Looney Labs EcoFluxx Mailing list Archive

[Eco] (no subject)

  • FromDaniel Brashler <dannob@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateSun, 4 Feb 2007 13:35:17 -0500
I realize the stream has moved on a bit, but had to respond.

On Jan 31, 2007, at 11:37 AM, Jonathan Grabert wrote:

1. I think people's love of recycling does grow out of environmental movement of the 70's and 80's...I think that that mindset is precious all by itself.
The mindset may be precious to you, but is it worth the cost of recycling? Local, state, and federal governments, as well as private business, spend a lot of money, labor, time, and energy to recycle when the benefits of it are debatable at best and nonexistant or even detrimental at worst.  This is what P&T described as recycling "feeling good" to people.  And while good feelings are nice, they shouldn't be taxpayer funded.

Quite right -- I stopped too soon in that paragraph.  What I was trying to articulate was a defense of the motives behind the desire to recycle -- I don't think people should feel bad for wanting to take care with what they throw away.  That value shouldn't be tossed out, but tapped to motivate some significant, objective analyses and communication of the costs and benefits.  Clearly there's a question to be answered about what the benefit of a recycling program really is, and whether the work that's being done to save digging up another plot of land isn't just clogging the air with burned fossil fuels in the end.  Taxpayers can't make good decisions without good information.  Links posted in this forum are interesting and valuable, but don't seem to have made it into the public consciousness.

2. While we may not be running out of landfill space, land itself is still a fundamentally limited resource.
But even here, you're exaggerating the size of the landfills that we need. 

3. The oil too is going away -- it's a finite resource as well.
Again, we are in absolutely no danger of running out of oil for thousands of years.  Even if that weren't the case, there *will* be a better fuel source developed well before we'd run out.  (Solar, anyone?)  

Both of these are questions of scope -- how far out do you want to look?  There are some folks who deeply believe that the world's going to end within the next couple of hundred years, and so saving resources for any longer than that is a moot point.  For views longer than that, one gets into the vagaries of prediction.  How much oil is down there, really?  I've heard estimates ranging from 200 to 2000 years' worth.  And how much land is really fillable?  How much of it will be there down the road?  What is it that makes you so sure of those predictions?  The vaunted flying cars aren't here yet. . .

Prediction is hard enough with good information, and we can't even agree on statistics.  With that in mind, I'm trying to avoid the predictions and make a comparison in principle with whatever absolutes I can get a hold of:  we aren't making any more oil, or planets;  and despite the Mr. Rogers tour that P&T gave us, I'm still not convinced that landfills are cool and we should run out making as many trash holes as we can.  Just because we're not at a crisis point doesn't mean we can't decide what's best in a fundamental way, and therefore, what we should be working toward.  An understanding of goals is basic.  If your goal is comfort for the next couple hundred years, that's one thing; if your goal is sustainability for the long term, that's different.  With any 'how-much-have-we-got' way of looking at things, you're either saying 'I don't care what happens when we run out' or you're going on faith that some magic bullet will come along to save us from the problems at some point.   Neither of them really solves the problem, they're just ways of rationalizing not doing so.  Not all of us are content to simply set the date for the crisis farther away -- we'd like to find a way not to have one.

4. Ultimately, all our efforts at recycling are tiny in comparison to the one on-going juggernaut event that is the growth of human civilization.
The population problems aren't in the developed world.  

By human civilization, I'm trying to refer to more than just population growth and include the continuing use of resources of all types by humans.  India and China's use of fossil fuels has increased significantly, and shows no signs of decreasing.  As well, relegating the problem to "the developing world" like it's some other place is ridiculous.  Just because they're not in your back yard doesn't mean they're irrelevant.  Right now they're answering huge amounts of our tech service calls and manufacturing many of our electronic gizmos.  We're helping to fund their population growth. This article is interesting at least as an overview:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Anway, I think we can agree that it's important that the real data gets compiled, presented and analyzed for and by the public a lot better than it has.  

The next question then is: what's this magic technology that's going to save us all?  I'm a science geek myself, and am as interested in anyone to find out what works to reduce the impact of people on the environment or at the very least, the adverse impact of people on each other. 

One thing I've seen that works remarkably well:  vehicles that burn vegetable oil.  Here's a case were we *are* making some new oil (a little) that we can do something with.  Perhaps we should spend some more money and fit out all the garbage trucks and landfill bulldozers with veggie engines.  A good friend of mine drives his family around in a bus fueled by the fry-vats from a local restaurant.  Anybody have some good links?


Dan Brashler


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