Earth day is tuesday……but remember…..

And this doesn’t mean I’m a communist or anti-American or any other sound bite. As I see it, this is just how it is. A way of life based on continuous growth cannot last on a finite planet. We’ve known this all along…

To get at the root problems, we have to question more than our consumer choices.

Here are two examples from many that illustrate the way in which the “green revolution” merely acts as a smoke and mirror trick, whereby one environmental problem is “fixed” but creates other—often larger—problems for the environment in other ways.

Food. (NYT) (thanks to beneath the pavement [formerly Auckland’s Burning] for posting this article.)

The world’s food situation is bleak, and shortsighted policies in the United States and other wealthy countries — which are diverting crops to environmentally dubious biofuels — bear much of the blame.

The global cost of wheat has increased by 80% in the last year alone.

Prices have gone so high that the World Food Program, which aims to feed 73 million people this year, said it might have to reduce rations or the number of people it will help.

The reason? We’re not growing food to eat, we’re increasingly growing food to put in our gas tanks.

Yet the most important reason for the price shock is the rich world’s subsidized appetite for biofuels. In the United States, 14 percent of the corn crop was used to produce ethanol in 2006 — a share expected to reach 30 percent by 2010.

Now, you might be thinking, “well, my new plug-in Prius runs solely on electricity.”

They may not be gas-guzzlers, but electric cars have a raging thirst for water. (ENN)

A comparison of the volume of coolant water used in the thermoelectric power plants that provide most of our electricity and that used in extracting and refining petroleum suggests that electric vehicles require significantly more water per mile than those powered by gasoline.

… cars, light trucks, and SUVs running off the electric grid consume three times more water and withdraw 17 times more water per mile than their equivalent gasoline-powered vehicles.

The other day, I read a bumper sticker that said, “question their answers.” Frankly, I can’t think of a better slogan to accompany a good honest interrogation of the green “revolution” we’re apparently having. While this post is not one on how the media has cheapened and co-opted the meaning behind the word, “revolution,” it is, similarly, one about deception and the reinforcement of dominant power structures.

A friend of mine was appalled by recent claims by the global warming skeptics that this green frenzy was simply cooked up by politicians and CEO’s to make money while at the same time, fear mongering. It is a disgusting thought, but I can’t blame the skeptics for thinking this. Not one bit.

It’s everywhere—completely unchecked and out of control.

Last month provided many “green” gift ideas for xmas. Apparently Pittsburgh rang in the new year with an eco friendly dropping ball. The Daily Green: “The Consumer’s Guide to the Green Revolution”, however, provides information on everything from green cuizines to tips on taking “green vacations” to information on how to win a $250,000 “eco-makeover”—where you can “green your car, green your home, green your life.”

The New Air Jordan basketball shoes are made from recycled “sustainable” material. The first “Green” sports shoe. Nevermind the fact that the shoes still come from exploited countries thousands of miles away and require the design and construction of new machines in order to be constructed. Sustainable indeed.

The “Green” revolution is bullshit. For anyone paying attention, it quickly became a marketing strategy, used by politicians to claim moral superiority and used by corporations to reinforce false virtues of capitalism by promoting consumption to save the planet. Yoink! It’s a classic bate and switch, the ol’ buff and bluff, the ol’…well, you get the point.

I recently read Derrick Jensen’s new graphic novel that pokes fun at Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth. The truth of course is even more inconvenient. Remember all those tips provided at the end of the film—such as replacing lightbulbs, installing low-flow shower heads, recycling, and keeping your tires inflated—that were touted as individual things everyone can do to save the planet? Lets go through them…

1. Replacing one regular light bulb with a compact fluorescent saves 150 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. If everyone in the U.S. does this, 400 million tons of carbon dioxide would be saved.

2. You’ll save one pound of carbon dioxide for every mile you don’t drive
(Which of course means you put out one pound for every mile you do). Considering that motorists in the U.S. drive about 2.3 trillion miles, if we cut that in half we save about 575 million tons of CO2

3. Recycle: you can save 2,400 pounds of carbon dioxide per year by recycling just half of your household waste
(Which means, of course, that you still dump 2,400 pounds for the other half). If every American household did this, 125 million tons of CO2 would be saved.

