April 23, 2006
Recycling Redemption, Producing Penance
The overwhelmingly negative tone for this week was accented by a bit of incredulity in the McBride article when she wondered why consumers even bother with the whole recycling bit. If the vast majority of waste gets ejected from the cycle long before it even makes it into a salable product, why bother with the bins behind the garage?
On the one hand, even though recycling consumer waste can limit the total flows of waste by at most 1-2%, we still do it because there is something comforting about individuals working for the collective good. On the other hand, there are no corporations who seem to care one wit about the collective good, at least when it’s so distant from the bottom line. If there were a way it could pump profits, say if it were a safety concern and the corporation was Boeing…you get the idea. But waste management and efficiency are never adopted at the corporate level just because they are the right thing to do for the good citizens of the world. If they save money, they have a fighting chance; if they don’t, they never reach the level of discussion topics. What confused me a little bit was why, on the one hand, individuals are so interested in collective action as consumers, but so uninterested in collective action as producers. At some level we are talking about the very same people here. The CEO of Boeing, or the engineers, or whoever, go home and sort their paper into glossy newsprint, magazines, black and white newsprint, office paper, paperboard, plastic, glass, and so on. McBride incredulously marvels at the level of participation in what is a dirty and thankless act with no immediate benefits. For me the marvel is a little different: why do people feel such a need to be collectively good as consumers but not as producers? I realize that it is unwise to assume people are rational actors, but I feel like our readings (or maybe just my brain) is missing a piece of this puzzle. As an aggregate the same people are dirtying their hands messing around with old smelly waste because it’s the right thing to do, and on the other, they don’t care one wit about what happens to vast quantities of “waste” materials in their work places. The Unocal example suggested that bureaucratic culture can make it difficult to script new answers to old problems, which is undoubtedly true. But why didn’t waste management make it into the script of running the joint in the first place? If we are so concerned about waste at home, why don’t we care at work? Creative reuse of objects goes back quite a ways, long enough to have made it into bureaucratic regimes, especially when it seems as though waste and energy use management would likely save money over time in many cases. Is it consumer guilt that motivates individuals to recycle? Is sorting dirty soda cans like doing penance for having purchased a single use can in the first place? So then the reason production activities don’t result in waste management behavior is simply because they are oriented towards production, which is a pride-inducing guilt-free activity, rather than consumption? Is it that the very act of production is perceived to be of great benefit to society therefore producers are already in the altruistic black and feel no compulsion to seek redemption through recycling?
A giant heap of toxic rubbish. What a way to end the discussion of the tangible world.
Posted by Laura Noren at 10:03 PM
Capitalism and the Ecological Imaginary
The readings for this week all converge on an important point: what would the world look like if we took environmental concerns seriously. The Becker piece provides a nice theoretical frame with which to address this point: How do we take these concerns seriously when we are stuck in a rut, so to speak – to accustomed to doing things one way that it becomes almost unimaginable to change the status quo. Becker looks at how we can “understand the narrowness of our choices to make music when there are so many possibilities” (302). The same question holds true for ecological reform. McBride, Daly, Hawken et al, and McDonough and Braungart all offer alternatives: alternative regulations, alternative understandings of what development is, and alternative design patterns.
McDonough and Braungart pose an interesting question: “What would have happened, we sometimes wonder, if the Industrial Revolution had taken place in societies that emphasize the community over the individual, and where people believed not in cradle to grave life cycle but in reincarnation?” Asked differently, could the Industrial revolution have happened in that type of society? This piece, as with the Hawken and et al piece, is written absent a critique of the larger capitalist consumer model – it in fact proposes design initiatives that work within this model. Maybe that’s the problem. To use Becker’s (or rather use Becker’s use of Gramsci’s) term, hegemony isn’t in the design, but instead in a social/economic system that doesn’t prioritize ecological concerns.
In short, our current political economy doesn’t allow us to have an ecological imaginary – it doesn’t provide us with the tools with which we could imagine being more environmentally conscious. McBride’s piece, for example, illustrates that not only are “facts” not disseminated in a judicious manner, they are converted into information in such a way that detracts us from the more important environmental concern, which is producer waste rather than consumer waste. Daly’s description of the World Bank’s complete inability to even discuss sustainable development resonates similarly. This lack of an ecological imaginary isn’t only present at the organizational level, as these two pieces, along with Beamish, illustrate, but also at the level of public discourse and governmental policy and regulation.
