It’s populare these days to take a proactive stance regarding the pollution and/or alteration of the natural environment, as well as to adopt so-called sustainability practices into one’s everyday life. Many people take this to the furthest extreme they feel is possible, having a strong emotive context inspiring their actions. Common steps taken are regular recycling, purchasing organic foods and ethanol based vehicles, and using “natural” products.
The problems here are many. As far as recycling goes, it seems to serve the same purpose confession does to a not-so-devout Catholic. Recycling is comparably simpler to do than many other “green” activites, and has an immediate and observable result – all your cans are out there in a tub by the street. The breakdown occurs in what actually happens to that sorted material. Does any of it actually make it back into new products? Does it even make it past the waste collection centre? Do you even bother to check that you’re buying new products produced from recycled materials? Few people bother to answer any of these questions.
Organic foods and ethanol or other pure petroleum-alternative fueled vehicles take another direction. In the case of organics, an often overlooked point is the origin of the foods. Not all states have regulations defining the term “organic.” The regulations that do exist may vary from region to region. This has many effects; the term itself breaks down in meaning, and organic foods are more likely to be produced in states with well known standards (Oregon, California) and shipped by conventional means, which requires fossil fuels. This brings me to petroleum alternatives. Hybrid cars are merely a stopgap in truth, whereas electric cars most likely still depend on fossil fuels being burnt at the generator, as is often the case. A popular and fairly recent third choice is E-85 ethanol burning vehicles. While ethanol burns “cleanly” in comparison with petroleum distillate, it doesn’t come from out of nowhere. The corn that is required to make it must be grown like any other commodity, requiring machine tending and harvesting in today’s modern agriculture, then shipping and processing, all of which require energy in the form of electricity and/or the burning of fuels. Another dent in the “green” efficiency of ethanol is its production requires an increase of corn crops, which requires expansion of farmlands, displacing some farms into new, more poorly equipped areas, or just outright farming on new, undomesticated land.
The last concept I find ridiculous: that of consuming “natural” products. This is an idea that some clever marketeer dreamed up and was made king of Advertoria for. There seems to be a persistant belief that natural things are somehow better. The problem is, nothing that claims to be natural on the package can back up that claim to any point of satisfaction. One example is a fruit salad. All the individual fruits in the salad can be naturally, but pineapples don’t naturally come in small wedges, bereft of seed and skin and tree, nestled closely to orange sections. At best, the salad can claim to be a collection of natural things, but they’ve all already lost that distinction by being modified by human hands. The fact of it is that something is natural when it occurs in nature. Even the natural tomatoes you purchase cannot claim to have originated in the area they were grown. Furthermore, tomatoes and all other commodity crops have been selectively bred and hybridised over years by humans to improve flavour, size, productivity, uniformity, and a dozen other traits. The only way you can hope to really eat naturally is if you run freely in the woods and take bites out of birches and deer.
Why the fuck do you feel so good about being “green?”
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants