Category Archives: Messaging

The Somebody Else’s Problem Field

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Science fiction has a habit of becoming fact. Star Trek’s communicator is perhaps the most renowned example. In a more recent one, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future opens with a devastating, deadly heat wave in India. Another of his books, New York 2140, takes place in a NYC flooded by rising sea levels, which is not yet an example.

Cover of Ministry for the Future

The Ministry for the Future is part of a growing genre of fiction
(for now) centered around climate change that’s been dubbed Cli-Fi.

Whereas the Star Trek communicator took 32 years (yes, I looked it up) to make a real-world flip phone appearance, Robinson’s India scenario took a mere two years, occurring even in the same location.

Sometimes science fiction scenarios are more about concepts than inventions or events. In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the spaceship “Bistromath” was mysteriously made invisible by something called The Somebody Else’s Problem field. If you look it up in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Wiki (because where else would you look it up?), you’ll find “An S.E.P. can run almost indefinitely … and is able to do so because it utilises a person’s natural tendency to ignore things they don’t easily accept.”

Cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

A famous phrase from The Hitchhiker’s Guide is “Don’t Panic.”
It could substitute for climate change deniers accusing
‘believers’ of being climate alarmists. (And, yes, this is my old beat up copy.)

Another fan site explains further that the S.E.P. field “relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.”

The direct quote in The Hitchhikers Guide, in the expert words of Ford Prefect, says “An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem.”

(The Ford Prefect, by the way, was a line of British cars in production until 1961, 17 years before the Hitchhiker radio show was broadcast. So maybe that constitutes a reverse of science fiction foretelling the real world.)

If you want a real-world application of the S.E.P. field, Wikipedia cites a 1976 article on bureaucratic inaction on low-income housing as an example of the principle of somebody else’s problem.

Climate change deniers have often employed something like this as one of their, perhaps unconscious, excuses. Something that we can’t see because we don’t want to is the equivalent of a child covering their ears and saying “I can’t hear you; I can’t hear you.”

If they can no longer maintain that it doesn’t exist – which is pretty difficult to argue in the face of record-breaking heatwaves around the world, record-breaking droughts, deadly floods and wildfires in places that have never had them – they can still ignore it because it’s something that happens to somebody else (unless they can’t water their expansive lawn in California, in which case it becomes a nuisance) or something that is caused by somebody else. “China produces more CO2 than the US does so why should we have to reduce ours.”

It’s not science fiction, but there’s another concept that comes into play here: confirmation bias. Psychology Today defines confirmation bias as something that happens “[w]hen people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, [so] they end up believing it to be true.” Trump’s “Big Lie” is, of course, an all-too-current example.

Senator James Inhofe using a snowball to confirm his bias

Senator James Inhofe using a snowball to confirm his bias

The S.E.P. field’s application was in allowing the ship to be invisible. Until very recently, the climate crisis had a built-in S.E.P. field in that its impacts were invisible. You can’t see CO2. Rising sea levels were merely a prediction. A global temperature change of 1o was imperceptible and sounds insignificant. Now, while you still can’t see CO2, its impacts are unavoidably visible. If they haven’t affected deniers directly, they can see it in the news. (Unless, of course, they only watch Fox News, which exists to promote conservative confirmation bias.)

Now that the impacts are visible, one would think that deniers’ S.E.P. fields would fail, that their cloaking device (to bring this back to Star Trek) had blown an EPS conduit or isolinear circuit or something. But confirmation bias is strong, especially in our severely polarized culture. What will it take to overcome it? How we turn deniers into alarmists? It’s a shame we don’t have Vulcan mindmelds to pull them out of their parallel universe.

Will Lawyers Save the World?

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With deference to Shakespeare, maybe we don’t kill all the lawyers.

Shakespeare with quote

Despite the growingly alarming evidence and warnings, the needle has barely moved with either politicians or ‘civilians’ in terms of accepting and acting on the climate emergency. That would appear to leave us with the necessity of going beyond the court of public opinion and into the court of law. And that’s precisely what’s been happening. In earlier posts, we’ve documented some of this path in terms of lawsuits seeking to recognize the rights of nature and suits, in particular those by youth, alleging that their right to a future is being jeopardized by inaction. (here, here and here)

So, here’s a question and perhaps a way of looking at this. If shouting fire in a crowded theater is a crime (technically, whether it actually is a crime depends on some specifics), should it also be illegal to say there is no fire when in fact there is one? That’s exactly what Exxon did for years. They knew as early as 1981 that fossil fuels were connected to climate change yet spent decades denying it and funding thinktanks and researchers that promoted climate denial. Several states and New York City have sued Exxon Mobil for “lying to shareholders and to the public about the costs and consequences of climate change.” (It’s a move straight out of the tobacco industry’s playbook, i.e., “nothing to see here.”) The lawsuits have been unsuccessful to date, but I doubt the effort is over.