Last week, I was somewhat resistant to the critiques of globalization as morally wrong or inherently oppressive, and pushed for some specificity in the critique of globalization. This week’s readings do provide a better sense of where a consumer driven economic system combined with a neoliberal regulatory system (as illustrated in the Beamish) results in very concrete problems that do not seem as if they can be solved if we follow our current economic models and maintain our current system of governance (self-reporting as a method of environmental regulation seems patently ineffective, not to mention absurd).
In the end, we are left with Appadurai and the imaginary, because these readings can push us theoretically to ask important questions: when we discuss production vs consumption, how do we discuss what happens after consumption. How do we understand the environment and the economy as two co-existing systems? Finally, how do we imagine a cultural/economic system in which we can take ecology seriously, and what would that system look like?
Posted by Jane Jones at 8:24 PM
Inertia and Innovation
I don’t think we still have a clear sense of which factors cause stability in cultural systems, although Becker provides convincing explanations regarding the “package”-culture as a package of organizations and systems that function in association with each other. Sometimes, although the ratio of the inertia seems high and unalterable, innovation in a society might happen quite rapidly and without great additional effort. Thus, seemingly same type of societies might pose totally different stances regarding a change of a specific cultural practice. Also, while Becker’s article raises the issue of innovation as a kind of resistance to a given dominant ideology/culture (resistance to inertia), it is possible to talk about inertia as a resistance.
Let me give you two examples to clarify my point here. We talked about the system of measures in different countries (metric system versus British system). While U.S. still uses the latter, Canada moved to the metric system in 1985. Although there were debates in Canada about this transformation as well, and although metric system is being taught in science courses in the US and thus US is witnessing a slow change in the attitude towards the metric system, the ‘ratio’ of the inertia of the system of measurement is different in these two countries. What does the experience of the two countries say about the inertia of English measure system? Becker is illuminating to understand the innovation in one society yet what he would say is the difference between these two countries, since it is not easy to think that the US cannot provide the ratio of attempt needed to bring a specific innovation which was relatively easily introduced by Canada.
Another example is from Northern Cyprus. Being recognized only by Turkey, the Republic of Northern Cyprus has official economic relation only with that country. And although it would probably be much easier to use the same system with Turkey (which is the metric system) North Cyprus is still using English units. As a former British colony, it has preserved the inverse traffic flow with respect to the continental, which is the case in Turkey. Becker sees the innovation as a resistance yet he does not provide us with the symbolic value and importance of ‘inertia’.
Posted by Ilgin Yorukoglu at 4:35 PM | Comments (1)
Kiss my Grandmother’s ass
Reading this week’s articles left me with nostalgic, and sometimes guilty feelings; the product of being raised by two Depression-era ‘survivors.’ My Father boasted about being able to eat and live on five dollars a week (in 1985) and his home/office space was stacked with broken computer equipment, office furniture, construction off-casts, half-filled paint cans, and tools from his trade as a engineer at sewage and waste-water treatment plants. My Grandmother’s apartment was an archeological dumpsite of saved newspapers, plastic containers, old clothing, paper and plastic bags, tin pans, and twist-ties. Her attempts at economy and reuse continued in the kitchen, where her stovetop always contained a pot of filmy water to which she would add dirty dishes. To clean the dishes, she would boil them for a bit, saving money on soap. She also chose to recycle her old underwear and use them as dish washing rags, so in effect, to eat off the plates at my Grandmother’s apartment was a exercise in kissing her ass.
Growing up, I was labeled as someone who wasted dish soap, that conditioning, that ‘a little goes a long way,’ seems a direct contrary to the spillage of dilutants described by Beamish. Perhaps what industry needs, is less self-regulation and a Depression-era Grandmother to supervise in its stead. The Depression is a contemporary example where man-made capital was a scarce resource in contrast to the natural. It was also a time when the Federal government acted as a somewhat cooperative employee to a vast unemployed workforce. And it marked a time when the Army Corp of Engineers implemented some of its most aggressive tactics at harnessing the natural landscape (ex. the Tennessee Valley Authority’s damming of the Tennessee River and our current problems with water rights and access in the Appalachians.) Daly clearly tackled these concerns under the umbrella of sustainable development – to what extent can we control nature, population and resources – especially in a world with an expanding divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’? In the case of the Depression, the government wished to create jobs – labor and unemployment were the issues.
