Reflections on "Implementing Sustainability"

One of my courses has us write regular "participation notes" about our readings. Here's mine for class today. Page citations are for Kevin Wilhelm's Return on Sustainability.

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Participation Notes - Returns
Caleb A Phillips
Course – Professor

Sunday, October 16, 2011

I'm not going to hand over th assignment you're after. I can write pages on sustainability initiatives, but I'm already doing that with other projects I'm working on. What I'm writing on is a confusion around sustainability that produces a sustainability lite. Businesses around the world can take on sustainability initiatives, they can save money on transportation through video conferencing or reduce packaging while making more of it recycled or biodegradable. These are projects that many businesses can do and learn from. What many can't do is become sustainable in a meaningful way.

The reading refers to Michael Braungart and Bill McDonough. In their remarkable book, Cradle to Cradle, they do say that we must turn industrial production on its head and capture the innumerable technical nutrients that are lost when we through things away. Waste does equal food (36). They also remark that sustainability, that cradle-to-cradle manufacturing can't be done in part, in must be done in its entirety or else we are simply delaying the industrial collapse. Certainly this process can be accomplished in stages, but how can look to Lockheed Martin for sustainability guidance (29)? This is a company that builds jet engines and missiles. Where exactly do tactical missiles fit in with sustainability?

In addition, there seems to be only a very shallow assessment of sustainability in these examples. If a business moves to replaces CRT monitors (conventional, boxy monitors) with sleek new LCD monitors, that makes hundreds if not thousands of pounds of electronic waste out of functional equipment (31). Replacement strategies without employing reuse (fixing and handing off monitors to low-income schools or community centers, for example) strategies or a comprehensive e-waste management scheme is foolhardy. Electronics and especially computers involve heavy metals and toxic chemicals that, without proper disposal, can contaminate ground and surface water supplies. Even existing e-waste programs may mean simply shipping computers off to other countries where they are picked through in unhealthy conditions (even landfills and by children) for the previous metals that are worth relatively more than they do in the United States.

And citing Hamburger Helper's packaging? Hamburger Helper is a nutritionally lacking food, high in sodium, and aimed at complementing cheap meat (33-34). Should we really be complementing a business that puts 30% or more of daily recommended sodium in a single, adult-sized serving (http://www.coheso.com/nutridata/Hamburger_Helper/list_item.html)? What does it say that sustainability for these uncritical assessments ignores a healthy diet of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains for a dish of cheap meat, salt, and simple starches?

What I'm getting at is that sustainability isn't something businesses can tack on or even innovate toward. Sustainability requires a much deeper assessment of sourcing, procedures, and goals in a social and environmental context. What these little blips about various businesses do sound more like greenwashing that real evaluations of what the business does and how it makes its money. If sustainability mean putting Lockheed Martin out of business, I think that is what sustainability—even for businesspeople—ought to mean. If Kevin Wilhelm thinks that sustainability is simply a change in sourcing or an update in electronics, then he is profoundly mistaken.

A wandering heart

Krysta was teasing me, though not as much as I tease myself, for what I referred to as my wandering heart. I have a tendency to become enamored. I see wit and charm and a clever smile and, well, I see it. Krysta has recently accepted a maxim that "love is pain," an equation that has set her own heart at ease. Love, I suppose, has treated her with no great gentility. She loves no less than I do. She seems to approach the day with love, to send it out in lolling waves. Often it comes back her way, but sometimes with greater turbulence than desired.

I do not think of love as pain, except in the way that love can develop as attachment, and like any "good" Buddhist, I understand that attachment eventually produces suffering. (Though I like to reflect on "attachment to attachment" as just as prone to producing suffering as more obvious forms of attachment.) Krysta's radiating love is reinforced, even encouraged by her new understanding of "love is pain." Earlier tonight she did something between chiding and cautioning me because of my delight in amorous sentiments. To her, "love is pain" and therefore these little affections are just a road to suffering, that even the company of such compatriots will become painful. I don't find this to be true.

A wandering heart, that's what it is. I am happy to love, to receive a sharp-toothed smile and lend out music, literature, film. I let my love follow rivulets--the shores of which are marked with lends and gifts--out into the world and appreciate where they might come back and where they might go on to intersperse with others. I have taken to thinking of myself as a menace of sorts, letting these streams out into the world that might precipitate unpleasant circumstances. These little reflective condescensions, I suppose, are intended to keep me in check but don't really change much of anything. Rather than a maxim, I temper myself. I have lost more than one book and more than one DVD to a romantically inclined favor, and what scars do I have to show for it? My scars are more to do with bike accidents than misguided affection.

In senior year I was told by more than one friend that our place was the most comforting, welcoming place to be. It felt increasingly like a loving place, an open and warm and generous place. Gift-giving--lends and favors I group in with gifts, though they are temporally bound--is about creating a generous environment, a hearth around which wandering hearts might warm themselves, recuperate, reflect. I may be making myself into a menace, an affection fiend, but it is a posture that makes sense to me. Loving is more about giving, about being, about virtue and character to me than it is about physicality and gazing through darkness at one another.

In "Buddhism and Civil Rights," David Chappell (not the other Chappelle) writes, " Compassion is often considered an emotion in the West, but in Buddhist tradition it is presented as an insight: once we have seen that we are related to others, that we are the same kind, we develop a sense of kinship and kindness becomes an expression of this insight in action." I have been talking about love, but this sense of compassion makes a good deal of sense to me with regards to love. Whether that love is romantic, amicable, familial, or more general (Civic or global love? That sounds too vague to my ears.), we end up with a giving out, a mindset or lens out onto the world that ultimately shapes how others perceive the original viewer. I look out with love, looking for love, sending out love; my heart wanders in the world and I am happy enough to learn what comes following it back to me.

