Konstantin Tovstiadi

Last Friday I drove for 15 hours, travelling 870 miles and consuming approximately 32 gallons of gasoline. My truck (Ford Ranger with the 2.3 liter engine) is the most fuel efficient and the least polluting of all trucks currently sold in the US. It produces 279 grams of CO2 per mile travelled (which compares poorly to the cleanest car, the 2010 Toyota Prius, at 127 gm/mile, but favorably to the 476 gm/mile of the Nissan Titan or the 479 gm/mile of the the Porsche Cayenne). So my ride produced 242 kilograms of CO2. If I had the inclination to drive like that every day, I would have produced 88 metric tons of CO2 a year, four times the average of US per capita emissions, and forty times the average the global per capita emissions. In other words, even if I drove like that only once every forty days, that driving alone would produce enough CO2 to match the global per capita average.

The reality is even worse. The carbon impact of my drive includes the emissions that were needed to extract, refine, and transport the fuel as well as the emissions needed to extract, refine, and transport the raw materials for the manufacture the vehicle itself. I am also indirectly responsible for the pollution needed to sustain the infrastructure that makes driving possible - maintaining the roads, filling stations, and road police. I am responsible for the destruction of habitats needed to build the roads, noise and light pollution that they create, and the disruptions in the migration patterns of wildlife. These hidden costs are immense. They are not reflected in the MPG or CO2 emissions numbers. All these factors are connected and interdependent, sometimes linked together into positive feedback loops (where a growth in consumption in one area leads to a spiral of increased pollution and consumption in other areas).

If my contribution as an individual is so huge, what is it like to have a society of driving loving individuals? What sort of environmental impact can they produce? This is one of the questions that Jared Diamond attempts to answer in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The book looks at the problem from a variety of disciplinary angles, and describes a broad range of societal settings - Norse Greenland, oil mining in New Guinea, Anasazi and Pueblo people, modern Los Angeles, and the vanished civilization of the Easter Island, to name just a few.

It is a great read that I am not going to summarize or evaluate here. It is also a very thought provoking read, and I am going to focus on the ideas that it triggered.

1. Many of our problems can be explained by the tragedy of the commons. When a resource is shared with various parties exploiting it, they tend to each attempt to extract as much as possible. As a result, resources that could be used in a sustainable manner with quota management are overexploited, depleted, and destroyed.

2. Reducing the environmental impact often necessitates a change of values that the cultures hold dear. For example, the US would have to give up the myth of the untamed Wild West, and the exhilarating freedom of driving on a whim (among other things) to reduce its footprint.

3. World population problem is not the only problem; it is the growing proportion of the population striving for and achieving First World lifestyles, thereby driving the global per capita impact up.

4. As a corollary to both 2 and 3, one of the worst values that we have that contributes to our growing impact is defining achievement as increased consumption.

5. Recycling is wonderful, but not even remotely as wonderful as non-consumption. Recycling only solves a tiny fraction of the carbon cycle - the consumer part, not the manufacturing part, which is many times more than the consumer part.

6. The current governmental pre-occupation with global warming and green house emissions - as well as endless debates whether global warming is happening distracts us from problems that are most certainly happening - soil erosion, depletion of fisheries, deforestation, increasing consumption, toxic waste and toxic manufacture transfer to the Third World, and so on.

7. Those still doubting the gravity of these problems should be reminded of the Pascal's wager. The risk of doubting them and being wrong is the risk of destroying the Earth; this is a chance no one should want to take.

There is a cluster in rhetorical criticism called apologia, or corporate apologia, that deals with image restoration in response to a crisis caused by a corporate screwup - such as an oil spill, or exposure to toxic chemicals (asbestos, lead, arsenic - take your pick).

One of the interesting conclusions of apologia research is that it takes different people to do the cleanup and to talk about doing the cleanup, while giving the audience the illusion of a unified front. It is very hard to for the same person to do both. It is unlike trying to be a photographer at your own wedding, or as Erving Goffman would put it, playing tennis with yourself. You cannot be part of the action and outside of the action at the same time. You cannot be a participant and an onlooker (unless you are in shavasana getting an extracorporeal glimpse of your own restive body, but that is beside the point). You cannot be part of the reality and of metareality (just like the map can never be the territory, but that is beside the point, too).

Yet that is increasingly the expectation if you are an active user of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. If you want to be popular, you have to do interesting things and then be able to describe them in an interesting way. You are supposed to run both manufacturing and public relations, all by yourself. It is probably a good thing. I hope it gives us a better grasp of how these two activities relate to each other, and how to manage both successfully. It can't hurt to have such a grasp in today's workplace.