The article that best tackled the question of labor was Beamish, but his frame focused on why employees privilege corporate ‘loyalty’ over moral and ethical concerns. Class, money and fraternity function as key factors. Having worked as a house painter for several years, Beamish is on-track with his presentation of acceptable spillage. So, you spill a little toluene, xylene or acetone into your client’s yard, is that any worse than the dripping oil from the underside of their car, their visible consumption of consumer durables, or the release of teratogens from the soles of their running shoes (McDonough, 115)? Moral choice became a compromise in the task of getting the job done (but we did try to reuse our thinner.) And there is the added frustration of being part of the rank and file of a large corporate machine, if your boss doesn’t care, why should you?
McDonough proposes that the answer lies in design, and my Grandmother wasn’t far off with her recycled underwear. If Hanes and Fruit of the Loom would only make panties with removable elastics, then Hawken would have another example to add to his list.
Posted by Pilou Miller at 4:24 PM | Comments (1804)
A Pessimistic Ending
More than any other, this week’s readings challenge economic models of rational choice. People (like pelicans) do not live in a vacuum as atomistic, self-interested individuals. These models miss the culture and soil upon which business is done, and is done to. Here are a few quick lessons on dissing the neoclassical myth, followed by a gloomy outlook as to why a revisionist account won’t work.
Lesson #1: No one thinks rationally about the environment. In attempting to guide us toward sustainable development, Daly shows how following economic models of optimal scale completely, and irrationally, ruins the environment. Hawken echoes this, noting that if natural design is an optimization, human design is mere compromise. And atomistic individuals fail to see the whole package, thus being self-interested to their own self-detriment in the long run.
Lesson #2: People fear the wrong things. Beamish shows how harm is socially constructed and organizationally constrained, such that rational actors calculate risk poorly all the time. Again, people do not optimize properly - we have irrational fears and absurd confidences.
Lesson #3: Rationality loses its clarity in organizations. If people cannot be expected to act optimally as profit-driven machines, then forget about corporations. Logic all but drops out of the equation for the oil companies studied by Beamish, such that we are left with the image of a giant ship steering itself through catastrophe, stuck on course from the power of inertia. Which leads to the final lesson:
Lesson #4: Decent people do bad things. Those at the head of the corporation are steering a ship that’s largely out of their grip. The big problems of our day, as Beamish notes, are big organizations, not a handful of morally reprehensible individuals (although they are out there, certainly). The organizational destroyer ship is a far more formidable foe.
Economists may insist that they’ve thought of all this before; of course they know the world is much messier and complex. But the point is that rational choice models matter; they are performative and have real consequences. Hawken argues that we should abandon them, change our thinking, and start seeing the “whole package.” But I think this is a futile approach, because, as Becker notes, innovation is uncomfortable. No one wants to deal with correcting a major environmental hazard because, simply stated, it’s a pain in the ass. So Greenpeace activists probably cheat on their car emissions test. And labor-rights supporters scoff when their employee strikes. And I’ll just keep shopping at Wal-Mart. Or does anyone have a better suggestion?
Posted by Ashley Mears at 4:18 PM | Comments (1)
Using
What Becker’s article enlightened for me was the idea that the restructuring of a product’s or object’s design is in direct relation to its “usability” and “marketability.” As noted in both the McDonough & Braungart and the Hawken, Lovins & Lovins writings, companies have the means to change their design habits in order to accommodate a product’s environmental responsibility, encouraging a cyclic rather than linear usage and lifespan.
But perhaps the reason these changes in design do not occur as quickly or frequently as would be beneficial to both the company and the greater environment, is the time and effort it takes to assess one’s design methodology. It is precisely that time and money that are directly related to income and profit, which is connected to a potential risk of losing profit threatens the necessity of an object’s very existence. What is interesting about a lot of art is that one does not have this kind of concern. While art is certainly created and circulated through economics, many an artist do not set out to make art with the end goal of becoming wealthy and famous. It would be an inefficient goal, one much more attainable through the mass production of more usable or marketable products. What I found questionable in Becker’s article was his discussion (or lack thereof) of innovative thinking – that the artist can take risks in his work by expelling his inertia outside of his social world, but that these risks will not bear profitable return because no one in this social world will understand them. I think he is selling the “audience” or “consumer” a bit short, and selling the artist much shorter. Artists do not receive recognition for their work from buyers or presenters or funders for making things that are carbon copies of pre-existing artworks. They are innovative with their thinking and their methodology, and are acknowledged for such innovations, perhaps according to scale. But for someone using innovation to create a sellable product as opposed to an artwork, the innovation in design must be related to usability and marketability, not to “ideas.” The use-value, and re-use-value, of the object is inherent in its design and consumption, but not without reliance upon economy and financial value.
