talk to, and listen to, Rob Nixon, the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. (Now that's an honorific title if there ever was one.) He presented the Lora Heberle Lecture of the year (with Amrita winning the Heberle Award for Outstanding Achievement in Critical Writing!), and titled his talk, "Slow Violence and The Environmentalism of the Poor"...

In an age that venerates the instant and the spectacular, how can writers turn slow-moving environmental calamities into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment? What are the imaginative and strategic challenges of exposing the forces of slow violence that inflict incremental environmental damage? This talk connects an analysis of slow violence to a vision of sustainable security with a focus on activism in the global South.

I will write more about what Professor Nixon talked about over the next few days, but a particular paradox of time struck me. Our ever quickening lives, filled with minutiae, upward mobility, tweets, and instant Youtube videos on our iPhones are causing large-scale, but slow violence. This is violence and injustice that manifests itself in chemically-caused cancers, climate change, hypoxic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, the leaching of toxic material into groundwater and land from landfills. I instantly think of the incinerator at the Detroit Wastewater Treatment Plant when I hear the word slow. Click on the image below and just look at the eerily slow effluent being emitted from the smokestacks.

Much of my thinking for the past two years has been about time and its dimensions--about legacy, about appreciation of the present, about concern for the future. But, as Professor Nixon pointed out, the atrocities that are being committed suffer from the "drama deficit" of being incremental and slowly evolving. This is in contrast to other events such as bomb blasts and exploding oil rigs, violent and dramatic acts that are bounded in time.

It is time to slow down.

The idealism of youthfulness

There is something innocent yet incredibly observant and extremely powerful in the youth pointing out the flaws in decades-old trends and culture, just like Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen have. It says, "How could you let things get to this point?" It also says, "We are inheriting this Earth after you. Why are you debasing and defiling it?" In that, all the criticisms of this culture, these politics, are crystallised. In it, the idealism of youthfulness is at play.

There are of course things that are seemingly more fundamental and timeless than others, things that don't change. For example, "Be nice to people" seems like something more fundamental than "Marriage is between a man and a woman". It is so because most no one would say that being nice to people is something we should not do. There are no objections. But marriage between two people of the same gender? That becomes murky for many people.

Many of the timeless lessons come just from human experience and time. Things have a way of revealing themselves to you. All you have to do is live, and, well, be observant and a little bit reflective and reflexive. When we are young, we can be petulant, abrasive, and say mean things to people. (I actually know a lot of people of my age, 26, and older that still behave that way. Just check out the Republican primary debates.) But as time goes on, hopefully people become kinder and gentler and thoughtful and more dynamic. At the same time, it is hard not to notice that there is something about the way that we've cultured ourselves, that as we get older and older, we get more and more drawn in to everything that is degrading to this Earth, and the human spirit. It is pretty clear, if you talk to your parents, grandparents, or anyone older than you, that as time progresses, people become more and more wary of change. We become part of "the system". We get jobs, get families, try to feed those families by buying food from box supermarkets in which produce has traveled one thousand five hundred miles. We see no way other than addressing things through bureaucracy. We seem to get mired in the same political debates that have now become so fractious that there is seemingly no way forward.

It is in these circumstances that imagination of the youthful breaks everything down, and creates things anew. Whether it is imaginary friends for children or pie-in-the-sky dreams for those seeking change, it is that idealism that must temper and dismantle the "pragmatism" that is grossly inadequate.

John Paul Lederach, Professor of International Peacebuilding speaks to this from experience. What he says is relevant and accessible to all of us, trying to address the manifold issues we face. His words are positive and constructive. Listen to his beautiful conversation with Krista Tippett (above). Or, read the excerpt below.

Ms. Tippett: You've talked about how you've seen that violence destroys a person's capacity to perceive themselves as an integrated part of a whole, and that makes it difficult for people to see themselves in a web of relationships that has to include their enemies and some imagination about their enemies' grandchildren, right? I mean, it's almost like you're asking the impossible of people.

Mr. Lederach: Well, it's — it's the impossible until you consider the alternative, which we've watched now evolve in so many places across decades, half-centuries. Columbia is a half-century. Middle East can go back centuries. In other words, the notion that it's more realistic to pursue the other avenue, the one that's supposed to be more pragmatic, shows itself over and over again to basically reseed the very things that create the cycles of violence that we're trying to supersede.

