I care about the environment because that's the cool thing to do.
After last weeks discussion in my Sustainable Practices class, I really started thinking..
(short version of 3 hours of class: why change something even if its going to 'save/change the world' if it inconveniences me and takes more of my time/resources/money/effort? We as a society maybe care, but we are too lazy to do something unless it incurs a penalty, usually $$.)
This got me thinking, what would happen if we literally stopped having our trash taken away? What would happen if we were forced to keep everything which we could not recycle or reuse. How would this affect a persons habits?
Lets start with trash. The best example I can think of right off hand is our coffee cups we (okay, I) get every morning. What does 365+ coffee cups look like? How much space does that take up? What if everything we brought onto the floor at ITP could only be removed if it was being reused or recycled?
I realize this sounds radical: trash nothing, recycle, compost, reuse and live with, literally everything: this means your trash.
I'd be really interested in doing my own experiment on myself. Not allowing myself to 'trash' anything; delivery cups, bags, uneaten food. Anything that comes into my apartment I either have to reuse, compost, recycle or live with.
I'd also really like to do a project at ITP. All those coffee cups? I say we collect more.
We start stacking them, we create and build walls until there is no where to go, if we create trash, we should live with the consequences at a much more micro level then turning our backs on our own demise. What if we were forced to live with the consequences of ALL of our actions?
I'd like to see what happens, I'd rather be approximately right about our worlds demise then precisely wrong.
cost are usually labeled into two categories:
accounting cost: checks, money, quantified
economic cost: checks are not written for (e.g. cost of time)
what's important about economic cost is they are measured by opportunity cost. how do you decide what your time is worth and how much is the value of time? What's the opportunity cost of your life? your health? breathing? What is the impact of cost when it doesn't effect you but effects your children?
How do you quantify the opportunity cost of your life? Of air? Or more importantly, the opportunity cost of your choices today on generations after?
land, labor, capital and enterpenurship; what could we be doing? Or maybe the better question is, what are we not doing?