It brings me to some interesting, if different conclusions and ethics. First off, though, I"m a total hypocrite. I am appalled by the amount of waste my family and I generate in a given week.
While I think we are becoming environmentally conscience in terms of energy, I beleive that’s the least of it. To me, the great evil of modern society is the bic razor and all that it has wrought. Planned obsolescence and cheap shit so fill our lives that we have hardly any idea how much we waste.
It didn’t always used to be this way. I’ll give you an example.
I moved to a farm in PA in 1993. There was a tractor there, a 1948 Super A IH with a belly mower. Looked like this:
http://www.proxibid.com/asp/LotDetail.asp?ahid=372&aid=4177&lid=1362354
(except unrestored)
I mowed with that for ten years. It had the original tires on it. I did some repairs and replacements to it, but essentially it was always running and in continuous service for over fifty years. When I moved, I took it with me. The property here though is too hilly to safely use that machine and I nearly tipped it. I bought a $1,400 lawn tractor from Lowes to do the hills. That thing was made out of pot metal, cheap pressed sheat metal and plastic. I wore it out within two years. The steering ball was made out of plastic and exposed so that the teeth accumulated grit and wore to nothing. The frame ben, the plastic cracked. The pot metal mounts to the engine cracked, etc, etc. Basically the entire machine wore out.
A year old and they don’t make parts for it. It was not built to be fixed. It was built to be used for a little while and then discarded. It had less than 100 hours on it.
They Still make parts for that Super A.
I searched long and hard and I eventually traded the Super A for a new Kubota. This machine is built to outlast me, and it should reasonably be giving somebody service 60 years from now.
So, my ethic about these things is that that Super was the most environmentally friendly lawn tractor anybody ever had. It cost a lot to manufacture, yes, but it only cost that much once. It was built to last.
The entire effort and cost of manufacturing shitty lawnmowers is a tremendous waste on this world that I think is destroying the environment. Think of the cost and energy and consumption of resources needed to manufacture these shitty things. Think of clear cut forests, strip mining, the labor, the energy all needed to make and transport a shitty lawnmower. And then think that that is all a waste because you will need to do it again in a couple of years.
I can see the difference in the house I live in now versus that farmhouse. That farmhouse was almost three hundred years old. Every 60-80 years, the mortar needed repointing. The slate roof could be repaired indefinately. I doubt the house I stand in now will last 60 years. All the energy and effort that went into constructing it will have been wasted.
Look at bic razors. You use them for a while, throw them away and buy new ones. Look at all the resources wasted on that. It’s in everything in our lives.
It’s all cheap shit.
Yvonne Choinard, the founder of Patagonia has a book on the subject and the environmentalism of all this callous waste. **Let My People Go Surfing[b/] They try to build some clothes that are meant to last. I have a pair of their stand up shorts. I’ll bet I wear them still 40 years from now.
Look at all of our electronics. How old is your phone? How often must you replace all your crappy shit that falls apart all the time?
So, my environmental ethic is this: I strive to buy the last of something that I will ever buy. I try to buy things that are efficient, not fashionably efficient, but truly efficient.
I installed a geothermal heat pump in my house, and paid a lot more money to get one that should outlast the building. I’ve been upgrading my building so that it too will last longer than otherwise. I have cookware that looks like it was carved out of a single block of steel, a watch that should outlast me. The idea is that I will spend a lot more money up front but I will only spend it once.
I think the most enviromentally sound vehicle I ever owned was a truck I built out of two '79 Chevys. I took the cab from one, the bed from another, ground and welded the rusty panels, put new cab and bed mounts and a rebuilt motor and transmission into it. It was mechanically new, but cost me about $2,500. I drove it about 30,000 miles, plowed snow and used it on the farm. I sold it for $2,000. Net cost to me about $500 plus gas. I don’t think it got more than 15 mpg, but I’ll stack that truck up against anybody with a prius or a Civic. It didn’t have these huge battery cells to be replaced, and it didn’t have the huge cost of manufacture, and transportation. It was basically salvaged. To my knowledge it’s still running.
I mulch. I save my carbboard boxes for storage or to start a fire. I try not to throw away food, and I buy in bulk when I can, because the biggest waste that I can think of comes from the manufacture, transport and packaging of goods. Still, it seems that 90% of my garbage is packaging of stuff I bought. What a waste.
I think most people are worried about the wrong things. There’s nothing wrong or cruel with eating beef to my thinking. The whole animal basically gets used, and it’s efficient in terms of calories to bulk. I imagine that a head of iceberg lettuce would not compare favorably to a steak if we were to try and measure cruelty and waste and loss of life by the calorie.
I try to keep myself physically fit and strong, and I try to maintain everything I own myself. I try to fix things that break and I try to buy things that are meant to be fixed not discarded because I think it’s a win all around if I do. I gain knowledge and satisfaction and skills from being able to do these things. I have nice stuff that will last. It should be cheaper in the long run, and I am draining less resources and creating less waste. Ultimately, I think my ethic of efficiency means that there is less cruelty and suffering than I would otherwise create.
Still though, I am tremendously wasteful compared to what I think I should be.
A potato is a pretty efficient food source. It can be grown locally in a sustainable fashion. It’s pretty tough to beat a potato in terms of efficiency. You are planting a monocrop and tilling land and risking erosion and killing everything else on that land to do it. We have dairy farms around here and they’re actually a pretty neat operation, too. They plant corn and other silage crops and feed the cows with it, take the milk, collect and store the cow’s waste and recycle it into the fields. The cows get butchered and used pretty completely when they are no longer productive. A cow produces a lot of milk over it’s life, and it’s not a bad life at all, not cruel that I can see. Milk is pretty dense nutritionally and massively useful in all kinds of food products. I guess I would have to give the edge to the potato, but I don’t think it’s such a great win that a potato eater could look down on a cow drinker, or think they were living so much cleaner. That edge could easily be eroded. Do you waste the skin of the potato? Eat the whole thing? Do you buy in bulk? Are they local potatos? Do you drink the whole bottle of milk, or only use half?
I think the amount of cruelty and suffering is going to come down to packaging and efficiency of use by the consumer, and is not going to be significantly inherent in the potato versus the cow.
YMMV.