Domain Change

The Green Filter will be going back to its blogspot domain, thegreenfilter.blogspot.com, in a week or so. I haven't had a lot of time to devote to the blog, and it looks like it will continue to take a backseat for the time being.

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Connected

Hopefully I have more time and energy to post something more substantial soon, but in the meantime, I recommend listening to this or go here.

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The Narcissism Epidemic, Semi-Reviewed

This is probably a pretty tangential post, but I'm fairly sure some "environmental perspective" will seep in at the edges.

I'm reading The Narcissism Epidemic by Twenge and Campbell. In a lot of ways the authors are completely correct about selfishness taking over modern societies to varying degrees. It's a huge problem that I actually have had many non-academic conversations about with a pretty broad range of people. People feel it and sense the problem with it. The authors talk about how reciprocity is important for societies to work, and when blind selfishness causes people to take without giving back, it can have wide-reaching consequences as the person who is cheated of the returned favor becomes less inclined to help others and the cycle continues and expands to affect more and more people. Most of the rest of what's in the book you could arguably trace back to this one idea.

However, the chapter "All Play and No Work: Entitlement" left me less than impressed. It is absolutely true that there are a lot of young people who expect work to give them far more than they give it. At the same time, work is much less rewarding than it used to be except for those at the top of the pay scale. There's nothing in this chapter about the declining loyalty of companies to their employees (vs. the opposite), stagnant wages or the growing income gap, especially in the United States, where the authors reside and where most of the stats and anecdotes in the book are drawn from.

The criticism of the new drive for work-life balance also seems over the top. The authors seem to be, presumably without noticing it, biased towards a traditional lifestyle where work and/or family were the cornerstone of life, and wanting time for other activities is made to seem unrealistic or less desirable than focusing on work or family. Narcissism is no doubt somewhat linked to the rise in care-free, childless adults in low responsibility jobs, ultra flexible jobs, or seeking such jobs with probably unrealistically good pay to match. But there are also other trends at work.

The change in gender roles probably has something to do with it. Women, arguably, have traditionally been more interested in having children and actively raising a family than men have been. Now women are encouraged, if not expected, to pull their income and career weight as prospective marriage partners. Men have had their roles blurred as well so that career isn't the only thing they are expected to contribute anymore, but must now also help around the house and be more active parents. They may even stay at home with the kids while their wives go to work, however much society has lagged in valuing and including such men thus far. Is it any wonder that some people are throwing up their hands and letting both family and work slide in favour of something more immediate, such as a social life with solid friends and personal development and fulfillment? People are struggling with how to do it all, whether to try to do it all, and where they fit at all. They might also be wondering whether it's better to remain childless in such uncertain and challenging times when there are already more than enough people on the planet, degrading our own once-beautiful, varied and plentiful habitat more and more everyday.

There is also more widespread recognition of new realities regarding work, especially by young people. Work is less rewarding than in the past (i.e. stagnant wages, growing inequality, fewer benefits, fewer pension plans, less loyalty from employers) and there is growing recognition that a lot of jobs do not actually contribute much good to society at large. Being a little too idealistic myself, I have struggled with a choice of career in a world dominated by corporations and the drive to produce money for the economy (how about something good for society? Isn't that what the economy's for?). The authors are professors who get to spend their time thinking about things like what's gone wrong with society. They do not peddle or contribute to the peddling of more needless goods in the economy. At the same time, it seems probable that a lot of people in the new "information" and "service" economies being sought all over the world are feeling a sense of disconnection from their work, which produces less and less tangible results. Professors might think they are contributing to progress in society through research and the world of thought and debate, education. But the people who really make society work, the ones who grow and make our food, build our buildings and infrastructure, work in manufacturing and staff all those lowly service jobs where they sell you groceries and cut your hair, are often among the lowest paid there out there.

