Earth Day 2012

If you want to do something meaningful for Earth Day, I recommend contacting one of your elected representatives tomorrow morning (Member of Parliament, etc) to share your concerns about climate change or another environmental issue. If there are going to be solutions to the dire environmental problems we face, they are going to be at the level of all of society, not at the level of individual consumption. Signing the petition against the Northern Gateway pipeline wouldn’t hurt either. Every way you look at them, the oil sands are an environmental disaster and a violation of our obligation to pass on a healthy planet to our descendants.

Michael Maniates explains why we must go beyond individual action well in his article: “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” (Global Environmental Politics 1:3, August 2001):

The other road, a rocky one, winds towards a future where environmentally concerned citizens come to understand, by virtue of spirited debate and animated conversation, the “consumption problem.” They would see that their individual consumption choices are environmentally important, but that their control over these choices is constrained, shaped, and framed by institutions and political forces that can be remade only through collective citizen action, as opposed to individual consumer behavior. This future world will not be easy to reach. Getting there means challenging the dominant view—the production, technological, efficiency-oriented perspective that infuses contemporary definitions of progress—and requires linking explorations of consumption to politically charged issues that challenge the political imagination. Walking this path means becoming attentive to the underlying forces that narrow our understanding of the possible.

To many, alas, an environmentalism of “plant a tree, save the world” appears to be apolitical and non-confrontational, and thus ripe for success. Such an approach is anything but, insofar as it works to constrain our imagination about what is possible and what is worth working towards. It is time for those who hope for renewed and rich discussion about “the consumption problem” to come to grips with this narrowing of the collective imagination and the growing individualization of responsibility that drives it, and to grapple intently with ways of reversing the tide.

If you really want to take individual action, I would suggest that you make a start on doing something substantial:

  • Resolving to eat less meat
  • Resolving to travel less
  • Resolving to have fewer children

At the very least, replace a few incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent or LED alternatives. Then at least you will be making a contribution with a value that extends beyond 24 hours.

Toronto’s graffiti plan

Generally, I think graffiti is great. While there is certainly a lot of it that is made without skill, much of it consists of skillfully executed art and social commentary. The fact that graffiti is not approved – and that creating it carries a certain risk for the artist – contributes to the degree to which it is artistically and politically interesting. To an extent, graffiti reveals the true thoughts of a city, as opposed to the comparatively inert and uncontroversial thoughts normally reflected by officially approved public art.

Given all of that, I object to Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s new graffiti reporting plan:

[H]e’s going to charge small businesses to remove the graffiti on their walls, even if the graffiti in question is a beautiful mural that everyone, including the business-owner, approves of

I have photographed graffiti in a wide variety of places, from Vancouver to Helsinki to Marrakesh, and much more often than not what I have seen has been an improvement over the blank wall that preceded it. I certainly don’t think that graffiti should be removed just because one person with a smartphone app complains to the city about it. In particular, if the owner of the property where the graffiti was made approves of it, the graffiti should have the same protection under the law as a blank coat of paint would.

The only sort of graffiti that I really object to is when someone artlessly scrawls their name or some banal slogan on a wall or – even worse – on a nicely executed piece of existing graffiti. That and blatantly offensive graffiti I would not object to seeing removed. As for the rest of it, I recommend leaving it where it is.

Graduate school responses

Today, I got back the result for my final PhD application. The process has been a long one.

School Application due date Result
University of British Columbia 01-Jan-2012 Accepted – 27 FEB 2012
University of Toronto 16-Jan-2012 Accepted – 6 MAR 2012
McGill 15-Jan-2012 Wait list – 16 MAR 2012 – Rejected – 19 APR 2012
Harvard (GSAS) 15-Dec-2011 Rejected – 23 FEB 2012
Yale 15-Dec-2011 Rejected – 23 FEB 2012
Columbia 1-Dec-2011 Rejected – 1 MAR 2012
University of California, Santa Barbara 1-Jan-2012 Accepted – 2 FEB 2012
Duke 08-Dec-2011 Rejected – 6 FEB 2012
University of Michigan 15-Dec-2011 Rejected – 23 MAR 2012

Tally: 3-6, in a competitive field

Just for fun, I used the acceptance and rejection letters I received to make some word clouds:

Accepted:

Rejected:

If you need to tell what the message of a letter is at a glance, knowing these frequencies may be helpful. Also worth noting: the average acceptance letter contained 491 words, the average rejection letter only 116.

The shortest was a terse 90 words – the longest, an eloquent 818.

Building options and resilience

It seems to me that one fairly central human aspiration is to have a broadening set of options; it’s encouraging to see new options becoming possible, and worrisome to see options that existed before being closed off forever. In addition to satisfying human preferences, broadening options may also serve the purpose of building resilience in the face of massive change. If we don’t know what the future is going to be like, we have all the more reason to avoid committing ourselves to choices that may end up being poorly matched with the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Previously, I have written about the idea of a steady-state economy. In particular, I stressed the distinction between an economy that is stable in terms of the total biophysical impact of humanity and an economy in which everything stays the same. One critical difference between the ‘constant impact’ and the ‘set in stone’ options is technological development. With a set amount of copper and electricity and silicon we can now make a much better computer than we could ten or twenty years ago. Because we can make better use of resources – as well as avoiding waste, and handling the waste we do produce better – we can still aspire to an improving quality of life, even if we keep the amount of raw material we take from the planet constant and keep the amount of waste we release into the environment constant.

That’s not the only way of keeping our options open, along with those of future generations, but it is a relatively optimistic scenario. I don’t think what matters from a moral perspective is the total number of people on the planet, the size of their homes, or the amount of energy they use. What matters is the richness of their lives. Since the richness of the lives of future generations matters as much as the richness of our lives, we have an obligation to interact with the planet in a way that doesn’t close off too many options for the people who come after us. To me, that implies minimizing serious and irreversible changes in the functioning of the planet system, which in turn requires us to replace the global energy system with a sustainable one, while working to increase the sustainability of other activities. From this perspective, one of the most morally dubious things we can do is continue to invest in a fossil-fuel based economy. Not only will it be increasingly dysfunctional as fossil fuel reserves are exhausted, but our reliance on fossil fuels is the primary cause of climate change.

Life inevitably involves the narrowing as well as the broadening of choices. We can’t hope to keep everything that is possible today possible forever. That being acknowledged, I think a strong case can be made that there is both a practical and moral importance to keeping options open, including across an intergenerational timespan. Similarly, we should pay more attention to irrevocable choices (like “burn all the world’s coal”) than to reversible ones. When it comes to these irreversible choices, we should also be especially on guard for people who simply make the choice that works best for them personally. There is a huge risk of moral corruption wherever the possibility of a big up-front payout with a big long-term cost exists, given that you can take the payout and fob off the cost on others (a favourite strategy of tax-cutting conservatives everywhere). Perhaps adjusting our thinking to pay more attention to keeping options open could be one way of reducing the seriousness of such problems.