Arte de Timo

There is a reason why we need to make conservation a legislative matter and why free market solutions don’t work to lower waste and overuse. That reason has to do with  how conservation and consumption work. The two are quantitatively different, even though qualitatively they are similar. Conservation and consumption behave in inverse ways. Not to mention all the incentives of our economic system directed toward more consumption.

Here is my description of this issue, and I think it makes sense. The range of consumption per capita is quite large in this country. I would say that range may be as large as a factor of 50, and not in the fractions as it might seem. Lets take my new neighborhood for example. My family consists of 2.25 people and we use about 5 units of water which is about what a single person uses, we drive a Prius, and a small pickup and don’t put many miles or our vehicles. We compost and recycle most of our household waste.  Nearly every electronics product we have is energy star rated, and we don’t use anything other than our computers (mostly laptops) for any length of time on most days… OK you get the picture, we are near bottom of energy/resource usage.

Our neighbors are on the other extreme for the same demographics of course (this means we are only looking at middle class home owners, not the very rich, or the poor.) They are 3.75 people I would say (parents, adult child and teenager.) They have 3 vehicles, two of which are SUV’s, a house more than double the size of ours, a garbage can more than double ours, AC unit  (which runs in the winter sometimes!), massive entertainment system in their garage that gets used heavily every day, etc.

So if you start to add things up, you start to see that they use double and triple what we do instead of the 3.75/2.25 ratio that you might expect. What I am saying, is that family culture and individual lifestyle, because of the consumerist freedom we share, can allow people of similar means to have wildly different impact on our greater society and environment through resource usage.

If we need people to use less in order to save ourselves, common sense and market incentives won’t get people to change. We must be faced by unwavering certainty of an outcome, whether it be fines and jail time for breaking the law, or  an unwavering core value that is backed by drastic consequence (i.e belief in the wrath of God, or understanding of climate science, or a vindictive relative, etc.). Humans have to be forced to change, like any other animal on the planet.

“Life on the edge;” “the cutting edge;” we’ve all heard of the “edge,” and it seems like an attractive place, but the change that this edge-ness represents isn’t just the novelty our bored heads crave. There is a lot at stake when you travel to the edge and back, or work on the bleeding edge. Get too close, and we cut our selves, or … fly off the cliff.

As individuals we seem to seek barriers to break, and triumphs to win. We want to struggle with the unknown, or the seemingly unknown, to conquer some primordial fear. Somehow our quests prove to ourselves that we are more than our impulses and instincts, but alas that drive to face down fear is just that, isn’t it? An impulse.

I’ve always found it odd that the things people fear are the simply overcome things in life; spiders, snakes, heights, enclosures, to name a few. With even a somewhat evolved mind, none of those things pose any threat to our individual safety or or collective well being, yet the phobias mingle on  in generation after generation of people.

Our instincts control us in so many ways, and we are always in a battle with our own minds to feel evolved and carry on reasoned thinking. At any moment we can fall victim to ourselves and become someone else, and maybe someone less, for a moment or for a hundred moments. When it happens, its hard to know what we’ll do next. That scares us.  Maybe we race through a changing street light, or yell at a waitress, or often much worse. We all have that in us, and those moments pepper our lives from the moment we enter the world to the moment we leave it.

We are a hoard of individuals with multiple personalities, and we are all on the edge. No one knows when one of us will be cut or will fall off the other side, so it keeps us on that edge. There’s excitement in it, like a game of Russian roulette, but our collective minds grow weary of the stress. Life on the edge robs us of any sense of solid ground.

The games we play mascaraed as an evolved existence when we live out there… on the edge.

Where do we go when we’ve only learned to walk in a straight line, often pushed to do so by the mob around us, and in our path lies a mortal challenge?