We are currently in the "bargaining stage" of our grief[1] about how we've built our lifestyles on a failure to pay for environmental externalities.
People living modern, first-world lifestyles are (myself included) horrified by the idea that we can probably only afford to live like the global middle class - which is tremendously deficient in services, infrastructure, material possessions and their built environment.
And so, otherwise intelligent people propose very silly things like the idea that if you just sorted your garbage just right your role in this crisis (the crisis of modernity, in my opinion) has been absolved.
For what it's worth, the final stage of grief is paraphrased as:
"It's going to be okay."; "I can't fight it; I may as well prepare for it."
It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life.
Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars.
Although, I might agree that it’s best (at least for me) if people don’t realize this or think about it in these terms en masse.
True, but from a resource utilization perspective those things are pretty wasteful. We could definitely meet somewhere in the middle, our options are not “everyone lives like kings and some are destitute” or “all live like kings”. The idea that anyone needs those things (or even deserves them more than anyone else) is the real enemy here.
Not only do I have vastly longer life expectancy, the quality of life during which I’m alive is likely much better, both physically and spiritually, except the getting 100 servants part.
Why not? There are ~7.7 billion acres of arable land on the earth. 0.25 acres per person would leave ~5.7 billion acres of arable land for agriculture.
Installing sewers and electrical grids and internet and roads and grocery stores etc. is more prohibitive than land, even if that land was available for sale
Technology will definitely help but think about it this way: people who live in those dispersed areas will likely be there out of necessity, not choice. How many people in say, rural Appalachia, are currently using Door Dash to regularly get groceries or can rely on solar to be off the grid? Grocery delivery doesn’t help much when you’re over an hour away because it drives up cost and limits the types of goods available. Those solutions already exist from a technological standpoint but they aren’t causing people to move en masse to these locations despite housing shortages elsewhere.
Door dash: none. Nobody is using it, or am incredibly small number.
Solar off grid: a decent amount. It’s certainly doable. It’s easier to be on-grid, though.
> The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...
I agree that in the long run, the fertility trend will reverse itself. But in the medium term, it’s not an excuse for not fixing global poverty.
Think of all the areas of the world in which neither the winners nor the losers of the wars have the things you refer to. Your statement (a) is incorrect, and (b) reveals that you have a dangerous and unpleasant view of your homeland (You're American; I don't think there's any doubt about that!) as a land of prosperity that is somehow due to its military prowess.
What resource is that constrained today? Beach access? I don't think people would even think about a war over that.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120618-global-resources... (image: http://i.imgur.com/L5qWNN9.jpg)
Rainforests, coral reefs, coal, oil, gas, aluminium, phosphorus, tantalum, titanium, copper, siliver, indium, antimony.
More seriously,
> They just end up in forms that are much more difficult to utilize
Right. And as the costs of, say, energy rise, people use less of it. Which means less mobility, less heating or cooling, less plastic, quite possibly less medical care.
Which means a drastic lifestyle change for the nonrich advanced-economy participants, no joining them for most everyone in less advanced economies, and more authoritarianism, war and civil unrest for everyone while the, um, "adjustments" settle in.
But things are fine, sure.
[1]: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/aluminum-statistics-and-in... (click on an annual PDF).
percent remaining = 100 * (r^generations))
Even at 90% recovery, over 90% of the original material is lost after 22 generations. The highest recycling rate of any material in the US is lead (mostly from auto batteries). The USGS reports that rate as ~70%, though this may be the amount of recycled material in new production.
Not really. More like we already cut them all down and it's easy to have sustainable use of young forests.
An awful lot of forest land is managed by commercial foresters, with an eye towards maximizing the value extracted over long periods of time.
And then there is the management of small plots, which is also often done by commercial foresters, with an eye towards immediately extracting as much value as possible once they convince the landowner to let them do a cut.
And recovery of degraded habitats may take centuries or longer.
Extinction of species is forever.
Use at rates greater than formation or in a manner which will result in extinction of a resource is nonrenewable and unsustainable.
http://www.differencebetween.net/science/difference-between-...
