Some things just hit you. Not that they are new or deep insights, but all of a sudden they feel tangible. My mother calls this the blinding flash of the obvious. So here’s my recent one.
I’m not a big fan of Thoreau; I find him to be a self-centered blowhard who lacks healthy self-criticism. Still, his writing contains so many little jewels that he’s worth it. In Walden, Thoreau defines economy as the easiest way to get one’s basic needs met. This is a broader definition than the one we tend to use. He isn’t concerned just with money, but all the resources used in doing something. And not just physical resources, but labor as well. So by this definition, he sees his society as lacking in economy. Take a bottle of milk for instance. The simplest way to get milk, the most economic in Thoreau’s sense, would be to have a cow. Instead of this, someone else owns the cow. The someone else ships the milk (another person may be involved with pasteurizing it). Then there is someone else, like a man I talked with on a plane once, who maintains refrigerated buildings to keep the milk cold along its route. Then someone stocks the milk in a store. Someone else takes your money for it. Then you take it home and drink it. According to Thoreau, these steps in the process make the whole thing uneconomic. Again, it has nothing to do with money.
And that’s the problem that hit me the other day. There are two examples that brought this to my attention.
Plastic water bottles. I was listening to Fresh Air and there was a discussion about what happened to the plastic water bottles that were actually recycled (most never are recycled, by the way). Well, the plastic is then put on a boat and shipped to China. Then that plastic is rendered into goods, such as toys and polyester suits. Then those goods are put back on a boat and shipped back to the U.S. Basically, the same hunk of plastic is shipped across the ocean twice. Terri Gross asked why they couldn’t just use the recycled plastic to make new water bottles. In Thoreau’s sense, that would be more economic. But of course, in the modern sense, it wouldn’t. There’s more profit in shipping a bunch of plastic half way around the world two times. The economy of the market has nothing to do with economy.
Sardines. I live on the west coast of the United States and there are sardines swimming a few miles from where I sit now. Yet if I go to the store to buy sardines they come from either Nova Scotia (the Brunswick sardines distributed by Bumble Bee) or Portugal (the Trader Joe’s sardines). Don’t we have people fishing sardines in California? Yes, we do. So why can’t I buy local sardines? Because California sardines are shipped to Japan. Then fed to tuna. Which are then shipped back to California. Halfway around the world twice yet again.
Now business owners aren’t constantly shipping things around the world over and over again simply because they can. They do this because it’s profitable. They make more money this way. Therefor, we have a world economic system that does not reward economy. In fact, we have a system that rewards this excessive use of resources. On the positive side, this creates more jobs. The more uneconomic the whole business is, the more fingers there are in the pie. Some argue that this is not sustainable. Some say that our dependence on oil will cause this system to come crashing down. There is evidence for this and it’s a very practical argument. My argument is more about principles. Like Thoreau, I’m disgusted by the lack of economy in the whole thing. What I see now is that the problem is not greedy business owners, but the system itself.
Again, this insight isn’t new, but the craziness of it finally became more real to me.