4. Keeping your tires inflated properly can improve gas mileage by more than 3%. Every gallon of gasoline saved keeps 20 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
(Which means that every gallon burned… )

5. You can install a low flow showerhead to save 350 pounds of CO2 per year and wash your clothes in cold or warm water to save 500 pounds per year. If both of these are implemented, 105 million tons will be saved.

6. Roughly another 105 million tons of CO2 would be saved if people adjusted their thermostat an average of 2 degrees down in the winter and up and in the summer.

7. Plant a tree: one will absorb one ton of CO2 during its lifetime
(Or we could just stop cutting them down). Again, if everybody in the U.S. did this, roughly seven million tons of CO2 will be saved.

Go ahead and add up the numbers; the math is pretty easy (and I was an English major!). If all these individual cut-backs were implemented, about 1.5 billion tons of CO2 would be saved! Relish in this utopia—this land of make believe. Thanks Al!

There is just one problem. Total carbon emissions for the U.S. are 7.1 billion tons per year. All these hokey individual contributions, which appeared in Al Gore’s list at the end of An Inconvienent Truth, would decrease emissions by a little over 20 percent—and lets be real with this culture, it won’t happen.

But for the sake of argument, lets pretend every American does implement these strategies and emissions are cut by 21%. There are still two major kickers:
A) the general scientific consensus holds that at least half (that would be 50%…) of our emissions need to be cut before any meaningful transformation may occur.
B) Considering, of course, that the total carbon emissions for the U.S. increase roughly two percent every year, the fact that we’ve all been swindled by corporate sponsored “green” propaganda” should be horribly clear.

It is the job of marketers to get you to associate products and brand names with the kind of positive emotions and feelings we’re all seeking. We all want to help the environment, but we won’t buy our way out of this one.

Sure, ride your bike, recycle, use energy efficient light bulbs, install low-flow shower-heads, be slightly hotter in the summer and slightly colder in the winter, and keep those tires properly inflated. But do it because you want to live a good moral life, not because you think you’re saving the planet. Because you’re not.

We should not be surprised to learn that the subjugation of women, alternative masculinities, and the environment are fueled by the same dominant masculine ideologies. As batterer-intervention counselor Lundy Bancroft concludes in his book, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, abusive men have internalized cultural beliefs about what it means to be a man that legitimize their behavior. One of the central issues at work in the construction of these ideologies is characterized by an initial sense of entitlement. “Entitlement,” according to Bancroft, “is the abuser’s belief that he has a special status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges that do not apply to his partner” (Bancroft 54). When we consider the ways in which men have similarly legitimized their control over the natural world, we might understand that “the attitudes that drive abuse [of women, alternative masculinities, and the natural world] can largely be summarized by this one word” (Bancroft 54). Consider the roots of men’s sense of entitlement over the natural world in one of the oldest and, arguably, most influential texts, The Bible.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (Genesis, chap. 1, v. 26)

The most problematic word in this passage of The Bible is the word, “dominion,” which is defined as “lands or domains subject to sovereignty or control,” thus the derivative, “domination.” Thousands of years of identifying the environment in this way has had, as we have seen, devastating effects for the natural world. Further, identifying the natural world as one giant smorgasbord, whose purpose lies in the service of men, has brought with it the comforts and privileges we’ve grown accustomed to. This dominant ideology, however, similarly fuels the kind of battery and abuse that Bancroft describes. “Over time, the man grows attached to his ballooning collection of comforts and privileges” (Bancroft 152). This “attachment” is primarily in relation to the ideology that produces these comforts and privileges. Therefore, in the same way one must be defined in opposition in order to justify inhuman treatment of them, the ideologies that characterize the dominant masculine ideology must similarly never be questioned because of the comforts and privileges such an ideology produces for those in power.

As the question in the title of Bancroft’s book suggests, as long as women ask, “Why does he do that?” the emphasis is on the victim to change her behavior to avoid the abuse. As long as the victim of abuse is questioning his or her own actions, s/he remains blind to the systemic violence that underlies entire relationship. This also exemplifies a strong disconnection between the ideology and action. “Power, like property, like land and water, has become privatized and concentrated. And it’s been that way for so long that we believe it to such an extent that we think that’s the natural order of things” (Jensen 42).