Some more thoughts on time

I have written several times about the notion of time. The importance of understanding time is fully encapsulated in a piece of trash. A piece of trash speaks to so many aspects of time--legacy, compulsiveness, convenience, instantaneousness, longevity, seasons, and cycles, and contradictions abound when thinking about time.

I have been felt time go by quicker and quicker each year, and people I have talked to that are elder to me tend to agree with this. But it also seems like time is moving ever more quickly nowadays, maybe because more and more is happening around us. We are constantly surrounded by messages of people trying to sell us things and surrounded by distractions. This is a fundamental feature of capitalism, as Marx, in his book Grundrisses, has pointed out:  

“While capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e., to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time…The more developed the capital…the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time.”  

Planned obsolescence means that we will always be anachronistic, and our culture demands being up to speed materially. On the other hand, I have realised the importance of being fully present (not materially), in the here and now, for mental and spiritual well-being, as well as to reduce our burdens on the world.

At the same time, I have been thinking about the importance of a 'pause' button for this culture, something that would make us all stop for a while, and think about what we are doing, something that would allow us space to breathe and to relax, and to reflect. I believe that one of the most valuable things to us in today's day and age are space and time for us to think, for ourselves, about whether we are living to the fullest of our capacities as empathic, conscious, mindful, and moral beings.

I say this knowing that time is not on our side in the fight to halt (or to lessen) the huge ecological crises that are presenting themselves at our doorsteps. I say this having the feeling that four or five years of doing nothing substantive towards the causes of environmental justice and sustainability is four or five years lost, four or five years of more infrastructure and inertia that will have to be overcome in four or five years time. And so, what does it mean to take a break from being active? I fully appreciate the importance of breaks, and the way breaks allow a more rejuvenated approach to our lives. But how can we hit the pause button for ourselves, when others (including the environment) are being continually subjected to harsh and violent treatment from the decadently materialistic and privileged? I don't have answers, and as always, would love your feedback.

A daily meditation

My lab life consists of a deeply satisfying ritual. While fully taking apart and cleaning my experimental facility after each experiment, I listen to The Story (or On Being if I've listened to The Story already). A couple of days ago, I listened to the story of Angela Walters, who has been collecting pictures of the lives of the people of Joplin, Missouri, the town that was demolished by a massive tornado six months ago (see video below). Her effort has been trying to get these pictures back to the people of Joplin, in an effort to preserve the history of the place.



Walters mentioned in her interview that the one thing that people regret most when some event like a tornado occurs is not the loss of their material objects, but rather of the memories captured in photographs. I found this to be so poignant, as obvious as it may seem.

We live our daily lives doing things that aren't really important to us, materially and spiritually. When it comes down to it, what we value most in our lives is not that we had an iPod or the latest computer, but the times we spent with other people. Why then, do we continue to invest vast amounts of time and effort doing things we do not want?

We are stuck in a mindless slavery and cycle of our daily lives. I find it disappointing that it must always come down to a calamity or some freak event that makes us reorganise our lives and our priorities. Think about how much more lightly we could tread on our Earth, how much more community we could build, if we constantly reminded ourselves that what matters most is not materialism, but rather good time spent with people we care about, not engaged in material exchange, but rather, just being? How might this unfold on the world that is beyond our immediacy, both in space and time?

I believe it would be powerful for us to have a daily meditation on what is most important to us, and act accordingly, as much as we can. The effects of such a meditation, of a change in our behaviour cannot be expected to be immediate, but they might be. We won't know if we don't try. If you are to tell yourself each morning that what is most important to you are your family and your watershed, then you will act accordingly. You may not buy that make-up or eye-liner or chemical bathroom cleaner if we think that those things will contaminate the water you drink. If you were to start all over again, as the people in Joplin may have had to, where would you start? How would you proceed? How would we proceed?

There is no single answer

We are possessed by and at the mercy of the powers of centralisation and absolutism. The way many of us think of and frame problems is in the hope that there is some definitive outcome at the end. "The answer is forty-two!" we would like to hear. When we are interested in the outcomes of a policy option, we ask, How many people will this give cancer to? or, How many people will this save from cancer? This is the way policy-making is done--through some sort of quanitfication of outcomes, through cost-benefit analyses, through some sort of Pareto optimisation. Unfortunately, this is a massive mischaracterisation of the problems that face us, and of the way we need to be addressing them.

