Reading ‘That buzz in your ear may be green noise‘, yesterday’s article in the New York Times, I had a feeling of deja vu. The issue of green cacophony and the resulting confusion in people’s minds, is one that has been covered many times before in this blog. Rather than repeating myself, I thought I would just retrieve all my previous posts on the topic:
‘The fatigue factor and what it means for the climate fight’
‘The failure of the green media to communicate simply‘
‘Top three green actions to reduce your ecological footprint‘
‘Seven green marketing strategies to persuade Americans to go green‘
Since December, the date of my last post, things have only gotten worse. People are more aware. They are also more confused, and suspicious about all green matters. What should be simple, has now reached levels of unparalleled complexity.
I think it’s time we go back to the old and proven adage: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. Not sexy, with maybe too much of a treehugger flavor, but in the end, still the best planet saving tip.
La Marguerite 
Thank you for responding to this article in the New York Times! I too read it and while doing so, became even more and more confused myself as to how to BEST help the earth.
~Your fellow peace innovator, Cassie
Yep, the three Rs do it. Except that you got the order wrong in your title. And the order’s important, since if you reduce then you don’t have to reuse or recycle as much, and if you reuse you don’t have to recycle at all.
“Reduce” is the one people have the most trouble with, though, which is another reason to put it first.
I think the newspaper articles… well, I’m starting to think like old Thoreau – do enough really important things happen every day that I need to know about? I mean, it’s nice to know, but… do I really need to know that some Austrian guy kept his daughter locked in his fallout shelter and raped her for a quarter century? Or that the baseline emissions scenario for an IPCC graph changed from 1,800 to 1,850Gt? Or that crude oil is now $139 instead of $135?
Surely if the things are important to my daily life I’ll find out soon enough? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being well-informed – but there’s a limit to how much information is useful. In the military they even talk about it as a problem, “information paralysis”. Ever seen Aliens? There’s a scene where the commander is sitting in the vehicle looking at a dozen monitors, each with a feed from the soldier’s helmet, then something happens and he’s lost – there’s just too much information coming at him at once. He can’t make any decisions. Whereas if he just had the voice of his sergeant telling him what was happening, with the others able to chip in if they thought something needed to be added, he’d be able to make a decision.
It’s a genuine problem, information paralysis. And the truth is that most of the articles you’ll see in the papers have very little information, it’s just one bit and then lots of opinion about it. Sometimes it’s even the same information as the last several articles.
For example, the other day it was reported that the Saudis had agreed to increase their oil production. Even the same news service reported it several times, though. For example, the ABC reported it here, and here, and here, and here, and so on. It’s essentially the same story published several times. Why, I don’t know. But there it is – a good part of the information overload is simple repetition.
And really it’s not all that complicated, as you say. We need to reduce, reuse and recycle – and do it very strongly and quickly, because we face significant dangers.
That’s why I so often try to suggest ways to reduce. “Okay, we’re all agreed there’s a problem? Rightyo, this is one way to fix it.” We can leave everyone else still arguing over whether there is a problem and if so who is responsible for fixing it and hey let’s read another report saying the same thing and…
Oops, fixed the title. . . Now Reduce got back the place it so justly deserve! Thanks, Kyle, for catching that one, and for another great comment. Love your Aliens image. Very powerful.
I also appreciate you making it even more simple and reducing it to one simple command, ‘Reduce’.
Cassie, thanks for visiting. If only all young people were made in your image. You are such an inspiration!
Wow! I’ve read many of these, but I didn’t realize how much you’ve written on the subject. I just hope the noise doesn’t prevent people from actively engaging in incremental decisions based on the reduce, reuse, recycle concept.
If we Americans would reduce our consumption of “stuff,” then it would assuredly be good for the environment, and probably for most of us as individuals as well. Interestingly, however, we have created an economy that depends on consumption for about 70% of its GDP. The other side of our reduced consumption, then, would be lower production, which would result in a lower demand for labor, more layoffs, higher unemployment rates, etc.