Similarly, the discourse surrounding sustainability right now challenges us only to ask questions that do not question the entire abusive, destructive, and inherently, unsustainable system. “Global timber harvesters are squeezing more and more fiber out of a hectare of forest and yet deforestation proceeds unabated” (Princen 33). Similarly, our culture is feverishly examining alternative fuels such as hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol, bio-diesel and scores of others, but because the discourse surrounding sustainability is focused on the question of “how are we going to run our cars, sustainably?” it is rare that anyone considers the underlying premise that questions whether or not cars can ever truly be sustainable in the first place. “The outcomes, the goals of the institutions, are to ‘improve’ the environment, to use the resource more efficiently, to ‘green up’ consumption,” without questioning the culture of consumption itself (Prinsen 33). In this way, the dominant masculine ideology has us identify with its creations and its needs, which produce the comforts and privileges gained through a sense of entitlement, instead of identifying with real world needs.

Bancroft, Lundy. Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. New York: Berkley Trade. 2003

Jensen, Derrick. Endgame: Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization. New York: Seven Stories Press. 2006

Princen, Thomas. “Principles for Sustainability: From Cooperation and Efficiency to Sufficiency.” Global Environmental Politics. Vol. 3, No. 1. 33-50. 2003

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. ethanol rush could drain drinking water supplies in parts of the country because corn — a key source of the country’s alternative fuel — requires vast quantities of water for irrigation, the National Research Council reported on Wednesday.

U.S. President George W. Bush has called for production of 35 billion gallons per year of alternative motor fuels including ethanol by 2017, as part of an effort to wean the country from foreign oil. U.S. capacity to make the fuel, believed to emit low levels of greenhouse gases, has spiked about 28 percent this year to nearly 7 billion gallons.

But the use of more corn to make ethanol could drain water supplies like the Ogallala, or High Plains, aquifer, which extends from west Texas up into South Dakota and Wyoming.

It takes roughly 4 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. Keep questioning their solutions.

I’ve written many times about my frustration with those touting global warming alleviations as solutions. An article titled, “Garlic and Cow Belching: A Global Warming Cure?” further propagates this mindset.

Several months ago a UN study came out that concluded that “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” 

Belching farm animals account for 16% of our planet’s methane, a gas even more responsible for global warming than carbon dioxide.Apparently, feeding garlic to cows minimizes their release of methane. 

Further, and I’ve been trying to emphasize this a lot lately, global warming is just one of many environmental problems. Granted it’s an important and significant problem, but it is certainly not the only one. Focusing on this issue to the extent that we have detracts from all the others.

In composing/researching this thesis, I learned more about myself as a writer and thinker than through any other project I’ve ever undertaken. For those that don’t know, I wanted to figure out a way to discuss rhetoric, masculinities, and the environment within one central theme: I chose pickup truck advertising. There are still a lot of problems with it, I think. Though I’m going to work this semester to glean material from all of this to produce two solid scholarly journal articles: masculinities will be the focus of one, and environment (greenwashing, sustainability…etc.) will be the focus of the other.

With this project, I was able (hopefully) to illuminate the ways in which feminist and environmental activism are constrained and affected by the same power structures, the same issues of entitlement, control, and dominance. This year, I’m hoping to put some of this into action, forming coalitions between my work with The MARS Project (men against rape and sexism) with local environmental groups. If, for some reason, there is anyone who wants to read the whole thing (like 95 pages), I’d be happy to send it through email as long as all the copyright stuff is respected.

The entire thesis is called: Power Under the Hood: Pickup Truck Advertising, Hyper-Masculinities, and Denial in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse

Members of American culture would be hard pressed to imagine an advertisement for a pickup truck that didn’t display a rugged individual behind the wheel, navigating his new mud-splattered F-150 through towering canyons, his truck clawing its way over jagged boulders and rapid streams—spitting up water and gravel along the way—only for it to rest at an impossibly jagged cliff among the desolate, pristine wilderness that lays before him. The other dominant image depicted in these advertisements, of course, is a construction site. In this advertisement the viewer catches up with the same rugged individual as he finishes loading his new Silverado with 2 x 4’s; he hops into the cab, leaving the construction site in a cloud of dust, just in time for a catchy, masculine slogan to run across the screen such as “built Ford tough,” “size matters,” “like a rock,” or “high performance starts here.”