> It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life.
The comment you're responding to is saying that resources aren't constrained; we're just not using them effectively. That's a political problem and it can be solved only when people believe it can be.
We’ve already seen what happens to the world’s ecosystem when a very small portion of the world’s population lives a comparably luxurious lifestyle, and unless a breakthrough in thermodynamics is achieved in very short order, I don’t see how it can scale to the whole world.
All those new jet setters, car driving commuters, and air conditioned homes aren’t going to come without consequence. I’m not aware of any technological breakthroughs that can enable us to use resources without heavily altering the ecosystem.
If the energy isn't lost to friction then most of it can be recovered. Although I think it's impractical, the Hyperloop concept is one way to reduce friction. Instead of increasing transport speeds beyond current air travel, it could be used at the same speeds but much lower energy cost.
It took effort to fuck things up, which means that with effort, we can un-fuck things as well.
I'm not particularly convinced by the green new deal either: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...
I do believe that first-world, middle-class living standards, circa 2020, are globally possible ... just not in 2020.
By the time that those standards are globally possible without unpaid debits in the form of environmental externalities, there will be a new "first world" standard that we will then decide whether or not to borrow from the future to pay for ...
Netflix today has four times the annual revenue Blockbuster had at its peak. Which company consumed more natural resources? Which kind of car is more valuable, a Tesla Model S or a Ford Explorer? Which one consumes petroleum products?
Economic value is a measure of the value delivered to some customer, as measured by that customer’s willingness to pay for it. If I want to watch a movie, I don’t care whether or not somebody has to manufacture a hard plastic cassette or disk, in fact I’d rather they didn’t and they’d rather save the expense if there’s any alternative. If I want to drive somewhere I don’t fundamentally give a damn if the car is powered by the gasoline in the tank or by a hydroelectric dam in the mountains so long as I can get where I want to go in style and comfort. Efficiently allocating scarce resources is the entire object of the game—and if you add up everyone’s score at the end of the year, you have a measure of economic growth.
We are too smart for our own good, but not smart enough by half.
I don't know about the rest of your comment but there's no question that current first world standards are not possible for all people. It's a very simple math problem. If everyone ate beef and drove cars and consumed carbon and participated in wanton habits at the current levels of the first world then the planet would be utterly and irreversibly ruined. It's not even close.
I understand acknowledging our unsustainable habits makes us uncomfortable. But for better or worse that doesn't change the truth.
These are all highly developed countries. When we consider sustainability and the limits of global development, "American" too often stands in for "developed," and "upper-income-bracket Texan" too often stands in for "American."
Even among Americans, there are large differences between states in CO2 emissions per capita:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
New York has only 1/3 the per-capita emissions as Texas. If the rest of the globe wants to be like Americans, it still makes a big difference whether they want to live like in Houston or like in New York City.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...
Poverty was rampant and people lived in a feudal society, but people were by and large comfortable. The minimalistic Japanese esthetic that exists even now is a carry over from that period. People's dwellings were very small, but in comparison to European standards things were incredibly clean. There are numerous writings from Europeans who almost universally remark on both the level of poverty and on the surprising level of happiness.
There is an interesting book (the name of which escapes me at the moment) where the author tries to enumerate some of the things that the Edo period Japanese got right and that could be used as a model going forward.
One of the things that I think we, as a more affluent generation/society, often get wrong is that we equate prosperity with comfort. Indeed, we also equate comfort with being better.
A friend of mine was eating grapes that he brought with his lunch. "You know how sometimes you eat a grape and it's got this amazing flavour and sweetness, but sometimes you eat a grape and it is virtually tasteless? I mean, even with the same variety of grape. Why is that?" I had to explain to him that eating grapes in February is not necessarily going to lead to tasty grapes because they aren't really in season anywhere.
Why are we flying unripe grapes from half way around the world? And why are we ever trying to buy and sell grapes that are over irrigated and over produced so that they no longer have any flavour? Well, the answer is that people want to buy inexpensive grapes in Canada in February.