In that fire-in-a-theater example, one of the criteria for considering it a crime is whether that fire is a “clear and present danger.” Back when Exxon was busy denying what they knew to be true, maybe it was only a clear danger. Well, now it’s most definitely also a present danger as well.

I occasionally intersperse EcoOptimism posts with something I call “The Distillery.” These contain synopses of encouraging environmental news articles, often presented topically. I preface the series each time writing, “We can all use some positive news these days.”

Herewith, in the format of The Distillery, is an extensive compendium of news on the fronts of rights of people and rights of nature. The latter, by the way, often seeks to give nature rights equivalent to or similar to the rights of people, so associating these two approaches is not as unrelated as it might seem.

Given the number of legal actions (which, putting aside our short attention spans, is a good thing), I’ve kept the descriptions and commentary short. But you can always follow the links for more detailed info.

Also in the name of one of those annoying webspeak of the moment, TL:DR, I’ve organized this into categories of lawsuits:

Rights of Nature
Lawsuits brought by the next generation
Lawsuits brought by governments, i.e., the grown ups 

Rights of Nature Category:

I’ve written about environmental lawsuits in the name of nature’s rights. But they’ve usually been brought by people on behalf of nature. Renowned environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert brings us the story of nature suing on its own behalf. As she notes and as we document below, this case is different. “Mary Jane’s case is a first. Never before has an inanimate slice of nature tried to defend its rights in an American courtroom.”

Her article, which is expansive in the style of The New Yorker, documents the history of nature having rights and suing for them going back half a century. In a Supreme Court case that ruled against nature, the dissenting view noted that ships and corporations are considered “legal personalities,” so nature should be viewed that way as well. That opinion also brings up a larger topic of corporations being defined as people. (Made infamous by Mitt Romney’s off-the-cuff statement “Corporations are people.”) The Supreme Court agreed in its ruling in the “Citizens United” case which, arguably, has ruined the American electoral system.

photo of Lake Mary Jane

Photo credit: Florida Fish and Wildlife. [I found this image via “Reasons to be Cheerful,” a blog founded by musician, environmentalist and avid cyclist David Byrne.]

From The New Yorker:
April 11,2022
“A Lake in Florida Suing to Protect Itself”

And  a lot of other places are covering it, too:

From The Guardian:
May 1, 2021
“Streams and lakes have rights, a US county decided. Now they’re suing Florida”

From Reasons to be Cheerful:
April 22, 2022
“Does This Water Have Legal Rights?”

From Inhabitat:
May 4, 2021
“Florida waterways demand their rights”

In the New Yorker article, Kolbert has what, I think, is the most salient line: “In an effort to protect herself, Mary Jane is suing.” She adds, “There have also been several cases brought by entire species; for instance, the palila, a critically endangered bird, successfully sued Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources for allowing feral goats to graze on its last remaining bit of habitat.”

EcoOptimism’s take: The Mary Jane court case takes what might be a more direct route to establishing nature’s rights. Instead of people suing on behalf of nature, the plaintiffs in this suit – Boggy Branch, Wilde Cypress Branch, Lake Hart, Lake Mary Jane and Crosby Island Marsh – apparently are the waterways themselves. They are suing a developer whose project would destroy 63 plus acres of wetlands and 33 acres of streams.

Perhaps accompanying the movement to at least acknowledge if not recognize indigenous inhabitants’ claims to what was their ancestral land before colonialism, there is also a movement in the form of lawsuits to protect the ecology of those lands.

From Grist:
April 18, 2022
How rights of nature and wild rice could stop a pipeline

This builds on an 1837 treaty between the White Earth Band of Ojibwe and the U.S. government, adding in 2018 a law recognizing the rights of a local wild rice called Manoomin. Perhaps what’s interesting here is that, though the law has to do with the Ojibwe, it’s about the rights of the rice, not the Ojibwe. The lawsuit says the rice would be endangered by a pipeline that would run from Canada through the wild rice beds.

In the more traditional method of claiming nature has rights, there is a subset of legal actions brought by First Nations:

From Grist:
March 1, 2022
“Do salmon have rights?”

This case is a suit based on the rights of an American First Nation, the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe, but is back in the more traditional approach to asserting the rights of nature, The suit claims that the declining salmon population is the result of hydroelectric dams supplying the City of Seattle.

The Ross Dam on the Skagit River

The Ross Dam on the Skagit River. Credit Wiki Commons

From National Geographic:
April 15, 2022
This Canadian river is now legally a person. It’s not the only one.

This National Geographic article first profiles the Magpie River on the lands of the Innu First Nation, which has been granted personhood, and then goes on to discuss the general movement granting rights to rivers globally.


Lawsuits Brought by the Next Generation:

Image source

One of the challenging issues in fighting the climate crisis is that it hasn’t been (until now, maybe – cases in point wildfires, hurricanes, droughts) readily visible. In that sense, it may not affect the generations that created it, but will affect those following them. (I wrote about this concept, “intergenerational remote tyranny,” in an earlier post.) The lawsuit filed by a group of US children in 2015 has had many ups and downs but is still proceeding. This is by no means the first such suit. I wrote about several of them in a post back in 2017.