In this world, pickup trucks—and the men in them—are invincible. They are in the driver’s seat, paving their own destinies. They are in control, they are steadfast, they are confident. Such a man is just as much a part of the truck as the truck is a part of him. There is nothing a man and his truck cannot conquer in the world created by pickup truck advertising. It is a world not affected by the environmental impacts of combustion engines, or the destructive wake of heavy off-road tires. It is a world where men are fueled by aggression and sustained by power, control, and dominance over alternative masculinities, women, and the natural world.

Analyzing the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising reveals intersections between rhetoric, masculinity, and the way our relationship to the natural world is constructed. An analysis such as this is crucial in that it allows us to rediscover what it means to be authentic, autonomous, and fully human members of a culture outside of generic and confining gender roles. Once we sift through the negative effects of the cultural norms, deep-seated within the rhetoric of advertising, we can begin to uncover what it means to be fully human and, thus, interact with one another and the natural world in a way that is truly meaningful and reciprocal. In order for this to happen, a careful examination surrounding the discourse on sustainability and so-called “green” automobiles must be interrogated as well. If our culture is, indeed, in the process of a transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life, the disconnection between ideology and action must be united. The world illustrated in the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising gives members of American culture false and harmful representations of masculinity. By portraying the dominant masculine ideology as virtuous in the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising, a myth is further propagated that, through the implementation of domineering technology, man can transcend the needs of the natural world. In the narcissistic world of pickup truck advertising, violence, aggression, control, and domination are portrayed as innate, as natural and predictable as the setting sun.

Meanwhile, in the real world, nearly one-third of American woman will “report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point during their lives” (Katz 21). Approximately one in four or one in five women will experience an attempted or completed rape in college (Katz 21). Over 99% of the perpetrators of rape are men (Katz 5). But men don’t just attack women; “Between 50 and 70 percent of men who abuse their female partners also abuse their children” (Katz 21). The dominance of patriarchy—and particularly a masculinist ideology— also fuels a strong sense of homophobia in our culture. In 2005, 13.8% of all reported hate crimes were motivated because of sexual orientation (FBI). Of the 1,213 victims targeted because of sexual orientation bias, 61.3 percent of the victims were homosexual men (FBI stats). Though the FBI doesn’t list statistics on how many of these crimes were perpetrated by men, “the Bureau of Justice Statistics say that over 85% of violent crimes in the U.S. are committed by men” (Katz 79).

We also live in a world where roughly three percent of old growth forests remain intact in the United States (San Francisco Chronicle). An average of 150 species of animals go extinct every single day (BBC News). According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are carcinogens in every single stream in the United States (U.S.G.S.). Ninety percent of all the large fish in the sea are gone (National Geographic News). It is predicted that by 2030, a quarter of all the earth’s mammals will be gone, forever (Podger). There are, of course, many systematic and institutional reasons for these striking figures, but most of them can be summed up as due to increasing loss of habitat. This is particularly true if, in the definition of habitat, we include drinkable water, breathable air, and sustainable food sources. Much like the trucks described above, as our culture has extended its colonization of wild habitats, it has destroyed, in whole or in part, everything in its path.

In short, our culture is very violent. Statistics support the notion that this violence can, in part, be attributed to the dominant masculine ideology, which functions as a cycle from which narrow, and, indeed, harmful interpretations of what it means to be a man are encouraged throughout development, reproduced in the media—particularly through advertising—and ultimately rewarded in the capitalist society at large. Like a fish unaware of its own liquid environment, it is important to recognize the difficulty inherent in questioning the impact of one’s surroundings and how these surroundings influence behavior, world-views, and motivations. This project is particularly concerned with the role that advertising in the mainstream media plays in the construction of world views. Long after the marriage between production and promotion, products have been linked symbolically to the “world of social values,” whereby accepting the “selling message is to accept the values it presupposes” (Wernick 23). By looking critically at today’s advertising, we can begin to understand what is being “sold” or “promoted” beyond the product itself.

So why, one may ask, have I chosen pickup trucks and not, say, SUVs? I am deliberately omitting SUVs, insofar as I can, from my analysis and, instead, focusing specifically on pickup trucks for two main reasons. First, though many women do drive pickup trucks, advertising, by and large, is generally geared towards men. In fact, a Chevrolet marketing campaign from 2005 called, “Long Live the Truck,” was according to the marketing director, “aimed at men, who make up 87 percent of the full-sized pickup’s buyers” (Geist 1). Rob Schwartz, creative director for Nissan, specifically identified the full-sized truck market as a “male-dominated category” (Halliday 2). Further, SUVs are a relatively recent phenomenon while pickup trucks represent a long tradition of masculinity and men’s roles in American culture.

