Seminar Three | Fall 2012
Professor Alexandratos
Office Hours: Monday and ThursdayITF: Karen Gregory
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Author Archives: dp
Posts by dp
Ocean Cleanup
Week 12 — Demetra Panagiotopoulos
When I think about all the ways that it could go wrong, nuclear power terrifies me. Why? Because fission is a process that unleashes potentially catastrophic amounts of energy, and because it’s being put in the hands of human beings. People—whatever their accomplishments—are just people. And I have trouble trusting them. Nuclear power could work out really well in a better world. (Ahem, like in France). And it could work just as well here, too, once people get over their carnal American need for profit and start doing/spending whatever it takes to ensure people’s safety. As long as private investors have a stake in this, the corporations that build and operate nuclear power plants will always have their eyes on the short-term bottom line. They’re operated by trained and qualified engineers, but a corporation-esque board of trained and qualified engineer-directors is what makes decisions for them. A long-term overhaul would clearly cause a drop in the stock value, so instead of pushing forward for reform, the power plants only nudge through the standard level of maintenance and repair that regulators expect. They’re still businesses run by businessmen. We can do better than that.
I chose to argue for keeping the Indian Point Power Plant open because, theoretically, it could work out. I truly believe that it could. But I still wouldn’t want to live near it. Because, like the city’s subway system, it’s old and outdated. Because it’s not as securely built as a 21st-century reactor could be. And, most of all, because I don’t trust the American way. Can we get things right? Yes. Will we? I don’t know. And not knowing makes me afraid.
Maybe nobody noticed, but in my argument, I chose not to overly focus on the economic advantages of nuclear power. Because money is not the bottom line. Corporations might see things differently, but that’s too bad, because corporations are not people. They are groups with a specific, highly self-centered and self-interested goal. What do they value? Do they have a conscience? It all depends on the people involved. But, because of their size and their capital, they inherently have more power—they have a greater capacity to do good or cause damage than individuals alone can—and that’s why they can’t be allowed the same freedom in their decision-making as individuals.
The bottom line is quality of life. Having more money does not automatically equal a better quality of life. In America, people often have more than enough to spare, and it seems to me that this surplus capital can go three ways—people can invest it, save it, or waste it. What are we doing with our surplus capital? Are we just going spend it without thinking, causing as much damage as we can unintentionally manage until we run out of fuel? Will the profits from Indian Point wind up more often in the accounts of wealthy investors, or will they go into reinforcing our current clean energy technology standards and researching even better alternatives?
Nuclear power comes with inherent risk, but the long-term cost to the environment—and to the humans directly and indirectly involved with it—is much smaller than the cost of mining, deforestation, fracking, oil refining and whatever else humans do to suck the last vestiges of fossil fuels from beneath the earth’s surface. It is, by far, a cleaner option, when done properly. And when done properly, it’s safer. Whether we choose to make it work is up to us. Whether we choose to take advantage of its potential and enforce the best possible standards is, as I stated in my debate, up to us.
Week 11 — Demetra Panagiotopoulos
PlaNYC seems like a good start towards sustainable development. That’s not to say that our job will be over once it’s completed. Even if PlaNYC’s goals are reached, the general population would still be nowhere near achieving 100% sustainability in our lifestyles. But it’s a start. It’s far better than not having any plan or policy at all. Changing habits this ingrained and widespread is a painstakingly slow process, but baby steps are better than complete immobility.
The plan is very vague about how the city will go about achieving its goals, which could be both an advantage and a disadvantage. For one thing, it leaves plenty of options open. So when it comes to reducing greenhouse emissions, shrinking combined sewage overflows, and combating traffic congestion, we can do whatever it takes to reach these ends—without being bothered about the specifics of government policy. Right? Hopefully. Or the ambiguity could lead to long legal debates about which specific technology or course of action would be best for each case. These debates would have to happen at some point down the line, of course, but the fact that they aren’t already resolved means that we have even more opportunities to go wrong—to choose low-cost convenience over investments in sustainable development, to compromise rather than push forward. We have many choices—but once we begin to walk a certain path, it’s hard to opt out of it, as our current situation demonstrates. We need to be careful and stay involved.