Many of the legal actions that are taken by youth allege that government policies – or, more accurately, the lack of them – endanger their futures. What that means is governments have abandoned what is arguably their most fundamental purpose: protecting their citizens.

EcoOptimism has looked at this, in particular with the post “Stealing from the Future.”

youth lawsuit

Image source: Our Children’s Trust/Facebook via cbcradio

From Gizmodo:
March 29, 2022
“’I Should Be Able to Go Outside’: Why a Utah Teen Is Suing Over Polluted Air”

Seven young activists, led by a fifteen-year-old, are suing the state of Utah. The suit was filed with the assistance of Our Children’s Trust, the same organization that represented 21 youth in Juliana v. United States. Like that suit, this one says the issue is that the rights of this generation to a healthy and safe life have been unconstitutionally violated.

As I was about to post this article, in came an email from Our Children’s Trust announcing a new lawsuit:

We have huge news to share: 14 young people in Hawai‘i filed a new constitutional climate lawsuit today against the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation (HDOT), HDOT Director Jade Butay, Government David Ige, and the State of Hawai‘i!

Our Childrens' Trust Hawai'i lawsuit

Our Children’s Trust Hawai’i lawsuit

And from overseas, more lawsuits by youth:

From Gizmodo: 
April 30, 2021
“Climate Youth Win Landmark Victory in Germany’s Top Court”

This one’s a little older, but strikes a similar approach:

From The Guardian:
Sept 3, 2020
“Portuguese children sue 33 countries over climate change at European court”


Lawsuits Brought by Governments, i.e., the Grown Ups:

Suits against Big Oil have been wending their way through the courts in the US, with several state attorneys general  – and now some cities – leading the effort, though the literal jury is still out. But by the same token, this kind of suit is gaining more traction elsewhere.

From The Guardian:
June 1, 2021
“Shell’s historic loss in The Hague is a turning point in the fight against big oil”

and

June 1, 2021
“Court orders Royal Dutch Shell to cut carbon emissions by 45% by 2030”

Courtroom photo

Photo: Friends of the Earth Europe

From Grist:
May 25, 2021
“Can the ‘right to a healthy environment’ stop Exxon’s expansion in Guyana?”

From CNN:
Jan 14, 2021
“France taken to court over ‘climate inaction’ in landmark case”

ExxonMobil map of oil sites

Map of ExxonMobil’s offshore Guyana oil discovery sites as of February 11, 2020

EcoOptimism’s take: This case is filed by an interesting combo of a Guyanese scientist and an indigenous youth. If you search ‘ExxonMobil in Guyana,’ you actually come up with an ExxonMobil site boasting about its operations and exploration off the coast there.

Perhaps the broadest move in this direction is the coining of the word ‘ecocide’ along with its legal definition. The draft of a new law, proposed by an international group of legal experts, says ecocide is “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

From The Guardian:
June 22, 2021
“Legal experts worldwide draw up ‘historic’ definition of ecocide”

EcoOptimism’s take: I’m sure some will attack this as climate alarmism, but, well, they’re wrong. And it defies the core concept of EcoOptimism, but there are times when optimism needs to be put aside in order to make the point.

EcoOptimism’s overall take: Where politicians have failed us, spurred on by the clout and finances of industry, perhaps we need to bypass both. So, let’s not follow Shakespeare’s famous line. Turns out we need those lawyers.

 

Plastic Bags: It’s an “It Depends” Situation

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Or, rather, should we just skip the question?plastic bag in tree

The eco-blog Treehugger this week has a grouping of posts on plastic bags that’s intended to leave you wondering.

Perhaps you’d thought that, amidst the many complicated environmental issues, plastic bags was a no-brainer. Plastic bad, paper OK, cloth best. Not so quick, though.

There was a study a few years ago, a very dense Life Cycle Assessment, that concluded reusable cloth bags were not a better choice than plastic bags. Their conclusion, with lots of background calculations, was that, given the resources required to make and maintain cloth bags, you had to reuse an organic cotton cloth bag up to 20,000 times in order for it to be environmentally preferable. It left us do-good well-intentioned folks scratching our heads.

Now along comes a study (you can’t access it easily, but the Treehugger post gives you the summary) that says another factor in favor of not banning plastic bags is, surprisingly, their reuse. The study said that, in many places where plastic bags were banned, sales of other types of plastic bags went up.

And I’ve heard this from many folks. “If plastic bags are banned,” which they are now in New York State, “what will I put my garbage in?” (In NYC, our kitchens are often too small for regular size garbage pails that use those larger garbage bags.) Or “what will I use to pick up my dog’s poop with?” The thinking goes that, when people don’t have plastic bags from groceries, they’ll have to buy kitchen garbage bags or dog poop bags.

The pat answers are to not make as much garbage (composting cuts down a third of household garbage in my experience) or to use (supposedly) biodegradable poop bags.

