Changing behaviors
I was excited to find that Sunday’s New York Times Magazine was dubbed their “Green Issue,” full of great journalistic nuggets on sustainability. It was divided into seven individual meaty sections: Act, Eat, Invent, Learn, Live, Move, Build. I haven’t made my way through the entire issue yet, but there’s plenty of good information and ideas here to “sustain” this ongoing global conversation.
Several of my favorite pieces deal with the reality that to successfully breed change we are not only going to need to reshape our individual and societal habits, but we’re going to need to reframe the entire conversation.
A favorite example is in an article entitled “Beyond Waste” in the “Act” section, where the goal of “zero waste” is analyzed as a state of eco-utopia:
“The daunting challenge is that so many consumer products are neither recyclable nor compostable. Worse, they’re made with highly toxic chemicals. Reducing the impact of these products may depend less on finding better ways to dispose of them and more on discovering how to remake them — or on no longer making them at all.”
It’s the last part of this statement that represents the radical sort of thinking I believe we need to undertake. For us to truly promote change, the focus needs to be much less about making the way we live our lives less reprehensible, and much more about why we live the way we do. It’s the difference between developing the perfect low-emissions car vs. finding ways to build communities so cars become unnecessary.
We live in a throwaway society. So many of the products we use daily are designed for obsolescence, and at this point, can’t be recycled at all. We know the cellphones and computers we rely on daily will be useless in a year or two or three. Still, we can’t imagine how we could survive without these necessities. So we look at ways to make them better or “greener” or “recyclable”, but not at how to make them completely unnecessary in their current form.
That’s the radical conversation that I think we’re going to see taking shape in the next few years. And I can’t wait!
Mark,
My brother is a nuclear engineer and has been warning people about Florescent light bulbs and the significant environmental problem that lies ahead of us. Three hundred million compact fluorescent light bulbs were sold last year. Each bulb has the potential to contaminate 6,000 gallons of water with Mercury beyond safe drinking levels. Mercury is a neurotoxin that can cause kidney and brain damage. Three hundred million bulbs times 6,000 gallons of water equals 1.8 Trillion gallons of contaminated water in a year. Just to give you some perspective on the magnitude of that number … about 150,000 gallons of water flows over the Niagara Falls each second of each day. If that water collected into a pool able to hold 1.8 Trillion gallons of water, it would take almost five months to fill that pool. That’s just from what was sold last year …
Shining a light on hazards of fluorescent bulbs
Compact fluorescent light bulbs pose a bigger threat to health and the environment than previously thought, say officials and activists, who warn that the bulbs’ mercury-laced contents can be hard to dispose of.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23694819/from/ET/
Posted by Tom on 05.01.08.