All right, you all asked for it: my justification for (almost) never recycling, and why I think you should follow suit. I'm going to try to get this done in the next forty minutes or so before meeting Sam for dinner (trying to stay zen before my comp tomorrow), so apologies if it seems a little rushed. Please please please ask me questions, tell me I'm full of crap, yell terrible things at me, I would love it if someone would prove me wrong.
Ok, so one caveat up front, it's not so much that I have a problem with recycling, it's that I have a problem with the constellation of behaviors people are told to engage in in order to be "eco-friendly" or whatever. I think, for a variety of reasons, that the way the mainstream American environmental movement (to say nothing of other social movements) conceptualizes the individual is hugely problematic. Instead of encouraging people to organize collectively and take political action as citizens, we're generally told that we have the power as individuals -- and, more insidiously, as consumers -- to make changes. I don't see change occurring that way, and even if it could, it seems to let government and corporations off the hook in a big way. Ultimately, it's not you and me throwing plastic bottles in the trash that 's doing the most damage to our environment, and putting the focus on changing behaviors like this seems inappropriate to me.
I also just don't trust people to do the right thing: sure, some people will be convinced by arguments for the common good, but there are plenty of people who couldn't care less about it. I believe we need policies that appeal to peoples' pocketbooks, not their good natures. My vision for environmental legislation is about as un-sexy as it comes: taxes on products that create externalities, like pollution or traffic congestion in the case of gasoline, so that people consume the socially-efficient quantities of these goods. That's not the only way to effect change, and it certainly isn't the easiest to implement, but it appeals to me as a student of economics.
With respect to it's environmental impact, I'd also argue that recycling just doesn't seem to be working: since we started recycling, total and per capita material throughput has increased. People tell me things would be worse if we had never started recycling, but while we're engaged in counterfactuals, what if we'd demanded more environmental accountability from the government and corporations during that time?
What recycling, as the foremost recommended environmental solution, does, is make environmentalism look easy. I firmly believe that, if we're serious about avoiding major ecological catastrophe, we have to acknowledge the fact that our way of life is unsustainable, and making it sustainable is going to be, excuse the language, a major pain in the ass. One of the comp questions I may have to answer tomorrow is about sustainability and how sustainability matters in emergency management. One of the authors wrote about six goals communities can work toward that will result in sustainability, including things like representative governments, high quality of life and diverse local economies. All of the things he recommends sound great -- I would love to live in one of Mileti's "sustainable" communities. In the short run, I can see how some of these qualities would make a community more sustainable, or at least more disaster-resilient, but in the long-run, I'm pretty sure it's nonsense. I hate to come across as a luddite or a Malthusian, but I believe that there are limits to our ability to 'technology' our way out of ecological collapse, and I believe that we're heading toward those limits pretty quickly. My interest in recycling is motivated less by animosity toward recycling specifically, but more by frustration with increasing individualization in the environmental movement, which I view, again, as a major barrier to change. If you're interested in that point specifically, definitely check out this piece by Michael Maniates from Confronting Consumption: Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?
So tell me if I'm wrong! I'm wrong about things a lot, and I'd love your feedback.
Why not do both? While corporations and the community as a whole needs to step up to really make a difference, I don't see why we shouldn't be responsible as an individual as well. It's a lot like why I am vegan; I am on a personal level because I don't want to hurt or enslave animals, while I tell everyone else to make a difference too, all the while writing companies telling them to change what they put in their food. If I told people and companies to go vegan, but didn't practice it myself, it doesn't make sense to me. I am just listening to the phrase in my head, "Clean up after yourself, and "Don't leave a mess." I can't imagine not recycling, especially when I see how fast landfills are filling up, and all the dumb plastic out there littering the oceans.
ReplyDeleteA combination of the aforementioned solutions along with recycling would be quite beneficial. Don't lambaste cleaning up after ourselves.
Thanks a bunch for mentioning my work! I suppose that my reply to Prairie Political Ponderings would be that doing the small things are good and fine, because they remind us daily about what is important in our lives -- what the Buddhists call 'mindful living.' But these small things won't coalesce to make a big difference, and we deceive ourselves if we think they will. (Walking old ladies across the street is super important to do, but this small act won't solve the pension crisis.) Cleaning up after ourselves means changing larger structures and rules of the game, and small acts of environmental kindness are a problem **if** they divert us from tackling the big political and economic structures and lead to the belief that we make big changes by getting everyone on board to do the small things. I wish it were otherwise, truly. For more on this, see http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-change/ and the sources cited and hypertexted therein.
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