When the authors mention the argument for illegal immigration that such immigrants do jobs Americans don't want to do, they talk about this as if there is the implication that Americans think they're "too good" for such jobs. (This is also the argument for legal immigration, by the way, for most of the rest of the "developed" world.) Maybe Americans (and Canadians and Europeans) wouldn't think they weren't too good for these jobs if they were better enumerated and respected. I don't like working in an office, despite the authors' talk of how much easier it is than building a roof in summer heat. But as soon as you move into an office and start wearing office clothes, you generally get a pay hike and more respect. I deal with this reality everyday in the job I currently work. My job is considered entry-level, but without me, a place of business does not run at all. Without one of the office staffers..a phone doesn't get answered. They're essentially administrators, while I deal with the public everyday, enforcing rules and ensuring the place keeps doing business. Don't get me wrong, administrators are important, but why should they be paid so much more and respected so much more just because they sit at a desk and work with a computer? (Sometimes I think it's because there is an instinctive sense that office jobs really aren't better, that they keep people cooped up inside dealing with the same faces and office politics day after day and generally are more of a grind, but a lot of people do seem to prefer the air conditioning and cooped-up aspect to what I do everyday.) Americans (and the rest of us) would probably be more than willing to do these other jobs if they got paid enough to be reasonably comfortable on the wages from them and didn't feel embarrassed about not haven't progressed to a "real job". Admittedly Twenge and Campbell suggest that everyone should work a difficult job to learn humility and sustained respect for those who remain in such jobs for life.

There is a lot of mixing of trends in society. The authors talk about work-life balance as if many people expect it without expecting a pay cut too. They've missed out on the simply living and voluntary simplicity movements, apparently. They admit that there's a collision of work and life in their own days, but don't acknowledge that maybe there's a reason for the backlash. They talk about materialism as it relates to narcissism, but thinking about work-life balance and trends in happiness-seeking, people seem to be catching on that experiences, not "stuff" are what bring contentment. And balancing work with "life" can also mean taking part in political activities and other outward-looking activities that build society just as narcissism seems ready to destroy it.

I guess what I'm saying is that you can be focused on yourself, and try to be a well-rounded person and it can be good for society. Twenge and Campbell may have swung too far to one side, simplified too much and run too much in favor of a lifestyle and a societal setup that has deserted us. I'm sure I've made plenty of mistaken statements here (I haven't read the entire book yet and have skipped around a fair bit, and I'm writing this during a bout of insomnia), but as I read the book, I can't help that hope and think that society is in transition. On the other side of that transition we'll hopefully find something better, something in between the "good old days" where people focused mainly on work or family, business or community (generally one at a time, let's face it) and today where people have retreated to become too-isolated individuals. We're still looking for balance.

In the meantime, everyone individually and together can gain by stepping outside the self once in a while, and really trying to give back to someone else and to the world at large. Civilization needs it too.

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Money Increasingly Made in a Lab, Infused into Food, But at What Price?

As usual, it's been too long since my last post, and this one too will be rushed. Taking that into account I'll try to quickly sum up one general theme on my mind of late.

Food, Inc. is out. I haven't had the pleasure of watching it yet, since I live in a small city and to my knowledge it's not playing anywhere. I did however watch an interview on The Daily Show with film producer Robert Kenner. The issue of food production is intensely important because of its place at the base of our civilization and our connection with the natural environment and because of its universal impact. Everybody eats, as you'll hear again and again among activists. This is a good place to focus one's efforts to link up the environment, health, and social and economic issues.

The one thing that I'd like to see more focus on is the chemical and genetic engineering issues involved. It's not enough to worry about the terrifying scale and impact of industrial food production, the parts of it that are obvious and readily understood just by looking. People need to understand that money is being made by coming up with new chemicals and new genetically engineered plants and animals, that money is increasingly being made in a lab and in patent offices and in questionable legal contracts.

While conservatives complain about our "nanny states" and too much regulation, governments around the world are dropping the ball in the face of "scientific progress." They are letting corporations run wild in the name of profit and job creation, tax revenue and maintaining a hold on power in an increasingly globalized world, one in which poorer countries with cheap labor and less regulation hold the competitive edge in attracting business. Chemicals, biotech and nanotech are highly skilled industries that require plenty of initial investment, but also involve a lot of "value added" to products.

