Did you catch the article on “green noise” in the New York Times? The claim is that there is so much information about environmentally responsible living out there that people get overwhelmed and do nothing. Unable to decide between despoiling forests for paper bags and choosing plastic bags with the attendant disposal problems, they say “What they heck!” and take up driving SUVs.
There are two things going on here, I think. The first is the old “The experts can’t agree, so I’ll do what I want” argument that we so often see applied to nutrition. Some experts say that potatoes are a healthy source of complex carbohydrates and others say that they have a high glycemic index, so you might as well eat french fries. If you can’t be sure whether cloth or disposable diapers are worse for the environment, then you might as well give up and use styrofoam tableware.
These arguments are terrible, if we’re looking at it from the point of view of logic. On the other hand, they’re great if we’re looking for an excuse to do what we wanted to do in the first place. And lots of us are.
#1 daughter told us about being at a bonfire with a group of people in Cowboy Land who were putting their styrofoam tableware into the fire. She offered to take the stuff into the house and throw it away instead, which may not make an enormous difference, but it would have made her feel better. People groaned at the suggestion that they should think at all about the environment.
One of the cowboys spoke up for her. “The world would be a better place if more people thought like her,” he said, tossing a stack of styrofoam cups into the fire.
That seems more honest than claiming that you’re paralyzed by the rival claims about burning Styrofoam vs. putting it in landfills.
On the offchance that you’re feeling paralyzed about it, let me remind you of a book I’ve mentioned here before: The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choice: Practical Advice From the Union of Concerned Scientists. Or, if you’re not up for a book, try Healthy and Green Living, a collection of blogs from the well-established environmental activist site, Care2.com.
The other issue here is the problem of information overload. The argument is that we in the modern world are so buffeted by information on every side that we can scarcely think straight, and we shut down our attention to much of it just in self-defence.
This is one of those things that we hear so often and from so many sources that it begins to be part of our worldview, but I don’t know whether it’s true or not. I have never seen any actual evidence for the claim; it’s just supposed to be self-evidently true.
I guess I can imagine that our pioneer foremothers dealt with much less information than we do. There they’d be, standing over the washtub all day on a Monday, and perhaps no one at all came and told them anything. They had nothing new to read, no electronic media, and met no one all day. When a letter came, it was a cause for excitement, and going to town was at least in part an opportunity to get a bit of news. There were many more newspapers in those days than we have now, but people would have access to fewer than we have, since they’d only get the ones from their own towns.
But if we’re talking about the 20th century rather than the 19th century, it seems less plausible. For the past hundred years, most of us have had access to new information from one source or another during all of our waking moments, haven’t we? Widespread literacy, affordable books and papers, the radio, television, and rapid travel all made the exchange of information easy long before the internet.
And many of us still haven’t caught on to the major scientific developments of the 19th and 20th centuries anyway, in spite of being bombarded with information. We seem to be able to pick and choose our information.
In fact, the internet has allowed us to filter and narrow our news sources in impressive new ways. Bloglines, Crayon, and similar services let us choose exactly what news we want to pay attention to and ignore everything else. You might be amazed at the amount of celebrity gossip I don’t know.
#2 son is home for the long weekend. The bell choir is suggesting, with apparent seriousness, that we should do a medley of cowboy songs, with the swinging of bells over our heads as though they were lassos and the wearing of cowboy hats. I find the whole handbell experience humiliating enough without that. Last night, having apparently forgotten what it is like to play handbells with me since we have been on hiatus for a while, the director and all the members were sort of crowding around me trying to figure out what was wrong with me and how to get me to play the flipping notes at the right time now and then.
Sigh.
I’ll have to read the article. However, I have a meeting now.
On the plus side, lunch involved no packaging today. We went to a cafe. Very nice.
~x~
it just seems like every company has jumped on the green bandwagon making it more of a marketing tool than anything else. Mr & I were discussing the fact that compared to our little “carbon footprint” I’d like to see the amount some of these so called green product producers emit.
For a more entertaining view of ecology-run-amok, try reading “Fallen Angels” by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn.
I just finished rereading this, and have to admit that I’d forgotten how much fun it is.
I just checked on Amazon, and it’s apparently out of print. Try some used book stores, or Half.com at: http://product.half.ebay.com/Fallen-Angels_W0QQprZ412408QQtgZinfo
@illgrindmyownthankyou – That’s the trouble wiht fashion, isn’t it? Although I for one am glad to see that environmentalism is in fashion, if only because it will encourage trendy people to take it up.
@lostarts – Amazon has it used, but it looks like you can read it for free here: http://www.baen.com/library/067172052X/067172052X.htm
I read the first section, and I may go back to it. I’ve neer read it. Thanks for pointing it out.
“…crowding around me trying to figure out what was wrong with me and how to get me to play the flipping notes at the right time now and then;” that’s fantastic!
I hope things get better with the handbells soon! 
I’m not sure about in the States but over here the whole recycling thing is a bit of a farce. A friend worked in the big re-cycling centre in town and he told us what actually happens to the stuff we re-cycle. Remember that any process that breaks down plastic has toxic by-products. The stuff to be recycled that is actually toxic when broken down is sent to recycling factories in the less developed countries. There it is broken down into useful re-cycled material – providing useful low-paid employment for those who work in the factories (nevermind that the breaking down process still produces toxic waste – it’s the people who work in the factory and environs that get poisoned not us good people who recycled the rubbish they had to break down).
It is perhaps not surprising that many people refuse to think about the whole re-cycling, environmental issues problems. The damage was done when we started using plastics in particular on a large scale. The massive use of plastics has ensured that we have a wastepile of plastic bigger, I suspect, than wastepiles of toxic waste from nuclear power reactors. And we are now stuck between a rock and a hard place – leave plastic as it is and its volume will gradually choke the natural world. Re-cycle it and then try to work out what to do with the toxic remains of the recycling process.
@sighkey – We have a slogan: “reduce, reuse, recycle.” What I mind most about recycling (other than the points you’ve mentioned and the fact that recycling often uses more energy than making new — oh, and the fact that we can’t actually recycle all the stuff we put out for recycling, because there’s too much of it) is that it has swamped the other two parts of the slogan, because it’s so easy. People think it’s okay to buy too much stuff in too much packaging, because they put it out for recycling. Local schools are very proud of how many tons of paper they’ve gathered for recycling, and miffed when you suggest not using all that paper to begin with if no one actually needs to keep it.
And the worst thing about plastic is that when it breaks down, it breaks down into tiny little pieces that by now take up a startlingly large part of the ocean, and the internal space of ocean-dwelling creatures.
If some creature from another planet had been watching our behavior over the last century or so, it might have to conclude that we were trying to render ourselves extinct.
@fibermom – The plastic containers I have I usually re-use if possible – like for water and food containers for the animals. We always try to use both sides of printing paper in the lab (even tho the techs don’t like re-cycled paper in the printers). Our city does have re-cycling collections now and I do use it for things like cans, magazines. I’m not keen on re-cycling plastic now that I know where it is sent to be re-cycled. And I would not use styrofoam dishes at all! As well as being plastic based styrofoam is a killer as far as animals are concerned. I can’t get over the fact that the cowboys were throwing styrofoam into a fire! Don’t they know how poisonous plastic fumes are?
@sighkey – They certainly knew after #1 daughter told them, but they didn’t care. I think, if we are honest, there are lots of people who really don’t care.
@fibermom – But did it not occur to them that it was their own selves they were poisoning, right then and there, by breathing in the smoke from the fire?
@sighkey – Yeah, but people smoke, too.