One example of this ambiguity that particularly troubles me is the pledge to pursue “cleaner, more reliable power”. What does this mean? Does this mean investing in mechanisms for fossil-fuel burning plants—researching techniques to make energy production more efficient, filter out wastes more effectively? Does this mean building new nuclear power plants, or upgrading and maintaining the old ones? Does this mean resorting to solar energy, or to fracking? How would the government of the city go about executing any of these options? The stage is set for a prolonged and heated tussle over one of the most urgent questions that faces the city today.
Another thing that bothers me is that plaNYC says absolutely nothing about curbing growth. Growth is nearly always used as a positive term these days—for cities, for people, for economies and industries. Growth is a goal. But why does it have to be? Why do we continue to see all growth as desirable? When something begins to grow out of control, it’s called a tumor. Population growth is not the problem. The problem comes when the powers that be expand production exponentially and then use marketing to turn humans into consumers. How are we going to lower our greenhouse emissions while simultaneously increasing the power supply? We’re not quite at the stage where that can be done, yet. (And why do we really need to increase the power supply if we already have a surplus?) How are we going to reduce transportation congestion and make sure that everybody lives within a 10-minute walk of a park while coevally adding a million homes? And who’s going to live in those million homes? Are they going to be affordable enough to attract people from the more crowded, poorer areas of the city, or will they only attract newcomers—more affluent people from outside of the five boroughs? What will those homes do, overall, for the city? And where will they be squeezed—into new, completely undeveloped lands, or into preexisting neighborhoods? How will they meet their energy consumption needs?
PlaNYC tries to tackle the issues of economic, social and environmental equilibrium all at once. It’s not a perfect plan. PlaNYC is only a small first step. It leaves us with plenty of choices, and each one addresses at least one of the three goals of sustainable development to a certain degree. Finding the balance is tricky, but, in the long run, sustainable development is most definitely worth the work and effort that needs to be invested in it, especially in growing cities like New York.
Week 10 — Demetra Panagiotopoulos
Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, celebrated its 50th anniversary a short time ago. The New York Times article that we discussed in class examines Carson’s later life, especially what she went through in order to have that book published. I never knew that she faced such a personal struggle just to finish it—we never learned about that anywhere in school. I still don’t think most people know her story. Even in the face of debilitating and deteriorating illness, she never gave up on what she saw was her responsibility to her fellow human beings, and to the future of life on this planet.
Rachel Carson knew that she was only one person, but she also realized that one person—any person—can make a huge difference. She realized that it isn’t your place in the world that determines your future, but what you do there. As J.K. Rowling wrote in the first book of the Harry Potter series, “It is our choices, Harry, that show us what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” Carson looked at the potential impact of her choices in the long run—in those moments when she struggled with her lack of motivation due to her illness and their treatments. And she made a decision that she wouldn’t be ashamed to claim personal responsibility for. She decided to care.
Some people might point out that Rachel Carson didn’t have the pressures of a “real” life—she had no husband, no children of her own, and nobody to work for but herself. Some people might say their obligations to their loved ones prevent them from actively caring for the planet. There are two ways to refute this assertion. One is through Carson’s story—she cared for her own ailing mother and her late niece’s child while battling to finish Silent Spring—and while she wasn’t answering to a totalitarian boss at the office, she was struggling under the rule of cancer. Hence, the first refutation: the only things that prevent you from doing what you know is better for the planet are the things you allow to stop you—and if you cared enough, you wouldn’t let them. In other words—quit making excuses.
Certain uninformed people might respond that they’re not making excuses—they just happen to care more about people than they do about crickets. In other words, Rachel Carson must’ve cared an awful lot about crickets. But is that really the case? How did she finish her book—did she value her work just as much as, or more than, she valued her loved ones? I don’t think so.
I think that she worked hard on that book for the people and the world that she cared for. She knew that the Earth is our only home, that we all share it, and that we need to be careful not to cause any irreversible damage. She knew that we don’t fully understand the web of life on this planet yet, and that mankind often mistakenly imagines itself as above it, detached. This brings me to the second refutation—that when we neglect the environment, we neglect ourselves and every other human on this planet. To me, that statement is a fact.
Unfortunately, some people feel the opposite way. The recent increase in the ferocity of hurricanes? Obviously unrelated to human greenhouse gas emissions. Cancer, diabetes, hypertension, obesity? Completely irrelevant. Taking over the environment, certain people say, is what gives us a better quality of life than in other parts of the world. Better, I respond, if you devalue what is healthy, what has not brought harm to anybody in coming about, and what is lasting and sustainable. Better if you’ve convinced yourself that you “need” things that you really don’t. Better, perhaps, if you value what is quick, cheap and easy so much that, rather than take responsibility for supporting the system that produces things thus, you’d prefer to be a human being that looks the other way.