Engineers like to think about energy, and most of the engineers that are interested in sustainability and ecological issues tend to focus on the issues through the lens of energy. If you were ever to go to a talk on the energy "future" given by some engineer, you will inevitably here this statement: There is no silver bullet. When it comes to where our energy ought to be coming from (in all actuality we should be using less, in conjunction with a move away from extremely ecologically degrading sources), there are advantages and disadvantages to each kind of energy, be it coal, solar, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear, petroleum. Some are more "convenient" than others, some are more "easily produced" than others, some are more ecologically degrading than others, some are backed by more powerful interests than others. We must have the right "portfolio," some might say.

That being said, I want to tie together a few posts and themes that have emerged over the past months, which I have written about in, for example, The right, the wrong, and the other, Traveling at home, and What if you don't live in Ann Arbor?. I have realised that there is no definitive way in which I, or anyone else for that matter, can address the myriad of socio-environmental issues in existence. Issues are specific to time and place. However, what is true is that they have been influenced by a common ethic of domination, violence, greed, disrespect, hegemony, and carelessness. Such an ethic expresses itself differently in different places.

The desire for absolute, definitive answers masks the messiness of complexity, makes us simplify debate in terms of "right" and "wrong," "us" versus "them," and moves us no closer to a much-needed introspection of social norms. This was brought together beautifully, although in a slightly different context, by David Remnick, writing about what we have and have not learned since 9/11, in the September 12th issue of The New Yorker.

A decade later, we also continue to reckon no only with the violence that [Osama] bin Laden inflicted but with the follies, the misjudgments, and the violence that, directly or indirectly, he provoked--the acts of government deception, illegal domestic surveillance, "extraordinary rendition," "enhanced interrogation," waterboarding. The publication of Dick Cheney's memoirs is the latest instance of Bush Administration veterans serenely insisting that they "got it right," that the explosion of popular discontent that began in Tunisia last December and spread through the region is the direct result of the American-led invasion and the occupation of Iraq. This is as dubious as it is self-serving...Ten years after the attacks, we are still faced with questions about ourselves--questions about the balance of liberty and security, about the urge to make common cause with liberation movements abroad, and about countervailing limits. Only absolutists answer these questions absolutely.

There is nothing absolute when it comes to dealing with social or environmental problems, because each place is unique. This we must understand. What works here doesn't work there. Solar power in cloudy regions doesn't work, but it may in sunny regions. Damming rivers nonchalantly doesn't take into account the specificities of seismic activity. Building a bridge in the name of "economic development" at the expense of community, consequently disenfranchising a group of people, just isn't sustainable. On the contrary, empowering people knowledgeable about the place and watershed they live in, a thoughtful education of the interconnectedness of the local and the global, and a sincere understanding and acceptance of the differences that define us, can lead to more sustainable, more respectful outcomes. If we have a fertile foundation upon which our actions can bloom, we will be much better equipped in dealing with the uniqueness of place and time.

What if you don't live in Ann Arbor?

While many of us do appreciate living on Earth, enjoying and wondering about its beauty and mysticism, what concerns us mostly is what surrounds us--it is our immediacy that is most important to us. As Wendell Berry has said in The Long-Legged House (an absolutely exquisite book of essays), he cares more for Port Royal than he does for the State of Kentucky, more for Kentucky than for the US, more for the US than for some other country, but he cares as much about the Earth as he does for Port Royal. The trick is reconciling your behaviour in your place with what your hopes are for the world.

I have written and said several times, including in my last post, that living trash-free is purely an expression of my appreciation for where I live, for it is the least I can do to fully appreciate where I live. But such an appreciation can be difficult given how communities are set up in other parts of this state and this country. While talking to Will yesterday morning, he asked me what I would do if I wasn't in Ann Arbor? Now while this question is purely speculative, it is an extremely important one, for Ann Arbor isn't the only place on Earth contributing to ecological degradation.

Honestly, I don't know what I would do if I lived elsewhere, because I don't know what those other places are like. But there are some key features of society and culture that I have been able to assimilate in the past year and a half, and if one was to do anything about social and environmental injustice, ecological degradation, living in a way that treads more softly on the Earth, it would be to think about and act on these cultural phenomena.

