Tell me bout how you've been waiting so patiently, and how you tried but I just turned away. And I'll say yeah, well you know: I'm shy that way...

.


Oh hey blog hey. This is kind of awkward... I know its been a while since we saw each other. I meant to write, I swear. I just, you know... I've been really busy, and umm... its not that I didn't wanna see you, uhh...

Annnywaaaay, I'm back en force. I've been kept busy by some new things, life, the spring, and that whole finishing my thesis rough draft thing. Annnnd not gonna talk about it! Cool, lets just launch, shall we?

Yesterday I was reading the Green Issue of Vanity Fair, or at least, I was reading the maybe five paragraphs of actual literacy sandwiched between Dior ads and those irritating perfume samples that nauseatingly waft out of the pages as I'm reading and residually make my hands smell like a combination of an opium field, Madonna's sweat, and the mall. ANYWAY, two articles in particular stuck our for me, one of which I'm going to write about for next week, a kind of continuum of the ideas framed in this post. The other, was titled “Industrial Revolution, Take Two”, and it was an article about architect William McDonough, a pioneer of a new eco-design field called “Cradle to Cradle”. McDonough, who has collaborated with everyone from Nike to Google to the City of San Francisco, is a proponent of a new kind of design – design which “does not just reduce waste, it eliminates the concept of waste”. McDonough, who saw that the ways in which we produce are problematic to a sustainable planet and our environment, who had already begun to incorporate green design into his architecture while he was still at Yale, now is at the helm of eco-design revolution concerned which doesn't only minimize waste, not only seeks to eliminate it, but seeks to turn waste and byproducts into positive things; cars that expel oxygen, factories that make clean water from their assembly lines. McDonough, who coined the phrase “Cradle to Cradle” defines it as a process by which things produced are reduced to their essential biological and technical elements so that everything can be re-used. It sounds insane, almost impossible, yet somehow this huge paradigm shift has actually become a reality; McDonough's design was used for the Adam Joseph Lewis Center at Oberlin College, a building which in addition to being a habitat for birds, a building constructed almost entirely of sustainable materials from local areas, PRODUCES 13% more energy than it uses, and utilizes a natural marsh system of snails and plants to clean waste water. No pesticides are used anywhere, since indigenous plants were used in the gardens, and everything in the building is recyclable. That includes the carpet. When NASA, so impressed with McDonough's other designs, approached him earlier this year with a request for a new sustainable design prototype for lunar colonies (note: that is not a joke. Lunar colonies.), McDonough was able to tell them such a prototype was already designed. He had already completed construction of the Lewis Center in 2001. NASA pretty much hired him on the spot.

Later in the article, McDonough posits: “I want things designed so that there's no need for regulations. How about cars that spew out good emissions? Factories that make clean water. Then the growth is good. Then the question becomes: What do you want to grow? Right now industry is set up to grow cancer and Alzheimer's. For every case of leukemia we create nine jobs. Are the government and industry willing to sign on to that as the right kind of job-creation program? If so, we clearly need an alternative plan.”

First, to be honest, that shocked and bothered me. But then I started really thinking about it, and I couldn't get it out of my head. Its a statement like that, which links design to health and jobs is a statement so easy to dismiss as the conspiratorial rantings of an aged environ-hippie ... except for the fact that its very true.

Right now, as McDonough asserts, we live in a society that understands hazardous “waste” as a necessity, from industry to every day life. In our conceptualization of what production and products ARE, waste is a necessity. Perhaps it is because we've never grown up in a world where there were no such things as garbage dumps and factory run-offs, which accounts for why we can't envisage what creation looks like without destruction. For everything we see that we Want, we concurrently see (or maybe don't see, but accept) that there will be things that will have to be discarded, or used up, or gotten rid of, in order for our new Want to be accommodated for. Byproducts, if you will.

This morning as if just to prove he's not crazy, as I was thinking about this article this morning an article on chemicals in plastic baby bottles was on googlenews; the main point behind it, being that BPA, a harmful chemical component in plastics, soda cans, and canned foods, is being shown to leech into water and food, and thus, our bodies. In the human body, it can act as an estrogen and disrupt hormone functioning, in addition to disrupting brain patterns and the entire endocrine system. P.S. - BPA is also found in the Nalgene bottles Hampshire students are so super-fond of toting around.

Now, the levels at which BPA is leeched from plastics into the human body is absurdly small; but the point is, that almost everything we produce and own contributes in the same way that hard plastic Nalgene bottles do: its just a little bit. Just a little bit from the hormones in your food, just a little bit from the power lines behind your house, just a little bit from your hippie jug o' water, just a little bit from the pesticides on your apples, just a little bit from the CO2 of your car exhaust... etc., etc. All that little bit, every day, starts to build up. Maybe in the long run, it doesn't affect us at all, and we're all going to start walking around with aluminum foil hats on our heads muttering about “the man” for no reason.