Posted by Kimberly Brandt at 2:27 PM | Comments (1)
Comparison for fun and a question
Functionalism and Becker’s approach have many similarities that I want to point out. Both see certain things as necessary; in functionalism things are necessary so that system is in equilibrium and functioning smoothly while in Becker elements of a package are also necessary in order to constitute a package.
For example, for Becker music has to have performers, instruments, audience, etc and no element can be missing if something is to be called music rather than noise. In case an element is missing or a new one is introduced into a package than it will be either rejected by package or it will become a new, different package with a new identity (if nothing else an improved or a worse version of the old one). In this sense Becker’s package and functionalist system seem to be very similar. The difference is that for the first one change is possible and all it requires is will and resources, and the new way of doing things is not better but simply a different way. In the second one change is seen as deviation from equilibrium, normality, that should be eliminated to ensure proper functioning of a system. Another similarity between Becker and functionalism is that I think both have trouble explaining sources of change: where do people’s new ideas come from why do they want to make changes in Becker and why is there deviance if a system assumes the best way of doing things in functionalism. Perhaps I could let Becker of the hook by referring to his initial assumption that the world and human cooperation are inherently unstable and that it is stability that we need to explain.
A question: Becker recognizes that there are different forms of music coexisting at the same time with all the necessary requirements to be recognized as music by certain populations. How come it is that some of them get a more favored treatment by state and big private organizations than others? He brings up the power of professional definitions of what should be taken seriously (308) but this seems to be kind of ad hoc and not that much part of the inertia explanation. I guess inertia and dominant knowledge could be linked together but I didn’t see Becker do it in this paper.
Posted by Miodrag Stojnic at 1:51 PM | Comments (2)
Social vocabularies and inertia
These articles paint a particularly damning account for the (in)ability of social structures to grapple with their effects on the external environment – and how those effects can come circling back on society. The discussions in Daly and MacBride about the intersections of the economy and the environment show just how contradictory this relationship is. I found MacBride’s analysis of the linkages and disconnects between personal responsibility and larger institutional forces illuminating, especially how the ‘real’ environment interacts with the ‘constructed’ social world, and how the constructed social world ‘wins’ out (in the short term, at least).
Beamish’s article was somewhat more hopeful than MacBride’s, in that its policy recommendations suppose that something can be done (i.e. get rid of self-reporting) to improve the situation. However, on the one hand, it is a valuable illustration of the tyranny of small decisions, and on the other, MacBride’s linkage of decision making (or even, what questions get asked in the first place) convincingly calls into question the potential for regulatory change
The social construction of the ‘growth’ world is central to Daly and MacBride. Becker’s discussion of ‘inertia’ is relevant as well – the ways in which a type of institutional thought can crowd out other ways of thinking (a societal-level transposition of Wittgenstein’s “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”). Daly’s book and the other essays (in Hawken, et al, and in the “Cradle to Cradle,” are attempts to create a new framework to overcome that inertia. Daly’s book is especially interesting given his focus on institutional frameworks and assumptions, how they get propagated over time, and how alternative conceptions (as in the Mill) can be readily available yet ignored.
My following comments on Becker’s piece fly a bit off to the side of the general discussion here, so I’m placing this note at the bottom of my posting, although it should probably be off to the side in smaller, grayed-out print. The inertia of social worlds is well described, but the role of the audience and shared social experiences is skimmed over. Although Becker does note the importance of having an audience that “will know how to listen” to whatever is created, the ramifications of this are not treated in detail. The social construction of, say, tonality and the 8 note scale creates a framework and shared vocabulary for innovation within that system. The claim Becker makes (p. 6) that working within a system is ‘easy’ and innovating outside of that system is ‘hard’, while true from a technical standpoint (which he lays out), misses the point of working within and innovating using a shared vocabulary.
I’ve read multiple times that Beethoven’s ‘Grosse Fugue’ stretched conventional tonality as far as it would go before the 20th century. The implicit point these writers make is that he didn’t break the tonal system. Becker explains why he couldn’t make the break; but the other question to ask is why he would even want to. The importance of working within a social framework (using a specific musical vocabulary) is illustrated by funk clubs in Rio and the Northern Soul scene in the U.K. Putting on a recording of the ‘Grosse Fugue’ in these contexts would be ‘innovative,’ but it would also be ignoring the social role of the music itself.