Before such a formal analysis of these commercials as cultural texts can take place, however, it is important to get a sense of the way advertising works and how the focus of advertising has shifted from logically-based appeals to those that attempt to exploit our deepest emotions. Further, it is crucial to understand how these appeals to emotion specifically reinforce, and thus promote, traditional gendered stereotypes and worldviews characterized by false and limiting dichotomies. This will lead into a demonstration of the way in which this mindset negatively affects men’s relationships with women and alternative masculinities. In addition, I shall examine how the consequences of this hegemonic gendered identity alongside the rhetoric of pickup truck advertisements converge in a manner that justifies the on-going destruction of the environment.

High fives to Sale Kirkpatrick for writing this fantastic essay. It’s few years old, but pretty on point with my thoughts on the Live Earth fiasco (here and here. I found it when I was researching my thesis and meant to post it. Here is a great excerpt.

The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them. Take our crazy energy consumption. For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption – residential, by private car, and so on – is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution. I mean, sure, go ahead and live a responsible environmental life; recycle, compost, ride a push-bike; but do it because it is the right, moral thing to do – not because it’s going to save the planet.

If we really want to understand why this happened we have to ask ourselves another question: ‘Why is it that we seem willing to live with the threat of apocalypse rather than trying to seriously alter a world where consumption, of anything, is seen as unrelieved virtue, production, of anything, is regarded as a social and economic necessity, and more, of anything (like children or cars or chemicals or PhDs or golf courses or recycling centres), is unquestioningly accepted?’

The Ecologist is rad.

A bit early I know, but I’m going to be busy working on some other things this week, then I’m off to Taos, NM for a few days. So here it is. Enjoy.

On 7/7/07, more than 10 million people tuned in to watch Al Gore’s Live Earth™, “The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis.” In case you were in a coma that day, Live Earth was a 24-hour, 7 continent (including Antarctica—I’ve heard they’ve got a great music scene there) concert series that brought together more than 100 mainstream music artists and 2 billion people to “trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.”

I really tried not to be cynical about this thing because I do appreciate the increased awareness. Plus Al Gore and Madonna certainly have the power to reach populations of people that would never give me the time-a-day. Perhaps the millions of people who signed the Live Earth Pledge™ will act on their commitment and think critically about it. Or, maybe they just wanted to see their name appear on the Live Earth jumbo-tron.

On the surface, it would seem that any environmentalist would be doing back flips in their Chacos upon hearing word of a global concert that raises awareness about global warming. I mean, one couldn’t turn the television on that day without hearing the word “green,” and every other Myspace bulletin I received hyped up the event. So why did I think the whole thing was a sham?

Increased awareness is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. We need everyone on board if we are going to have a planet that will support life in the future. But what kind of awareness and “solutions” are being touted here?

Let’s take a look at the content of The Live Earth Pledge™ and we’ll see what Al Gore says will save the planet. “1. I will change four light bulbs to CFLs at my home.” “2. I will ride public transit or carpool one or more times per week.” 3. I will shop for the most energy efficient electronics and appliances.” “4. I will forward a Live Earth email message to 5 friends” (at this point, I have coffee coming out of my nose). “6. I will shut off my equipment and lights whenever I’m not using them.”

The list goes on. It does get a little better, but like these first 6 commitments, they all reinforce the notion that nothing fundamental about the way we live on this planet has to change. Perhaps most importantly, none of these things are solutions to global warming, and they should not be touted as such.

My pledge would be short and to the point: “I will do whatever it takes to stop industrial logging, stop industrial agriculture, stop the murder of the oceans, put an end to factory farms, remove dams to liberate rivers, and put an end to the destruction of communities, both foreign and domestic.”

Perhaps after all these CFL light bulbs burn out in 7 years and the toxic mercury contained in them seeps into our local environment, people will begin to look at things differently. Perhaps, at this point, our culture might finally realize that the environmental problems we face are much more complex, that real solutions are tied to the institutional foundations from which our civilization is based.

