It is delightfully uncomfortable to start a new semester
having to take a hard look at oneself.
Self-deception is a happy existence, and self-reflection is a valuable
tool. It's easy to feel separate
from the issues at hand when we are trying to objectively and academically
analyze them, residing in Nicholson and Wapner's "intellectual
exosphere" as it were.
My overall reaction to the section three readings of Wapner
and Nicholson, primarily to the discussions by Friedman, McKibben, and
Assadourian, was an exercise in this uncomfortable scrutiny on myself and the
society in which I reside.
Friedman's concept of the "Americum," a unit measured as
"any group of 350 million people with a per capita income above $15000 and
a growing penchant for consumerism” (81) made me cringe. He emphasizes that we must set a better
example, to redefine the American middle class lifestyle, and notes that Europe
and Japan show that we can have this lifestyle with less consumption. I grew up mostly in Japan, and for
years this gave me some warped sense that I was different, not superior but
somehow separate from my peers and the American lifestyle. Looking back, however, it is clear that
my family adapted to Japan quite well but only to the extent that it suited us. We lived on the economy (off base) and
hung our clothes outside to dry on racks and railings, which probably had less
to do with our concern for energy savings and more to do with the futility of
using our Japanese dryer. It was
about the size of an American microwave and in the humidity, about as useful for
drying clothes.
My city was always pretty stringent on waste management, and
when I was in high school they began a system for neighborhood trash pickup
where you had to buy specially marked clear plastic bags in three different
sizes - the largest of which was probably as big as a pillowcase - and from the
post office or convenience stores you had to purchase sheets of special
stickers which had to be placed on the garbage bags in sets of one, two, or
three based on the bag size. There
were also strict rules on sorting and the days you could drop off trash at the
collection sites. I'm embarrassed
to say that after a few months of dutifully participating in this rather
expensive but presumably efficient system, my mother gave up and had us use
good old American black Hefty bags to corral our household trash, put it in the
trunk of our car every week or so, and drive it to the base which for some
reason was allowed to have dumpsters. Er, we still proudly sorted recyclables
for our neighborhood collection.
When Friedman talks about Americans everywhere, I thus see it literally
as well as in the sense of other cultures adopting our stereotypical
lifestyle. Our foundation and
approach indeed continues to be flawed, and as Friedman concludes,
"Unfortunately, instead of rethinking and redesigning what it means to be
an American, in many areas we Americans are still intensifying, expanding, and
plain old doubling down on our old energy-guzzling model" (86).
McKibben continues the uncomfortable examination with a
discussion of a classic question on the Earth's carrying capacity and essentially
whether we have an overpopulation problem or a maldistribution problem. He doesn't let us off the hook as
readers; on the whole we have large footprints and our academic pursuits don't
always mesh with our lifestyles…but we do have the solutions, right? "If they are politicians and
engineers, they’re in favor of us living more efficiently – of building new
cars that go much farther on a gallon of gas, or that don’t use gas at all. If
they’re vegetarians, they support living more simply – riding bikes or buses
instead of driving cars" (91). As a LEED accredited vegetarian who has never owned a car,
this one made me smile. McKibben knows his audience, and I somehow felt guilty
for sitting in my apartment reading the book with my electricity and
refrigerator and imported cheese.
I agree with McKibben's premise that changes to the consumer lifestyle
are difficult both for the embedded cultural ties and for the fact that many of
us don't feel rich, which is a relative and subjective notion. We still have to do something about it.
Assadourian delves further into consumerism as a cultural
construct and the history that has shaped our society into the current
model. It's not easy to undo years
of such conditioning, but as he asserts: "Considering the social and
ecological costs that come with consumerism, it makes sense to intentionally
shift to a cultural paradigm where the norms, symbols, values, and traditions
encourage just enough consumption to satisfy human well-being while directing
more human energy toward practices that help to restore planetary
well-being." (104). This seems to align well with the Brundtland
definition of sustainability, meeting the needs of the present without
sacrificing the needs of the future, but will Assadourian's cultural pioneers
be enough? Are there enough people willing to lead this shift, and do we have
enough time? The pioneer image is inspiring to be sure, but it is easy to be
pessimistic and lament the scores of consumers (yes, I used the term to refer
to people in general) unwilling or unprepared for change. I'd like to think I'm still separate from
this, enlightened and eager to participate in shaping new cultural norms, but I
am still a product of a culture and I still have my own identity to develop and
question individually. If you're doing nothing, you think you should be doing
something. If you're doing something, you wonder if it's enough. I'm not sure
it's ever enough.
Tierney finishes out the section on a seemingly positive note
that only made me more pessimistic.
A proponent of the [environmental] Kuznets curve, he is clearly of the
market liberal worldview that (simply put) if we keep getting richer, we'll
also be greener. I find the arguments
associated with the Kuznets curve to be simplistic and applicable only to
environmental measures directly linked to human health. As Tierney points out,
when incomes go up people start to focus on things like clean drinking water
and hazardous air pollutants (107) and other efforts that improve quality of
life. This is great, but Tierney
(and the Kuznets curve) glide over other environmental issues that don't fit
into a nice curve - namely carbon emissions. Tierney mentions this outlier in
an attempt to be balanced, but is optimistic that we "seem to be near the
top of a Kuznets curve for carbon emissions and ready to start the happy
downward slope” (107). As if we're
poised to start caring more as long as we get raises every year, and carbon
emissions will finally fit into the bell curve without us really thinking about
it. I disagree with this, and on Tierney's assumption that "in the long
run, a Kuznets curve is more reliable than a revolution." I think that's
just an excuse to do nothing, which none of us can afford.
Moving on from Nicholson and Wapner, McNeill gives us an
overview of the growth and energy changes across human history as well as the
oddity of the twentieth century.
The achievements our species has made in an explosion of growth came
with both a social and an environmental price (7). In discussing the advent of
the fossil fuel age and its widening of a wealth gap, I found it odd that
McNeill juxtaposes it as "a good thing if one prefers to see some people
comfortable instead of almost all locked in poverty, but it is a bad thing if
one prefers equality" (16). I understand the core of this argument, but he
makes it seem like some people have metal roofs while some have mud. I'm not trying to be a bleeding heart
or demand that people fly their private jets over the developing world and
throw out bags of cash, but after all we've read on consumerism I think the
wealth gap constitutes a bit more than "some people [are]
comfortable."
We finish off with Clapp and Dauvergne's introduction to their
four main overviews on environmental change and the global economy:
"market liberals, institutionalists, bioenvironmentalists, and social
greens." I've read discussions by other authors on similar paradigms with
different names, and agree with the authors' note that these are
"ideal" categories that can each provide their own insights, that
one's individual ideology can overlap categories, and that there is a range of
debates within these worldviews as well as amongst them. I myself feel rather pragmatic and can
fit pieces of my evolving ideology into more than one paradigm. After reading
the descriptions of the different views, it is easy to start trying to classify
an author of another book or article into one of the categories - as I did with
Tierney. This can be enlightening
as an exercise to identify common themes and read more into the author's
interpretation of facts or their agenda, but it can be limiting as well. Not everything fits so neatly into one
box, and if we assume we know what an author is trying to achieve, we may miss
their nuances or in some cases the entire point altogether. I find Clapp and Dauvergne's categories
to be a useful tool and very helpful for analysis of my own and others' ideas,
but not the only tool available in critical analysis.
No comments:
Post a Comment