Posted by Mark Treskon at 12:41 PM | Comments (1)
the black goo on my feet
When I was in college at UC Santa Barbara I couldn’t help but notice that when you walk along the beach something that looks like tar washes up on the beach. When you go in the water you come out with it on your feet and only an hour of scrubbing your feet with baby oil will get it off. For some reason I never thought much of it.
I could see oil platforms out in the water off in the distance. I had heard about the spillage up by San Luis Obispo or Santa Maria or wherever. It seems obvious that there was a connection between the black goo on our feet and the oil industry nearby, but it just didn’t seem that important an issue for me. I love my car and I can’t afford to pay too much for gas so if I have to get black stuff on my feet I’m not gonna make an issue out of it. I can understand how the workers who work on those rigs feel the same way. They have to make a living and if some chemicals or oil spills into the ground or the ocean for that to happen then so be it. If you have a good paying job why would you want to lose that? They’re just trying to get by in the here and now and so am I.
Posted by Robert Weide at 11:31 AM | Comments (1)
Sustainable Diplomacy
There is the coolest environmentalist guy in one of the classes that I am taking this semester. His slimmer than slim legs are wedged into the slimmest of slim fitting jeans. He sports the coolest hairdo ever known to man, and he drinks so neat and pretty from a single-use water bottle, which he has had for two years. During our classes he will sit and knit while he spits out comments and knits together arguments against the spitefulness of capitalist and patriarchal society, and how much energy that really goes into producing a bottle of Poland Spring. And when he says: “Kids, I swear to god that the tap water in this city is clean”, we all smile and go soft at our knees, wishing we were more like him. But all his coolness aside, I have had this gut feeling, that there was something silly about him picking up the empty bottles and cans in the trash bin before leaving class. Don’t get me wrong I sort of sort my trash too, it’s just that I have a feeling he should be sorting it out at an entirely different level in order to really promote some changes.
Enter the “Ecology and Social Reform” readings. I think I will wrap the MacBride paper around an empty can of coke and put it neatly in the trashcan for environmentalist guy to find after class this week. I think he likes to find stuff and enlighten the people within the proximal radius of inertia. Yes, some things are better left stable.
Becker’s article was really nice, and I can definitely see a point in having him as a friend, because it seems he has it all figured out in this “let get down to the bare essentials” kind of way – which is wonderful for the non-sociologist likes of me, who are not fully versed in all this structure/agency stuff, and whatever electrical dichotomy you may be fooling around with down on the corner of Houston and Lafayette. That said, I do wonder if he presents the ability to “ just do something else” as a little too easy? He talks about the “control of definition” being one aspect of the power of intertia, but other than that it seems that it is ‘be my guest” and “go ahead” easy peasy for the individual to break out of intertia. Anyway, while I get his point about “the package” making it difficult to actually promote reform on a large scale, I can’t help think that this explanation is just a little too friendly to get you anywhere. Perhaps there really are some distinctions to be made between the realm of classical music and that of ecology and economy.
I wonder if there are any sociologists that write about Diplomacy? Somehow I feel that Becker touches a little bit upon it respecting the preparatory work one must do to exert reform. I may be reading it totally wrong here, but it seems that Becker really acknowledges the individual’s ability to get what’s going on. In prolongation of this, I am wondering how central diplomacy is in our everyday agency. Well, any tips on readings would be much appreciated.
Respecting Braungart and McDonough: That is capital A Art. I really think so, and these people seem to have their diplomatic strategies down. So even though, just like Daly’s article, I find it to be orbiting a lot around a change of rationality and the discourse that accompanies it, my slightly utopian mind can really imagine this reaching political practice. I will wrap this around an empty coke too.
Posted by Sarah Carlson at 11:00 AM | Comments (1)
"I'm so glad we had this time together...."
Four miscellaneous comments, including a thank you note.
I had a great time and I appreciate your inventive minds
and senses (collectively?) of humor.
Thanks all.
1. The queer thing about Becker's discussion of Inertia is his leading point about orchestras, his insistence on their inertia. Classical orchestral music has been in a crisis of declining and greying audiences for decades. It's not static, it's dying. Opera, which was the popular music of its day, is also dying as a live art form. And the repertoire does shift: Bach was rediscovered long after he had gone out of fashion. In his day, Bach was the uncool fuddy-duddy backwater composer and his composer sons were hip and happening. In their time, the classical composers were the ones combating inertia.... Beethoven was so frustrated by the limitations of the conventional keyboard of his time (not enough highs and lows) that he INVENTED the 88-key piano. Chopin, a radical, shocked the contemporary music community by mostly composed for the NEW (thanks to Beethoven) 88-key piano. Even so, Becker's overarching point about inertia ties in really well to Max Weber's discussion of bureaucracy and was helpful to me. Becker, it seems to me, is more of an optimist than Weber. Inertia? Let's see how we can make it serve our own ends.