But, is this actually a good idea? As a society, perhaps we would actually be better off if you could only buy grapes in Canada in September or October. Maybe you would have culturally relevant food as well, instead of fulfilling every whim of every person in society.
And maybe we don't need cars everywhere. I mean, how many families have 2 cars? How many have kids and therefore have 3 or 4 cars? Are we actually better off this way? And do you actually need air conditioning in most parts of North America? And do we need to keep our houses at 22 C, and have remote car starters so that our cars idle and are sitting at 22 C for when we dash into them and we have giant underground tunnels all heated to 22 C and we don't have to walk outside when we are shopping, and all the parking garages are heated so that we don't even have to run to our car and don't even get me started about taking a bus, or walking out of doors: It's winter out there!
Which is not to say that I am idolising the noble savage and thinking that we're all going to turn into Tarzan and swing from tree house to tree house on vines in a wonderful magical world where we don't need anything. It's just that I don't think the pursuit of riches is necessarily going to enrich our lives and culture. I've been rich and I've been poor and I've got to say that the rich are often the ones missing out.
Overall it would be fantastic if more of the population could be happier without the newest shiny and an eye towards the durable, the repairable, and the least impactful but it takes a lot of effort to incorporate that process. I don't think it can happen without a broader cultural shift, particularly by those with the most wealth (who many first-worlders want to emulate even if only in one small aspect).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism is a useful reference. Of course Japan was not technically feudal, but the parallels with feudal Europe run deep, so most things I've read on the topic use that term.
One of the reasons I started avoiding conversations on HN of late is due to questions like this. It's appears to be a very shallow dismissal of what I was saying. I really don't mind if people disagree with me -- especially when I'm saying something as extreme as I have in this thread. However, you seem to be saying that the upper classes treated the lower classes terribly badly and therefore nothing can be learned from that era.
Indeed, when I say that Japanese people admire Edo culture, they are not only, or even principally, speaking of the noble classes. Indeed, most are referring to craftspeople, farmers, etc. In fact, you will even see a considerable amount of respect and gratitude toward the Yakusa who generally protected normal people against the excesses of the powerful. There is a reason for the huge number of Zatoichi movies out there, as well as all the ronin (disgraced samurai whose daimyo is dead, but who didn't commit suicide) movies where the protagonist wanders around and protects the common people.
When the Meiji restoration came about, the government was keen to take on European culture and technology which it viewed as being more advanced compared to the seemingly backward analogies in Japan. So suits and neckties came into fashion. Brick and stone were used to build buildings, etc, etc. Much of the appropriate cultural technology that had evolved to suit the climate and nature of Japan was thrown out the window.
Things like the natural life cycle of cloth was changed for example. Originally a parent would buy a kimono. When it was worn, it was taken apart and a kimono was made for the children from it. When it was worn, it was taken apart and cleaning cloths were made from it. When it was worn, it was burned as fuel. There was a general ban on burning firewood in parts of the Edo period because of over logging, and so people were very clever about how they got fuel.
Even now, if you go to a traditional futon store and try to buy a new futon the first thing the craftsperson will ask you is if you have old cotton from a futon or zabuton. In fact, if you do not, they may heavily encourage you to go away and ask your family for old cushions and what-not as they are very loath to use new cotton if they can avoid it. Again, this comes from the Edo traditions and is something that many people cherish in Japanese culture. It's also something that is slowly disappearing as the country becomes more westernised.
I hope you found the above interesting. I probably shouldn't complain about the quality of responses I get from crazy postings I make, but it's something I'm starting to feel more acutely these days. If you found what I wrote interesting, I hope you will find a way to encourage others to write something similar rather that to write in a way that may dismiss what they are saying out of hand. I'm sure that wasn't your intention, otherwise I would not have wasted my time typing all of the above, but I still had that feeling from reading the words that you typed.
From what I understood, you are saying that the old way of doing it was better, but I cannot help but feel, that some things are better on a larger scale.
