Alda Yuan

Professor Alexandratos

MHC 200

Week 8 Response

I feel that Macbeth was a particularly good choice for play adaption. The original already raises a lot of ethical and moral questions easily related to the issues we face today. Ambition and greed, the characteristics instrumental to Macbeth’s eventual downfall are also a part of the problem in changing our society so that we are no longer responsible for such sustained and horrendous harm to the natural environment. In this, I would say that all of us share guilt. Or course, unscrupulous businessmen like the one depicted in the movie can lay claim to large chunks of individual responsibility but we all, by virtue of living in and perpetuating our society, share some segment of the blame.

That is not to say that our societies and our place in history cannot be salvaged. In fact, I am firmly of the belief that it is possible to change our ways while sacrificing few of our material comforts. Indeed, I don’t believe that change is possible any other way than while continuing to preserve the way of life to which we have become accustomed. For instance, though I am well aware of the harm that carbon emissions from cars and planes do, I would hardly be willing to walk home to Virginia over the holidays or ride a sailboat to visit family overseas. But the key is that there does not exist the necessity to choose between extremes. I trust that human ingenuity, which has brought about so many change and so many benefits, has the power to offer acceptable solutions as well. And indeed, as the Principles of Engineering article shows, these middle ground solutions are already being developed and used. If we do not see their effect immediately, it is likely because there is always a barrier before the rapid evolution and dissemination of any technology or way of thinking. But, as pointed out by the article, once the changes are made, the financial benefits will come. And as long as people are conscientious about the need to recycle, these profits will come quickly.

The problem, as always is the get people to start taking these small steps, which do add up in the long run though it may not seem like it. That, I think is the idea behind the concept of the messianic moment. Many of the steps that we need to take toward redefining the problem and ensuring sustainability seem hopeless to a certain degree. This is especially true at the start, often because there are so few people around doing the same thing and providing moral support.

The same is true, I suspect of any major social movement or change. Just looking at our own past, the suffrage movements are prominent examples. Each individual protest and written tract was viewed by some as an exercise in futility. Much in the way that people maintain recycling or reusing is useless if you are the only person advocating it or doing it. And this serves as something of a cognitive barrier. People naturally shy away from positions and actions that are not accepted or at least not commonly adopted. Just as it takes an initial financial investment to kick start more efficient processes, success in something as comprehensive and overarching as environmentalism requires that one invest something as well. Participation requires an investment of time, effort but perhaps most importantly, of confidence your actions will matter. Perhaps it requires almost an element of something approaching doublethink to convince yourself that small actions will build up to a paradigm shift. But it should be a comfort to note that such things have been accomplished before.

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.

Seong Im Hong

October 29, 2012

The Opiate of Freedom and Trying

“Freedom doesn’t let you off the hook, and failing doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for trying.” – Tony Kushner

            Freedom is a slippery thing. It seems to be a masturbatory word for politicians to scream at the frenzied masses that are drunk on their own idea of freedom. We talk about freedom so much in our country—our very political discourse hinges upon freedom and how much is too much. In this class, we mention again and again the conflict between market freedom verses government regulation. Freedom, we think, is an inalienable right. But freedom exists because the opposite (or lack thereof) exists—servitude, constriction, and limitations. So when we talk about freedom in rallies, what do we want freedom from?

Religion is an opiate, someone said, but so are love and freedom, and much and more things. Freedom is great, sure, but is it really? We talk about freedom from The Man, freedom from taxation, freedom from oppression, and it seems that “freedom” is too big of a concept to be truly used in a useful way without plentiful context and modifiers.

And I think that’s our great fallacy. Freedom is what we Americans love to think as the quintessential American ideal that we forget that all freedom all the time isn’t all it’s stoked up to be. Freedom by itself is dangerous, because it makes us drunk on our sense of self-righteousness and exceptionalism and other things that make us complacent when things that are obviously Not Okay happen. In terms of our class, for example, when companies violate environmental standards, or edge close to violating the environmental standards, some of us think, “Well, it’s their right as businesses to gain a competitive edge over others. Let the free market decide.” But in this case, what is the business free from?

Too often, we want freedom from responsibilities.

But as Kushner said, “freedom doesn’t let you off the hook.” Freedom shouldn’t mean freedom from responsibilities. And we all have responsibilities, from personal responsibilities (to do right by self), to familiar responsibilities (to take care of aging parents in future, perhaps), to environmental responsibilities (to aim for sustainability). And yes, it sucks to have responsibilities. That’s why we procrastinate or drink or do any number of things to avoid, avoid, avoid what we must to in favor of what we want to do. But that’s not how life works, and that’s not how it ought to work, either. Sometimes, selfishness is under the guise of freedom.

Selfishness also comes under the guise of “trying”

The second part of Kushner’s quote is much harder to understand. Too often, we are faced with forces larger than ourselves. Life, death, love, you name it. When we are trying to face environmentalism, too, we are faced with forces larger than ourselves, though they are often of our own making. Global corporations, for example, are too great for individuals to truly effect. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves while we buy their sneakers, their seafood, and their smartphones. It’s with a mixture of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality and “oh well” mentality that we continue to patronize these companies that we know, as surely as we know any other things, that pollute and exploit. We might even try buying locally or from alternative sources before we realize ethical doesn’t mean economical and our pockets aren’t as deep as the corporations’. Oh, well, we tried, we think. But sometimes, when it comes to important things, failing doesn’t mean you should cease to try. Not all of us can afford to shop at Whole Foods all the time. (Actually, if you go to Hunter, you probably can’t, period.) But we can surely try to influence others, or look for alternatives or go out of our way to buy better.

