Chapter Two
"Why Being 'Less Bad' is No Good"
- Vocabulary from the "less bad" approach: reduce,
avoid, minimize, sustain, limit, halt.
- Thomas Malthus: Late eighteenth century warning
that humans would reproduce exponentially with
devastating consequences for humankind - from
Population: The First Essay. 1978 in response to
William Godwin who espoused man's
"perfectibility."
- Literary figures: English Romantic writers,
William Wordsworth and William Blake spoke
out against an increasingly mechanistic and urban
society. Americans George Perkins Marsh,
Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold.
From the Maine woods, Canada, Alaska, the
the Midwest, and the Southwest spoke out on
behalf of the landscape - some went on to help
form conservation societies such as the Sierra Club
and the Wilderness Society, to preserve wilderness
and keep it untouched by industrial growth.
- Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", 1962: The
romantic strain of wilderness appreciation merged
with the scientific: Carson pointed out
environmental offenses at the chemical level -
human-made chemicals, pesticides, and DDT
in particular.
- Paul Elrich's "The Population Bomb", 1968,
predicted resource shortages and famine in the
1970's and 1980's. Went on to write
"The Population Explosion" with his wife Anne in
1984.
- A message to consumers from Robert Lilienfeld
and William Rathje's 1998 "Use Less Stuff:
Environmental Solutions for Who We Really Are".
Western culture has a devouring impulse
comparable to drug or alcohol addiction for
which "recycling is an aspirin, alleviating a
rather large collective hangover . . .
overconsumption.
- It wasn't until the mid 1990's that industries
themselves began to listen to the growing number of
urgent messages and warnings.
- The 1992 Rio Earth Summit concluded with an
agreement to refit industry with cleaner, faster,
quieter engines. No agreements were binding,
unfortunately, but the notion of eco-efficiency
was born and began to permeate industry as a
choice strategy of change.
- Eco-efficiency: "doing more with less."
The Four R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - and Regulate
- Reduction, although a central tenet of eco-efficiency,
reduction in toxic waste created or emitted,
quantity of raw materials used, or the product
size itself, serves merely to slow these things down,
allowing them to take place in smaller increments
over a longer period of time.
- Reuse can make industries and customers feel
that something good is being done for the
environment, because piles of waste appear to go
"away" when often they are simply being
transferred to another place.
- Recycling, in most cases, is really just "downcycling."
It reduces the quality of a material over time due,
in large part, to the fact that most man-made
materials were not designed to be reused. In
addition, just because a material has been
recycled does not automatically make it
ecologically benign. Downcycling can also
be more expensive for businesses partly
because it tries to force materials into more
lifetimes than they were originally designed for,
thus expending more energy and resources.
- Jane Jacobs, "Systems of Survival": Describes
two fundamental syndromes of human
civilizations: the "guardian" and "commerce"
that, by their very nature, have conflicting
agendas. Money, the tool of commerce, will
corrupt the guardian. Regulation, the tool of
the guardian, will slow down commerce -
businesses will naturally seek to cut costs by
avoiding regulation however they can, thus
giving unregulated and potentially dangerous
products a competitive advantage. This also
fosters " end of pipe" solutions where regulation
is applied to the waste and polluting streams of
a process or system, after the damage is already
being done.
Efficient - at What?
- Question the general goal of efficiency for a
system that is largely destructive - consider energy
efficient buildings: building "shells" have
become much better insulated, reducing air flow
flow back and forth between inside and outside
and have reduced energy use to maintain climate
control. However, this also strengthens the
concentration of indoor air pollution from poorly
designed materials and products in the home -
overly efficient buildings can be dangerous.
- Designing for efficiency can create problems
structurally in building design, agriculturally
(through the elimination of ecological diversity),
and industrially, through the distribution of
pollution in less obvious ways.
- Efficiency is not much fun: compare to beauty,
creativity, fantasy, enjoyment, inspiration, poetry,
etc. Efficiency is not ALL bad, it just lacks
independent value and should not be pursued
for its own sake, or purely for financial gain.
- Instead of presenting an exciting vision of change,
conventional environmental approaches focus
on what not to do. The goal is zero: zero waste,
zero emissions, zero "ecological footprint."
But this is to accept things as they are. What
about an entirely different model? What if we
replace "be less bad" with "be 100% good?"
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