For me the problem with modern recycling is more the frequency and the percentage that is actually recycled, not the scale it is done at. Maybe the scale contributes to the percentage problem, but I cannot imagine the frequency being caused by it.
The frequency to me seems to be caused by the marketing and the general mindset to always have the newest, shiniest toys, or to stay on clothing: fashion trends.
To your first point, I agree that some people seem to be dismissing an entire comment based on one small remark. Do you think the system being a feudal one contributes to the way recycling and consumption was done? To me it has more to do with the poverty and making due, what you have. This cycles back to reusing things you already used beyond their lifespan. I cannot imagine an interaction that is born solely of the governmental system, but please share your viewpoint.
Also: I don't think your viewpoint is too extreme. We should learn from our history and maybe we could even derive ways to move forward.
I think you are right that many of the things that are admired about the Edo period has to do with what's called "mottainai" in Japanese. In English you might say "Waste not want not". However there is more to it than that.
One of the things you might consider is that it is more efficient to use new cloth than old cloth -- because the industry is geared towards it. As you say, you can scale the industry towards making lots of new clothes cheaply. If you make clothes from old clothes, then it is not cheap. You need someone to do it. Similarly, if you recycle old cotton for new futons, it's a labour intensive process.
Maybe one day we'll have robots to do all of those things, but the attractive part of the idea is that it is a craft. It is precisely because it is not efficient that it is desirable. It provides a job. And it is more expensive. And people have less money and so there is less growth. But people have meaningful jobs doing crafts that they care about. So, is it actually less growth? It really depends on how we measure growth.
My cupboards are currently full of dishes I hate. I mean, it's really true. I bought them at the 100 yen store when I moved back to Japan most recently because they were place holders for when I had time to buy something I liked. But, actually, I think this was a mistake. I should have bought things I liked and done without if I couldn't find something. A bowl will last a lifetime. It will last several lifetimes. Why are we making bowls over and over and over again? Why are we not making bowls to make up for the extra population and then basically having people trade up to nicer bowls. Nobody I know has nice bowls. And yet if I go to the "recycle" shops (used goods which are mostly filled with stuff that they picked up from estate sales), I can get truly wonderful pieces for nearly the same price as the junk I got at the 100 yen store. How is that possible? Because we're optimising our processes for the wrong kind of growth (IMHO).
I often buy canned coffee (because I'm a lazy sod). I can't help but think what the process is. I want coffee. What's the first thing I need? Aluminium. Because I'm going to smelt me a can. And the can costs about 10 cents of the $1.20 that the coffee costs me (my friend actually engineers the machines that make the cans -- I asked him). So it costs "nothing". But isn't that kind of crazy? Why am I creating a can for such a transitory experience? And don't get me wrong -- the can is a thing of beauty. In the Edo period, I bet you could trade one for a house! But... I don't really need it. And this can, that is a problem for me when I can't throw it out accounts for just under 10% of the economic growth that happens when I drink the coffee. But I don't need it. I'm just lazy.
Sorry... thinking off the top of my head :-)
If everyone lived like the average american we'd be in deeeep trouble. We went way too far past equilibrium and the only reason we're still able to make somehow it work is because the majority of the world hasn't make it as far as us.
There are a number of currently less than popular steps that are obvious short / middle term answers.
* Nuclear power (cleaner, cheaper energy)
* Waste Reducing Nuclear designs ('breeder' reactors)
* Population design (reducing humans on Earth)
* Fund better land / farming use.
* Tax misuse.
* Colonies in space (orbit, moon, other planets)
* Establishing at least robots in the 'belt
* Building world ships to distribute backups
* Solar collector rings for more power
Entirely unnecessary. Native population growth rate is negative in every affluent country in the world, and they maintain their populations only via immigration.
Focus on improving the quality of life in third world nations (via investment, education, etc.) and growth rate will naturally fall, like it has everywhere else.
Though 100% social security and retirement security as a right has been theorized (at least in science fiction if not reality) to greatly discourage using kids as a retirement insurance policy.