So perhaps considering plastic bags to be in the single-use plastics category is misplaced. We can, instead, put them in the double-use category. (I think I just invented that.) Never mind that, in my experience, those bags can barely last one use and, more often than not, have holes in them that tend to leak nasty stuff out when filled with garbage. And dog poop? Not goin’ there.

(Check out, btw, “Plastic Bag,” narrated tongue in cheek by Werner Herzog. Then again, I think it’s tongue in cheek, it’s sometimes a bit hard to tell with him.)

Screen shot from "Plastic Bag"

Screen shot from “Plastic Bag”

Then there’s the question of whether the environmental issues have been fully taken into account. That plastic bag vs canvas bag equation, I’m pretty sure, didn’t look at the related issues of ocean life – two of the parallel Treehugger posts (here and here) bring up that part – or even litter. Sometimes they focus almost entirely on carbon emissions. Quantifying for objectivity is fine, and often, useful. But what about issues that are hard to quantify, perhaps because they’re subjective? What’s the value of a dead turtle, suffocated in a plastic bag, or a whale whose stomach is filled with bags and toothbrushes and Bic lighters? Or the esthetic cost of bags snagged in tree branches.

And now we can add the health impacts of microplastics in humans as well as in other creatures.

microplastics on finger

The carbon part of the picture is hardly irrelevant and, of course, has an additional story. As the fossil fuel industry realizes its future as a fuel is narrowing, its focus has shifted to promoting plastics as another way to boost petroleum sales. This movement was further fueled (sorry) by the pandemic which, initially at least, cut down fuel consumption by significant amounts as people commuted and traveled much less.

And lest you want to factor in recycling, in the case of plastic bags, that’s a myth. Even when you can find recycling programs that accept them, they rarely get recycled. And recycling facilities hate them because they get caught in their machines.

So, are bans a good idea? They certainly have taken off. My database of bans and regulations has grown greatly since I began it a few years ago, though it’s perhaps telling that the growth slowed considerably during the pandemic.

plastic bags in ocean

My environmental roots say ‘hell yes,’ get rid of those nasty things. But the part of me that studies Life Cycle Assessment says hang on a moment, maybe, counterintuitively, we’ve got this wrong. And then my ever-split thinking counters the counter thoughts by asking if those studies really have got it right.

It gets sooo complicated. My conclusion rests on a non-objective thought: we can’t let this message get so complicated. People are confused enough about environmental issues and, along with that, overwhelmed by both the complexity and the gravity of things. We get bogged down in it, not sure what to do or even if what we can do matters. We need simple – perhaps simplistic – approaches and advice, even if perhaps plastic bags aren’t as bad as many of us say; even if perhaps they’re better than some of the alternatives. But the message and the public support erode when it gets unclear. Even if we’re a bit wrong on this specific question – and I’m not convinced we are – we need to have make things simple and easy so we can get to the bigger picture.

 

Can we be hopeful?

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It’s a two-part question: can we and should we?

Embed from Getty Images

Being the self-anointed EcoOptimist, these days (can I say “in the current environment” or “in the current climate” without being tongue in cheek?) can sometimes be quite difficult when, with each passing day, we hear about another legislative rollback, another record high temperature or another iceberg calving off Antarctica. Indeed, it raises the question of whether being – or attempting to be – optimistic is a good approach. In one sense, the answer is no if it encourages reducing the pressure to act by saying that we can ‘do this.’ On the other hand, as I’ve stated elsewhere, becoming an ‘Eco Pessimist’ can be akin to giving up. Since we’re doomed, a pessimist might say, let’s just enjoy things – drive, fly, be carnivores, live in McMansions – like there’s no tomorrow. Because maybe there isn’t a tomorrow?

OK, that’s taking the pessimism a bit too far, but you get the idea. The question is which is more effective: optimism or fear? The carrot or the stick?

As with much else around us, this isn’t a binary choice. We need both: fear of what can happen and the hope of solutions. One without the other is not likely to get us to the necessary results.

Greta Thunberg, whose powerful fearlessness is perhaps the most positive thing that 2019 brought us, is great at combining the two, while also shaming us into action. Speaking to British MPs, she said “The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases.” I’ll skip the hardest in favor of trying to be optimistic here. (And the linked article about the speech in the Guardian was headlined “’You did not act in time: Great Thunberg’s full speech to MPs.” So, I’m being selective in my quotes.)

Project Drawdown also says we know what to do but gets specific about it. In Chad Frischmann’s TED talk he says “we have mapped, measured and detailed 100 solutions to reversing global warming. Eighty already exist today.”