Reflections on Conflict

It still seems funny to me. Tim and I moved in and the three (really, the four) of us didn't know each other any better than Tim and I when we moved in to the apartment last summer. I hadn't thought much of it. I was more worried about the unknown roommate. But when you left for a while and we did some cleaning and some rearranging of the furniture, it was not what you expected. You thought it was an indication of our low regard for you, that it was some deep-seated disrespect. I admit that it was disrespectful, but just in the shallow sense, the way someone turns the corner without signaling. But that is a big disrespect and a regular concern for a cyclist riding alongside. I think you felt like a cyclist, the terrain and behavior changing suddenly. It didn't help that you came off of a rough trip.

Afterward you seemed to have cooled and I seemed to understand your vantage better. Unfortunately what you were asking you weren't willing to give. Respect is never a one-way road--not that I know of any one-way roads in terms of people--and you seem to expect to see something you don't practice. I remember wondering how people might jump from sports to parties to the night after to family and still have it all in there, all in their life and in their head. It boggled me. Those were things, practices, behaviors I didn't know. I spoke with Becca on the way back from Sarah and Matt's farm; she said that what they were doing--farming--was so crazy and great and miraculous to her. I agreed. What Becca had trouble seeing was her own delicate magic of pastry making, the pleasant rituals of gelato. Where one saw magic the other saw the quotidian.

That's where we are, I think. What you do in terms of work and management is really something. I can see that and appreciate that. I most certainly respect the challenge you've set for yourself. That said, you drive me up the wall with complaints about money or difficulties because their sources are obvious to me. Flagstaff is not a town for juice and smoothies most of the time; selling such goods--regardless of their quality--is a fool's once the frosts start coming. We might get weird late-fall summertime days, but last week we got snow and next week it might average in the 40s or 50s. This is where you are living and it seems foolhardy to complain about it.

Despite that respect, despite that appreciation, you are obviously not interested in practicing that which you demand. Without practice I don't know if what I do or who I am makes a difference. I could push and I could make space, try to connect through the depression, anxiety, and frustration you experience, but why would I? You have made so little effort to make it feel worthwhile and one bad day seems to undermine any successes made in the meantime. There is a lesson in this, a lesson about how we build bridges and how we tear them down again; about the scorched earth we sometimes leave in our wake. But forest fires and lava flows bring out new growth. One can always find green sprouts the year after such devastation, not to mention the abundant mushrooms feasting on the boon. If I thought you would be in my life in some capacity in the years ahead, I might try. As it is, I see so little topsoil, so little humus worth cultivating that I leave you alone and I make a point that you leave me alone. A chipped bowl, cluttered kitchen, loud chatter into the night, a bike sitting squarely in the middle of the entry, these are sometimes the cost for what I have now and what I feel I must wrest from what you would otherwise take.

And yes, dammit, that is my lamp.

Hey! It's a Bread Recipe; also, School

I made my first yeast bread in sometime for class yesterday. Julia asked for the recipe, so I already had it typed up. It was something like:
1 & 1/2 cup wheat flour
3/4 cup white flour (more to balance)
1 Tbsp yeast
1 tsp salt (put salt on opposite side from yeast)
1 & 1/2 Tbsp cinnamon
1 & 1/2 Tbsp brown sugar
3 Tbsp butter
Mix well (I did most the work in my food processor) and add enough water to make a soft dough. Turn out and knead until smooth (didn't take long after the whirring of the processor), shape into a loaf and place in a small pan. Cover and let rise for about 45-60 minutes, start oven preheat to 350 F. Before baking, drizzle with a little bit of honey and sprinkle oats on top. Bake for 18-25 minutes, once firm enough, flip out of pan and bake on the rack for 3 minutes.

The flour may be a little off. I just used what I had of the wheat. My bread pan was also the smallest one I had, so don't expect a big loaf in a large bread pan.

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I used my food processor (new to me) in memory of making ridiculous quantities of focaccia and breadsticks for the Greens' House/ILS House Progressive Dinner back in junior year. I was on my feet for about eight hours, first baking and then hosting because nearly all of my housemates vanished. It was also one of the few identifiable times when I was really angry at someone, but it seems sort of funny thinking about that whole day coming together the way it did. Oof, I even had to do the dishes afterward. We had rounds of rather airy focaccia in the freezer for sometime. That was a nice outcome. I need to go grocery shopping and afterward, I may just make more bread.

My class with Rom Coles has yielded some really fantastic--if stupidly rushed--reading material. Like Marshall Ganz's "Why David Sometimes Wins" and right now we're reading J.K. Gibson-Graham's A Postcapitalist Politics which is pretty fantastic. I really want to pick up Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference which read in a week last year for David Schlosberg before he hightailed it to Sidney. What a loss for the school. I wrote a pretty solid paper for him and Jim Sell on grassroots food justice activism and urban planning if folks want me to post that. If you can't tell, I rather enjoy having found so many interesting readings available for free; I am growing weary of my computer screen, though. Anyone want to buy me an iPad or Nook? I swear I'll only use it for .pdfs, not real books I would rather show off on my bookshelf.