I'm right up there with you on increasing global prosperity and raising the bottom though. That'll fix so many ills that achieving it would be a true benefit to everything.
-
Additionally - cheaper energy (my first two unpopular points) should be one of the theoretical routes to getting to this kind of outcome. Having enough energy means that all sorts of other things become economically viable.
What portions? What about them makes it less fair for them to fulfill their human goal of reproducing?
Second: I'm starting to think that grief is less about loss than it is about model change.
The more deeply embedded, and identity-providing that model is, the deeper the grief.
This seems to follow a continuum, with benign instances ranging from humour (often based on violated expectations when in an open mental state) and surprise, to anger (feeling agency against change), fear (lack of agency, but an option to withdraw), panic (disordered action), and ultimately depression or freezing (no sensible action).
Individually, adapting to major shocks means rescaling expectations and rewriting our own world models and life plans.
Collectively, it's all of that plus the challenge of coming up on a social basis a new set of tribal myths to replace the old standard.
(This is mostly my own construct, though it borrows heavily from a few sources, notably Kubler-Ross, as well as others. I'd be very surprised if there were no similar extant concept in circulation.)
Alvin Toffler expresses a quite similar notion toward the end of Chapter 8 of Future Shock, "Information: The Kinetic Image":
Change, roraring through society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to freflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or less rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increaingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, witdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis --- or even death.
The passage continues for another five paragraphs, recommended. One of the sources is Harold D. Lasswell's work on education, learning, and relearning, particularly concerning the limits on this.
I've long been a fan of applying K-R to existential threats and Big Problems:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/237qw6/is_tact...
I hate to be that guy, but: "citation needed."
Otherwise I do agree on recycling being mostly a boondoggle. But, again: politics. There are ways.
We have been using plastics for less time than fusion has been “just around the corner.” Going back to a plastics-free lifestyle will be easier than magicking up fusion power.
The point is: the claim is just that, a claim. A big, sweeping, depressing claim, without any actual evidence to back it up, and which doesn't hold up against a bit of critical analysis.
To be clear: I'm not saying we need fusion to keep our environment inhabitable for humans. Personally, I'm bullish on more effective use of the resources we already have, first and foremost through pigovian taxes. I'm pessimistic about the politics required to achieve that. But I disagree that we're doomed. That's patently false.
We are essentially doomed, because we have an economy geared around infinite expansion. No level of Pigovian taxation is going to suppress that. Taxes will lead to the house-for-every-family, bedroom-for-every-person, and tv-in-every-room lifestyles being unattainable and then people start rioting.
To produce food sustainably we need to find sources for phosphates other than mining. To produce anything out of metal we need to find sources of metals other than mining. We can’t keep going on the assumption that Earth’s crust has limitless supplies of resources, because we need that land to live on and grow food.
As for the politics required to get Pigovian taxes accepted, it’s very easy to run negative campaigns to scare people such as the Murdoch campaign during the Gillard Government in Australia telling people that the carbon pricing scheme was going to make a lamb roast cost $100, and that people wouldn’t be able to afford to turn on the air conditioning in Summer.
> By focusing on food waste, corporate actors wash their hands of their responsibility to ensure their workers are paid — and therefore fed — just as fast as they punt responsibility for environmental action to consumers. Food waste’s anti-hunger bent doesn’t only divert food from landfills — it diverts our attention from food justice.
And earlier in the article:
> anti-hunger networks like Feeding America are largely bankrolled by shiny corporate interests like Walmart and Kroger. On its own, this seems uncontroversial. But in light of the fact that these same companies notoriously undermine worker protections and pay workers measly wages — while consistently lobbying Washington to keep wages suppressed — claims to fighting hunger are straight-up deceitful.
The unwritten effect is that many smaller businesses who cannot handle the wage pressure were put into a bit of bind and some people employable at minimum wage won't make the cut at higher wages when people who would not have considered the job before enter the market.
* I only commented because people tend to herd mentality jump on anything negative about Walmart when in fact they do far better than much of the retail environment out there.
