This article is written as a response to:

“Environmental Challenge No 1.”
http://www.rentoid.com/blog/?p=995

This proposition made in that blog post is a tough proposition to approach from a philosophical perspective.

I’ll write this post from a Sydney/Australia centric perspective, as life in the city of Sydney is the core of my world experience and world view.

On the one hand there is the consideration that the elite decision makers are out of touch with the median urban dweller’s situation and therefore ill-equipped to make decisions appropriate to the median urban dweller.

On the other hand, there is the consideration that the elite decision makers have the outlook and perspective they enjoy because they and their families do things differently than the median urban dweller, who is situated where they are and with their outlook as a result of choices they and their families have made.

Some would argue that better equips them for decision making, while some would contend that their environment and consequently their decision making framework is biased against the interests of the mass of people.

As an aside, we cannot necessarily make predictions about the personal ecological footprints of the dwelling occupiers based solely on pictures of the dwellings.

If I take the proposition at face value, that the greatest challenge is that our decision makers inhabit an environment that is atypical of that inhabited by the greater part of the citizenry, how much further removed relatively speaking are both groups represented, being in a top 1% urban environment, compared with those eking out a subsistence existence on less than $1 per day, often without adequate safe drinking water, somewhere around 2 billion of the approaching 7 billion people on the planet.

What then are the impacts of the decisions made by the decision-makers on the 40% to 60% (wild guess) of the world’s population who have no effective political franchise via which to express their dissatisfaction with the way global affairs are governed?

Furthermore, what are the impacts of the decisions made by the greater part of the educated free citizenry of the planet, the 2 billion or so people who have a standard of living not too dissimilar from the range depicted by the images above.

While I acknowledge the effort to highlight a disparity in living circumstances in our society, and the consequent framing of perspectives between its elites and its median members, I definitely don’t consider that in itself to be our greatest challenge.

My belief is that our greatest challenge is our own individual contribution to things being the way they are.

I submit that collectively the individual choices and actions of billions of people play a far greater aggregate role in shaping our world than than the decisions made by the global power elites.

They only have power by virtue of the choices we make to cede that power to them. For example, by choosing to drive cars and buy fuel, we support and maintain an oil-dependent society that provides huge profits and massive economic, social and political power to the oil pirates. For the origin of the term “oil pirates”, I refer you to “Critical Path” by R. Buckminster Fuller.

The same applies to our usage of electricity. We demand cheap energy (collectively as a society) to run our plasma screens (I own one myself), our computers, our air conditioners (I don’t have or use A/C, this is Sydney, not Kuala Lumpur).

A few years ago, just after new years day, early in January (2006 I think it was?), hundreds of thousands of people in Sydney got literally and mentally all hot and bothered when at least quarter of a million air conditioners were turned on when the mercury rose above 40C, causing large chunks of Sydney’s power grid to shut down for up to five hours.

Our collective inability to tolerate some level of discomfort caused an effect that resulted in a much greater level of discomfort, inconvenience and resource wastage, as the contents of many thousands of refrigerators and freezers warmed and defrosted and consequently spoiled. Not to mention the impacts of lost productivity. I was attempting (in my non-airconditioned home office) to get my annual business taxation return completed and had to abandon work for the day.

That’s because I choose to do my accounts using a computer, rather than in a hand-written journal and ledger.

I saw a mother at the shopping centre today who had an entire trolley-load of disposal nappies (diapers in USA) for her baby. We’re talking at least a cubic metre here.

My mother and her maternal lineage before her, all used cloth nappies, soilage of which was returned to the earth via septic tank or sewerage treatment works and the nappies were washed and re-used many times.

No decision-maker is imposing that kind of decision on that mother. It’s her free choice to spend a small fortune on disposable nappies for the sake of convenience in our fast-paced, disposable society.

Imagine if the (wild guess here!) 50% to 70% of people on the planet who are not yet using disposal nappies, let alone driving cars and all the other ‘necessities’ of our modern urban existence were in a position to make the same choice.

That’s an awful lot of plastic, packaging, petro-chemical processing and fuel required for transport to landfill, just to dispose of infant excrement.

Personally I try to recycle everything I can, to limit the usage of energy as much as practicable, to extend the life of objects through regular maintenance and replacement of components.

One recent example is my engagement of a technician friend to replace blown capacitors in a PC power supply. We desoldered $3 equivalent worth of capacitors out of other failed PSUs and used them to repair the damaged PSU, to save throwing it out and avoid buying a $45 replacement cost PSU.

There is always a trade-off in time and convenience. It would have been much easier, faster and simpler to purchase a replacement PSU and we both could have used the time required to source the components and effect the repair to make more than $45 to cover that expense.

But we chose a more sustaining approach, out of our commitment to waste reduction, by repairing an item that still had utility.

My choice is always to evaluate the possibility of repairing the faulty item first.

For decades there have been proponents of piping Sydney’s sewerage out west through the Blue Mountains to fertilise land for food production on the central table lands.

There appears to be some kind of cultural taboo preventing this idea from gaining serious support; we prefer instead to pump our crap into the ocean where that resource is lost to us.

There are so many good ideas for resource utilisation optimisation lying fallow for want of rational consideration and social support for their implementation.

Its through the choices we each make that we create the results that we see and experience in the world today.

Consider that structural impact of our taxation system. We have a GST now which increased the cost of technician’s services by 10%. At the same time it was introduced there was a reduction of 22% sales tax off a wide range of consumer electronics items.

Consequently, people don’t get things repaired nearly as much any more. Something has broken, eg. TV not working? Toss it and buy another one. It makes better economic sense.

But what is economic sense other than a construct of the human imagination? It’s now accepted as Gospel that we must have economic growth, that recessions are bad and depressions are really terrible.

Therein lies the greatest environmental challenge in my view.

People have been conditioned to look to economic considerations as the primary framework for behavioural modification.

This is a false view of reality, as it is based on a human-created conceptual model that does not reflect physical reality.

That false view of reality, must necessarily be replaced by a model that more closely resembles physical reality, ideally encompassing an ecological framework for decision-making if we are to survive and possibly even thrive as a species heading towards 10 billions, while still maintaining an adequate degree of bio-diversity of life on earth for future generations to exercise custodianship and/or stewardship over.

That contextual switch will not soon come from the global elites, political, financial or corporate.

It must first arise as a phenomena of the mass of humanity who are committed to a sustainable future for humanity and as many other life forms on our planet as we are still in a position to preserve and protect.

Until ecology has gained the ascendancy above economy, until economics has been subsumed into a holistic conceptual framework for perception of reality, we will not see any truly transformative movement toward the type of world that may be possible.

I love to criticise our political leaders; its a national sport in Australia, as in the USA and other liberal democracies in accordance with the tradition established in ancient Athens and reborn in 18th/19th century France and the United States of America; we are fortunate indeed to possess the privilege thereof.

However, I must submit for consideration of any who reads this that it is our own good selves who must constantly seek to self-assess and re-evaluate our own choices and modify our own actions accordingly.

My belief is that http://Rentoid.com represents a valuable contribution towards this transformative shift.

Rentoid is premised around the ideal of sharing out the functional utility of objects, distributing the economic cost and benefit of physical goods amongst those whose use benefit exceeds the cost requested. Thereby extending the useful life of those physical goods so they may have the fullest use value extracted from them prior to discarding or disposal at the end of their functional utility.

How can you contribute today towards an objective that is founded in a similar premise or spirit of intention?

Together, we can be the change we want to see in the world, a proposition given to us by Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi.

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