Crazy Life — Demetra Panagiotopoulos
Political activism takes many forms and exists on many levels. On the national level, organizations raise money to elect and lobby candidates in their own interests. On the community level, a group might sponsor an ad campaign, gather signatures for a petition or a hold a local event to raise awareness. And on the individual level, everything from the food one chooses to buy to the beliefs one expresses while in company can spark new thoughts and a change in the behavior of those nearby. When it comes to the personal choices one makes, artists have yet another option—to unleash their beliefs and feelings into the world through their art. This is what Frances Ford Coppola does with his 1982 film, Koyaanisqatsi.
Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word whose shades of meaning include “crazy life”, “life out of balance” and “a way of life that calls for another way of life”. Coppola illustrates it through his juxtaposition of a classical Philip Glass score and Hopi chanting, by confronting viewers with the disparities between things wrought by nature and things that are man-made. It is an avant-garde film—perhaps not excessively so for somebody that has gone near the visual arts scene in 2012. The film itself has no characters, only scenes of the Earth and the variety that spreads across its surface. It tells a story but does not have a plot, nor narration. Its slow pace could make it more difficult to ingest for people used to the fast flashes of today’s movies, to six-minute-tops YouTube videos. The way that it lingers on each scene stresses in viewer’s minds the passing of time. It emphasizes the enormity of all things nature created, the cheap transience of what humans make, and how quickly humans can destroy both.
The scenes of nature that the movie begins with are mostly landscapes—deserts, oceans, mountains, clouds—that hit the viewer with the grandeur of the Earth. One could find beauty on a smaller scale, but rather than focusing on plants and animals, Coppola decides to highlight the vastness of the planet. Watching it makes you feel small. Taking in the massive mountains—that stand for countless human lifetimes—makes you feel insignificant. You realize how slowly the land forms, ages and changes on its own. It dawns on you how small a fraction of time you’ll be alive in its presence. In the scenes with clouds, racing or rapidly shifting, you notice that fluidity and movement are also a part of the earth’s equilibrium. It illustrates how, though faster at changing than huge rock formations, water and the atmosphere do not leave a trace of a scar. They, and whatever they carve over time, fit neatly into their place in nature, however chaotic or uncontrollable humans find them. The shot taken from a plane as it flies just above the surface, over mountain, tree and water—the horizon rushing towards the viewer—gives you the sense of something limitless.
Entering the scenes of human creations, viewers encounter a very different set of ideas. Some sort of land-clearing vehicle, quickly obscured by the black smoke of its own expulsion, marks the ominous transition. It disappears completely into the fumes—you never see it move, but the scenes begin to shift, and explosions begin and spread. The mountains—whose strength and endurance you had just finished appreciating—crumble to debris in seconds. Power lines cut across skylines, power plants flatten the landscape they lie on, and the level of variety on the Earth’s surface plummets. Soon, the only surfaces you see are flat ones—glass, concrete, sidewalks, walls. Soon, things become predictable. Lights switch on and off in windows as sunlight slides over and past them. Assembly lines run on a repeat loop endlessly, churning out everything from cars to prepackaged food. Highways grow crowded at the same time every day because the practices of a human society demand it. Life has sunk into a rushed routine. And for what? As you watch, you get the sense that humans are making themselves part of a machine that runs their lives, one that they’ve constructed themselves. Soon the images shift again, and you see humans tearing down their own creations. TNT winds and snaps through city buildings, making them rubble as dust spreads outwards. You see flashes of today’s tools of war–the magnitude of the world’s investment in military technology. Military aircraft, aircraft carriers, tanks, and missiles give way to the explosions of the atomic bomb. In the final scene, we watch a space rocket rise into the atmosphere and explode due to a malfunction. Even after the rest of the rocket has disintegrated, a shard of its booster continues to consume fuel and spew out flames as it falls, spinning, from the sky. An unintended catastrophe, but a catastrophe nonetheless—and, some might argue, a highly preventable one.