First, our individual and collective behaviours stem from a deep-rooted unappreciation materially for where we live, in time and space. For those of us who are privileged, why do we want more material? While physical things are limited, as any conservation law would say so, and while physical things have the potential to scar the Earth, the spiritual journeys that we can all take can lead to emotional growth unbounded. This growth, this learning, does have significant physical impact, but hopefully in a good way.

Second, this culture erects barriers between those that are privileged, and those that are not. These are physical barriers, political barriers, and emotional barriers. We build highways and box stores using eminent domain only in places that cannot afford monetarily to put up a fight. We cite landfills and incinerators in places already downtrodden. When a homeless person approaches us, we don't seek to understand why this person is homeless.

Third, this culture has continually centralised decision-making, and we have given away much responsibility such that we are reliant on others for many of our basic needs. While this can be fruitful to a certain extent, claiming back that responsibility, and being able to live without being impacted or influenced by major corporations and corrupt governments becomes more and more difficult. Goodwill and compassion seems to be rare with these elites. We lose our power as individuals and small collectives of people.

All of these thoughts will most certainly play out in different ways depending on where we live and who we are surrounded by. And so while it may be difficult to live trash-free in some other places, there is so much more that can be done, given an understanding and appreciation of place.

More reflections on where I live

It has been a while since I traveled at home; I haven't had the directed attention that traveling at home requires. But even still, when I look around me, and I see amazing people doing amazing and creative things, things that are intended to bring communities together, intended to create dialogue and discussion and conversation. While many scenes that I see around Ann Arbor are suffused with privilege, there is more genuineness here than many places I have been to in this country.

It is hard to think that the place I live in is a part of a bigger "sovereign" place whose values don't necessarily align with mine, or many of the people I know in Ann Arbor and elsewhere. But that is okay, I guess, as long as we have the energy for more good work that will turn the tides of injustice, inequality, and ecological degradation, into those of community, kindness, a true acceptance, and a true appreciation for all that we have.

In a previous post, I mentioned how this town provides each one of us the option of choosing to live experimentally and experientially, how this town makes it easy to live so. But while talking to Samantha about living trash-free on the Diag today, I came to a different realisation, one that I am going to go with from now on (until, of course, I have another realisation), and it is this--I realised that given this time, and given this town, living trash-free is the least I can do to fully appreciate where I live. Living trash-free isn't an experiment, and it isn't extreme either. Instead, it is something normal, it is a foundation on which to be more creative and more imaginative. It is the zeroth step on an individual and collective journey of reflection, introspection, and change.

I am very excited about the next steps.

Social justice and sustainability - the conflict of time

The way we've posed the problem of sustainability has had a huge impact on the outcomes we've deemed as feasible. As I've written previously, the world has basically defined three pillars of sustainability- environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability, all of which intersect with each other but can also be mutually exclusive. The way the problem of sustainability is currently set up is such that goals and targets must be met for all three pillars - environmental, social, and economic. A "sustainable" outcome is some sort of "optimisation" of the three pillars. What this means is that there are some compromises that need to be made, and one or two of the pillars will be compromised more so than the others; there are conflicts and tensions between these pillars. Add on to this the issue of time - injustice now vs. injustice in the future - and what you have is a full-blown case of complexity and politics.

So how does a contemporary environmental justice problem fit in this paradigm? Not well. We can all agree that what we need to strive for is a world of lasting peace within ourselves and with the Earth we live on. But there are injustices that are happening right now that are a result of massive systems of oppression and violence towards people; we've exposed people to horrific living conditions, and have gotten them mired in a cycle of poverty that they honestly cannot leave. We need to deal with these issues right now. Unfortunately, as we witnessed in Delray, a semi-"just" (I cringe to use this word here.) solution now means affording people the opportunity to leave Delray by buying them out, or by beautifying their streets by funneling some money from the New International Trade Crossing project to the neighbourhood. But the bridge itself is not something that is sustainable in the long term. Rather, it further imprints on us the need for cars and trucks and shipping, while the fourteen thousand trucks passing over the bridge daily will worsen air quality for the residents left behind.

We're stuck in this mindset of trade-offs. We can give people money, but only at the expense of the environment. Short-term social justice trumps long-term sustainability. If we try to do less harm on the environment by not building the bridge, Matty Maroun will continue his monopoly, and people will have no money to leave Delray. Long-term steps toward sustainability might keep oppressive systems in place today. What I've realised is that there is no way we can live in a sustainable world unless everything (except the environment) is on the table for radical change - economy, society, culture, international politics and diplomacy.