Project Drawdown's top 10 solutions

Project Drawdown’s top 10 solutions. https://www.drawdown.org/solutions

In the midst of an otherwise thoroughly depressing Washington Post article titled “The 2010s were a lost decade for climate. We can’t afford a repeat, scientists warn,” a cherry-picked paragraph reads:

[Surabi Menon, vice president for global intelligence at the ClimateWorks Foundation and a steering committee member for the U.N.’s emissions gap,] draws hope from progress that has been made on the ground in the past decade, even as global leaders fell short. Global renewable energy capacity has quadrupled since 2010, largely because of improved technology and falling costs, she noted. People increasingly see climate change as a threat; a Washington Post poll this year found that 76 percent of American adults view the issue as a “major problem”or a “crisis.”

Hope and fear.

Washington Post lost decade headline screenshot

At the end of every year, we get inundated with all those year-end summary articles. You know, the ones that appear in every newspaper or TV channel and attempt to provide some insight into the events of the year but usually end up feeling like treacle-y filler: “The ten best [fill in the blank] of the year.” I mostly ignore them because, well, treacle is way too sweet.

Two of them, though, were about the positive (treacle-free) aspects of an otherwise dreadful year for environmental news. EcoWatch, one of my favorite blogs, posted “20 Reasons Why 2019 Gave Us Climate Hope” and, while not exactly an end of the year review, the Huffington Post chimed in with “We Spoke To 5 Climate Experts About What Gives Them Hope.”

EcoWatch’s twenty reasons basically boil down to four:  increased public interest (reasons 1, 2, 3, 4 and part of 5), the pending slow demise of fossil fuel companies (#’s 5 and 6), increased media coverage (#’s 8 and 9), and celebrity and political candidate positions (#’s 7 and 10). Nothing that new. Celebrities, for example, have been doing this for years, usually to no avail or, worse, causing a backlash. And the downturn of the fossil fuel industry has been predicted for as long as I can remember. But perhaps the twenty reasons are significant in their totality.

Jane Fonda Fire Drill Fridays

Jane Fonda at one her Fire Drill Fridays protests in Washington, DC. Image from @janefonda Facebook page

While none of the Huffington Post interviewees got down to the specifics of Project Drawdown, they still – to state the obvious – give us hope. More or less.

Gina McCarthy, the EPA Secretary under Obama back when the EPA actually protected the environment, said “my hopeful energy comes from young people.” But that can be read as doing exactly what young activists are complaining about: kicking the can down the road. You can almost hear the “OK boomer” exasperated response.

Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson sounds much like Frischmann or Thunberg. “I am certainly bolstered by the fact that we already have all the solutions we need.” Her caveat: she predicates her hopes on having a new president.

Weather and climate expert Marshall Shepherd sounds like a true EcoOptimist when he says “we are seeing a genuine ship-turning moment…. Fortune 500 companies, faith-based communities and the military recognize the ‘here and now’ threat and are acting. There are genuine bipartisan efforts now in our Congress and within states.” Forgive me if I ditch my optimism and find his faith in Congress to be unrealistic in even an EcoOptimistic mindset.

Leah Stokes, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara, pins her hopes in multiple fronts: fossil fuel companies “starting to be held accountable,” youth pressure, and presidential candidates trying to one up each other supporting the New Green Deal.  But she ends on a less than optimistic note about people losing money and the disproportionate impact on the poor.

Michael Mann, climatologist, geophysicist and co-creator of the famous “hockey stick graph” depicting rapid global warming, takes a measured tack, “The good news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable. The bad news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable.” He, too, however, finds hope in the youth climate movement. It’s hard, though, to accuse him of abdicating leadership and passing on the responsibility since he’s been one of our most vocal environmental advocates.

Michael Mann's "hockey stick graph."

Michael Mann’s “hockey stick graph.” Mann says we can be hopeful in spite of what the graph depicts.

Gizmodo Earther reporter Brian Kahn along with writer/activist Mary Annaïse Heglar tackle ‘the hope question’ head on. Hope, they say, is not sufficient and perhaps, given the state of climate inaction, we’re beyond the point where hope is useful. Kahn writes “I get that hope is a thing we’re all looking for amidst the worsening climate carnage, but I firmly believe hope isn’t the most useful thing to steer us away from a worst-case scenario.” EcoOptimism, however, is not ready to give up on hope as part of the path to solutions.

Heglar, in what became a lengthy Twitter thread, says the question of hope is “stale AF” and writes “my wish for 2020 is for people to stop asking climate activists what gives us hope and start asking ‘how can I help?’” This is closer to the EcoOptimist position of combining hope and fear, adding action into the mix.

Kahn’s concise version is: “Fuck hope. Long Live Action.” As with EcoWatch, he reaches out to climate activists to ask, “how can I help?” Among his respondents, 350.org founder Bill McKibben replies he’s concentrating on taking on the financial industry that bankrolls fossil fuels. Margaret Kleinman, founder of Climate Mobilization, directs us to “Break the silence: Start talking about the climate emergency and the need for WWII scale climate mobilization — in a realistic, blunt, emergency-focused way.” Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, policy coordinator at the Climate Justice Alliance echoes Kahn, albeit in a slightly more family-friendly way: “Hope without action is like expecting a rock to float on water because you meditate.