These industries represent what probably looks to governments like one of the last areas in which rich countries might maintain dominance. They also look a lot like a sneaky new form of colonialism or feudalism, where poor countries have their biological resources and indigenous knowledge "discovered", exploited, patented and modified and sold back to them in new systems of agriculture (and perhaps medicine and food generally) that inherently cause dependence and a steady loop of wealth transfer from poor to rich. This wealth transfer occurs within the wealthy nations as well, as farmers caught in a cycle of debt are more and more indebted to and controlled by companies like Monsanto or Tyson Foods. They're no longer farmers, but technicians doing as they're told and only being treated as the true owners and operators when something goes awry and they are held entirely responsible.

It may also be that governments simply do not know how to stop the onslaught of new chemicals and genetically engineered organisms. They are unsure how to regulate these things as they enter the market, "adding value" to products, while simultaneously posing a huge threat. Their long - and even short - term impacts on human health and the natural environment aren't and cannot be known due to their very nature and the scale of their distribution and application in the market and in the environment, in human beings, plants and animals.

Leaving genetic engineering aside, every time I eat something with artificial flavours my complexion seems to show it within days or even hours. My body's not the best at clearing out toxins, and I know plenty of people who can eat endless amounts of junk food and almost no produce and remain completely unblemished, but I take this to mean these things are toxins that need to be excreted. I don't care if they make my food taste better or make the companies producing them a few more bucks. What are they doing to my health?

So what can you do, today, tomorrow? Get away from eating processed foods. Cook at home, so you know what you're eating. When your food bill goes up, think of the savings in health benefits. In case your health isn't enough motivation, I'll confess it's primarily driven by vanity for me in the short run. I stay a decent weight and keep my complexion clear this way. I feel generally better day to day. I'm not thinking about living until I'm 90, I'm just trying to have the best possible existence day to day. Knowing that I'm making an effort to stop this disgusting - or at least poorly thought out - pursuit of profit by corporations at the expense of humanity and the planet at large makes it all the easier to continue to eat this way.

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Art, Culture as Making the Change

Related to my post from yesterday, and the idea that some people have turned away from the ecological problems we face, preferring to live in the moment, I've been meaning to talk more about the current state of the "public consciousness" so to speak. It seems to me, that even in this "turning away" there is a potentially very positive force, even if it's not an active drive towards solutions. Getting people to realize how the world works and how that functioning and those processes diminish our quality of life and our communities is half the battle. Changing how people think, in other words, is a good starting point. I wouldn't say it automatically results in change (for a deeper discussion of this, see Meyer's Political Nature) or change in the "right" direction, but it seems ultimately very necessary to cause a change in worldviews to put into practice the vast lifestyle changes that are required to deal with the issues we're facing. 

Understanding the disconnect between what is good for the economy and what is good for humanity can be as simple as conveying the cycle of processed food and pharmaceuticals to bad health and more pharmaceuticals and treatments and therapies and products to improve appearance and so on. All this injects money into the economy, but you have to wonder if it wouldn't be better if we kept most of that money in our pockets and ate healthier food, exercised and led less stressful lives. But imagine how the economy would contract in the pharmaceutical, processed food and beauty industries. There is a lot of money, and jobs, invested in the current system. The desire for change needs to reach far and wide, and also deep, if it's to get us where we need to go.

On that note, this post signifies my vote of support for a new project, Dark Mountain, just lifting off to try to spur such a cultural change through art. It seems to me there's already probably plenty of potential out there, along with art and cultural objects, tangible and intangible, for this kind of cultural shift. I was amused when I came across Tiesto's Elements of Life tour videos and listened to the opening "message." The crowd cheers after hearing how technology has reached the point where it's causing people to "grow apart, rather than coming together." The voice goes on, telling us that we must "traverse the force" to get back to the "essence of life."All the while you see the crowd with their phones and cameras stretched out overhead to capture whatever is there to be captured in the dark crowd, overcast by lights, waiting for the DJ to come on stage and light the place up with music that is about as technological as it gets as far as its "elements." 