Somehow we need to find ways to improve the structure of our economy, so that it is not so dependent on consumers, and a good start would be to improve our educational system. Rather than investing too much in wars and widgets, we could invest more in infrastructure, the improvement of public spaces, and the beautification of our communities. As Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos wrote many years ago, in Only One Earth, “The rivers along which lovers might formerly have wandered may be deserted as hydrogen sulfide replaces the old smells of springtime. But it is a bold economic calculus that balances the increase in sewage costs against the decline in lyric poetry.” Much earlier William Wordsworth recognized the same creeping phenomenon, writing that
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
We could reduce our consumption of “stuff” in this country if we could educate people early on to use their minds more and their TVs less; to find more enjoyment in nature, art, literature, poetry, and music and to see endless shopping for the false god that it is; to find meaning in conversations with friends, visits to local public spaces (now made more appealing because they are better appreciated), and even in simple contemplation; and to seek work that gives more meaning to their lives.
Gary, as I’ve said in previous responses here and elsewhere, just because we reduce our consumption of and spending on stuff, does not mean the economy will collapse.
Economies exist because people trade, not the other way around. And people trade goods, but they also trade services. Consider a person living a one tonne CO2 lifestyle: this person doesn’t buy much stuff, their consumption of physical resources and impact on the environment is not very great. But they could still be spending literally thousands of dollars each week on services.
Accountants, lawyers, counsellors, teachers, medical practioners of all kinds, actors, musicians, engineers, masseurs, prostitutes, writers, – all these are people who make their living providing not goods but services. They could work out of a cave naked. Little or no physical resources are used up, and little or no pollution necessarily accompany what they sell.
Throughout history economies have changed with fewer and fewer people producing physical goods, and more and more providing services. Yet we’re better off than ever, economies did not collapse.
Economies exist because people trade, not the other way around. Whatever happens, people will want things from each-other, I will have more than I need of this, and you have more than you need of that, we’ll swap for mutual benefit. If plastic wishbones, burgers and SUVs are no longer in demand, people will produce other goods and services instead.
If some particular kind of goods are banned or restricted, the people producing them need not go broke. And usually we don’t worry, anyway. Most of us believe heroin should be restricted or banned, but nobody says, “oh no what about the poor Afghan poppy farmers?” So why worry about the poor coal miners?
So for a change to an economy which is less destructive of the environment, we need no great change in human nature to make us all hippies dancing around our beautiful communities. We need only restrict or ban the goods which cause harm, and encourage their producers to instead produce some services which do not cause harm.
> Kyle : I agree with you a 100 %. I love this blog each day more for the great articles and opinions expressed.
Keep up the good work, all of you ! 🙂
I’ve read that the European Union will require environmental footprint labels on products at some point in the future. That would really help consumers make “reduce” decisions.
I think the “reduce” component could also be helped by providing an “lifetime environmental impact” calculator for something like a car. Come to think of it, I think it would be great if car manufacturers would be required to put such a calculator on their website.
What’s bugging me the most in reduce decisions is the fact that we don’t separate labor from energy (and to a lesser extend resource mining) costs. As Kyle is pointing out, an economy would work fine with more labor-intensive products, we would only have less stuff because energy (and mining instead of recycling) was providing leverage for the labor.
A bold suggestion: Why not make “reduce, reuse, recycle” your blog’s tag-line? “An environment blog, focused on behavioral solutions to global warming.” sounds quite abstract and academic.
It would also gently remind everyone why they’re here. 😉
Kiashu,
I wish I could agree with you, but it contradicts too much that I can easily observe around me. You wrote that “So for a change to an economy which is less destructive of the environment, we need no great change in human nature to make us all hippies dancing around our beautiful communities. We need only restrict or ban the goods which cause harm, and encourage their producers to instead produce some services which do not cause harm.”
No politician could get votes with slogans we could extract from your statement. Even Dennis Kucinich wouldn’t touch it! I appreciate your idealism but question your sense of reality.
