Changing with the Times
A few observations on selfishly rampant consumerism and pending solutions to the environmental damage caused by selfishly rampant consumerism.
Thanks to fellow writer Will Hull, I was recently afforded a brief opportunity to take a walk down memory lane and review a few classic baseball card designs. I used to collect baseball cards when I was a kid, partly because I randomly stumbled into being a fan of the sport (someone told me it was the best sport and naive, impressionable me just ran with it) but also, collecting baseball cards conferred a bit of status among my classmates, and having the right cards meant you were someone important, or you at least got a bit of attention from the cool kids as they tried to con you out of your ‘good’ cards.
One of the kids in my neighborhood, a boy named Miguel, had so little respect for me that he tried on two distinct occasions to use worthless cards to get the good cards I had, of which there were few. One was a 1989 or 1990 Topps Dickie Thon card that he merely tried to pass off as valuable and important, but on the other occasion he tried to pawn off a worthless 1987 Donruss George Hendricks card by claiming George was the brother of a famous rock legend. Thankfully, it didn’t work either of the two times he tried, but I still hate myself to this day for being so trusting in people that I was seen as someone who could be fooled so easily.
I kept collecting baseball cards for a few years but the interest waned as my ability to play the sport died out. Little league was easy enough for the first four years, not that I was any good, but when the emphasis on competition rose in the fifth year and the ‘fun’ died out, I became less interested in playing. I tried to join the baseball team in high school but my hair was too long and the coach was such an arrogant jackass that he assumed I wouldn’t make the team on appearance alone. So yeah…childhood doesn’t die so easily… Anyway, at some point after high school, I threw all of my cards in the trash just to unburden myself of the bad memory shackles they represented.
After about ten years, there emerged a trend of marketing companies buying up masses of old card collections and then boxing a mess of worthless cards together with a few ‘decent’ ones and selling at what appeared to be a reasonable price in order to appeal to (read: exploit) the nostalgia of man-children like myself who had a driving need to relive a ‘glorious’ past that wouldn’t have seemed so glorious were it not for the marketing con-job. At the time, I was dealing with depression and anxiety and I thought that collecting cards again might be a decent way to positively reconnect with the bad childhood I was lamenting so frequently.
It wasn’t such a good idea, as it happens. Over the years I had become increasingly sensitive to notions of toxic consumerism and human damage done to the environment. I had also, where it concerns my experiences with mental illness, become aware of a principle called ‘annihilation of the self’ wherein something becomes so emotionally burdensome to the sufferer that a clean break needs to occur in order to cope. In extreme cases, this can lead to varying degrees of self harm, but in other cases it merely manifests as an urge to destroy material goods or severe ties with previously trusted friends and associates. Call it the flight aspect of the ‘fight or flight’ impulse spoken about so frequently.
And this what happened with me…again… You see, collector cards have very little inherent or intrinsic value beyond what speculators and trends dictate. As an example, when I was a kid I lusted after a 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco rookie card that was selling for $125 at one point. When I finally had the chance to own one as an adult, the value of the card had deteriorated to less than a tenth of what it had been. Ultimately, they’re just ‘pretty’ things to hold as a proxy for the inability to do the things associated with them, in my case play sports.
Eventually I realized that I wasn’t using the collecting of baseball cards as a fun way to rectify the collateral damage from a bad childhood, but was in fact using them as a means of distracting myself from the work needed to really rectify, or at least confront the issues behind my emotional difficulties. Once this realization set it, I was so repulsed with myself that I shredded every card I had. Some were marginally valuable, like a 1950s Mickey Mantle reprint, but I have never regretted doing so. The catharsis from the clean break was so complete that no amount of regret over the loss of economic value, if there is any, has been able to come close to overwhelming it.
Meanderings down materialist memory lane aside, if one is not blind to the nature of reality, one has to admit on some level that consumerism is an inherently self-involved and exploitative enterprise. The nostalgia play has been a massive part of the paradigm for so many years now that people simply take it for granted and go with the flow, never really taking the time to see the marketing exploitations for what they actually are, as opposed to the ‘harmonious’ affirmations of self the marketing slime would have us believe. As much as I used to love Star Wars, or currently enjoy superhero films, it has to be said that the markets which surround these properties, devised to generate ancillary revenue for the content producers, are not beneficial to the species by any stretch of the imagination.
Some things have utility and some don’t. Books can be read and when they reach their end of life, the paper can be recycled to one degree or another. CDs and DVDs hold movies and music and other sources of information, and are starting to be looked at for recycling potential. A few firms have started taking in used merchandise of this type to recycle into other forms. LPs hold music which is enjoyable for a time and, thanks to the basic design of the product, can last a long time; but they are not easily recyclable, which means they are more likely to spend decades sitting in a landfill when their utility ends, the recent resurgent interest in the medium not withstanding. VHS tapes may have been at the vanguard of the home video market, but the plastics used to create them are not recyclable as yet, and the toxic chemicals used to create the magnetic tape are not easily extracted, hence more toxic consumer waste sitting in landfills long term. And action figures…as the bible says “…when I became a man, I put away childish things…”
So environmental damage from consumerism is a huge concern where the survival of our species is concerned. Some say we are already past the point of no return. If not, the obvious solution is to scale back our consumerist impulses and focus more on utility as opposed to perpetuating the delusion that fuzzy, happy, warmy-warm feels matter more than practical utility. The first of the three big R’s is, of course, REDUCE CONSUMPTION. It’s to that end that I decided to compose this brief missive. There are some very interesting projects and strategies at play in the world which aim to rectify the damage of toxic materialism and I would like to briefly share some of them with you.