We must act now in the best interests of those that have borne the brunt of our actions, and that means allowing these people a nicer place to live in. We must care for the abused, and welcome them into our neighbourhoods and circles, and break down the barriers that have held them back. This means that we, the privileged, need to change. Posing sustainability as a win-win problem ("sustainable development"), a problem in which we can alleviate ecological burdens on some while enjoying the lifestyles and privileges that others currently do, will only continue ecological degradation. We must therefore simultaneously envision a more holistic world - a world in which our human choices (say, of building a bridge or a dam) are tempered by an understanding that the long-term consequences of these choices lead to situations in which future short-term decisions will not be in conflict with future long-term actions needed.

Reconciling behaviour

We live our lives in ways that ebb and flow with the times, and it is a true that we are born in a time, and that we must live in that time. Nostalgia and reminiscence are nice and fun, but they cannot take away from the fact that life is lived now, or it is never. This doesn't mean that we accept all of the norms of the time we are in. Rather, the way we view the world must be nuanced and interpreted under the lenses of history and experience, as well as the immediate experiences we go through. Put more plainly, we must learn from the past, understand how the past has influenced the present, and see what needs to be done to avoid continuing behaviour that wreaks havoc on lives and this Earth. But even though we've gained a lot of knowledge over the past two hundred years, we've gained very little wisdom. Wisdom stands the test of time. Much knowledge can be fashionable.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of action or behaviour - those that are fashionable and ephemeral, and those that are true and good no matter what time or place or situation you are in. ("No duh," you might say.) It is clear that many fashionable behaviours, like industrialisation (it's been too long a fashion cycle, you might say!), are those that cause ecological degradation, and those that are good no matter what time we live in, like kindness and respect, are those that seek to preserve and sustain this planet. There is a dichotomy between scales here - industrialisation is a larger scale of activity than our individual lives. Why do many of our collective behaviours directly contradict our individual beliefs? I wrote earlier that the moral fabric upon which they operate is defined through the collection of our moralities. However, in the process of the weaving of the fabric, individual moralities are averaged out, resulting in a destructiveness that was from the outset unthinkable. 

And how do we reconcile what we are doing now with what we should be doing, individually and collectively? I believe there can no reconciliation, other than appreciating the effort that some people and some organisations are making in trying to better this world. More importantly, however, there can be no reconciliation, because the way we behave just isn't sustainable. This is the crucial point; we cannot eat our cake and have it too. If we cannot agree to the sustainability of our of individual and collective lives, then there's no reason to continue behaving the way we do as individuals, and there is no way we should be allowing larger organisations to behave in ways that are against the values we preach as individuals.

On legacy and time

Time is several things. It can be a measure of experience. The more we go through, the more time we feel has passed. The two weeks my class and I spent in Detroit felt like two months, because the sum of the experiences was tremendous. On the other hand, time might mean something very different for the Hadza in Tanzania, who lead hunter-gatherer lives. Michael Finkel, a journalist who spent time with the Hadza, met up with them in the following way. (I love this story.)

"Merely getting this far, to a traditional Hadza encampment, is not an easy task. Year's aren't the only unit of time the Hadza do not keep close track of  - they also ignore hours and days and weeks and months.n The Hadza language (Hadzane) doesn't have numbers past three or four. Making an appointment can be a tricky matter. But I had contacted the owner of a tourist camp not far outside the Hadza territory to see if he could arrange for me to spend time with a remote Hadza group. While on a camping trip in the bush, the owner came across Onwas (the eldest member of the group) and asked him, in Swahili, if I might visit. The Hadza tend to be gregarious people, and Onwas readily agreed. He said I'd be the first foreigner to ever visit the camp. He promised to send this son to a particular tree at the edge of the bush to meet me when I was scheduled to arrive, in three weeks.


Sure enough, three weeks later, when my interpreter and I arrived by Land Rover in the bush, there was Onwas's son Ngoala waiting for us. Apparently, Onwas had noted stages of the moon, and when he felt enough time had past, he sent his son to the tree. I asked Ngoala if he'd waited for a long time for me. 'No,' he said. 'Only a few days.'"

The Hadza have been living in the same place for tens of thousands of years, and are successfully living there right now. Does this have anything to do with how they perceive time?

