Jason asks:

Justin,
I’ve seen you become more and more interested in the environment and sustainability over the past couple years. Was there one thing that impacted you greatly? Or was it a slow realization?

Thanks for asking. It was definitely gradual, one issue at a time. One factor was the energy pyramid that shows the relative impact of eating meat vs. eating vegetables. I’m not a vegetarian, but it helped me realize why it’s not sustainable for everyone to live as Americans do.

I was initially skeptical about global warming, though less so over time. My late grandfather was an oil executive - petroleum put me through college. I majored in science, though, and while I never studied global warming as part of a class, I did learn a respect for science that helped me see past the “everything is fine” pseudoscience that denied global warming. I was convinced by the time An Inconvenient Truth came out, but that film turned knowledge into mission. I’m still irritated that every hot day is attributed to global warming, since I think it decreases people’s respect for a thorough understanding of science, but at least people are more aware now.

I’ve also been thinking about recycling and resource sustainability for a long time, probably since I wrote a paper on reusable food packaging in college (which was the basis for my recent “Close the Loop” post).

At the same time, these issues have gained more and more traction in our culture, so I can’t claim to be at all radical in these interests. Right now, I’m trying to focus people’s attention on those issues that hold the most promise for making a difference - that is, identifying and pushing at points of leverage for change. My two main areas of concentration are:
1. Stopping climate change, e.g. through carbon offsets, reduced fossil fuel use, and increased efficiency
2. Overall sustainability - renewable energy, recycling, composting, waste reduction, and reducing our ecological footprints

That’s my story. What about you, fellow envirogeeks?

I’ve long been frightened by a definition I once heard of “practical atheism:” living daily as if God does not exist.

Do I do this? How do I keep God a part of my daily existence?

The obvious answers are to reflect regularly on God, pray continually, and lift my heart to God in worship regularly.

So why is it so easy not to do these things? Why is it so easy to go days at a time without even thinking of God?

God has, strangely, hidden himself so that we must be looking for him in order to find him. Consequently, he’s easy to miss when we get busy or distracted.

Is it enough to live in ways that honor God, without meditating on him daily? Is it enough to simply do the right thing, and only periodically revisit the fact of God? Do we need to practice the presence of God in order to avoid practical atheism?

I should say at this point that I think a good percentage of the meditating on God that happens in the world is really people just thinking to themselves, and has nothing to do with God. It’s introspection, but not prayer or worship.

Why is it so easy to ignore God? What is the solution to this problem? How do we make it harder for ourselves to ignore God, or should we?

Regular worship services are one way people address this problem. If we collectively approach God each week in worship, we’re likely to get refocused on his ordering of the universe. The Monday problem, though, is widely documented - the day after church, when we’re back at work, we tend to quickly forget.

In TV scheduling, there’s a concept called tent-poling, in which a strong show props up ratings for the weaker shows that air before and after it. Is this the way worship functions in the Christian life?

For a lot of people, yes. For an increasing number of people, no. I’ve been a rather vocal opponent on this blog of focusing all our energies on the worship service. If we refuse to subscribe to this ups-and-downs, God-is-only-in-church way of thinking, then the ultimate life would be one unending church service. I don’t think that’s what we were made for.

We were made to work, to build, to accomplish. Sometimes we go too far with this, and allow work itself to become the god we worship. But it needn’t be this way.

We were made to live fully, deeply, generously. We were made to encounter, to love, to suffer, to help, to care. God is there, in that connection.

God, save us from forgetting. Remind us of you, and let us live with a constant awareness of your purposes.

I wrote a paper in college about how wasteful food packing is, and will post it if I can find it. The vast majority of food packaging is now single-use, which is incredibly wasteful. Consider the following hierarchy:

Single-use, non-recyclable < Single-use, recyclable < Washable & reusable < No-wash reusable < No container at all

On the left end of the spectrum would be things like Capri Sun juice containers and pizza boxes, which aren’t recyclable in most places. On the right end would be multi-gallon water jugs, which can be refilled without requiring a washing, and water fountains, which don’t require a container at all (and thus count as Manvironmentally Friendly). In the middle are containers that don’t completely go to waste, but still take some energy to use more than once (e.g. in the form of melting and remolding or simply washing out).

Very few food packages could be reused without washing, but we could save a ton of energy by washing and reusing containers rather than recycling them. In other words, there’s huge leverage for reducing our ecological footprint by moving from recycling to reuse.