Still, I think there is a place for hope – and that it’s actually necessary – so long as it’s in tandem with both fear and action. The realistic EcoOptimist will say that we can really only hope that the seemingly hopeless events of 2019 will result in governmental change. Will the massive heat waves and fires in Australia cause voters to depose their anti-climate change prime minister? Will China’s tepid attention to climate change expand? And the big one, will this country be able to vote out (I’m not placing any hope in impeachment – I’m not that optimistic) a president (there are too many derogatory adjectives I could have put in front of that word) who has single-handedly put us decades back in time?

We can still be optimistic while holding our breath. Better yet, let’s mix optimism with action. Anyone want to go to DC with me and get arrested with Jane Fonda? I’m in, so long as we don’t fly there.

Plastic Bans Update

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Along with some Good News Disguised as Bad News

People take part in a demonstration in front of the European Parliament on October 23. Credit: Frederick Florin/AFP via The Telegraph

It may not be as evocative and disturbing as that image of the turtle with a straw stuck in its nose, or the even more disturbing video  (warning: it’s very graphic and hard to watch), but recent stories about not just the environmental impacts of plastics, but the human health impacts as well, are serving to further the worldwide restrictions and bans on single-use plastics.

As with the turtle image, the realization that we are all affected by the proliferation of plastics carries a bit of what I’ve been calling “good news disguised as bad news.” Admittedly, in virtually all the instances I’ve cited previously – and now here – as examples of this, it’s hard to put a positive spin on such disturbing images and impacts, but the result is often a strong and visceral reaction that can kick us into action. A prime example of this is the infamous burning of Lake Cuyahoga in 1969 that resulted in the Clean Water Act and was responsible, in part, for the creation of the EPA.

In my “Good News Disguised as Bad News” post, I wrote about the countering, galvanizing response that is emerging from the rampant destruction of both environmental and health protections enacted by this administration (including the decimation of the EPA). A case in point: a pre-election post in ThinkProgress about a climate change-denying Congresswoman’s difficult re-election campaign asserted “Even climate and environmental issues, frequently relegated to the back-burner, have made it onto the radar in 2018 due to the administration’s rejection of climate science and assault on environmental protection.”

Still, conveying the urgency, or even the importance, of environmental issues can be difficult and explains, in part, why public support lags. Taking a cue from the women’s marches’ “pussy hat,” perhaps a hardhat made to look like a turtle shell or tee shirts emblazoned with the Chris Jordan photo of the albatross that died from consuming plastic waste may be the emblem we need to further awareness of the global problem of single-use plastics.

The health impacts of plastics are harder to convey. How do we conjure an image to depict microbeads in our food? Or plastics in salt and our poop? (Let’s skip the imagery of the last one. I don’t think it will help our cause.)

Nonetheless, even without a rallying image, regulations and bans of single-use plastic are spreading almost as fast as ocean plastics, and so my “Status of Plastics Bans Worldwide” continues to be updated. Just this month I added bans ranging from Jamaica to England to the entire EU. And 250 companies, governments and other organizations around the world signed “The New Plastics Economy Global Commitment,” pledging to eliminate by 2025 all plastic packaging that isn’t recyclable, reusable or compostable. The signatory companies alone, which include the likes of Coca-Cola and Unilever, represent 20% of all plastic packaging produced globally.

If you know of bans or fees that aren’t on the list, please let me know.

Some Positive Responses to that Depressing IPCC Report

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I’ve been going on lately about “Good News Disguised as Bad News.” And while it’s pretty difficult to see any silver lining in last week’s IPCC (The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report that said, basically, we have 12 years to prevent runaway, devastating climate disruption, maybe this will provide the galvanization we need to both get our act together and get more people and organizations onboard.

A case in point is a post yesterday in The New School’s page in Medium. In it, a faculty member and friend, Raz Godelnick, asked nine other Parsons and New School faculty members – including me – to share responses to the report and make suggestions about what to do next, with an emphasis on what we, as profs, can do within our teaching.

Among the various insightful contributions, many discussed ways to interest and involve students. Mine described what has become a theme of my research and teaching: that artists and designers have the ability to craft messages that appeal to those who don’t respond to scientific data (or who don’t accept the data).

We Need to Dispose of the Word Disposable

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I’ve often written here [1, 2, 3, 4] about how word choices can affect how we see things. Problematic connotations can sometimes arise by stigma and sometimes by subtle associations. A classic environmental example is how we refer to global warming. In the 90s, the Republican strategist Frank Luntz encouraged rebranding it as climate change because it seemed less frightening and would therefore make it less of an issue. (The irony is that it’s actually a more accurate term. But because it minimizes perception of the problem, as Luntz desired, many of us prefer to call it something more emphatic like climate disruption.)

In a similar vein, years ago, before the advent of LED lights, when improved fluorescent lights were the most energy-efficient technology, I wrote in a guest column in a lighting industry magazine that the word “fluorescent” had too many negative associations with its older, uglier versions. So, to get people to come around to the newer, more pleasing fluorescent bulbs, I wrote that they needed to be renamed.