The movie employs both sound and visuals to express its heavy symbolism. Throughout the movie, the music relates to what Coppola wishes to convey. The chanting of the phrase “koyaanisqatsi” is only present during the scenes with the spacecraft—during the opening credits, and during the last scene. These are the scenes that put an emphasis on the wastefulness of human practices that are completely unnecessary to life. The instrumentals sound smoother, softer and sweeping during the opening landscapes and quicker, more urgent and panicky, as the film phases into the details of human creation. The use of humans themselves in the film is also symbolic. The cave paintings at the beginning and end of the film show a type of human expression that can endure almost as long as the rock itself—a form of expression that came about before mankind upset the balance of life on the planet. The moving portraits of modern humans, meanwhile, illustrate the fast pace of life today. Some people smile at the camera, others scowl and look away, and others pose, but all of them seem too occupied with their lives—with wherever they need to go next—to give much thought to most of what is around them. One shot even shows people lying on the beach as a horrible power plant hovers over them, just on the other side of a nearby fence. What this says is that modern humans are too preoccupied with their conveniences to care much about sustainability. They’re too busy, and too estranged from the planet, to create anything truly lasting.
There’s a line from an e.e. cummings poem that goes, “Progress is a comfortable disease”—and that fits the theme of this movie exactly. To me, that line rings true. The surface of our planet—the very literal landscape—has been transformed by human greed, and our lives haven’t gotten any better in the process. What is progress, anyway? The earliest human societies were hunter-gatherers. They were communal, and small enough that everybody knew everybody else; there was no currency, not even any form of permanent settlement. There were also no homeless shelters, no orphanages, and no gas stations, because these things simply weren’t needed. People took care of each other. They had what they needed to live. Today, people in huge swaths of the world have more. They have much more than is enough, and they still don’t feel like it’s enough. So what has progress done? Has it taught us to be humbler, more compassionate, and more appreciative of what we have?
I’m not suggesting that scientific inquiry and business activity must halt—these things have always been a part of human life, and always will be. But, as Koyaanisqatsi shows, mankind is destroying the bounty of its own home. Humans today don’t value the Earth enough to keep from stripping it down and wasting it. What I’m saying is that our gifts can be used to bring us to a future where we’re still connected to the roots of our humanity, rather than to some stressful, unhealthy, unsustainable machine we’ve created. It’s a different kind of progress—one based on people acting in their own self-interest without being selfish. And, yes, it is possible. It can happen if people stop being hasty and recognize that when they improve the quality of life for the people and creatures around them, they do so for themselves. I believe that we will only have achieved real progress when people value everything that nature gives them and remember, as some cultures have long taught, that nobody floats above the web of life on this planet.
Week 8 — Demetra Panagiotopoulos
I don’t know exactly what “enlightened environmentalism” is or where the term comes from .I haven’t Googled it and I’m not going to. For all I know, it could be anything from a Sierra Club pact to a term of the professor’s own coinage. It’s not government policy, that’s for sure. The first three paths all have to do with the mindset transformation that must take place to put us on the tract to lasting change and sustainability. My guess is that the last two, as of yet unrevealed, will have to do with a commitment to action.
The problem with the actions taken thus far by the government, the only authority that can enforce environmental policies, is that they’re limited in their scope and their goals. The conservation movement delineated lands that would be protected from commercial use, but there’s nothing that can protect those lands from the environmental impact of commercial activities nearby or upriver. There’s no bubble that any piece of land can be shoved into that will place it above the Earth’s web of life.
The measures taken seem to have been put in place with hardly any sense of value for the land. Why were they conserved? So people could still have a bit of nature to enjoy, to divert themselves with after everything else is gone. I don’t think that the mindset behind the conservation laws was actually serious about protecting the environment from the impact of pollution in the long run. What they did was relatively easy and looked much nicer, in symbolic terms, to the public. Rather than chasing down big business and forcing them to follow regulations for ethical and sustainable behavior—which could’ve been reported as “socialism”, “communism” or “restriction of free speech” and provoked citizen outcry—the government took some pristine lands, stuck a ribbon on them and said to the public, Look—You’ve got a nice new park! It’s huge!