2. Daly's nuanced discussion of sustainable development ties in really well with the Jane Jacobs book on the nature of economies which I've been poking through (it was on the recommended list a few weeks ago). I like Daly's plugging the economic argument into a larger web which holds economics responsible for the out gassing from its theories. Too much of our industrial development relies on a limited theoretical infrastructure which allows a dangerous lack of accountability for products and by-products of industry. I'm hyper-aware of this because of discussions I've had with a friend who just finished Columbia Business School. The only liberal student in the program, he found it excruciating that the emphasis of the program was on finding a small niche and exploiting the hell out of it. Consequences? Who cares? Just make your money!
3. Regarding Beamish's discussion of "accumulating trouble," it's worth reading another piece by Diane Vaughan on the Challenger disaster (he refers to her) for more information ("Theorizing Disaster" in Ethnography vol 5 (3) 315-47)
4. I wanted to thank you all for an enormously interesting semester. For me, this was not only the sociology of objects but also the sociology of NYU... This was my only course at the university and it was interesting to me to see how different the culture is from my home university: CUNY. I especially appreciate the performance studies people and those from other disciplines than sociology... I learned a lot from your fresh point of view.
At times I feel my own stubborn-ness got in the way of my learning. Namely, I came in with a kind of arrogance: "What can you tell me about stuff? I know from stuff." I appreciate your gamely sallying forth. I learned a lot.
Posted by Andrea Siegel at 9:01 AM | Comments (1)
April 22, 2006
Teaching Awareness
I read “Recycling Reconsidered” after reading my building’s emergency plans in the event of a doorman strike.
I read “Recycling Reconsidered” after reading my building’s emergency plans in the event of a doorman strike. I had been musing about the call for volunteers to keep the building functioning and how asking volunteer residents to be responsible for putting out their own garbage might cause them to confront the physical evidence of how much of it the residents of one medium-rise urban building. I would have been curious to see how residents would have managed to fulfill this task together and whether it would have inspired any conversations about the environment.
In class Harvey kept commenting that the corporate world needs to get its act together on the issue of the environment or we are all in trouble. His repeated comment made me wonder about what it takes for a sizeable enough number of planetary inhabitants to develop this awareness and be moved to collective action. The discussion of recycling education materials in MacBride (see “Teaching the Children” on p. 27) caused me to think about this as an educational question: what would children, or adults, need to study in order to understand the predicament of our environment? Additionally, what forms of such education might run the danger of seeming more like propaganda than education? Donna Lee King, who is quoted by MacBride, “investigates the social construction of environmental problems through pedagogy.” (ibid) King’s analysis of the focus on the “next generation” in a way “that leaves production systems unexamined and unchallenged, especially through collective social action” (p. 28) seems on the money to me. I would add that such curricula may skew towards emphasizing individual or small collective actions that children can undertake themselves or within the contexts of their family, community or school. Most educators or curriculum writers would not want children to feel that they problem they are being sensitized to is one that is beyond their ability to fix. This should probably be equally true for adult learners being engaged on this topic. I then thought about the different ways in which the reading engaged with the topic and wondered what they could offer in terms of curricular approaches to the issue. In what ways are economic discussions beneficial over economic or scientific discussions? Is a case study more powerfully illustrative than a study of the systems of production that yield such waster? In what ways do questions of design engage learning audiences in a way that other material does not? Could this be considered more productive? And are the answers to these questions different depending on the pedagogical goal? For example, the desire to incite political activism may require a different strategy than the desire to empower a future generation to work on solving some of the systemic problems of production that cause environmental damage. I am identifying these strategies in terms of pedagogical goals, but I am not sure that the questions are so different for academic works and their purposes or arguments.