Let’s consider that person living a “one tonne CO2 lifestyle” for a minute. I’m not sure how many of the world’s 6.7 billion people fit that category, but I am willing to bet that most are doing it involuntarily and would gladly swap with any of us who aren’t. If this were really a popular goal for Americans and Europeans, then we would all be spreading out across the countryside to grow food and become more self-sufficient or heading for places where life is closer to that level, mostly in Africa or the poorer parts of Asia. If you see this occurring on a large scale, then you certainly look at different data than I do. I don’t see the Mexican government building walls at the border and beefing up forces to keep the Gringoes from heading south.
Throughout the poorer countries everyone is trying to attain better lives, and, from their perspective, given what they are actually doing, that means having bigger and better homes, more appliances, cars or motor scooters rather than bicycles, more meat in their diets, etc. The demand for energy to help provide these things is growing rapidly in China, India, Russia, and elsewhere.
My guess is that no one who reads or writes on this blog comes close to living a “one tonne CO2 lifestyle,” and virtually none of us would exchange ours for theirs. Unless you want to argue that all the benefits of the Industrial Revolution have been against human nature, you are going to have to face a much more complicated issue than you think–simply changing human nature a bit is going to be much tougher than you think.
I suspect that you, and perhaps others who appear here, including me, would be willing to move more in the direction of reducing CO2 output. I personally don’t buy enough “stuff” to help the economy along very much, so I have no trouble accepting your suggestions, or the ones that I made along the same lines.
However, as I look around, I don’t see most Americans moving in your direction. Even as our economy has become more service-oriented, our exports have risen because we still want to have the things we no longer manufacture ourselves. “We need only restrict or ban the goods which cause harm,” you wrote. We could also imagine politicians burning the constitution and bill of rights.
Even as I write this, I can hear a steady stream of traffic on a highway in the distance. If you were talk to those drivers, most of them would tell you that they don’t want smaller cars, or better yet bicycles, they want cheaper gas so they can continue their lifestyle. I’m not sure that any American or western European would be happy with you deciding to “ban the goods which cause harm.”
Meryn is right about trying to separate labor from energy, but I think he knows full well that it is energy that has made labor more productive during the last two hundred years, and that most of those productivity increases, which have given us all that we have today, has come from the widespread use of fossil fuels. Labeling products with their environmental footprints is a good idea, and would help consumers who wish to “reduce” find efficient ways to do it.
However, most people in the world still want to consume more, not less, and I see nothing in human nature that doesn’t support that. At different times and in different places small groups decide to simplify their lifestyles, but such movements seldom last for long. Hippies in the 1960s are a good example–by the 1980s most had moved into the corporate world and were selling stocks, bonds, insurance, and whatever else they could to support their new, costly, high-carbon lifestyles.
I’m out of time, but am happy to continue this discussion. Thanks to Marguerite for providing this forum, and to all of you who contribute.
It’s true that no US President could get elected with slogans about “no more burgers and SUVs” or similar. But I think a few federal Congresspeople could get in, and certainly plenty of state ones. And in any case, the US is not the world, and looking around you’ll find that Green party members have not only been elected, but are parts of governments across the developed West; wikipedia gives a rundown on it. And they make far more radical suggestions than I do.
“My guess is that no one who reads or writes on this blog comes close to living a “one tonne CO2 lifestyle,””
I think perhaps you’ve not looked at the actual link, and are imagining that only emitting a tonne of CO2 means living in a cave somewhere dreadful.
I’m closer than you might think – about 1.6t, last I tallied it up. That’s down from the Aussie average of 12t. You write that most people wouldn’t want such a lifestyle, but if you look at the example I give, there are millions of people across the developed West living something like that right now.
