All Natural

I've always taken something of a laid-back attitude to environmental issues. I don't really worry about the planet. Mother Nature is a grown woman and can take care of herself. We, on the other hand, could really create serious problems for ourselves if we're not careful. But that said, I'm glad that environmental protection wasn't an issue tens of thousands of years ago. I can just imagine what the environmental impact statement for "fire" would have looked like. We'd still be living in caves.

I think that we've come to see ourselves as outside influences on "the environment" rather than a natural (if unusually influential) part of it. If the population of some particular animal - any animal, most likely, were being decimated, or even pushed towards a realistic chance of extinction by a different animal that had recently evolved into a remarkable effective animal-hunting niche without any measurably direct influence from human activity, no-one would be saying that we had a responsibility to attempt to halt the evolution of one animal to spare another. And we, as humans, have simply evolved to the point where we're capable of doing incredibly destructive things to the environments that we live in and interact with. Some of these things we live with, because we like for people to be able to have more children or keep out of the rain. Some of these things we push back against because we like the idea of having pristine spaces or we worry about damaging the Earth's ability to support us over the indefinite term (which is almost certainly limited).

Where I do think that we have a responsibility is to take ownership. I don't find anything wrong, in and of itself, with deciding that we're willing to trade bats and birds for a lower atmospheric carbon load - or when it really comes down to it, that we're willing to trade bats and birds for a better standard or living for some number of people. But I think that carelessly stumbling into those tradeoffs is what is going to get us into trouble. But that's kind of the way it's always worked. I know that here in the United States, we tend to not work to avoid catastrophes - we simply dump resources into cleaning up after them after the fact. And that, more than likely, is one of the real drivers of a lot the issues that we have. But it is what it is, and we don't have the drive and unity that it would take to change it.

Downtown

Object Lesson

There's a photographer who posts on DeviantArt by the name of Marcus J. Ranum. His work is often simply amazing. Back in 2010, he took a stab at exploring the concept of obscenity. Specifically, what makes something obscene and when does it cross the line from "non-obscene." This was the result.

Do-It-Yourself Deviation. Marcus J. Ranum, 2010. URL: http://mjranum.deviantart.com/art/Do-it-Yourself-Deviation-150768428

Part of the question that Mr. Ranum expects that viewers would have asked themselves is: "A pretty girl... a meat slicer? Bananas, rope, and medical implements? How do they possibly go together?" And he points out that there's nothing inherently... anything about this photograph. Whatever it is to a viewer, banal, artistic or even obscene, it's all in what they bring to it.

I was looking at this the other day, and a thought occurred to me. It's entirely possible to decide that not all of the items in this photograph actually do go together. A least not all at once. After all, it would be fairly difficult for the model to wear all three pairs of shoes, or both uniforms, at once. So perhaps your Do-it-Yourself Deviation would remove one or more of those things. Of course, if you did that, you could just as easily remove the model herself. At which point I realized that this doesn't have to be a photograph of "a pretty girl and a pile of stuff" it could, really, instead be a photograph of a black beret and a pile of stuff.

And if it is, in addition to illustrating something about how we see obscenity, we can also use this to illustrate how we see objectification, as the model becomes simply another thing in this picture - no more or less important than any other thing. The main point that Mr. Ranum was making, that obscenity is all in your mind (or, if you prefer, your polka-dot undies) would be just as valid, not only with any other model in this picture, but without any model at all. The very interchangeability that is central to anything we encounter being "just an object."

Something Better

It's a common enough complaint: "Too bad [fill in the blank] can't think of anything better to do with the money." It comes up almost every time a wealthy person or institution spends what comes across as a significant amount of money on something that someone could consider frivolous or otherwise unnecessary. But implicit in that criticism is an assumption - that the people who receive the money for the goods and services provided are not doing anything constructive with it either.

One of the issues with many forms of charity is that they do nothing to reduce the need for charity. It's easy to complain that someone who bought, say, a large yacht, would have done the world more good if they had fed some number of people with the money, but does simply feeding people actually help to life people out of poverty? Especially given the fact that here in the United States, we often buy food from relatively well-off farmers (and large agricultural corporations) and have it shipped across the ocean, where one of its main effects is to make it more difficult for local farmers to make a living. But, of course, there is a trade-off - while the people in the area who grow food are hurt by the influx of free food, since many people are net purchasers of food (as otherwise, it's less like that food needs to be imported) the population as a whole may be better off. But, in the long run, if the local farmers had the financial means to become even better farmers, perhaps they would be better able to supply the food needs of the people in their communities.

This not to say that the relatively well-off employees of a company that makes what are effectively a luxury good are at risk of being immediately unemployed if a particular wealthy person doesn't knock on their door to have their precious cat copied. Or that the money they earn from their work will be immediately spent in ways that will benefit impoverished members of their communities. But I don't know that the apparent default assumption - which is that the money that goes most directly to the poorest person it can find is the best spent is necessarily accurate.

Raising the Volume

During both my morning and evening commutes today, I heard news stories in which people were talking about "having their voices heard," and "raising awareness." All of the issues involved were things that I was perfectly aware of and knew many of the major talking points for. And I suspect that I'm not alone in that.

As I understand it, the issue isn't that people don't have a voice, that the general public is unaware or that "the media" is working to distract them with sports and reality television - it's that it's difficult to get people to pay attention to someone else's problems when they understand that they have problems of their own that they need to be dealing with. People don't come home and turn on the "boob tube" because they've been manipulated into it by a shadowy cabal of business and media élites who are living lives of luxury by oppressing the downtrodden and who fear only the righteous anger of the masses. People come home and watch television because, as far as they're concerned, they've had a difficult/long/stressful day and they simply want to unwind or find out what's going on in the world. By the same token, people aren't uninformed about one issue or another because "the media" is constantly waving shiny things in front of them. People are informed about those issues that they aren't interested enough in to do any research on. (And this, of course, presumes that people are uninformed to start with - but in pretty much every single conversation I've had with someone who said "this information is being suppressed, but..." I've known exactly what they were talking about. It's a pretty poorly-kept secret when I'm in the know.)

People aren't "silenced" as much as the rest of us aren't listening. People aren't "unaware" of issues as they are uninterested in them. Given this, simply raising the volume isn't the answer. No matter what one does to drive attention, it's always possible to for others to simply ignore you.