Freedom to be Wrong

by Matt DeNoto

How do we change people’s behaviors?

In Seattle, a ballot measure was recently defeated to impose a 20-cent fee on paper and plastic bags from grocery stores. People from Seattle are generally considered to be fairly progressive, environmentally-minded folk. More people already use reusable shopping bags in Seattle than most other places in the country (though it’s still only 20-30%). It’s easy to imagine that they know exactly why this fee is being proposed, and the good that it could accomplish.

Originally, the City Council simply voted to impose the fee. But the American Chemistry Council decided to put up a fight (and more than $1 million) to get the measure first put on the ballot for a public vote, and then to make sure that vote was “No.”

Given the choice between doing the right thing and the easy thing, the people of Seattle chose the easy thing. They chose to make it easier for themselves to forget their reusable bags in the car or at home, because who cares? The bags at the grocery store are free. Maybe next time.

If the people are unwilling to give themselves the incentives to change, how will anything get done? It’s clear that people aren’t simply making the right choices on their own. If that were the case, Seattle wouldn’t have needed a fee in the first place.

But perhaps that’s a bit too hopeless (and drastic) of a viewpoint. Despite the outcome, perhaps some good was done simply by getting the information out there and making people at least consider the consequences of their actions. Perhaps this vote won’t mandate change, but a few more citizens will voluntarily take up the reusable bags now than would have otherwise.

Even if the fee had been enacted, it’s not as though that would make the kind of change we need. Plastic bags are, on the whole, a tiny piece of the pollution problem.

On the other hand, it’s a tiny piece that is easily accessible. Everybody knows about grocery store bags, and it’s easy to see that they are wasteful. If we could get everybody to make just one change, then the next would be easier.

But that’s not how this country works. We were founded on principles of freedom, including the freedom to be wrong.

So how do we change people’s behaviors?

Not one behavior at a time, but one person at a time.

Prism of Patriotism

by Matt DeNoto

It’s good that people love the country in which they live. In America, nationalism has always been fundamental. And for good reason. This country was founded on strong democratic principles, revolutionary for their time. Even in its infancy, there was something unquestionable about people in America believing that they lived in the greatest country in the world. It was an idea only reinforced by America’s massive influence in WWII. And then the Space Race. We are a Superpower.

America has a long history of seeing itself as the best. So it’s only natural that its citizens make that claim somewhat without thought. But accepting something without examination is dangerous. So let me take a second to ask…

Is America the greatest nation in the world? How do we judge?

Unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence that suggests that we, the people of America, are not the best. We are not the smartest (That’s South Korea). We are not the healthiest (Iceland). We do not live the longest (Canada). For all our boasting, we’re not even the happiest (Denmark). Heck, we don’t even crack the top ten in the list of most democratic countries (Sweden’s #1). We pay more for most things (except those that are government-subsidized). We’re not the greenest either.

If you have questions about where I got this information from, that’s good. Do some research to satisfy yourself about the statistics. Don’t accept it without examination.

I often hear that America is the ‘richest’ country. But I’m not rich. Are you rich? I would imagine that citizens of the richest country in the world never have to worry about money. But we’re all in debt. And can we really consider ourselves to be rich when everything we buy and all the money our government spends both come from China?

There are people going to well-reported ‘town hall’ meetings and screaming at their representatives about the terrible danger posed by the government trying to give its people health care reform. They cower in terror from the slightest whiff of socialism (even though the police, fire and public school systems have been socialized for years).

Is this how civilized debate works in the world’s greatest country? What are we really trying to protect?

Claims that America is the best without any evidence to back it up isn’t nationalism, it’s delusion. What if America wasn’t the best? Would that let us be more objective about our problems? Would that give us more freedom to accept that when we try to fix things, there’s always a chance it might not work?

I grew up in New York, watching the Knicks with my dad. The Knicks haven’t won an NBA Championship since 1972. Sometimes, the team is great, sometimes (the last decade or so) the team isn’t so great. But that’s just how it goes. At the end of the day, I root for them not because they’re the best (they’re not), but because the Knicks are my team.

America’s pretty great. But it’s not the best, and that’s okay. Not being the best gives us not only something to strive for, it also means there are other countries that we can learn from. It takes strength to be humble.

Green When You’ve Gone

by Matt DeNoto

In my first article on this site, I wrote about the confusion landfills have always caused in me. Today I’d like to write about another source of confusion – graveyards.