With the current ordering of our society, most people do not have the power or economic freedom to effectively advocate for change in our urban design, reliance on cars, or subsidies on crop monocultures.
Do you really think the people making small changes in the ways that they have access to would reject more significant structural changes? This seems like a complete caricature to me.
If you might be very near some threshold where the outcome can go from bad to good, then this kind of microoptimization in the face of macrowaste can make sense. Otherwise, it's actually more wasteful to do small things when the big things don't change.
The urge to "do my part" is a strong and important one, but in some contexts it leads to a more wasteful outcome.
Which eventually will enable new policies that do a better job of changing the big things.
Such as - I guess that the biggest, environmental, advantage of an electric car is signalling that hey, I'm willing to put many thousands of dollars and tolerate an reduced range - partly because I value the environment.
Doesn't matter if an electric car actually is better for the environment (buying a new car seldom is) - it signals a will and desire. Both of which are paramount for policy-makers.
Walk the walk and talk the talk in small ways on a daily basis, and learn about and push for policy changes to try and encourage big changes.
Or, to put it differently: on average, the people I know in my life who think about straw-waste reduction (and similar activities) positively are the ones also wanting larger changes. The people I know with disdain for "straw bans" and "plastic bag bans" also don't care about, or aren't aware of, the larger issues. They use the argument that "it's an irrelevant fix" as a shield to avoid thinking about the actual larger problems.
The skeptic in me believes the whole thing has been promoted to make people feel better and keep on consuming. Just like "recycling" where most just goes to a landfill or worse.
It's just another way to punt the problem to the end user instead of dealing with it in a systematic manner.
>It’s in the commodity itself the price of your leftist, honest, resistance to consumerism is included.[0]
Some hope for a consumerist or market solution because that is the easiest way to feel like a part of the solution and not part of the problem. Individual responsibility is a concept shared by both groups to varying degrees. This is exploited by the market to create a market for products advertised as solutions. These market solutions may not go far enough, but it signals a willingness to put your money where your mouth is. That it ends up being ineffectual or even counter productive is a cruel irony of consumerism and its way of serving its own ends and not necessarily those of any individuals market participants. It’s almost like the market is a means to its own end and any consequences bad or good are incidental to the goals of the participants. If we’re trained to shop on price or quality it seems that every kind of solution the market can provide will inherently be a marketable solution. As in a product or service or other good.
I guess what I mean to say is that the other group which is advocating for larger societal changes may not ever see progress. Social and legislative changes take time and effort. It seems the effect is much larger when these social changes are made in this way. Perhaps that is why regulatory capture is an important business concept. For market participants it is an existential necessity to make sure they can continue to participate in the market. We have misaligned incentives everywhere. It’s in the markets’ interest that we only see market based solutions as viable or possible or realistic. That makes us discouraged from pursuing other ways of signaling our desires and intentions and keeps us locked in as market participants. We never get better because we settle for less.
Sorry kind of all over the place and no real conclusion. Change is coming either way so might as well pull all the levers that make sense for your ethical and ecological framework and hope for the best.
>[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome. [2]
[0] http://www.jonathanwaring.net/2010/07/16/slavoj-zizek-and-th...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/cqu5x/slavoj_ži...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/269707-t-his-readiness-to-a...
We would likely be better off if we put all focus into the big things and completely ignored the small things.
This is immeasurably important.
Occasionally, the present needs to be destroyed regardless. But it's really a final resort.
It seems to me that you've made the assumption that all revolution involves violence and purges of dissenters.
historically speaking, revolutions are a crapshoot.
forward looking, revolutions are a crapshoot (often sold by people not acquainted with history).
This. In many many places you see people like that. Many NGOs and charities don't help solving the problems at all if not aggravating them. It makes me doubt if the people running them are actual well intentioned people or just selfish in a different way.
It is rarely, if ever, about feeling nice about yourself. In fact charity work generally demands being confronted daily with what you like least about the world. My personal experience working for an environmental NGO is that, while not entirely thankless, it is exhausting and often depressing work.