Let’s face it, some societies have made a sport of drinking. And if we’re going to tackle climate change, we need to focus on reshaping the industrial processes which go into facilitating what are our most common predilections. This is why I find this article so fascinating. Absent some miracle technology which reduces our collective carbon footprint to absolute zero, achieving net zero impact is a worthwhile goal, and this brewery seems to have a sound formula for getting to that point.
The use of iron powder as a heat sources was a novel discovery for me. I was amazed to learn that it can be reconstituted from its waste form into its original form after its utility as a heat source is expended, merely with the application of a dose of electricity. As they say in the article, if they can find a way to facilitate this process with renewable energy like wind or solar, then their brewing process will be fairly close to net-zero in terms of environmental impact. Supporting brewers who use this process would be a good way, I feel, for consumers to get in on the action where it regards directly mitigating our impact on the environment.
Let’s face it, single-use plastics are the bane of our existence, at least where environmental impact is concerned. I like the idea of alternatives such as this ‘pasta straw’ product merely for the fact that they degrade faster than plastics, mere weeks as opposed to decades. Admittedly, it would be better to just forgo a straw entirely, but let’s be reasonable…humans are not all that reasonable when it comes to their creature comforts.
Another option I once read about in this regard…or maybe I saw it on TV…is that some cultures in the Orient practice ownership of personal chopstick sets which are carried with when out and about, for the purpose of not having to use wasteful plastic products when not eating at home. There are certainly many durable and interest-specific chopstick sets on offer, so if we here in the west could get used to using the damned things, that would go a long way toward mitigating the impact of single use plastics on the environment.
There’s very little doubt that food waste is a HUGE issue where consumerism is concerned, so it’s no surprise that there has emerged a trend of more sustainable awareness where it concerns general practices in regard to our need for sustenance, among other things. I myself have taken to using glass canning jars these last few years as a means to avoid using plastics for food storage. Freezing in bulk may not be the most environmentally friendly, owing to the expenditure of energy required to sustain the storage of frozen foods, but buying in bulk and then freezing for later use is, indeed, a decent stop-gap measure to help mitigate the wasting of food in our consumer supply chain.
Using science and technology to alter non-productive land into something capable of being farmed is, of course, another means of bolstering our food supply chain, especially given the need which is coming to feed a population that seems intent on reproducing exponentially. After all, if you try and tell people they can’t have a lot of kids because too many people is a strain on the environment, they are more likely to get dismissive. And forget about trying limit reproduction through social legislation. If there’s one thing people in the West hate more than anything else, it’s governments telling them what they can’t do.
There’s no question that DIY projects can be fun. And as the second of the three R’s is REUSE, it makes sense to look at ways to repurpose items intended for the garbage toward new applications. Now I will admit that solar energy isn’t the most effective on a small scale, at least not without a mechanism of storage for the energy accumulated. That will change, however, as solar cell technology advances and higher capacity batteries become available for home use. And, of course, living in a region which gets an abundance of sunlight certainly helps. Cloudy days and solar charging don’t exactly work well together. Limitations aside, if you are a DIY enthusiast, making your own solar panel chargers as a way to mitigate your carbon footprint can be a rewarding venture.
Speaking as a former musician, I find it fascinating that there are active groups out there taking random bits of garbage and reworking them into usable instruments for the creation of harmonious music. It reminds of a video I saw years ago of the rock star Jack White taking random bits of material and electronics to fashion a kind of instrument, albeit a limited one.
Were I a better craftsman, I might be inclined to tackle a DIY instrument project myself, but playing music is just not very important to me anymore, so I leave it to more capable people to facilitate the DIY garbage instrument trend. Would be very interesting to have a group on the market which utilized nothing but garbage instruments to create music. If you know of one, please let me know.
This is another good idea in the REUSE category of three R’s logic, and definitely overlaps with the least of the three — RECYCLE. Physical art may not have the best utility where material goods are concerned, but taking garbage and making something artistic of it is certainly a valid stop-gap measure one can employ to mitigate the damage of materialism on the environment.
Another environmental initiative I’ve read about in the realm of artistic endeavor is the use of exterior murals made with special materials designed to absorb and convert air pollutants into harmless forms. As quoted in the article -
“This technology uses light energy to break down noxious air pollutants and convert them into harmless substances…Any surface coated with this paint becomes an active air-purifying surface that helps protect people from harmful gases.”
This is absolutely brilliant, the use of art to clean the air, if it can be scaled up to city-wide applications. I look forward to seeing more of this in the future.
So that is just a taste of some of the things in the world which are available now. How we expand on these things is largely dependent on societal awareness and our willingness to change with the times in which we live. Consumerism/Materialism needs to become a thing of the past if we’re to have a snowball’s chance in hell of NOT going extinct.
If anyone has any other ideas on how to bring action down to a consumer level, please let me know. In the meantime, here are a few more links to explore on things that are happening in world with regard to the new consciousness on sustainability.
- Five weird and wonderful ways nature is being harnessed to build a sustainable fashion industry
- They’re making paper out of stone — and saving lots of trees
- 10 Life Changes That Will Actually Make A Difference For The Environment
- A New Method to Chemically Recycle Polyurethane Waste
- These bacteria turn industrial emissions into fuel