But look at the size of the crowd. The "environmentalist" in me imagines they left a lot of garbage behind, even as I'm sure there's got to be a way to get from A - the message of coming together and "the true meaning of our existence" - to B: a better world. I think there's a lot of support for something better, we just haven't figured out how to get there yet, or what we're trading all our "stuff" in for. People need to be convinced we're getting something better, that's worth the change, that it's not really a "sacrifice." I'm already convinced it's not, but I'm realistic that it's not going to be easy or straightforward to transition and that far more people need to see the benefits. I'm sure there's a ton of this kind of expression of discontent in popular culture, if people look. 

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Oceans Update: Overfishing and the Problem of Plastic

Hopefully I'll be able to post more regularly soon, but in the meantime I thought I'd offer an update on some issues I've already covered. 

A couple years ago I read a book by Carl Safina that opened the door to how big an impact human activity is having on the oceans and marine life. Around the same time a major, and majorly depressing, report was released on the state of global fisheries, suggesting most would collapse by 2048 based on current activities and behaviour. Here's an update on the situation. 

Callum Roberts, a professor of marine conservation at the University of York lays out the situation. The big news is fairly straightforward. There has been a big movement to have fisheries assessed and certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. This has changed the approach to regulation of fisheries, especially in countries and regions where there has been a lot of certification done. More importantly, as Carl Safina emphasized as being a major problem in the past, when regulators and fishing interests meet to set quotas, there's now increasing pressure to base them on science, rather than on what voters or the fishing industry wants. For decades quotas have been set much higher than what scientists have said was necessary for sustainability, and thus the major(ly depressing) report on the imminent collapse of fisheries. 

The other big development has been a new drive towards protecting large sections of the ocean to function as breeding grounds for marine life, which would spur recovery. Coral reefs are often specifically protected for this reason, preventing bottom trawling nets from harming the reefs and also creating a hub for breeding. This is actually one of the areas where the previous American administration did a good job, getting a series of marine protected areas (MPAs) put in place, which now make up a third of MPAs globally. Roberts argues that quotas need to be put to rest, since they only lead to twice as much dead or injured marine life being thrown overboard as is landed. Rather, 30% of the oceans should be protected to allow for stocks to recover. A great deal of recovery could be accomplished in as little as 20 years.

But in other oceans news, there is the plastic problem. Plastic is a serious environmental and health issue that still isn't getting enough attention. The damage it causes is possibly most apparent in the oceans, where huge plastic garbage patches exist in areas where currents and winds are favourable for such agglomerations. Sea birds and ocean life eat or are entangled in plastic objects and die at a rate of a million a year for sea birds and 100,000 a year for marine mammals. Then there's the fact that plastic's biodegrading involves breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, so that in certain places in the ocean these pieces are more abundant than plankton and on certain beaches they make up a high proportion of the "sand". It seems likely that people, like birds, fish, whales and wildlife on land as well, are ingesting plastic to a certain extent. Plastic in water bodies also tends to attract other toxic chemicals, so that when it's ingested, it often has a toxic punch - aside from anything inherent in the chemicals contained in the plastic itself - that can accumulate and be magnified up the food chain.

In case you're thinking that a lot of the plastic in the ocean comes from refuse from ships or broken ship containers of shoes and toothbrushes, it's believed that 80% of it actually comes from plastic discarded on land, much of it as pellets before it has even had the chance to be made into useful products. The bottom line for most of us is to cut down on using disposable plastic shopping bags by using reusable ones, and to avoid drinking bottled water. Together these two are the worst of the plastic problem, and the easiest to cut back.

This article gives a fairly good history of the discovery of the problem and the history of plastic. It concludes with a commentary on a project led by David de Rothschild, which aims to raise awareness about the issue by sailing a specially designed, low environmental impact boat made entirely of recycled plastic to the plastic garbage patch and a bunch of other plastic "hot spots" in the Pacific, including certain islands and beaches. Mother Jones also recently did a piece that explains the potential, the usefulness and the problems of plastic.