This musing brings me to thinking about a disciplinary hazard of sociology that always fascinates me: that sociologists must work with what is or can be made manifest in order to document the social interactions that shape our world. Conversely (I think) is the question of what type of evidence of social interaction should be studied in order to understand a given sociological phenomenon. Potential evidence includes that of a material nature, as we have focused on this semester. In the case of the environment the evidence of erosion or damage may not be evident enough without extensive documentation or historical or contextual information. I wonder how well the topic of the environment serves to illustrate this conundrum. Whether we do change and even harm our environment, to what extent is this really true if we fail to acknowledge it? I ask the question in this way because I often questioned, when I was a teacher and listening to child students speaking passionately about the environment, what messages they were really learning about social processes (as well as government and business) as long as the situation remained unaddressed. Given this, I guess that at the moment I would opt for a curriculum that focused on design problems and case studies that pushed students to think through different possibilities and resolutions. The broader pedagogical question I think is to ask what lessons are learned in the intersection between the sensory experiences of the material world and the cognitive and emotional experiences of the social world. One illustration: at Bank Street I took a course called “Geography in the Social Studies Curriculum.” We began in small groups studying a clay terrain model, flooding it with water in slow increments and observing the landscape and how it shifted, including mapping it at different points. We discussed what the different water levels would mean for those who lived in the area: crops, transportation, communications, water sources, etc. Later on in the semester we designed and built our own models to use with our own students, considering what potential situations we could create to study with them.
Posted by Leah Strigler at 8:44 PM | Comments (1)
Good Design is Not Enough
This week’s readings all try to answer in some way the question, “Given that anyone who assesses the information on environmental problems with one iota of objectivity can recognize that there are seriously problems, why have we been able to do nothing about it?” The proposed answers range from the inertia of conventions, the vacuous concept of sustainable development, fudged numbers, poor design misplaced emphasis on individual, rather than collective solutions, and the misguided aim of continual economic growth. The hope is that the answer to this question will lead us to a solution. The issues discussed are not just academic or intellectual musings, but rather are dire problems that beg for an immediate solution.
In terms of explanations for the problem I think most of the proposed hypotheses are correct to an extent. Environmental degradation is an over-determined crisis, a perfect storm of problems that coalesce to buttress the status quo despite the mounting evidence of a bleak future. In essence, most of these specific explanations can be traced back to the problem of inertia as laid out by Becker. Ways of doing things get incorporated into our packages and practices to the extent that to change them becomes an overwhelmingly difficult task.
Given the simultaneous presence of many contributing factors, it becomes imperative that we direct and marshal the resources we have toward those solutions that will yield the greatest results. It is here that the recognition of this myriad causes is not enough. We must prioritize our energies. It is here that the real work begins.
In regards to solutions, I can’t help but think that the Hawkins, Lovins, and Lovins piece is hopelessly naïve. While certainly it is true that bad design is a contributing factor to these problems (we need to look no further than the failure of this country to pursue and successfully achieve fuel efficient cars), to argue that the solution then is simply better design is misguided. Hawkins et al argue that if designers reorient their thinking toward “whole system engineering” we would be able to save a significant amount of energy. Their prime example is that a pump design in a Shanghai factory, in which the designers we able to save energy (and money) by playing out the pipes in such a way as to minimize resistance. Certainly, efforts like this need to be encouraged. But this example is misleading because the designers had a blank slate to work with. In actuality most designs have to fit into a pre-established infrastructure. Thinking in terms of limits and compromising design visions to make them fit is not a product of poor reasoning. It is the product of soberly recognizing that poor design persists, not only through the inertia of practices, but also physically in our environment. Rarely are designers given a blank slate to work with. So instead they focus on working within these constraints to incrementally improve them. These constraints are real, and without addressing them first, we will never be able to escape these problems.
Human ingenuity is going to have to play an important role if we want to fix these problems. But it is not enough in and of itself. Technology and human innovation will not gets us out of this fix. We need some real sacrifice.
Posted by Owen Whooley at 1:19 PM | Comments (1)
how bad is it?
If last week’s readings took us to the good or bad question (whether globalization is good or bad), then I would suggest that this week’s texts ask “how bad it is?”. Reading some of these articles made me very anxious, they were so dark and pessimistic, but some other articles showed some hope and offered some solutions in the long run. Fortunately, I finished my readings with these more positive ones, so my anxiety attack is over and I do want to hope that soon we’ll be able to say “it’s not that bad anymore.” (OK, I agree – this is highly unlikely.)
The more I read of Samantha MacBride’s article, the more I wished I was reading an article on international regulations related to environment, something similar to Braithwaite and Drahos’ article for last week, even if as lengthy and overwritten, instead of this article about the lack of these regulations. I am shocked that there aren’t even “uniformly accepted criteria for classifying hazardous or toxic waste” (20). Environmental regulations are surely neglected, especially compared to ground and air traffic regulations. What I found so interesting in Braithwaite and Drahos’ article last week was the way in which safety had an essential influence on traffic regulations. If the protection of human lives could play such a crucial role in the establishment of traffic regulations, how is it possible that when it comes to environmental issues, we tend not to believe that human lives are at stake here as well? (As I was reading these articles, I also had to think about Chernobyl. Braithwaite and Drahos mention that ground traffic regulations were not so strict in the former Eastern bloc, and this makes me wonder if the lack or the negligence of the regulations caused the disaster in the former USSR.)