Last month, I interrogated the discourse on sustainability in the hopes that people might begin thinking about what sustainability really means and what sort of products, such as automobiles, will never characterize a sustainable future. In short, we’re not going to buy our way out of our environmental problems. Change will come when we look at our existence on this planet in a new way (which is actually a very old way).

We will have to give up a lot; that is simply the reality. I’m not in a position to say exactly how our transition to sustainability will unfold, but right now we have the choice to make this transition a voluntary one. In the near future, we won’t have that luxury. Part of this process, which thoughtfully interrogates and restructures the way we live on this planet, requires that we also think critically about our conceptualization of waste.

First of all, what does sustainability really mean? It is worth noting that there is currently no standard definition, from which standards are gauged, for sustainability. Maybe this is why we’re so confused. There is a little irony here. If one believes the stories of science, we’re the most intelligent beings on the planet, yet we’re the only animals that don’t know what it means to live sustainably.

We’re also the only animals on the planet that, simply by living here, do nothing to improve the land. We take and take and denude the landscape until there is nothing left. We’re the only ones, save perhaps cyclical locust invasions, that do this. Even in death, as we rot in caskets 6-feet under the ground, we block the land from using our bodies as we decompose.

I’ll take a stab at a reasonable definition, and I’m open to suggestions. A sustainable existence may be defined as any way of living that gives as much as it takes, thus supporting, respecting, and engaging in active relationships with those systems of live necessary to support ones own life. This means, if I eat elk, and rely on elk for my life, I am responsible for the continuation of the elk and its community—meaning everything that supports the life of the elk. If I don’t take responsibility, if I don’t engage in that relationship, there will be no more elk and my way of life will not last. And every animal knows this but us.

Live Earth taught me, if it taught me anything, that we are only capable of baby steps. I spoke on the phone with our local Sustainability Manager, Nicole Woodman. Part of her job, as is mine, is to engage the public and to help influence the way in which our city thinks about our impact on the land around us.

“When you talk about consumption, you need to also talk about education,” Nicole said. At this point, “we’re trying to instill a level of accountability.” It is hard to be accountable for problems that are largely invisible to the public. Flagstaff’s landfill, for example, is located over 10 miles northeast of town. Citizens don’t have to see the consequences of our way of life, which Nicole describes as “a throw away culture.”

“It’s way out there,” she said, “it’s hidden.” Just for kicks, I drove by it this afternoon. The wind was blowing hard, as monsoon rains were approaching. I have to say, the road leading up to the landfill is a beautiful one. Winding through dense forest to the right and spectacular views of the peaks through the prairie grasses to the left, the landfill is about two miles or less from 89 on “Landfill Road”. I was thinking about how vague the word “landfill” is. I mean when you say the world landfill, nobody asks what they’re filling the land with; everyone knows you’re talking about waste.

I often wonder, if aliens came down from outer space, what would they make of the artifacts of our civilization? I think our landfills would be the most telling. From where I’m looking, the garbage—which is constantly being moved, shuffled around, and buried—is mostly paper. Of whatever percentage is paper, roughly 20 to 30 percent of it is fast food remains. There is also a separate pile, towards the front, dedicated to broken televisions. To my left is “green trash,” which can only be described as a giant pile of grass clippings, dirt, and scattered weeds of all varieties.

Trucks drive in, dump, drive out. Trucks drive in, dump, drive out; day in and day out, 362 days out of the year—for-ev-er. The aliens would think we’re very weird indeed.

The first thing I noticed as I walked the fence, however, was the bags. Thousands of white plastic grocery bags flew through the air like a flock of seagulls. The wall seemed to be serving its purpose pretty well, in terms of containing most of the bags. Yet the surrounding area, trees, and shrubs were covered in bags, flapping violently in the cool summer wind.

I was the only one at the landfill in a car, which obviously makes sense. I was also the only one there taking pictures of the trash, which made me stick out even more. Nonetheless, everyone I ran into was very nice. As I walked along the back perimeter fence, careful to look where I was going, I had a clear perspective of the immensity of our landfill. It’s huge. It’s also well-managed, considering what they’re up against.

Nicole told me that Flagstaff currently spends tens of thousands of dollars on cleanup efforts, and bags are not very easy to get out of trees. The bags need to go. They, like many of the thoughtless consumables produced, should never have been made in the first place.

