Technosanity #42: contemplating the cost of making tea

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Making tea is such a simple thing isn't it? Or, is it? Where do the tea leaves come from and what is the environmental impact of growing the tea? Where does the paper for the tea bag come from, what is the environmental impact of that? What about limited water resources? Is the tea shipped across the planet?

Many tea makers attempt to appeal to green consciousness with fair trade practices, or claiming to grow the tea sustainably, etc. All that is laudible, but then they ship the tea thousands of miles and the environmental impact of the globalized shipping probably destroys several times over the gains from the sustainable farming practice.

Technosanity #42: contemplating the cost of making tea

Making Tea (on youtube)

TechnoSanity #35: Buy Nothing Day

It's thanksgiving day, 2009. I am thankful for my life, the work I'm doing, the ability to speak the message which I have to share.

Today is supposed to be a moment of being thankful, grateful for the bounty of our lives. Of course gratefulness is a practice for every day, not just one day a year, but it's helpful to have the reminder of gratefulness due to the day for giving thanks. But, wait, is this what most of thanksgiving celebrations are about? Is the orgy of football games a practice of gratefulness? Is the orgy of eating a practice of gratefulness? Well, okay, maybe that one is, or at least can be. Is the orgy of shopping on the day after, commonly called Black Friday, a practice of gratefulness?

Black Friday is supposed to be the official start of the Christmas Season. It's commonly the day a guy dressed as Santa lights the Christmas Tree, and there is the Thanksgiving Day Parades led by guys dressed as Santa. Sure it makes sense to have a ceremony to launch a period of other ceremonies leading up to a major celebration. But, just what part of Christs story does Santa come from? Just what part of Christs story do Christmas trees come from? And most importantly just what part of Christs story implies we should shop til we drop and engage in an orgy of consumption?

Buy Nothing Day is organized by Adbusters. It is observed on the day following Thanksgiving, the day commonly known as Black Friday, and the idea is to engage in activities other than shopping. Part of the message of Buy Nothing Day is the above points and others I'll be making below. I believe the purpose Adbusters has in mind behind Buy Nothing Day is to interrupt the practice of overconsumption tied into Black Friday and the way Christmas is currently practiced in the prevailing paradigm.

There are a lot of videos on youtube about Buy Nothing Day, just search for them. Some are linked below.

Buy Nothing Day is important to me for several reasons. One is the subversion or destruction of the real meaning of Christmas discussed above. Christmas is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of a great spiritual teacher, and it is supposed to be symbolic of the awakening within us of attributes taught by that spiritual teacher (Jesus Christ). But think about how Christmas is celebrated and the common symbols. Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus, the Nutcracker, Good King Wenceslaus, the Christmas tree, candy canes, elves, the orgy of presents bought and gifted, and on and on. None of this has a single thing to do with celebrating the birth of this great spiritual teacher. Not a thing.

Still, those things are the focus of most activities related to Christmas. And it is Black Friday which starts off the orgy of buying.

Another reason BND is important has to do with the ecological impact of the economics of this orgy of buying. Our Capitalistic system is driven by Consumerism. You hear it pretty plainly in the news if you care to listen. They talk about "Consumer Confidence" which is gobbledygook for measuring how much people are spending. The more we spend the more confident we are, supposedly. The news during Christmas season is full of analysis over how much we spend, and it is Christmas spending that keeps the economy going.

What this means is that rates of consumption drive rates of economic activity which drive rates of production which drives rates of mining resources to build this stuff. Often it's stuff that isn't truly needed, and in any case is produced for a celebration that's a subversion of a very real tradition our society has had with over 1000 years of history behind it. That very real tradition of Christmas has been destroyed and replaced by a fake mockery pretending to be the real tradition, but instead is a total and complete sham.

This sham is harming our traditions and harming our environment.

TechnoSanity #35: Buy Nothing Day

References:  What did you do for Buy Nothing Day?

References:  The battle for christmas

TechnoSanity #34: Our collective responsibility as consumers for the things we consume

What is the extent of responsibility we have when we buy a thing? In this podcast I suggest we have a lot of responsibility over the cradle-to-grave effects over the thing we buy, as well as the packaging that comes with the thing. Our purchases set in motion a bewildering array of activities aimed at fulfilling the desire we expressed through that purchase. Bags are made so we can carry home the purchase, the gizmo is made, the packaging to hold the gizmo is made, trucks and airplanes and cargo ships are made, forests are cut down, minerals mined, and on and on, all so we can have a plethora of stuff in the stores to buy.

This evening I went to the store to buy a few kitchen gizmos. Each were packaged primarily in cardboard boxes but then came the question at the counter, "Do you want this in a bag?" At least he asked, often the clerks don't ask and just start getting a bag ready causing me to say "I don't need a bag" but this time the number of items was enough to actually need a bag. But the whole situation brought my mind back to a common line of thinking. I'm responsible, now, for the existence of that bag, and what the heck do I do with that bag once I've used it to carry things home?

Maybe this seems overly anal to think that, hey, I'm responsible for the manufacture of this bag. But if I hadn't allowed the clerk to put those gizmos into the bag, then the store would have used one fewer bag that day, and their weekly purchase of bags would have been smaller. In other words because the gizmos were put in a plastic bag the store had to buy another bag to replace the one I used, something for which I am clearly directly responsible.

And, it doesn't stop there. It's of course not just the bag but also the gizmos I bought as well as the packaging the gizmos were contained in.

The responsibility includes the full lifetime of the gizmo, the packaging, the bags, and all the materials that went into making all those things. The gizmo you buy in the store would not exist unless all those materials were mined and manufactured into gizmos, packaging and bags.

The gizmo, the packaging and the bag, they all will eventually be disposed somewhere. They'll wear out or something and you'll want to throw the thing away. For example the plastic bag isn't terribly useful so most people wad up their bags and throw them in the trash. I tend to use whatever plastic bags I receive as trash can liners instead of buying normal trash bags.

The plastic bag is an interesting artifact. The plastic doesn't break down readily so assuming it ends up in a landfill it'll stay in that form for who knows how many thousands of years. Ponder that for a moment .. the bag I received tonight, I used it once to carry those gizmos home, I'll use it again as a trash can liner, and then it'll be taking up space in a landfull for a thousand years or more. How completely NUTS is that???

TechnoSanity #34: Our collective responsibility as consumers for the things we consume