The conservation movement did nothing to reform agri-industry, a perfect example of this country’s craze for overconsumption, nor did it do anything to prevent, curb or clean up pollution. All it did was protect certain lands from the damage of being directly used for commercial production. What if all U.S. lands had been protected from such exploitation from the time that this country first absorbed them? America would not be what it is today. If we tried to change the landscape to what it was in the early 1800s (pre-Lewis and Clark), the economy would probably collapse and people would be forced to adopt to a new quality-of-life standard—to live off of what they could grow, gather and catch. And, while sustainable and probably healthier in the long run, this would bruise people’s first-world egos. We’re so used to having more than we need that we’ve redefined “need”—from “something necessary” to “something necessary to live the life most other people with disposable income are living”.
What do people need? Masses of people today feel that they “need” to preserve a wasteful way of life. They feel that they need more goods, not better ones. And once they attain what they want, they still want more. Two TVs? Well, we have three floors in our house…–and look! We can get a great deal!—why not make it three TVs? Why not? We work hard, don’t we deserve it? They don’t bother informing themselves about the sources of their cheap luxury goods. Neither producers nor consumers stop to think about the long-term costs. When the costs that don’t impact them directly are brought to their attention, they shrug and say, “Oh well.” They say, “Such is the way of things,” “What do you want me to do?” or, “It’s a shame, but . . . there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Humans need food, water and shelter. They don’t need a new cell phone every year just because they’re tired of the old one. They need clothes and medicine, but not to the point where they can’t even reach the deepest depths of their closet, become resistant to Tylenol or can’t even remember what the flux of pills in their medicine cabinets are for. They need technology that works, not planned obsolescence. And they need air, water, and land that won’t make them sick in the long run. When it comes down to what people really need, it turns out that there’s no need to exploit the planet or each other to attain it.
Week 7 — Demetra Panagiotopoulos
Emotional engagement, along with a general paradigm shift, are necessary for people to convert to more sustainable lifestyles because of the personal sacrifices people will have to face. People today say that they care about a cleaner environment, but what will they do to attain it? Will they only buy food that’s in season, or organic food if they can afford it? Will they boycott all companies that slip past environmental and labor regulations by exploiting overseas labor? Will they become part-time activists, slow the growth of their economies? Will they pressure their families and employers to recycle? How much, in short, are they willing to change? How much do they care?
The people who care the most are the activists. They are the researchers, the consciousness-raisers, the ones who bring their own recycling bags to events which they know won’t be providing. They’re emotionally engaged, and make it a point to fight for sustainability in their lives and the lives of others, even if it’s not terribly convenient. They are of critical importance in catalyzing change because they give people an alternative set of behaviors to mimic—make people stop and think, “Why am I following the crowd I’m following, when I could be following this one instead?” Unfortunately, only a minority of people are like this. Most people will cede that they care but excuse themselves from making change a priority of theirs by saying, “I’m too busy”. They’re too busy to care too much; they have emotional engagements elsewhere.
Why, then, do some people care more about sustainability than others? My guess would be that many people don’t see it as their personal problem. They don’t see it as their responsibility to care or do anything, because responsibility has still not been clearly relegated. It’s everybody’s responsibility to care—we all share this planet together. But because it’s such a collective responsibility, people feel comfortable ignoring it completely and focusing only on the personal duties in their immediate lives. They’re not emotionally engaged because they don’t see how the political can also be highly personal; they don’t feel that they can make a significant difference; they do not see the consequences of their inaction. Of course, they might simply not care, or feel safe in assuming that “progress” will eventually set the important things (whatever those are) right again.
This is why we need a shift in the way of thinking, a widespread change in values. As long as people value what is cheap, quick and easy more than they value something of quality and substance—that costs more in the short run but less when the long-run costs of production are accounted for—they will not care enough to change. As long as people think only about what they want to buy next, and not what it takes to make it—they will not care enough to change. As long as people feel that the consequences are minute, distant, and not their fault—they will not care enough to change. Until they feel that it is their personal responsibility, as denizens of this planet, to live on it without compromising the ability of future generations to do so, they will not care enough. It’ll always be one of the last things on their list of problems to tackle—until ignoring the problem becomes so painful that they have to do something about it, until the situation gets so bad that they begin to see things that scare them.