“Even as I write this, I can hear a steady stream of traffic on a highway in the distance. If you were talk to those drivers -“
What you don’t hear is the people not on the highway, the people who’ve chosen not to drive. You won’t hear them on the highway anymore than you’ll find the vegetarians at McDs or the atheists at Sunday mass. Your observations are suffering from what we call “confirmation bias”. You’re choosing to look at things which confirm what you already believe, and ignoring things which don’t.
In looking at a highway in the USA you’re looking at the least environmentally-conscious people in the world, and then concluding that nobody wants change. It’d be like me looking at a madrassa in Iran and concluding that the entire world must be devout Shi’ia.
Wow! Rich thread here. I don’t even know where to begin. . .
Meryn, although I endorse the Reduce-Reuse-Recycle principle a hundred percent, I see it more as one of the strategies that are being explored within the scope of La Marguerite.
Edouard, as usual, thanks for your support. It means a lot.
Kyle, Gary, Meryn, maybe the connecting glue to your discussion has to do with time line. While we all agree with the aim of a reduced carbon lifestyle, this leaves us with a bunch of questions. How to move billions of people in that direction? How to move our global economy from natural resource intensive to more labor reliant production? How do we satisfy developing countries hunger for a more affluent lifestyle? They are at a different level along Maslow’s hierarchy, and cannot be blamed for wanting to partake in the orgy as well.
Some of the answers may not be found in words, but rather in brutal awakenings such as current gas and food crisis. I am also a big advocate of developed countries sharing their know how and resources in renewable technologies with their developing counterparts. Investing in education is also key. This is why I am such a big fan of such initiatives as Afrigadget, for instance – by the way Erik’s site made it to Times Top 50 websites list yesterday! –
> Marguerite, you are more than welcome as YOUR support to my humble researches mean a lot to me too.
Furthermore, you’re doing a great job here. Keep it up ! 😛
I agree with what you’re saying, Marguerite. We need global strategies of development of lower carbon societies which can be used by the Third World, too – otherwise First World efforts will be pointless – well, not entirely pointless, they’ll still make our lives more pleasant, but it won’t avoid global fossil fuel depletion and climate change.
That’s another reason I’m most keen on current technologies which can be quickly implemented. I really do not imagine that Burundi is ever going to be criss-crossed by mighty highways with everyone driving electric cars powered by its Generation IV nuclear power station. But for Burundi to have lots of railway lines, geothermal power, wind turbines and concentrated solar – that’s very plausible.
Renewable energy, mass transit powered by it, localised production of food and goods, a good telecommunications system, universal adult literacy, plenty of clean drinking water – these are things which the entire world can have, and at relatively small financial, resource and financial cost.
Liquid fluorine salt thorium reactors, solar satellites beaming power to the Earth, hydrogen cars, genetically modified supergrain crops, even assuming they prove to work well these sorts of things are simply never going to be universal.
As Marugerite says, we need solutions for everyone. If nothing else, the West should want the world to have these solutions because the Third World is going to get them one way or another – if they can’t get them at home, they’ll simply migrate to the West, legally or illegally. So even if you’re a neoconservative racist you should support the sustainable development of the Third World.
Amen, sister! Thanks for all of your great posts.
I too struggle with eco-overwhelm. Glad I am not the only one. The solution really is simple but like you said not sexy. People would rather buy a green product than reduce their consumption. Sigh!
Djuna, love your blog. Very practical, and to the point. Thanks for visiting.
[…] Chinese manufacturers are extremely energy inefficient. To produce an equivalent amount of goods, they use six times more resources than the United States, seven times more resources than Japan, and, most embarrassingly, three times more resources than India, to which China is most frequently compared. Guess who is feeding China’s gigantic pollution factory? Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, touted by Adam Werbach as the new corporate environmental hero, represents 30 percent of foreign purchasing in China. 27 billion dollars total. No greening strategy can make up for the fact that we, the 89% of American people who shop at Wal-Mart, are contributing in no insignificant terms, to China’s lethal gases spewing frenzy. More than ever, let us make ours, the old ‘Reduce-Reuse-Recycle‘ […]