Externalized Costs

I am annoyed by corporations, yes, even the same transnational corporations that I depend on to make the jeans that I wear, the coffee that I drink and the paper, O God, the paper that I rely on as a writer, poet, teacher, etc.
-->

Without even asking my permission, they are moving their business activities to Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and other places where the people do not have the political power to push their governments to ensure safe working conditions and decent wages for workers and environmentally safe standards for manufacturing facilities. In fact, as a rule, they are usually hiding their complicity—and thereby mine—in the kinds of practices that inevitably erode political power, labor safety and environmental sustainability. And it pisses me off.

I am also deeply offended by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which both force developing countries to “open” their markets to “foreign business” if they want “loans” that will help them “develop” without also mentioning how the “open markets” will change the countries’ economic basis so as to disempower the traditional small businesses and farmers and create an economic dependence on these foreign loans that will eventually (if it does not already) look disturbingly like addiction.

Wanna buy a watch? Cheap? Want some coke? Just a taste. No, really, this toot is free on me…

And I am really pissed off by the World Trade Organization, which encourages both of these “economic globalization” trends, making the conquistadors and their accompanying Christian missionaries look like innocent lambs in comparison. It's not just me who thinks this. The magazine Mother Jones has long criticized the way the WTO works.

And, naturally, the production processes, the extraordinary amount of transnational shipments of natural resources, parts and whole products rely on fossil fuels, the use of which is wrecking our planet’s climate and soon will overwhelm its natural ability to bounce back from more and more catastrophic changes.

Yes, I am mad, because I don’t know how to disengage myself from these corporations and their greedy, grimy, normal-seeming grip on my life. Going off the grid is not an option, as I do not have the skills to support myself. I am gradually trying to divest from investments in unsustainable companies, but when you make as little money as I do, you have to do this slowly so as not too lose to much of the nest-seed (it isn’t an egg, alas, not even close) that will support me when I can no longer work. And beyond even the economic side of this question, our social life, inherently, relies on objects, material objects whose manufacture puts us right in the middle of this problem.

I am grateful for Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff (and all the other versions, including those that discuss electronics, cosmetics, bottled water, cap and trade, and Citizens United). They give me, both personally as a consumer and professionally as a teacher of writing and critical thinking, tools to use to give knowledge and gain hope.

But grr. Arrgh.

Sometimes I just feel like my brain is going to pop. I can only hope that my anger gives me the passion and courage I am going to need to get through the next, wetter and messier and hotter and colder, few decades.

I suspect I’m going to need it.

The Tide Is Rising

Just last Friday, The Boston Metro did a front-page story on climate-change related flood dangers to the greater Boston area, including the expected storm surge increasing over the next 90 years. That day, Blizzard Nemo began, and ended up dumping almost 3 feet of snow on us. It seems appropriate that they named it Nemo, rather than Frosty, since the snow had barely ended before the rain began. I spent as much time wading through ice water at intersections today as I did sliding down the icy sidewalks.

I have never owned rubber boots before, but I have to say, I’m beginning to think I might just need to make that an investment, because I am pretty sure that this kind of Extreme(-ly Wet) Weather Event is only going to be more common in the coming years.

And as my financial advisor is encouraging me to buy my own place, this is one of the concerns that I am trying to figure out how to bring to conversations at open houses, for instance. I have found that when I bring up the topic of flooding into general conversations with friends, the response I often hear is that as long as I don’t live on the first floor or near the Charles River, I should be fine.

 

That seems a little naïve to me. After the Blizzard of ’78, when the snow melted and the rain came, our basement flooded, and so although the living areas weren’t affected, the cracked basement floor can’t be uncracked, and the problem of rising damp at least only grows worse over time.

I can only hope that, as the general public becomes more aware of these kinds of issues, more informed responses will become more available.

This Is Not A[n Ethnic] Joke

-->

Grr. Arrgh.

As it turns out, writing regularly about something you care deeply about is a problem. I do not say this as a “normal” person. I say this as a writer and a teacher of writing.