For a country that claims to have great faith in the power of the individual, we don’t seem to have much faith in ourselves. People go about their lives without making even the smallest, easiest eco-friendly changes because they feel that their choices don’t matter. They feel that one person is too small to make a difference. That’s not true. It’s a cognitive distortion, it’s a logical fallacy, it’s wrong. Everybody’s actions make a difference. Humanity is made up of individuals, and the sum of our individual choices, accumulated over time, reveals what we care about and impacts everybody. So how do we empower people to make the positive changes in their own lives that will benefit everybody? How do we make them realize that caring is worth it in the end? How do we make them believe that, by making more sustainable choices, they can impact the world in a good way?
Week 6 — Demetra Panagiotopoulos
The progress that we’ve made since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 shows just how painfully slow change can be. And it’s frustrating. Why should it take twenty years to go from acknowledging a need to actually starting to think critically about how to fulfill it? People’s priorities are elsewhere. Nearly every country in the world is obsessed with the idea of “progress”, and seems to feel that moving towards sustainability would only slow its growth. So, despite giving a nod in its direction, governments—influenced by big business and taxpayer interests alike—pass only the weakest laws and invest only the smallest amounts of money in it.
And part of the reason is that we’re stuck in a Nash equilibrium—none of the entities in the situation see anything to gain by changing. Industry bosses only see a loss of profit; most consumers see only the sting that their wallets would feel. Elected officials are afraid to pass anything comprehensive to the effect of making development sustainable because of the votes and contributions they would lose. This is a problem—people must realize that, ultimately, everybody will have to pay.
Air, water, and land, as I’ve said before, are common resources. The surface may be divided into tracts of private property, but there are no boundaries above and below it. If poisons are placed on one person’s plot, soaked up by the earth, pulled into the groundwater supply and from there taken to who knows where, they become everybody’s problem. As the saying goes, one man’s freedom to swing his fist ends where another’s nose begins. It’s easy to insist on the freedom to do whatever we wish on our own property. But is it really within anybody’s rights to take part in activities that inevitably affect the quality of life in other places? Our little plots of land are not closed systems.
It is possible to achieve total sustainability—social, environmental, and economic. Will it be cheap? Will it be quick? Easy? No. For one thing, sustainable technology is still developing. And it isn’t cheap—or, at least, it looks costly in the short run. For another thing, governments tend to be slow, especially when trying to coordinate international action, as we’ve seen with the UN. And they would be slow even if the majority of people were actively pressing the issue during elections, and even if the media were focusing on it, which they’re not.
This is why the first thing that needs to change is they way that people think. It’s not easy to try and undo the maxims society—family, media, education—has brainwashed people with since childhood. It takes time and it requires constant effort. The Civil Rights movement happened, yes—and yes, the US has elected its first Black president, but racism persists in people’s minds. That’s where the problem begins, and that’s where it needs to be tackled. When people value long-term contentment over short-term pleasure, then they will begin to ask for change. Only when they are dissatisfied with what today’s world gives them will they demand a form of progress that exploits nobody. And to be made dissatisfied, they must first be informed—they must realize the full extent of what they are paying, and what they are getting in return.
Week 5 — Demetra Panagiotopoulos
It’s interesting how powerful denial can be. You can acknowledge reality with your senses, take part in it, understand what’s going on, and still refuse to believe that it’s true. “I can’t believe it,” people say when a disaster strikes, because they have assumed conditions under which such a thing—fully likely in reality—could never happen. But choosing not to believe something doesn’t eliminate it as a possibility, or shake its truth. And people otherwise thinking rationally often trip themselves by denying the possibility of there being any variables which they don’t yet know of or understand.
This is what happened with the Southern Ocean. Humanity’s leading intellectuals and authorities on the matter assumed that they knew the rate at which an ocean—as a massive, circulating body of water—can absorb carbon dioxide. They underestimated the complexity of nature. They overestimated their own understanding of the situation and failed to ask themselves critical questions or search for data that could have brought the truth to their eyes sooner. They grew comfortable living in denial of the fact that, in the great scheme of nature that runs the cycles of life and physical phenomenon on this planet, they may have been something that they’d missed.
It’s not just scientists. All people do it. They assume that they know things and deny the possibility that they don’t, which is why they often let danger walk right up to them before they acknowledge the need to do anything. Even then they might deny the need for action—figuring that it’s somebody else’s job, someone else’s responsibility. So people assume that they’re safe from hazardous waste, and deny the fact that their safety, in the present climate, is not a given—that, unfortunately, violations of dumping regulations happen and are frighteningly likely to happen somewhere that comes into contact with their supply of food, water or air. And then they do nothing to push the violators to clean up, refusing—following the companies’ lead—to admit that nothing is being done.
