Environmental Ethics: Do your possessions (or your desired possessions) contradict your values

Thursday, October 1, 2020

Do your possessions (or your desired possessions) contradict your values

Like I reckon most of us here do, I try to do my part to reduce my carbon footprint and make better choices for the environment. I recycle my plastic, compost my food waste, turn off lights when I'm not in the room, and don't run the sink at full power. My possessions do contradict my values, though, and I think this is true for the average consumer. I don't drive an electric car, I don't live off solar energy, and I'm no stranger to processed food.

However, I don't beat myself up over it because those are the things that are attainable to me in my price range. As simple as it is to say that people should stop putting their money into the types of industries that flourish at the cost of the environment, some things are not realistic for the working class person. Right now, it is nowhere in my budget to be able to upgrade the car I already have to an electric car, and I certainly do not have my own house that I can put solar panels on. People will consume what is put out, and it is not inherently our fault that the things we can afford are the things that don't resonate with our environmental goals.

We can hopefully shift our focus to those industries that are not making the best decisions for the environment in the interest of saving a buck. Maybe some of those CEOs can find it in themselves to cut their ridiculous pay to make better choices for the environment, but we have instead found ourselves in a position of asking the working class to sacrifice out of pocket to ever so slightly reduce the negative impact on the environment.

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Comment on questions 9/28

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2 comments:

Levi J.October 2, 2020 at 11:32 PM
I agree wholeheartedly. I love the idea of eating homegrown or locally sourced food. I would love to drive less and spend more time outside. Unfortunately, good food is expensive and the college budget is tight. I commute to work and school, and walking/biking turns a 20 min commute into a 45 min bike ride or a 1 1/2 hr hike. I do not think you are alone in this, and I agree that we should not shame others for not being able to live a more "green" lifestyle. I certainly hope that as the green industry develops and people become more aware of these issues, we will see the barrier of entry lowered.
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PhilOctober 5, 2020 at 12:00 AM
Fortunately we're learning -- well, more of us are, and perhaps a cultural tipping point is closer than we realize -- to identify "systemic" and structural problems in our society. The system we've settled for does in fact make it difficult for people of average means to make and afford the most salutary choices. More progressive representation would address that. The biggest and most immediately impactful change for most college students, I imagine, would be policies that arrest and reverse the spiraling cost of higher education. Stay engaged in the process, I really believe a change of this magnitude is more likely now than it has ever been.
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First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
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Thursday, October 1, 2020

Do your possessions (or your desired possessions) contradict your values

2 comments:

Peripatetics