As a follow-up to Dave's prior post, I add here reference to a discussion about the same topic in response to an Orion article last Fall. The essay by Janisse Ray, "Altar Call for True Believers: Are we being change, or are we just talking about change?," was followed by over 200 comments. It offers a good canvas of the matter of green academics and the meaning of a greened academia.
She confronts the same moral issue raised in the story Dave cites, along the way posing this scenario:
A global-warming speaker is invited to a village ten miles from Brattleboro to speak. She accepts. There is no effort made to organize a carpool or a bus, and as might be expected, most of the people in the audience, including myself, have motored from town. Or, eighteen hundred land-trust advocates gather in Nashville. I am among them, grimly imagining the jet fuel, gasoline, and oil burned to get eighteen hundred people to a single location.
Members of the American Society for Environmental History are meeting in Boise, ID next month. They too started a conversation about the relationship betwen creed and deed. In the ASEH's most recent newsletter, historian Michael Smith asked some questions too:
How many tons of carbon is a single gathering of environmental historians responsible for, just in terms of air travel alone? How many of us who belong to CSA's, take alternative forms of transportation to work, or do all we can to reduce daily waste production, deviate from our normal patterns of consumption while on the road? Often we do this of necessity, since it is nearly impossible to eat locally grown food unless it is specially catered and the modern hotel generates an enormous amount of waste, those feel good cards asking patrons to reuse towels notwithstanding.
These are all fair issues. It's a legitimate conversation to have (as if I'm the one to make that judgment, sorry for abusing my soap box) and apparently an increasingly popular one. Smith, like Ray, seeks not to "to scold or cast judgments." Nor do I. Nor does Allen Doyle, whose work on greening his laboratory Barn Owl helpfully referenced in this comment to Dave's prior post.
My new question to add to the discussion is about the accounting mentality that attends to such calculations -- of off-setting carbon, of adding up all the sides of energy use, of tracking back to the broadest degree whether the benefits academics offer by studying and analyzing environmental issues outweigh the costs of traveling halfway across the world to discuss them. (Because isn't it the environmental studies folks, as scientists, social scientists, and humanities types, that work on the issues and make them the basis for public debate along with everyday Joes?)
Who knows. How could we know? In the end, I see it as the same issue from the posts on local food and alternative agriculture here last year (try here to look at one of those posts), which was one of environmental ethics. When we do these calculations, what exactly are we trying to save? Fossil fuels? Carbon emissions? The visibility of environmental problems? Public attention to environmental habits? More?
I'm asking again because I, like Smith and Ray and Ng and Doyle and Barn Owl and probably all of us, am in on the problems that I research, not outside them. So, what to do? The answer can't be simply more accounting. How do we add the moral and qualitative dimension to the prevailing quantitative mindset?
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Posing these qualitative questions to an audience, here, and focusing attention on moral concerns seems an important part of the process of responding thoughtfully, carefully, and wisely. So, thanks for asking, and thanks for sharing your concern.
The subtitle of one of my web sites says, "Sustainability is an attitude." Although that's not the most precise phrasing, it seems to work to associate sustainability with attitude in limited screen space. It's been my experience that behaviors result from individual attitudes and personal values. So I spend most of my time working to adjust attitudes and values in order to influence behaviors.
Sometimes it seems our professional, career behaviors spill over to become life habits. It seems to me that a quantitative mindset lends itself to detachment and disconnect. To be quantitative is to measure, and especially in the subculture of science, to measure is to stand apart, to attempt to limit participation only to measurement. What I see in this blog essay, and in its quotations, is a recognition that we participate in life to a greater extent than mere measurement -- whether we want to or not.
It's an important reminder. Thanks for focusing our attention on our own participation.
In the context of my lab and workplace, I think I routinely choose the sustainability or toxics issues that are easiest to "fix" or calculate. Calculations and measurements come naturally to most scientists, and so I can happily trot around to seminars with my own coffee mug, or save soda cans in a box in my lab, so the housekeeping staff can take them to metals recycling and get a little money for their work parties and potluck lunches. I'm good about defrosting my freezers periodically, bringing healthy locavore lunch in a reusable container, and minimizing my paper use, and I have several people at work "trained" to bring me plastic bags that I turn into crocheted tote bags for shopping.
However, all of these things are pretty simple and easy to do, and in the end don't do much to reduce my eco-footprint; they constitute the path of least resistance, and reflect my decision to follow advice about "choosing one's battles". Old friends of mine, who chose different routes after grad school, work on sustainability and toxics issues on a much larger and more difficult scale. They're great about helping me to see new ways to reduce my eco-footprint, but the ideas have to be realistic, and I have to remember to be receptive, and not take their suggestions as criticisms. For example, the CSA suggestion just did not work in my local area, as the one farm went out of business last year. Instead, I grew some vegetables in a friend's garden plot, and bought as much produce as I could from local sources. Without a proper focus, I think efforts to increase sustainability can resemble unsuccessful dieting attempts...you know, when one counts the calories in the rice cakes and apple, and then conveniently ignores those in the three slices of pizza one ate at the lunchtime journal club. ;-)
That piece was great. Will have to spread that one around my network as well.
My son, who lives in Houston, went to see the Al Gore movie. He commented that he was the only one who rode his bicycle to get there.
If everyone was willing to ride a bicycle to see An Inconvenient Truth, it seems to me the movie would not be necessary.
I hope other moviegoers saw your son arrive and depart on his bike. That's the kind of everyday, personal example that can help folks begin to think about changing their attitudes and behaviors.
Thanks for sharing that example. Cheers