Our charity is one of the many asking individuals to take small actions in their daily lives. It's a small request and direct outcomes are difficult if not impossible to measure, however our org has been directly involved in any number of environmental policy changes across the many businesses and even cities that we work with. These efforts bubble up. From little things big things grow.
The many people bit is problematic due to our brain's make-up.
It's kind of incredible to me that we've banned plastic straws, but we aren't willing to add 10 cents / gallon to the cost of gas.
But that isn’t the goal; the goal is to look and feel like something is being done, but to not let it affect one’s quality of life.
1. Doing less stuff 2. Doing the same amount of stuff with fewer negative side effects.
In the long run we'll get 2, and in the short run we'll get 1. And simply applying the tax will allow that transition to be seamless and efficient.
Maybe I am just too pessimistic. But I see most those people not as "well intentioned" but as "wanting to be part of the group". And to be part of the group, you have to play that game. Like it or not. After all, as humans we are very social animals and most of us need that group recognition.
Yes. Having more than enough food is better than not enough, but to have obscenely more than necessary, and to have the excess go to landfill is 'bad'. To have that excess go to somewhere productive is 'better'. It might not defeat poverty, as the article points out, that is a systemic issue. But it can have positive environmental outcomes. e.g., if food is consumed more efficiently, we need less land for crops; we have waste decomposing as compost which releases less greenhouse gasses than as landfill.
The article does a good job of straw-manning attempts at making the situation better, including the grass roots collective effort of consumers to be more mindful (how is this a bad thing?), but there are coincident economic incentives and environmental outcomes to less waste, and that is a 'good' thing.
Alternatively: people desperately want actual change, but are prevented from seeing it by structural details of their government that they can't fix alone. At least... eliminating microplastics and wasted food, or buying renewable electricity and using it to power a personal vehicle, or eating less meat, or taking transit... these are things we can do, if not to fix the problem at least to demonstrate our commitment to its solution in a way that other people can see and hopefully emulate.
I mean, look: addressing climate change requires extensive government action, period. Everyone knows this. But all I can do is vote. After that, what? Is your position that the rest of us should just shut up, eat steaks and buy pickups until the rest of "you" get around to agreeing with us?
Hence no politician gets voted in who can actually accomplish the goal of reducing energy and resources usage, because that’s not really what the populace wants. They want to continue consuming and continue feeling good about themselves.
At the end of the day I just personally hate spending money on food that sits in the fridge unused then gets thrown out. Or gets cooked and thrown out because we cooked too much.
Only thing worse would be setting money on fire directly.
So yes, food waste is bad. Avoid.
9 words to save the world:
Treat others kindly
Two kids max
Plant based diet
Plastic bags and plastic straws are frowned upon because of how permanent they are and one of the most single use items we use that we live reasonably without.
I feel like you want people to make even bigger changes than what they're being led too. I'm happy with consistent, small victories.
Now imagine what happens if you give those well-intentioned but under-informed activists real power. One saw a lot of problems like that in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: folks who (mostly) genuinely wanted to do good, or at least (generally) didn't wish to do harm, but who instead wrought a great deal of economic (and more) harm to their countrymen.
One sees the same phenomenon in large companies, most of whose executives really do want to do good or at least don't actively wish to hurt anyone, but whose decisions often result in unintended ill consequences both to themselves and others.
So things like straws, shopping bags, and your personal home trash becomes the focus, while vastly bigger problems that are out of sight/touch. are out of mind.
Almost, but not quite. At the end of the day, there are people making extraordinary amounts of money from the status quo, and those people would rather have the general population squabbling over minutiae than demanding systemic change that would actually resolve the problem (and subsequently cause those people to lose an awful lot of money).
I just don't see this. Paying a few dollars more or (gasp!) going without a straw is low-effort virtue signaling.
In aggregate I don't see people voluntarily avoiding car or airplane travel, living in tiny, centrally-located shared apartments or skipping fruits and vegetables that are not grown locally (i.e. just potatoes and carrots 8 months per year). We are not going to shift the needle without fundamental change at the point of consumption. Regardless of where you stand this is where we should be deciding collective next steps.