Rothschild picks up on a major theme in the public mind lately, which is that the environmental problems seem so great to many people that they've essentially resigned themselves to just enjoying their own lives while "it lasts". Like him, I understand the pull in this, but I don't think it's an either-or situation. People need to do both. We can't completely absolve ourselves or our political and corporate leaders of responsibility by just "enjoying the moment". So much of the modern lifestyle, aside from any effects it's having on "the environment" and "nature", has impinged on an individual's ability to "enjoy the moment" anyhow, that sitting and putting up with it seems pretty defeatist and maybe just simply lazy and uninspired. But, that's another post. I'll end by saying that enjoying what you've got can also mean enjoying causing and effecting change, and it might be a higher and more lasting level of enjoyment at that.

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Chemicals, Birth Defects, The Future

It's entirely possible I've posted about this study before, but it bears repeating:

Probably one of the most important investigators in this area is a man named Michael Skinner who has shown us that the capacity that pesticides have to alter our lives has been grossly underestimated. In his model a pregnant rat is exposed for just a brief period in the very first phase of pregnancy to one pesticide. Keep in mind that there are no children in America who are exposed to just one pesticide. The average child is exposed to 300 chemicals at the time of conception. But in his model with just one pesticide all the rat babies when they were born did not have any birth defects at all. They looked perfectly normal. That's really important to think about because had the experiment ended there, it would have been declared a safe exposure, not associated with any harm. As he likes to point out, thanks to some inquiring minds he was allowed to keep his experiment going long enough to see how these rats turned out as adults. And there he found that ninety percent of the males were afflicted by a whole host of disorders that we would refer to as adult disorders, adult diseases. They included conditions like low sperm count and infertility, immune disorders, kidney and prostate problems, cancer, high cholesterol and a shortened life span. And if that sounds bad, it's really not as bad as the rest of the experiment. Because the rest of the experiment showed that this condition could be transferred to all subsequent generations without any further exposure. So if one pesticide could do this, imagine what might be happening in our society.

This quote is from Dr. Paul Winchester, a neonatologist who is warning people that it birth defects are much more common in babies conceived in the spring due to the higher concentrations of pesticides in the environment at that time of year. Pesticides are one group of chemicals, but there are many others in our food supply, cosmetics and environment that we have essentially no idea whatsoever what the long term effects might be, especially considering the sheer number of chemicals interacting. The likelihood for harm that accumulates over time seems high.

Update: Here's another example, phthalates are being linked to obesity. Phthalates are used in a lot of products, making it easy for them to be absorbed or even ingested. Note that the article says:

They have raised concerns as possible carcinogens for more than a decade, but attention over their role in obesity is relatively recent.

Ask yourself why they're still being put into products and what happens when a chemical like this is banned or comes to the widespread attention of the public. (Generally they replace it with another chemical. It's a bit like whack a mole, except, every year we might ban a tiny percentage of chemicals compared to the new ones coming on the market all the time.) 

There seems to be more articles like this one everyday. With food additives, as one example, a lot, or even all, of the things chemicals are used for, are superficial or just to ultimately create profit. Consider how new flavors of processed foods are made, and you might start to comprehend how money is created in labs, potentially at the cost of the long-term health of the population at large. The argument for a lot of chemicals has to do with convenience. It's hard to make a decision about whether the convenience is worth it when we don't know the long term cost of that convenience.

And on a vaguely related note, Kim Stanley Robinson talks about the future as related to climate change. What he's saying applies to other environmental threats as well though, such as the unknown impacts of chemicals, biotechnology - specifically transgenic biotechnology -, resource depletion, pollution and degradation at large. It would be nice if the rhetoric of "your children and grandchildren" would be set aside. I'm not sure if it's a nod to the fact that people in their 50s essentially still have so much power, or if it's just a failure to note that harmful effects, possibly catastrophic ones, will likely be felt within this century, but it gets annoying. I'm not anywhere near 50 though, and have no children. It's me I'm worried about, and you should be too, even if you're 50. People need to think more holistically about social justice and the environment, security and safety, and they need to think nearer term. The more complex a system becomes, the more possibilities for (unpredictable) problems there are and the more risk. It's never been more complex than the globalized, highly technologized, increasingly "man-made" (artificial) world we're living in now.

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