I was also shocked to read in Beamish’ article that current regulatory systems rely on the corporates’ self-reports. How could this ever work? Coming from a post-Communist country, I am not a big fan of centralized state control and inspectors; however, I do believe that environment is a field where states and international organizations should increase their control. Beamish article is an excellent case study for MacBride’s theoretical framework and the juxtaposition of the two texts highlight how helpless the situation is. For instance, while MacBride suggests that environmentalists should listen not only to scientists, but also what “farmers, citizens, residents, in short ‘people’” (33) say; the example of Beamish’ Californian workers demonstrate how little ‘people’ might say of what they “confront everyday” (MacBride: 33). Becker’s notion of the inertia is present both on a corporate and an individual level.
Daly, Hawken and Lovin seem to be more optimistic. At the same time, in their texts, they primarily listen to scientists instead of the people. Although I find Daly’s proposal that we should maximize productivity (79) somewhat naïve, there are several suggestions both in Daly’s and in Hawken and Lovin’s articles which sound more rational and doable than stopping the ‘treadmill of production.’ Some of my favorites: I found Daly’s investigation how religion could mediate messages related to environment very interesting. If we think about religion’s influence in contemporary politics (and in the mediation of conservative values) both in the US and in Europe, it totally makes sense that religion could also generate a public opinion related to environment protection. I was also fascinated to read about the University of Zürich, where professors decided to “reverse the process” in a chemistry course and redesigned “some of the exercises to teach instead how to turn the toxic wastes back into pure, simple reagents.” (71) If we believe the authors’ claim that this study experience can and will determine the students’ future work in the chemical industry along with their other implications in relation to environmental friendly (re)manufacturing, perhaps the future does not look that dark and hopeless anymore.
To sum up, whether economists / sociologists are pessimistic or optimistic about environmental issues primarily depends on whether they interpret Becker’s ‘package’ as the package of producers and consumers (‘the silent communities’) or the package of production including technology, manufacture and design. Returning to my starting question, “how bad it is,” if we look at individual and corporate responsibility in environmental issues, it is as bad as it can be; however, if we look at the industrial/technological developments (at least theoretically), perhaps we’ll soon be able to say that it’s not that bad anymore.
Posted by Aniko Szucs at 11:05 AM | Comments (1)
April 21, 2006
Is that bioluminescence or a radioactive squirrel?
By now I think everyone can guess my view on the topic for this week. Excuse the informality but it rocked. Most of the articles did show consumers as weak social agents, mainly by not talking about them. Focusing on design and innovation assumes that as soon as these products are on the market people will blindly buy them. Changing social conciousness to passive living...but I could go on and on.
The Beamish article helped to infiltrate the ‘network’ and show some of the more human aspects of decision making in a complex social organization. Looking at the motivations of actors helps to understand agency. Ideas of self-restricted agency appealed to me the most, how the workers were ‘controlled’ either through the field culture milieu or personal dilemmas (getting fired). This shows the weakness of self-regulating industries, mainly ‘the self’.
Becker is back baffling as before. Would his idea of a “package” work everywhere? I’m thinking of musical syncretism, specifically musical forms from African and Europe combining in the Caribbean to create a rainbow new musical traditions. Or is it the “package” that makes reggae or calypso possible? Was slavery the package, breaking apart social organizations in Africa and reforming a ‘slave society’, where music was one way to again gain some sort of social cohesion. But it was salves who had the knowledge of a musical tradition not the institution of the slave trade. Not sure what to do with this, it may be a bad example.
To get back to the environment and waste, I recently received a BBC article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4923342.stm) about animals repopulating the area around Chernobyl. The article argues that animals are coming back because of the absence of humans, even with the presents of radioactive waste. So what about the hazardous waste that can’t be feed back into the biological/technical nutrient loops as described by McDonough? James Lovelock, sited in the BBC article, says to put it in tropical rainforests to protect against developers due to the findings at Chernobyl. That might be going a bit too far don’t you think.
Posted by Jean-Luc Howell at 2:58 PM | Comments (1)