The impetus for this current thought about words that can have misleading connotations occurred as I was sitting in a waiting room that had a coffee station. In need of caffeine – I had forgotten my coffee travel mug – I grabbed a cup. As I finished making my fix, I looked at the counter and saw the disposable Styrofoam cup, the disposable “K-cup” coffee pod and the tiny – you guessed it, disposable – milk container. My “garbage guilt” set in.

Those little ketchup squeeze tubes are another pet peeve. My order of fries inevitable needs a half dozen or more of them. They make a messy pile of garbage that can be neither recycled or composted. Plus they get all over your hands. They’re a rare example of something both disposable and inconvenient.

The litter atop that coffee station caused me to ponder the word “disposable.” For many people, disposability connotes convenience (finger-coating Ketchup pouches aside). You don’t have to bring stuff – containers, utensils, plastic bags – with you and you don’t have to worry about cleaning or taking care of them. Just toss it. No problem. Disposability is seen as a positive thing, reinforced by the “able” suffix.

The word makes the use of disposable things and the resulting garbage seem OK. They’re meant to be guiltlessly thrown away because that’s how they’re designed and perceived.

When I advocated for renaming fluorescent bulbs, I couldn’t come up with a replacement term. I’d like to do better here, especially as single-use plastics are being increasingly recognized as a major problem. (The issue is being addressed in part by bans and fees – see my “Status of Plastic Bans” list – but even then, there’s pushback by both users and producers.)

So, how can we retitle disposability? My first thought was an obvious one. Just call it what it is: “landfill.” But that doesn’t work as an adjective in front of “cups” or “bags” (or with the current fixation on straws).

Next, I attempted to channel Stephen Colbert’s coining of “truthiness” with “disposiness.” But I’m not as clever as Colbert and it didn’t feel like it solved the problem.  There was, though, some, er, truth to it as the garbage never really gets disposed of. It’s still here, just relocated. When we throw things away, there is, as Bill McDonough is fond of saying, no “away.”

I’ve concluded that our new term needs to have that suffix “able” in it, but with a prefix that drives the point home. Garbagable? Trashable? Wastable? They still imply, though, that because something has the ability to be thrown out – e.g. it’s trashable – it’s OK. The word needs to communicate that single-use stuff that doesn’t decompose or effectively recycle is NOT okay. It’s wasteful and it’s a problem so it needs to be discouraged. But I don’t usually advocate for guilting people into environmental action. That’s been repeatedly shown to not work. Better to play upon self-interest and desire. “Wasteful” (I rejected “wastable” even though I like creating new words) heads in the right direction – who wants to be wasteful? – but still doesn’t quite get us there.

We need to somehow say you really don’t want to do this. Not an admonishment that you shouldn’t do it.  And it needs to be “sticky,” meaning the word will attach itself to the item the way disposable does.

I’m reluctantly left for the moment with “garbagy.” But it still doesn’t fully meet my criteria. Plus, the English language being what it is, you wouldn’t be sure how to spell or pronounce it.

Maybe I should ask Colbert.

The Distillery: April 22, 2018

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We can all use some positive news these days, especially on the environmental front in which science is considered evil, denial is an alternative fact and the EPA is now what I’m calling the Environmental Destruction Agency. And while I don’t want to gloss over the issues – there isn’t enough paint in the world to do that – I offer here The Distillery, a weekly (or thereabouts) selection of posts to help offset the PTSD of our current nightmare.

The posts I pick will be “real” in the sense that they aren’t pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, as fun as those can be, but are evidence of EcoOptimism.

Here on this anniversary of Earth Day, it seems appropriate to update a topic I first wrote about in 2012 in a post I titled “Planets Are People, My Friends.” It was a reference at the time to a statement by then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney who told attendees at a rally that “corporations are people, my friend.” While the statement was actually in response to a comment about taxes, it also could be seen as being about the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court case that basically said corporations have the same free speech rights as people, and that spending on political campaigns is a form of free speech. That court decision has had a disastrous affect on our elections ever since.

While that Supreme Court case was about establishing the rights of corporations, my post drew a parallel with the equally odd-sounding idea of nature having rights. It talked about movements to give rights to South American forests, a New Zealand River and apes in Spain. Since then the movement has spread further.

From Treehugger
September 27, 2017

“Group files suit to recognize the Colorado River as a person”

EcoOptimism’s take: New Zealand has a river with rights and now the US may get one, too.

From Earther:
April 9, 2018

 “The Colombian Amazon Is Now a ‘Person’, and You Can Thank Actual People”

EcoOptimism’s take: In addition to being about recognizing nature’s rights, this also ties into some EcoOptimism posts including a recent Distillery post on the topic of intergenerational rights, meaning the right of young generations to grow up with a healthy environment. The Colombian Supreme Court case that decided this was brought by Colombian youth.