(For the record—I have a problem with how sweepingly broad Kushner’s claim about responsibility is. There are things we can’t and shouldn’t fix or change in life. Sometimes failing means that you have to let go of others.)

Reva McAulay

MHC 250

Weekly Writeup #8

            The 12 Principles of Green Engineering were an interesting if random seeming list of guidelines for how engineers and businesses should make their products.  Obviously they should avoid hazardous products and byproducts, prevent waste ,use an efficient production method, use renewable sources of energy and materials, and consider what happens to products after they are done being used.  But some of the other principles were more interesting, like the idea of using output-pull products.  Output-pull was something I had never heard of before, and didn’t really understand until we learned about the thing where you pull a nylon thread out of a chemical solution and it forms more nylon.   I’m still not sure whether or how this could be applied to anything other than chemistry, and google doesn’t have anything on it except more lists of the 12 Principles of Engineering.  Taking advantage of entropy is another interesting idea that is not obvious at first.  Using as few materials as possible is similarly not something that you would think would make a big difference, but it does make sense because the more materials that are in something, the more work it is to recycle.  And we’ve seen how people barely recycle the easy stuff, like aluminum cans or water bottles, so making things even more complicated to recycle will naturally make recycling even less common. 

            My three favorites of the 12 Principles of Green Engineering were the ones about designing for unnecessary capability, using energy and material flows, and designing for durability instead of immortality.  Using energy and material flows is interesting because it shows how little people consider the idea of reusing anything, even perfectly good energy that is already right there and doesn’t require any transportation or anything.  Using energy flows in manufacturing does not require an entire infrastructure like using alternative sources of energy does.  Nor does it require changing things to reduce the amount of energy it takes to complete the process.  All it takes is figuring out how to use waste energy from earlier in the process to help with a later part, using the waste energy as is.  It shows how little people consider using anything but something new, that minimizing energy use is thought of first before thinking of how to reuse energy that has already been taken out.  The same goes for waste products, obviously. 

            The idea that designing for unnecessary capacity or capability is flawed is great too.  It doesn’t make sense on any level, even a strictly economic one, to spend time, money, and resources to design and build something to do something it will never have to do.  Similarly, people tend to buy the most capable products even if they are more expensive and the consumer will never use its capabilities.  Why buy a computer that has huge capabilities and many special features if you just want to do basic internet and word processing? It doesn’t make any sense, and neither does buying a car that is made to handle off-road driving in terrible conditions, or one that can go 160 miles per hour, if the vast majority (or all) of its use will be driving in the city or on highways and never going over 60 mph.  If people did not demand unnecessary functions, manufacturers would be able to build more environmentally friendly products at lower prices. 

            Similarly, designing for immortality is basically designing for an unnecessary function.  The odds of a product being used for the consumer’s entire life and then being passed down to the next generation is absolutely none for most things, and very small even for things that people intend to use forever.  Certainly things that are meant to be disposable, like Styrofoam cups, don’t need to be made to last forever (unless recycled).  But for most things, people are not going to want to use it forever.  Eventually it’s going to be so outdated and out of fashion that nobody will want it even if you give it away for free.  Going back to computers and cars, only basic computers even need to be particularly durable, since the people who buy them might actually hold on to them for awhile.  A really fancy computer will probably only be used for a few years before it’s obsolete.  Cars need to last a while because they tend to be re-used, but even those will eventually be retired because they don’t have up to date safety features or gas mileage.

I really enjoyed the adaptation of Macbeth put on by Tom, Tom, Seong and Hayley. It was funny, intelligent, and relevant to our class and what we have been discussing. Everything seems to always come down to money and the idea that when people are given power, they tend to abuse it. Macbeth was the ideal example of this in their adaptation of the play. He was ruthless, manipulating and used others to gain power. This illustrates the idea that men are inherently greedy, always wanting more. He managed to make it to the top at the expense of others and the environment. He illegally cut corners and deleted records to maximize profit. All he cared about was making more money, even though he was already affluent and did not need more. This goes to show that money always drives higher-level decision-making.

I now know that change needs to happen now. We need to start embracing the principles of green engineering and the cradle-to-cradle model. By doing so, we will create less waste and make sure to reuse the waste that we do create. This will help solve the problem of having to figure out what to do with all the waste that we produce. This can possibly limit the amount of active landfills and incinerators we need. In order to do this however, we, as individuals need to choose to change.

We need to choose to fight for the implementation of green engineering and cradle-to-cradle design. We need to advocate for advancement in the use of solar energy. Most people seem to think our future lies in solar energy, which is perfect because it is a renewable source that will never run out (unless the sun explodes). Wind energy is also a viable alternative, but it is difficult to harness and put the turbines in places that are easily accessible.

We need to lose our American way of thinking of always wanting more. If something isn’t broken, who do we try to fix it? Is there really a need for thousands of different kinds of cars? Why not only have the environmentally friendly ones? Do we need access to fruits when they are off-season and difficult to get? The answer should be no. Millions of dollars are being wasted to accommodate the American life we are so used to. President Obama’s campaign slogan, “CHANGE” was correct, just in the wrong thinking. We need to stop putting off the environment for future generations and start caring for it now.

Yes, money is nice, but money won’t matter when the environment becomes so bad we cannot live properly. Instead of fighting of every last cent, the CEOs of big corporations should be making contributions to the search for alternative energy and the implementation of cradle-to-cradle design. It should be mandated that all factories and other institutions that apply that are building from the ground up need to use cradle-to-cradle design. This would create a much more efficient setup. It should also be mandated that all existing factories make an effort to convert to a cradle-to-cradle design, and they should be offered tax breaks as an incentive. Yet again, money is the only incentive that will work. The fact that you are helping the environment should be the only incentive needed to motivate a company to change to cradle-to-cradle.