In the 1990s, great strides were made in getting people to recycle instead of sending their containers to landfills. Recycling is great in terms of landfill and resource savings, but still consumes a ton of energy. Consider recycling a plastic food container, such as a dairy tub, which requires:

• Energy to rinse the container out (which often involves hot water)
• Energy to transport the container to a recycling facility, which may be hundreds of miles away
• Energy to further clean and melt the item, to produce pellets of recycled plastic
• Energy to transport the plastic pellets to another facility, such as a bottling plant
• Energy to melt the plastic pellets and mold the plastic into something new
• Energy to transport the new container back to the store

Remember bulk foods, those big bins of oats and granola and other stuff you could dispense for yourself in whatever quantity you wanted?

I hardly ever see this setup any more except at high-end stores like PCC and Whole Foods, which are out of reach for most people. I think the concept failed for several reasons, which explain why you don’t see bulk food sections in stores:

• They were gross - any kid could flick a booger in the dried apples or drop the scoop on the floor
• They were hard to use - you had to write a long ID number on each bag
• The bags were flimsy and easy to rip, and largely canceled out the benefit of buying bulk, since you still used a disposable container

We need bulk foods to come back and save all that energy we pour into recycling. There are of course easy solutions to the problems with bulk foods listed above, but they need some incentives to get into the mainstream:

• Use push-drop bins, like they have for coffee, instead of open bins with scoops.
• Provide barcoded little stickers at first, so people can make sure they’re paying for the right food (though this would introduce some waste - it could be phased out once people were used to buying bulk)
• Require people to bring their own containers, and only provide reusable containers for sale - no bags

The last point, of course, is the kicker. Who wants to bring a dozen or more empty plastic containers with them to the store? If there’s no financial incentive, very few people, which in turn drives down the incentive for stores to even have a bulk food section.

The solution is to tax all single-use food packaging, even if it’s recyclable. Perhaps a gradually increasing tax would be the best way to implement this, so people have time to acquire reusable containers and stores and food companies have time to adjust their systems. The tax would have to apply to the packaging used to transport goods to the store as well (such as large cardboard boxes), so there would be an incentive to create a completely closed loop - no single-use packaging anywhere along the supply chain.

It would take some ingenuity to create machines that would dispense food into customer-owned containers in a sanitary manner, since you couldn’t ensure that people would bring in perfectly clean containers. I’m confident that it could be done, though, for most food. Liquids are easy, since we already have the technology to dispense liquids into people’s containers. Oats, coffee, and other bulk-ish foods are also easy, since they can be poured. Crackers, meats, and the like would be the hardest, since you can’t dump crackers out of a chute without breaking them, and meats are just plain messy. Meats could be distributed in store-owned containers with a substantial deposit, and the store could wash and sanitize them upon return.

What do you think of this proposal to close the loop? How could the tax on food packaging be levied fairly, considering the vast array of foods and packages currently on the market?

I made some significant progress on the patio today:

I hired a day laborer to dig out the dirt and shovel in the paver base, and man did he ever work hard. After the paver base was in place, I poured some sand and started placing the blocks. I got about 20% done, but didn’t take a picture of the blocks. I still need some edging material to keep the outer bricks from moving.

Lots of fun. Any advice?

UPDATE: Here are some pics of the patio-fied portion, which as I said is about 20% done:

Is the environmental movement getting too preachy? Am I getting too preachy about environmental issues? I know that’s just about all I’ve been blogging about recently.

In Shades of Good: Ethical Living and Judgmentalism, I argued that we need to set an example by our actions to help the environment, but we should not be judgmental of others, since we are all infinitely hypocritical when it comes to “spectrum ethics” issues.

But certain environmental trends such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, avoiding bottled water, and plug-in hybrids, are points of potentially enormous leverage. I heard recently (in Episode 105 of 30 days) that if every US household replaced one incandescent bulb with a CFL, we could shut down a nuclear power plant with the savings. That’s the kind of thing I want to get behind, and it’s hard to resist being a little preachy.

But being preachy, as everyone who’s ever had any interaction with any religion should know, becomes counterproductive at a certain point. It turns people off to the message rather than motivating them to take it seriously.

What is the best course of action? How about getting into Kirk Cameron-style arguments with people about their ecological footprint, so they feel guilty and have to repent? Hehe.