Is that really it, or do people get a power trip out of getting plastic straws banned?
Our economic system is highly inefficient, and waste is a necessary part of maintaining profitable prices. This includes starvation, homelessness, and unemployment. Scarcity must be maintained.
Malnutrition, or simply hunger in more plain terms, is prevalent across every type of community in the US and the world. The ghettos of cities, trailer parks and economically depressed rural areas, dilapidated suburbs, and the often overlooked Native land reservations.
Just to get an idea of the inordinate balance of resources, consider that there are 552,830 homeless people in the US as of 2018 and 17,019,726 vacant homes. Billionaires hoard absolutely massive amounts of value generated by workers and do nothing with it or just let it sit in their portfolios.
This mode of production is obscenely inefficient and long due for an overhaul.
The mode of production in the US might seem highly inefficient if you have not lived in a different country for a prolonged period. But I can assure you, it is incredibly efficient.
Source: I lived in Venezuela for 25 years
This would be relatively simple to demonstrate: simply show that capitalist societies all experience significant hunger and malnutrition, and that non-capitalist societies do not.
You may find the latter somewhat challenging.
The majority of human history takes place in the mode of production of the hunter-gatherer society. This is before the agricultural revolution and the advent of agricultural civilization.
Economists describe this as early communism. The definition of this model is based in large part on the study of the Iroquois Confederacy. This, along with evolutionary models of food sharing, highlight a meat sharing system that is enforced communally. There is personal property, but private ownership of land and essential resources is nonexistent. The community owns the means of production as well as essential resources, and they dictate their distribution by need and not by profit.
In modern society, this would manifest as collective ownership of the means of production by the working class. The means of production are capital that is used to produce goods. Land, water, corporations, factories, etc. As workers exist worldwide, collective ownership would take the form of a global socialist state owned by the workers. This is the purpose of the world revolution.
As communities become organized around sustainability using vast amounts of capital created by workers under capitalism, the global state becomes redundant. At this stage, the economic structure returns to its original state, which is communism.
It's not a ideological debate, calling someone Marxist is as redundant as calling a physicist a Newtonian or a mathematician a Pythagorean. Capitalism itself as we know it was defined by that era of economic science. Of course we should remain skeptical and critical, as many ideas from that era turned out to be wrong. What's difficult is constantly working against decades of Cold War era propaganda and disinformation.
The primary American defense against the words socialism or communism is the idea that society is somehow built around personal character flaws and not laws of economic and political science. The capitalist is not inherently greedy, he simply follows the forces of economics. Communism is not some "ideal society" that works on paper but is undermined by human greed. It describes the majority of human history, and it requires a world revolution to exist again. Any nation that describes itself as "socialist" yet participates in the global economy is simply capitalist and masquerading as something else.
TL;DR Hairless monkeys are in-group favoring, mammalian magpie-like hoarders. Why would you expect something like ‘global good will’ to magically be embraced by the multitudes.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/19/bolivia-i...
This is my big takeaway from this article.
It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of sustainability, and how astoundingly futile or even counter productive it is. At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change.
At its base level things like urban design, our reliance on cars, subsidies on crop mono-cultures and the lack of proper introspection as a people hurt us far more than any of these specific problems.
Maybe we should start at the most basic question. Is food-waste even a bad thing to begin with. Food waste has been proven to not be the cause of malnutrition issues plaguing some parts the US or the world. If it is because of depleting water resources or land fertility, then crop-monocultures and mono culture subsidies are more at fault. Being sustainable is clearly more expensive, so it is certainly not a cost issue.
Across social, policy and organizational issues in the world, activists routinely assume a vague sense of what is "good" and then champion it, without actually looking into why something is good or what the word means in that context to begin with.
I know that not everyone is as utilitarian about how they go about things, but I often wonder if a concept even holds ground if it cannot be rephrased in a manner that makes sense in a utilitarian setting.