I thought of the ordinance that San Francisco recently passed, which places a ban on all plastic bags from grocery stores and pharmacies and Eugene, OR, which banned Styrofoam a few years back. San Francisco is now beginning to offer compostable bags made of cornstarch instead of oil.

I went home and called San Francisco. I was curious how such an ordinance was passed. I talked to Boris Delepine, the aide of Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who sponsored the ordinance. He said the idea is really catching on, that Seattle, Baltimore, and Annapolis are trying to pass similar legislation. “We went after the largest producers of bags,” said Delepine, “namely the grocery stores and pharmacies.”

Flagstaff has like 17 grocery stores, so I’m sure if such an ordinance was passed here, it would be similar. I got excited and asked Nicole if similar legislation could be passed here. “I’m researching our options at this point.” At first, I have to say, I thought she was just giving me lip service…as one who has interviewed many city officials during my writing career, I’m pretty used to it. Nicole, however, went on to explain the issue from a practical local level, which I really appreciated.

“The landscape of Flagstaff, Arizona is much different” than the land under and around San Francisco. San Francisco has a municipal compost service, so citizens can throw all their biodegradable material in one of these compostable bags and the city will pick it up. Flagstaff doesn’t have municipal compost due to the dry climate of the area. “While San Francisco can offer that service because it only takes the bags 10 to 45 days to compost, it would take roughly 2 years here.”

That makes sense, but it doesn’t stop the fact that the oil-dependent plastic bags should not exist in the first place. Plastic bags and Styrofoam are just the tip of the melting ice burg in terms of what needs to go. A thousand years after one takes their last sip of that nasty gas station coffee, the Styrofoam cup will remain. There is no excuse for that.

It’s 2007 and the Earth and all its life support systems are in crisis. Why do manufacturers continue to produce packaging that can only be used once? If it can’t be recycled and used again in one way or another, such as many plastics and specific papers, why do they still exist in the market?

I asked this question on my website and received the answer immediately from a friend of mine in Eugene. “Throwaway products continue to be produced because they are cheap, in the sense that many of their true costs are externalized and the cost to industry is minimal relative to alternatives,” he said.

In a culture that continues to put the needs of the economic system above the needs of the natural world, I can follow the attempt at logic. It’s still insane, however, and it still can’t last. Nicole touched on this subject as well. “We don’t look at the full cost of anything.” When we buy something and throw it out, it’s as if it disappeared. We’re privileged enough not to think about the fact that, like Styrofoam, our trash will outlive us.

Personally, I don’t want to pay the true cost of anything either. I don’t think you can put a price on a piece of trash that will continue to toxify the environment for a thousand years. Simply put, products that come with such extreme environmental consequences should not be manufactured. Period. And this list, of course, goes far beyond plastic bags and Styrofoam.

Nicole said it all comes back to making smart choices, but we have to be real with ourselves and make truly informed choices. And when no suitable choices exist, citizens need to demand alternatives.

“Contact City Council and express your concerns,” said Nicole. The Sustainability Commission meetings are held on the second Wednesday of every month. The next one is 4:30 P.M., August 8th, at City Hall. Nicole will bring the issue of plastic bags to the table. See you there!

I just received an email inviting me to this conference. I’m still a little clear on what its about.

It seems like they want me to speak about how, as a teacher, I might be able to mobilize students to work on sustainable initiatives by “transforming learning into action.” While that sounds fantastic on paper, I’m curious as to whether their idea of “action” is the same as mine. I talked with my brother on the phone last night and we briefly discussed my “cars will never be sustainable” essay. I told him that many of the “green” marketing out there is being touted as solutions, when in actuality, of course, they are not. He said that moving to a no-car culture, even though that is where sustainability lies, is not feasible. I agree, with the way everything is set up right now, a no-car culture is not feasible. Yet, I think it is very important to note that solutions to the problems we face are not going to be economically feasible. I’ll say it again, solutions to environmental problems will not be good for the economy; we have to accept that. When seriously dealing with and thinking about these issues, we have to put the needs of the environment first. That means shifting out understanding of the role the environment plays in our lives verses the role the economy plays. We have to rekindle a resounding and thoughtful dependence and respect for the environment because it is the land that sustains life, not the economy. And we’re going to have to accept that if we are going to be living sustainably, we are going to be living very different lives than what we are used to. And we will be living sustainably one day, or we won’t be living at all.