BBC has picked up on the story (see my first post for the breakdown).

I’m getting the impression that Flickr/Yahoo thinks that this problem will go away with time as the blog heat dies down over this. Methinks that it’s certainly not. Google “flickr” and “censor”. 1.5 million results don’t just disappear.

They have apologized and claim that policy changes are being considered, but have yet to announce exactly what they are going to do to change their policy of “delete first, ask questions later”. It’s especially disturbing that in the current setup, when a photo page is deleted by Flickr staff, it is gone permanently, with no advance warning, explanation or opportunity for recovery or contest.

Via Thomas Hawk.

I’ve been blogging a lot about environmentalism and ecofriendliness tips lately, and I had an inspiring thought: what if men could help save the planet just by doing what men naturally do? Here are my ideas; add your own in the comments.

Eat over the sink. You’ll waste less water washing dishes.

Eat ice cream (or drink milk) out of the carton. In fact, eat whatever you can directly out of the package. Every time you do this, you’re saving water and reducing the amount of detergent you put into the wastewater stream.

Light your flatulence on fire. Methane is a major component of flatulence, and it contributes to global warming 23x more (by mass) than carbon dioxide. Burning methane converts it into CO2, which isn’t nearly as bad. [N.B. Technically, CO2 emitted from living creatures is carbon-neutral, since our food was once a plant that took CO2 out of the air].

Pee in the dark, and stop using fossil fuels to illuminate your bodily functions. Leave the door open so you have enough light to aim. If you miss, clean it up with something biodegradable.

Don’t shower unless you have a good reason to.

Don’t do dishes until you have a full dishwasher load.

Other tips?

Where to start on this one? It’s been a dramatic couple of days…

•On Monday, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, one of Flickr’s most popular photographers, discovered that only-dreemin.com was selling her work on ebay and in their online store. They had profited thousands of dollars from this blatant copyright infringement.
•Rebekka posted about it on Flickr, under a composite image of the images that had been stolen (still available at her blog), starting a major @#$%-storm on Digg, Reddit, thomashawk and elsewhere.
•The page on Flickr had thousands of page views (over 101,000 views at the time of its deletion), and hundreds of comments (~450) offering support and advice to Rebekka.
•Yesterday, Flickr permanently deleted the image - along with all the comments, page views, favorites, etc. According to Flickr staff member Heather, “We maintain a rolling snapshot of the site to recover from outages etc. When a photo, comment, FlickrMail, tag, note, etc., is deleted, it’s removed from that snapshot.” An email was sent to Rebekka, accusing her of harassment and threatening account termination: “Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or terminate your account.”
•As should be expected, there’s a bit of an uproar about Flickr/Yahoo’s action here. See Rebekka, Thomas Hawk, and Digg. It’s currently the top story on Reddit.
•Flikr has apologized, admitting a “mistake”, but denying censorship: “Actions taken by the team to ensure that any content or activity on the site resides within these boundaries is not and cannot be viewed as censorship. That said, the removal of rebekka’s photo was a mistake.”
•There’s a discussion going on in Flickr’s forum about all this. Thomas makes a substantive point here saying (emphasis his),

The problem is with Yahoo’s process which is thoughtless and irresponsible at best. When a “mistake” happens over and over again you have to expect that a little “oopsie, we made another mistake,” might not be enough…Yahoo’s *process* needs to be changed. It should be changed. It could be changed in a very simple way to prevent most incidents like this from happening in the future.
1. Do not delete any image permanently.
2. Provide Flickr users a 48 hour rebuttal time to dispute those that would wish to censor their work.
3. Have an actual competent human being review the decision.

Thomas has been burned in the past by Flickr’s overeager deletion policy. He points out that the Flickr help forum has 90 threads on “censorship” - so there’s obviously a systemic problem with the Flickr/Yahoo process. The fact that it has been used (in at least two documented cases now) in favor of abusers over against the abused makes this a justice issue in my book.

getting out my hammer…

UPDATE: Stewart Butterfield, “one of the co-founders of Flickr, and … the general manager with overall responsibility for all things Flickr”, has posted a very thorough explanation and heartfelt apology for the entire situation, and claims that “There are several policies which will be changing as a direct result of this incident and the goal is that nothing like this ever happens again. Any errors from now on should be on the side of caution.” I very much look forward to hearing more about the policy changes.