But why should we even have to take that chance in the first place? By predefining waste as inherently part of production, we make it the normative – something, that when it doesn't exist, or isn't part of creation, is some sort of added bonus, luxury brownie points for the maker, a participant in the green subculture, but not the average. We accept the negative end of the spectrum as normal, and the positive end as abnormal; what if it was standardized to produce reusable products, with limited waste, made sustainably and with sustainable materials, and anything else, anything less, was understood to be inefficient, poorly conducted business, and essentially, just all around harmful?

For that to happen, I think, a shift needs to occur in how we understand “byproduct”; what we accept them to be in their very nature and what/who constitutes them. Yes, I said who. We live in a society currently, which has wants and is willing to sacrifice individuals as necessary to achieving those wants. If we apply that idea to war, then by default:

“This work involves great risk for Iraqis, and for Americans and coalition forces. Wars are not won without sacrifice -- and this war will require more sacrifice, more time, and more resolve.” ... “We don't know the course of our own struggle -- the course our own struggle will take -- or the sacrifices that might lie ahead. We do know, however, that the defense of freedom is worth our sacrifice. We do know the love of freedom is the mightiest force of history. And we do know the cause of freedom will once again prevail.” - President Bush's remarks on the “War on Terror” at the National Endowment for Democracy, 10/2005.

Therefore: Want = Victory/”Freedom”, Production = War, Byproduct = the sacrifice of Iraqi civilians, American troops, and foreign aid.
What Bush is saying, is that not only is the end result worth the sacrifice, but the end result, by its very definition, cannot occur without the sacrifice. (And perhaps, if we want to get really meta-whatever, the product/want isn't really worth as much if there isn't any sacrifice involved... )

This idea of the value and quality of human lives being a byproduct of production isn't just in wars or industry. Its almost every where, and I'm sure if you sat and thought about it for maybe five minutes, you could make a whole lotta connections on your own.

It is of note that this is not unrelated to health; who suffers the most from chemical exposure, who suffers from ill health the most, who has the least access to health care and the least chance of securing wellness? It is not coincidence that some of the lowest income jobs, jobs with the longest hours, which pay the least, deal with the most hazardous materials and dangerous byproducts.
We want our public bathrooms clean, ergo, someone has to be cleaning them. What they clean them with, we don't necessarily care; which means what happens to the people who are cleaning them, we don't necessarily care about.

This is a job we consider beneath us; anything we want should not have a transparent process as to how it happens, it should simply occur by the most efficient and magical means possible. The jobs that make things we want happen are the jobs we don't want to see; you might call these jobs the infrastructure societal wants. We want to wake up, use the bathroom, take out our trash, make our breakfast, get in our cars, and drive to where ever. What we don't want is to see the citizens who build and clean our sewers and bathrooms, who haul away our garbage and sort our waste, who grow, produce, and transport our food, who build our cars and find fuel for them, who construct and maintain our highways and roads. These jobs, and the people in them are like American society's santa clauses. We never see them, they give us what we want, and we don't have to think too hard about it. We don't want to deal with the gross parts of our lives, the hard parts, the messy or difficult parts. We want immediacy and immediate pleasure and satisfaction, but the Byproducts of that – whether they are health or people or chemicals, are, by our very understanding, simply needed sacrifices for our end goal.

Again: We want our public bathrooms clean, ergo, someone has to be cleaning them. What they clean them with, we don't necessarily care; which means what happens to the people who are cleaning them, we don't necessarily care about.

What happens to them, what happens to their health when they are exposed to our waste and harsh chemical detergents all day, in our minds, doesn't seem to be related to the fact that it was US who WANTED something. It was us who desired clean bathrooms. And it is us who don't want to know how that happens. If it means that at 5am, someone somewhere is on their knees scrubbing a toilet with carcinogenic disinfectants, we don't really want to know about it (and by that, I mean we don't really want to care). What is all of that really saying? Its saying that by looking away, we are essentially giving the go-ahead to whoever is managing the company, the building, and the chemicals, that its O.K. To use whatever means necessary; we approve the most efficient and easiest method, whatever that involves -- we don't see the dangerous chemicals or abuse of labor, and we're willing to look away. It means that by refusing to hold ourselves and that company accountable, we accept whatever means are used to ensure that we get our Wants. And it means that we are refusing to acknowledge that it is essentially our Wants contributing to the detriment of someone else; to their lives or to their health, whether they are exposed to bleaches and suffactants every single day. We want what we want and we think we should get it, even if it fucks someone else. We don't want to see the connection between ourselves and our destruction.