Writing is hard at the best of times. And right now when, quite literally, the water is rising in many low-lying parts of the world including our own major cities, is not the best of times. So, in the interest of offering my take both on environmental issues (on which I am surely not an expert) and on writing (on which I really am), I offer you here a frame tale, a story told about a story (kind of like Wuthering Heights, but with less over-the-top emotion and I hope more pragmatic usefulness). You can judge the ins and outs for yourself and, hopefully, draw your own (Earth-conscious) conclusion.

Two weeks ago I was in Philadelphia on a sustainability retreat organized by GreenFaith, an interfaith environmental education organization. Along with about 35 other people—including roughly 30 Christians, 3 Hindus, a Buddhist, a Jew, and a Muslim—we stayed at a Quaker retreat center called Pendle Hill and visited several sites where people are doing a variety of sustainability initiatives.

We saw the geothermal energy system and green roof at the national center for the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers). We visited the Energy Coordinating Agency, a green-jobs training center where young people learned how to weatherize and retrofit existing buildings to make them energy-efficient. And we conducted environmental audits of a church and a synagogue.

Interfaith initiatives are always fun, because you learn so much about other faiths, and they also require a little patience for the same reason, because somebody always has to explain why X Group does Y Crazy Thing, and sometimes the explanations can take a while. As you might imagine, when 35 people from 5 different faiths walk into a bar, it can take a long time to get to the punchline.

The half of the group that I was a part of was assigned to the synagogue, and my subgroup covered the Water part of the audit for that space. We looked at sinks, water fountains, toilets, urinals, refrigerators, coffee machines, potted plants, and the general risk of pipe leaks. Now, I have never spent any time in a synagogue and absolutely not while only paying attention to the water.

My group discovered that the synagogue was doing a good job avoiding bottled water at its events, but that all the toilets were standard flush. The easiest way for them to decrease the amount of water they used would be to change to low-flush toilets—the kind that make a distinction between “Number 1” and “Number 2” and allow you to choose the size of your flush accordingly. (I am not kidding. We have these at MIT and that is exactly the language they use.)

The other groups found ways for the synagogue to decrease the overall energy use and made recommendations for the avoidance and (when unavoidable) safe storage of toxic cleaning chemicals. And because they already kept a fairly complicated kitchen due to the need to separate kosher and non-kosher food, they had already done a lot of thinking around food issues.

The folks at the synagogue were as grateful for our help as we were to them for allowing us to get experience auditing with their community’s building. The exercise made the systems nature of environmental problems so much clearer, and also showed how different systems—like food and water, or water and energy—interact and/or overlap. Such dynamism means that thinking environmentally requires thinking flexibly, in a way that more traditional A-to-B-to-C linear thinking does not.

And that alone is interesting to me as a writer, since language is unavoidably linear: article to noun to verb to preposition to object… To accurately write down a complex environmental idea, one would practically have to borrow a baby’s mobile and put the words on the ends of the strings to show the dynamic relationships.

And then, if, for example, one had started writing a blog with a convenient image or phrase (ethnicity, jokes), which one thought at the time could be used to hook the reader at the start and gain closure at the end (environmental problems are no joke; insert interfaith humor here), and which later one realized wasn’t going to fly—

And if, just for example, one were Trying Very Hard to post to one’s environmental blog More Often than, say, every year or so—

Then one would, I suspect, have to be honest rather than perfectionistic, and simply post the damn thing without the pretty closure one had been, for example, hoping for.

* Sigh. *

The Next Post Will Amaze...Maybe

Okay, so here's the deal.

Sometimes the problems of the environmental crisis either get so traumatic or appear so complex that they become difficult to write about. Do I take a single side of a complicated battle? Do I attempt to show "both" sides of an issue that the extremes would like us to assume is only two-sided?

These are, at heart, writing problems. And as a writing teacher, I am hyper-aware of the parts of any environmental issue that can be broken down into such parts.

So when I don't write a blog post for a day or two or three, the odds are very good that I am not ignoring the problems I see, about which I sign petitions every day. But rather the odds are high that I am struggling to put my ideas and feelings into words that I think both people who might agree with me and people who might disagree with me could understand and accept.

So if you don't hear from me for a few days, post a comment. Tell me what YOU are thinking. Tell me what YOU are worrying about. Let me know what petitions YOU are signing.

Because that might give me the confidence to go on with this difficult quest we call human survival in a time of global climate change