From ThinkProgress:
April 16, 2018

“Florida kids are taking their climate-denying governor to court”

And also in Teen Vogue:
April 18, 2018

“Florida Governor Rick Scott Is Getting Sued by Teens for His Environmental Polices”

EcoOptimism’s take: More evidence of the growing trend of youth suing their unresponsive government. In this case, the suit is directed toward adamant climate change denier Governor Rick Scott. Scott has also been the subject of another teen-led suit. That one is over gun control in the aftermath of the Parkland High School shooting and has grown into an example of what galvanized youth can do.

Fake Growth

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(or, The Gross Domestic Product is Gross)

The last time I wrote about the problem with making economic growth a national goal, it was February 2013 and Obama was president. It seems sooo long ago.

EcoOptimism is a bit obsessed with the concept of growth (here and here, as well as the link above) and its misplaced and misleading focus on Gross Domestic Product. It‘s a contender for the most frequent topic here, up there with “win-win-win,” which is the essence of EcoOptimism.

In one of the other posts on this topic, I wrote that a major problem with economists’ and, especially, politicians’ attachment to the supposed necessity of growth – and particularly growth as measured by GDP – is the attractiveness of the word itself. Who can argue with growth? Who can oppose it and survive attack?

So I looked at ways to get around this by using a different word – a word or phrase that sounded as positive and appealing as growth. I mentioned “post-growth” as a phrase that many growth critics favor. I suggested “regrowth.” I brought up a less familiar term, “plenitude,” employed by Juliet Schor in her book by the same title.

But I wasn’t overwhelmed by any of them. I’d written in one of those previous posts: “how [can we] make a counterintuitive idea appealing? Facts and figures we have aplenty. It’s the sound bite we’re missing.”

While reading yet another book that criticizes focusing on conventional economic growth, I started getting worked up about a new way of putting it: “real growth.” Aside from its simplicity, its strength is that it makes conventional growth sound the opposite of real.

But from there, I jumped to thinking about things unreal and, in our current political climate, the word “fake” seemed an obvious synonym. I’ve been, shall we say, annoyed about the co-opting of the phrase “fake news.” It was originally used, back in the beginning of the campaign we wish we could forget, to refer to social media posts that we now know were planted by Russia and had a major influence on the election. But somehow, in an example of brilliant PR, the phrase got adopted by the right wing and by the man I’ve referred to as SCROTUS (so-called ruler of the United States) to malign any news they didn’t like. So, much as I hate that, I have to admire its success.

Which brings me back to growth and, specifically, the potential of “real growth” as its counterpoint. By implication then, conventional growth is not real. It’s FAKE. (Putting it in ungrammatical caps as SCROTUS does somehow makes it more effective.)

So I hereby propose, using all the powers vested in me, this combination of terms: real growth vs fake growth. Can “fake growth” make the point? Can it provide the sound bite in a social media world, where other terms haven’t?

Let the tweets begin.

The Distillery: February 27, 2018

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We can all use some positive news these days, especially on the environmental front in which science is considered evil, denial is an alternative fact and the EPA is now what I’m calling the Environmental Destruction Agency. And while I don’t want to gloss over the issues – there isn’t enough paint in the world to do that – I offer here The Distillery, a weekly (or thereabouts) selection of posts to help offset the PTSD of our current nightmare.

The posts I pick will be “real” in the sense that they aren’t pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, as fun as those can be, but are evidence of EcoOptimism.

A recent EcoOptimism Distillery post was on the theme of “good news disguised as bad news.” Here, perhaps, is the ultimate example of that. In spite of and maybe because of all the astoundingly bad news about Trump’s environmental “witch hunt” (to redirect his term)….

From ThinkProgress:
February 13, 2018

Poll reveals Americans are hitting their breaking point on the environment

(The previous high point – 2006 – was shortly after Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out.)
Image source: ThinkProgress

EcoOptimism’s take: Sure, it’d be better if public support for environmental actions was due to something positive, but this support as a reaction to the absolute illogic of Trump is encouraging. And even better, must piss off the denier-in-chief.

Here’s hoping it makes his twitter finger sore.

And in a similar vein, though media coverage of climate change still lags ridiculously behind other topics…

Also from ThinkProgress:
February 13, 2018

Trump’s climate denial backfires, drives more media coverage of the issue

Image source: MediaMatters

EcoOptimism’s take: The post’s subtitle kinda says it all. “How the president is getting more people to think and talk about climate change.” The post then explains: “Trump is driving TV coverage of climate change, and as a result, he is raising the profile of the issue. Last year’s spike in coverage of climate change corresponded with an uptick in public concern. Worry about climate change is now at an all-time high across several polls.” (As shown in the article and graph above.) But it also goes on to say “News outlets gave an uncontested platform to climate deniers.” And Media Matters, the data source for the post, said “The networks undercovered or ignored the ways that climate change had real-life impacts….”

I guess that makes it a qualified “good news disguised as bad news.”