Graveyards have always seemed to me like an incredible waste of space. Acres of land kept practically barren in an eternal tribute to death. Bodies preserved unnaturally using chemicals, buried in expensive, pointlessly comfortable boxes. We are ‘returned to the Earth’ in the most contradictory way imaginable.

The only other option seemed to be cremation. Have your body burned to ashes, to be stored forever in an urn or spread somewhere.

It is an interesting indication of this mentality humanity seems to hold about everything having a finite period of usefulness, and of our not really knowing what to do with anything once that use has been fulfilled. When we’ve eaten our fast food, we throw away the wrapper. When our TV stops working, we toss it and get a new one. We always need new clothes or shoes, because we’ve been taught that these things are less a practical means of keeping ourselves warm or protected, and more about expressing how we feel at any given moment.

Getting rid of these objects is easy. We set them out at the curb and someone comes to take them away to t he landfill. We need never consider them again.

We seem to be following the same impulse when we die. Get rid of the ‘trash.’ But because this waste used to be a person, it’s not so simple. We must be honored. So we each get our own mini-landfill.

But just like with regular landfills, this tradition is ultimately unsustainable. This practice of coddling our dead is, in more ways than one, hurting us.

Besides the space issue, there is another practical concern. A large number of people die every year because of a lack of donated organs. Our strange obsession with preserving ourselves after we die is now literally costing people their lives.

But as it is with many of the facets of the Green Revolution, we are starting to reexamine death. We are starting to come around. Already, many of us have marked on our driver’s licenses that we wish for our organs to be donated after we’ve died, so that our passing may give life to someone else who needs it.

Others are going even further. The Centre for Natural Burial is an organization promoting a way of reintroducing our lifeless bodies back into the Earth’s cycle, wherein the body is prepared for burial without using chemicals and buried in a way that encourages decomposition. A grave may be marked with a tree or a shrub that does not intrude on the natural landscape.

Or, for the green extreme, you can have yourself composted. It’s not quite legal yet, but in some parts of the world it may be catching on. Think of it. Your body will be used to fertilize and grow the food for the next generation.

Doesn’t that sound more interesting that spending eternity in a box?

Closed System

by Matt DeNoto

Up until about a week ago, my kitchen was infested with fruit flies. They pop up every summer, seemingly from out of nowhere, makes annoyances of themselves and, eventually, go away. Usually I try not to pay them any mind. I let them go about their business and they let me go about mine. But my kitchen was apparently a bit too fruitful for the flies, and their numbers started to grow beyond annoying into simply gross.

So I took a day, rolled up my sleeves and cleaned the kitchen thoroughly. Then I used the hose attachment on my vacuum to commit a little fruit fly genocide.

And silly though it may sound, I felt a little bad. I understand that they’re not intelligent creatures and that they don’t live long lives anyway, but I still try to hold as much as I can to the principle that living things generally have the right to go on living.

In my mind I began musing on the subject of niches. When we as humans started to become ‘civilized,’ living in houses with walls and roofs, we didn’t really reserve a place for the rest of nature’s creatures. Our homes are for us, and nothing else. And we have accepted this as natural, despite the fact that our dwellings take up significantly more space than we do as individuals.

Obviously we do not wish for the whole world to be standardized in this way. Even in our own neighborhoods we value parks and green spaces. National wildlife reserves protect species that might otherwise be endangered. But we have become addicted to control, drawing very thick lines between what parts of nature we are prepared to allow and which ones we are not. Hence pesticides and weed killers and immaculate lawns, to say nothing of the spaces inside our homes. Hard, flat surfaces and straight lines everywhere, so very unlike nature. They are designed for the comfort of humans, to the detriment of everything else. To those creatures that would dare to try and make themselves at home in our space we have given the name pests.

Of course, recently we have begun to see the benefits of the natural system. Over the centuries, the world has developed processes that keep things balanced. We are not yet so mature.

But we are starting to learn. We can now replace sewage systems with living, breathing mini-ecosystems that use our waste as food. We can build natural pools that utilize the inherent balances in nature, instead of harsh chemicals, to keep them clean and beautiful.

By slowly learning to reintegrate nature with our cold, selfish society, we not only benefit ourselves by cutting out those dangerous materials we used to keep the rest of the world at bay, we allow the rest of nature to do what it does best – allow every creature to perform its function to everyone’s benefit.