Crazy? Or responding sanely to an insane world?

This is the introduction to a paper I gave at Santa Fe College at the inaugural meeting of the Socratic Saints the Santa Fe philosophy and ethics club. The complete paper is available here as a .pdf.

One may very well be depressed by the majority of the news one sees on TV or the Internet. And why not? Such a reaction seems entirely appropriate. Many (if not most) of the major themes of the news stories we see are to do with catastrophe. For example, $700 billion has been taken from US taxpayers to bail out (or more euphemistically to 'rescue') the financial institutions now at the heart of the world economy. Take another example: unemployment is at record levels nationally and in Florida. Over 10% of those who want work can't find it, and many of those who do have jobs are underemployed. The lack of health insurance is a related issue. In the US, health insurance is usually had as part of a benefit package that accompanies full-time employment. If unemployment and underemployment are rising, then health insurance is sure to be a problem for the unlucky unemployed or underemployed. As a final illustration of the unending cataclysm we're told that we face, global climate change is thought to be under way and progressing faster than previously predicted. As if this problem with our environment weren't enough, many believe that the global peak of oil production has already occurred or is fast approaching. Once production has peaked, we're told, we must begin the inevitable process of economic decline.

It's saddening stuff, and stuff that shouldn't be taken lightly or disregarded if we're to believe what we see on TV and believe what we read on the Internet. In fact, if we take seriously many of the things we see and read, then we should be worried, very worried, about those vast and immane elemental forces with which we're unable to mettle but which may affect us all in very important ways.

I've tried to get your attention with the sort of stuff that would appear at the top of the local news at 11. They dictate that if it bleeds, it leads, and the biggest bleeders these days are taxpayers supporting Wall Street fat cats, rising joblessness and fast approaching environmental Armageddon. I hope I've just been every bit as dramatic and disturbing as AM talk radio or the Colbert Report.

But, as much fun as generating an uncontrollable hurricane of emotion is…. I'd like to try to give you a paper that does not continue on in the same way that Stephen Colbert, Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann might. I'd like to try to give a paper in which we consider the sorts of frightening news stories I just sketched, and perhaps more importantly our reactions to those news stories, and try to think about these issues in a calm, analytical and dispassionate way.

In this short paper, I would like to do three things. First, I want to bring some issues, pressing issues I believe, to our attention. Apart from the pressing issues themselves, I'd like to focus on our reaction to those issues. Second, I will offer some analysis on why the issues that we face are in fact pressing issues. And even though these issues are pressing and serious, I believe that there is something that can be done and done by us. Finally, I'll offer a sketch for the sort of actions I believe we should take. This sketch will be too vague and indeterminate, but I hope it may point us in the right direction.

Even though I used these as part of the mock-local-news-film-at-11 send up of the introduction, I would like to return to the three main difficulties we face today. Recall that the issues were (1) the $700 billion bail-out of the financial sector, (2) increasing unemployment, underemployment and the related problem of health insurance for the unemployed and underemployed and (3) environmental damage / global climate change / dwindling resources.

[Read the rest here, complete with references, as a google document.]

Reusing bags and the "durable" future

Starting today, shoppers at Target stores in Australia will no longer have the option to take their merchandise away in plastic bags. Will something similar happen in North American Targets? I hope so. This issue is indirectly related to advocacy for human-sized environments and directly related to the phrase in the title I stole from Bill McKibben.

I might shop in Target once a month, so I don't have too many Target bags crammed in some drawer in the kitchen, but I do shop quite a bit at Publix. I've just recently started riding my bike to shop instead of driving. I had been taking my stuff home in paper bags, but now have started using the reusable shopping bags they offer. The reusable bags are great because they fit neatly into the basket I have attached to the front of my bike. I had taken paper bags because we use them for garbage bags in the kitchen -- just like it seemed that everyone did in the old days. So perhaps I'll request the odd paper bag every few days just to have one at the ready.

It's obvious why a proliferation of plastic bags are of importance to the durable future. Such bags might not make as much of an environmental impact if they were all gathered and recycled, but judging by how many stray bags I see stuck in tree branches around town, I don't think recycling is the end most of these bags meet. Too many probably end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, if the wikipedia is to be believed on this issue. Whether any of North American Targets' bags make to an eternal life of not-quite-floating and not-quite-sinking in the North Pacific, it seems certain that quite a few make it into landfills, gullies by the side of the road and, yes, high in tree branches. It seems bad to introduce so many bags into the waste stream, but there are other options. I've heard that plastic bags are easier to recycle than paper bags and the process requires less energy, but I think Target has made a wise move (in Australia anyway) by eliminating plastic bags altogether.

As far as matter is concerned, planet Earth is a closed system. The amount of oil used to make plastic bags come from somewhere. If it's used to make a plastic bag then it can't be used for something else in the future. If we could get by without using plastic bags at all, wouldn't that be a better course to take for the long term? We see this nature of finite resources if we focus on human-sized environments. There are obviously only a finite number of trees in your neighborhood; possibly only enough to be counted quickly. If one is accustomed to living in a human-sized environment, and an human-sized environment is one's default frame of reference for thinking about resources and how to use them, moving away from the use of disposable packaging made from non-renewable raw materials is immediately obvious.

Not only do we want to be able to put things we've bought in a bag of some sort or other, we want to be able to do it for the foreseeable future. (If we want consumption to be sustainable, I'm uncertain we'll be shopping the way we do typically at Target. We'll probably have to buy less and not in the way many of us do now.) If sustainability is to be a priority, I suggest that we consumers treat our environments (no matter how vast they are) as if they were human-sized, and try to leave them cleaner than they were when we arrived.