People also have a hard time believing things that they can see firsthand—for example, that they can make a difference. Who can deny that a plastic bottle recycled is one less on its way to the landfill, or worse, to the ocean? Who would argue that turning off the lights you don’t need keeps energy from being wasted? People can, and people would, and people do. They think things like, “It doesn’t matter.” “It’s not a big deal.” “I’m too small to have any significant impact, so there’s no reason to feel guilty for not trying harder.”
In other words, people lie to themselves. They tell themselves that they see the whole truth and deny the possibility that they’re missing something or that they’re wrong. And, in doing so, they let the responsibility fall out of their hands. They lull themselves into a sense of security. They refuse to do anything to stop the disasters that creep up on them because they refuse, in the first place, to acknowledge their existence—which, in their minds, frees them from any duty to do anything.
Week 4 — Demetra Panagiotopoulos
New York City has an exceptional system for tracking the waste of its industries and residents. It can keep track of what gets thrown out and where it goes. It knows what can be recycled and which materials decay safely. It knows what industries and activities produce toxic and persistent chemicals that could maim people and damage the environment. It just doesn’t put this that knowledge to as much good use as it could.
That’s the problem with most of the world. We have all the information at our fingertips. We have opportunities to reverse the trend—sometimes they’re even shoved in front of us by others. We know what we can do better. We just don’t do it. Instead of taking our plastic bottle home to recycle it, we throw it wherever is convenient. Instead of packing our own lunch, we eat at McDonald’s. Instead of buying solar panels, we buy a third plasma-screen television. Cultural norms in the West today emphasize instant gratification whenever possible, and this leads to a huge system of efficient wastefulness. Today’s norms emphasize convenience, and this leads to laziness—or, to put it more kindly, to a general sense that things that require a little more work to get aren’t worth the effort. And, despite cultural norms that claim to appreciate independence and individuality, most people still continue to do as the majority does—whether it means “forgetting” to recycle, not thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions or simply not caring.
When it comes to the environment, this boils down to soiled disposable diapers floating in the Rio de Janeiro. We know that there is no way to recycle these things—they will persist for ages to come. Their numbers will keep growing, unless: a) people stop having babies altogether, or b) people start using cloth or biodegradable diapers. What stuns me is the fact that their mass production and use ever started. What dumbfounds me is how today, having had decades to ruminate the consequences, people have still not done anything to stop or reverse this trend.
Didn’t the inventors stop to think that there would eventually be mountains upon mountains of used diapers with nowhere to go? Did they maybe imagine they could be used to build out the coasts of Manhattan or San Francisco? Did they hope that somebody would eventually shoot them into the Sun, or find something else to do with them? Did they just forget that the Earth does not expand into infinity and that everything produced takes up some more of its finite space? Or did they not bother to consider any of these possibilities, deciding that they didn’t care, or that—despite creating it—the problem was not their responsibility to solve?
The data is at our hands, along with the wherewithal to improve things. We can begin to turn our ship away from the iceberg whenever we feel like it—even if it’s only by fractions of a degree at a time. So why does change drag its feet? It goes back to the way that people think, and what they value. If cultural norms insist that something—a lifestyle, a tradition—is right, then not many people will easily believe that anything is wrong with it, however harmful it is. People might not see a reason for change. Why should a faraway coastline be more important than your ability to change diapers as quickly, cheaply and easily as possible? Why should anything be more important than doing those annoying day-to-day tasks of living as quickly, cheaply and easily as possible?
The city of New York has laws meant to prevent toxins from infiltrating the environment and people’s lives. Carbon filters and dumping regulations have certainly helped curb pollution and improve quality of life, but it’s hard to imagine that these timely developments would’ve happened at the hands of corporations. And, whenever there are violations—as, unfortuanetely, there are—, the corporations make their excuses. My favorite so far:
EPA: These ponds have 20x the level of benzene deemed legally safe! Exxon Mobile: . . . No they don’t.
And, whatever their profits are, one of their common excuses involves corporations pointing out that it is their honor-bound duty to provide the consumers with what they want—quickly, cheaply, and easily.
Quick. Cheap. Easy. Are these qualities all that we, as a society, as a world, value? We need to reflect upon what we, as human beings, want out of life, and decide carefully.