What about when we are gone, those of us embedded in this degrading culture? What do we leave behind? Will our time on this Earth have mattered? Will our individual lives have mattered? What does time mean in this case? There seem to be two components of our legacy - a physical component, and a less physical, but more emotional and spiritual component. The physical component is comprised of things like trash and non-degradables, buildings and art. The emotional and spiritual component is comprised of what we strove to do with our lives, the impacts of our words and deeds.

When it comes down to it, what do we want to leave behind? I would hope that once we are gone, our physical impacts on this Earth should be as little as possible. Any imprint of our physical existence should decay quickly, or just not be there at all. Trash then becomes a massive problem. And anthropogenic climate change is a physical legacy, too. I would hope that where we once tread, only flowers return year after year, no toxicity, no degradation. What about the emotional and spiritual legacy? I would hope that the good work we do on this Earth, our words and our deeds, have a longer decay time than our physical legacy. But first and foremost, our work must be good, our deeds must be good, our thoughts and actions must be good.

Leading twenty-first century lives with Stone Age minds

When it comes down to living, we live because of what is around us, and we are less influenced by what is far away. The water that I drink needs to be here for me to drink it, and although the water in the Aral Sea was probably once here, it is not here now, and therefore, in some sense, I am unaffected by it.

It is likely that most of us think that our immediacy is most important to us - spatially, temporally, and emotionally. We generally care more about where we live than where we don't live, now as opposed to the future, and those closest to us, our friends and family, than those we've never met. Just a few hundred years ago, the bounds of our influence were defined by our immediacy. If we couldn't interact with people that lived thousands of miles away, or even just a hundred miles away, there was likely no way to influence those lives.

But today, the extent of our influence is the entire world. We have this influence, whether we like it or not. This influence has led to many great things (say maybe the spread of various rights for humans), but many destructive things, things that we have trouble even wrapping our minds around (like global poverty, like climate change). Unfortunately, our ethics and behaviour, which have caused the massive problems that face us, are wholly inadequate when dealing with these problems. We still end up focused on our immediacy; we still don't sympathise with people in the Maldives, whose home will be under sea in just a few years.

It is likely that over the past few hundred years of industrialisation and globalisation, our brains haven't changed much - evolutionarily, a few hundred or a few thousand years is nothing. While we have new knowledge about the world, while we have built planes and trains and automobiles and buildings and bridges, our ability to really and truly conceptualise the problems that face us and do anything about them rarely takes us further than our immediacy. And so, as Jon Kabat-Zinn has said, we lead twenty-first century lives with Stone Age minds. 

This means that what we need to do is limit our influence on those (people, trees, fish) we aren't able to sympathise with by expanding our ethical framework to encompass everything in this world. What this likely results in for our lives is an intense localisation - of space, of time, of emotion. We need to bring back the bounds of our influence (influence that results in ecological degradation) close to home, so that we see it and feel it, here and now. And that'll really make us think about and do something about our influence.

Intentionality and appreciation

After having traveled at home several times over the past few months, it has been reinforced to me that I am very lucky to be where I am, to have what I have. There is a uniqueness about each place and time, in my life and in yours. Observing this uniqueness is just a matter of living intentionally.

Rebecca mentioned in a comment a few weeks ago that while traveling at home is absolutely possible, it takes more "directed attention;" we might need to remind ourselves that we are actually traveling, even though we are at home. What I might suggest then for all of us is a directed attention of sorts. In a world of noise, one-hundred and forty character messages, and constant stimulation, this directed attention will likely require intention...hence living intentionally. What these words and phrases - directed attention and intentionality - may mean is simply appreciation.

I think our culture and society have ingrained in our minds and psyche a decided unappreciation. We are constantly distracted from what surrounds us by what we wish surrounded us. There is a constant urge to be somewhere else, both in time and in space. The very notion of progress hinges itself on a sort of dissatisfaction of here and now. As I mentioned previously, our I think a lack of appreciation is one of the fundamental drivers of our behaviour in the industrialised world. We are made to feel wholly inadequate about almost everything - women aren't "beautiful" enough, our smiles aren't "perfect" enough, our shoes and bicycling parts aren't the "latest." Very little of what we have already, and where we are already is appreciated. If we were to suffuse our every action with appreciation and intention, we would live against the grain of this ecologically degrading culture, and that is a good thing.

If we truly appreciate something, we wouldn't tolerate it being treated unjustly or violently. We would care for what we have and respect it. If we truly appreciate what the trees do for us, we wouldn't just stand by and watch as acres and acres of rainforest are cut down every day, whether for agriculture or for furniture. If we appreciate the air, the water, the land, take a stand, and live intentionally.

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.

Traveling at home: It's in your backyard

I have not written about traveling for the past few weeks, and that is because I have been involved in helping a group of students understand the complexities of urban planning, justice, and sustainability. I am back in Ann Arbor now after having spent an incredible two weeks in Delray and Detroit, away from the privilege of this town. How the experiences of these past two weeks have changed me I am unsure of. What I do know is that I have changed. In-depth conversations with the residents of Delray and animated discussions with the students in the class have provided me much to ponder about, much to mull over.

Travel is about time and space, just like trash. I feel as if I have come back from a long voyage of two months, not a two week trip to a neighbourhood forty miles away. Caleb had a reason why. He told me, "Time is a measure of change." It seems that a much longer time has passed because much has happened in my life (and the lives of the students taking the class - I can attest to that...I've been reading their journals) and I have learned much in these two weeks...all of this in our backyard, our backyard of Southeast Michigan. 

When we think of traveling, we think of faraway places, we think of exoticism, and we think of new people. Fundamentally it seems then that most traveling comes down to new experiences. Traveling takes you away from the routines many of us have become used to; traveling provides us a fresh look at the world and our neighbourhoods. What we learn on our travels impacts the choices we make and the way we live. What these past two weeks have further reinforced to me is that traveling can happen right here, right now. A new destination is in your backyard, on your street, and possibly in your own room. It is just a matter of perception.

This may be quite obvious to say, but the difference we can make in the world depends on how we choose to be affected by and respond to what surrounds us. It is possible to walk down the streets of Ann Arbor, or wherever you live, go on the same walk you've been on many times before, and have it change your world view, or at least modify it slightly. As I have mentioned before, reality is what we make of what surrounds us.  Now while I am not saying that people should not go to faraway places, what I am saying is that despite all the pressures of being "upwardly mobile" and gaining "social capital," traveling, and learning and action more broadly, consists solely of opening up ourselves to the possibilities that constantly surround us. Such a mindfulness will hopefully make us consider the ecological impacts of our choices.

"Instantaneous" trash

I apologise for the non-thought-out nature of this post; there's just a lot going through my head and for once I can't wait until it is the weekend! 

One kind of trash I am particularly struck by is the sort of "instantaneous" trash, i.e., the trash that comes out of an activity so small on a time scale, that it is truly meaningless and avoidable and selfish. (If you have a better name for this kind of trash, please let me know.) I am talking about how at BTB (formerly Big Ten Burrito), the worker will put a burrito in a paper bag, followed the person that ordered the burrito instantly taking it out of the bag, sitting down literally two feet away from the register, eating the burrito, and throwing away the bag. I have seen this numerous times. Another example is the trash that comes out of just a moment or an event. This past Saturday was the annual Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, which left the town literally drowning in trash, as you can see here.

 

This touches on a previous experience I had in Chicago, as well as on some things I thought about a long time ago about why we trash - we honestly don't think about more than just ourselves or the small group of people around us.

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.

On rapid responses to technology

To clarify after having received some comments from my last post, what I mean by "technology" is the technology that has been brought into the world in the past few decades, the rate of whose further introduction has followed something like Moore's law. That rate is an incomprehensible one. This is the technology I will continue to talk about in the next few posts.

At our monthly Sustainability Ethics Roundtable, the topic was a timely one, for me at least: Technology, Risk, Ethics and Sustainability, and the discussion was led by Professor Andrew Maynard of the School of Public Health and the Risk Science Center. One of the significant issues with technology that he pointed out is that given the kind of technology being introduced, and the rate at which it is being introduced, we do not have even slightly adequate mechanisms in place to assess whether or not that technology is doing potential harm in the world; we do not have mechanisms in place to respond rapidly to the technology itself. This is somewhat related to what Jon Kabat-Zinn has said, where Kabat-Zinn speaks of an emotional and metaphysical understanding of technology. Regardless, the issue of response and understanding is kind of like the issue of water pollution or air pollution (of course, technology is intimately related to these issues) in which we know toxic chemicals are being released indiscriminately, and yet many laws in place do not allow for adequate protection of those natural gifts and human health. The way that our legal structure is set up, at least around environmental issues, is that significant evidence beyond an ill-defined threshold is required, gathered over a long period of time, before any judgement can be made about the toxicity of a technological process or output. (This raises the significant issue of time scales associated with negative outcomes.) During that time, people have made money, grown in power and grown in influence such that the end result is likely not a discontinuation of the technology, but rather maybe a Pigouvian tax on the technology. Such is the case with technologies that result in greenhouse gas emissions, but in this case, it is politically infeasible to even have a rudimentary tax on emissions.

It seems to me that there are several reasons why we don't have adequate mechanisms and checks on technology in our society, and I hope to elaborate on these in individual posts over the next few days.

• We equate social prosperity with economic prosperity, but we can only achieve economic prosperity if we can consume, and we can only satisfactorily consume if what we consume is something different that what we have already consumed. Consequently, social prosperity boils down to an increasing reliance on technological advancement. This means we feel that more technology is always better than less technology.
• We have convinced ourselves that if we don't do it, someone else will, so we should try to make a buck off of it.
• There is always a vested interest in the development of new technologies, such that its development necessitates its use.
• There is an increasing diffusion in those with access to technology.
• The potential negative impacts have much longer time scales for their emergence and recognition, but the positive impacts (increasing amounts of money) is necessarily shorter term.

There are likely several other reasons, but I don't claim to be an expert in knowing them all. But what I do feel is that we are continuing to live in a world in which we don't learn from our mistakes. We therefore will continue in a world in which we can do no harm, and that the answer to any problem caused because of technology is a newer technology. The Watson computer (or the analytic methods) developed by IBM is touted as only a good thing. But if we tried to ask those very developers the potential negative outcomes of their system, will they have an answer? Will they have adequately assessed the risks (not only in terms of money value) of such capabilities? I hope so. How might we envision a future in which not more is the answer, but appropriate is the approach? Just because technology is good for one thing does not mean it is good for, on, or to something else.

On ownership

One of the defining concepts of our society is the notion of ownership. This goes far beyond the territorialism that animals may display to mark and guard their places of habitat. Human notions of ownership stretch beyond the bounds of their habitat. We have a system in place which monetarily values places other than habitat in a way that drives humans to "own" or "buy the rights" to those places. For example, much of the land in the US is actually leased to oil and gas companies for drilling (and this has not stopped those companies from trying to drill offshore, in virgin waters). But we also want to stretch our influence to the habitats of other humans, too. Fracking for natural gas is a great example - people from elsewhere are trying to buy off people from elsewhere because those people are unfortunate enough to have natural gas bound up in geologic structures under their land. In fact, our knowledge revolves around how we can own what nature hides - physical laws, chemical reactions and photosynthesis. In this sense, ownership leads to another sort of exploitation - how might we use nature and modify how it works such that we can derive the most monetary gain? Our need for ownership stretches far beyond land on Earth. Here is a woman that claims to have bought the rights to the Sun (thanks for this, Sherri!), and she fully intends to charge all users of the Sun.

It is fascinating how humans, that live individually on time scales of decades, can "own" something that has existed long before they did, and will continue to exist long after they are gone. Notions of ownership have in fact produced just the opposite of what we would want - what we would want is for our nature to sustain us for as long as possible, but in our quest to own, we have degraded. Just the reverse of how we think is what might be more logical- we are owned by this land, this air and this water, and our fate is tied to our respect to those forces.

Ownership also plays a significant part in our daily lives, and its influence also leads to much waste and trash. My laptop computer is now seven years old; it hobbles along, and at times sounds like a jet aircraft at full throttle trying to take off. I have not yet bought a new computer. In fact, I have used the computer just a couple of times in the past four or five months. Many of you might say, "How have you been living so long without a computer?" My answer is simple - there are computers in my lab, and all around campus, and so I don't need one of my own. I guess it would be more "convenient" to have one of my own, so I would not  have to bug my housemates to look something up every now and then (although I think I may have asked them just a few times in the past few months). Had I felt the need to own a computer of my own, I would have had to acquiesce to all of the trash and violence associated with such a purchase. (I know there are tons of people who hoard used computers and sell them - that may be an option.) But in general, there are things that all of us don't need to have, and maybe we can make due with just one lawnmower for a row of five homes, or and older family may be able to hand toys down to a younger family. A refusal to have one's own may in fact lead to stronger, more resilient social bonds.