Recycling Theater

I'm very worried about the environment and Climate Change, and am always trying to think of useful things we could do to effect useful change. This problem is getting worse as we speak, and we really need some serious public dialog on the matter.

Some suggestions about fixing the environment are technical in nature, some are social. It's in my nature to go meta once in a while, so here's a somewhat radical proposal to help break you out of your weekend stupor.

Perhaps we should make it illegal to have places at which people can individually drive to drop off their recycling. That is, perhaps we should disallow personal recycling.

I'll skip right past whining about the whole notion of driving somewhere to be earth-friendly at the end-location. That's an issue, too, but it's “in the noise” for my purposes here. Let's cut straight to the chase:

It's really nice that there are scattered people who care about recycling, but their individual actions are not enough to save everyone. “Well, every little bit helps,” I hear you complain. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

You see, I'm guessing that most of us are busy people who have only finite time. And in some cases that extra effort consumes the available free time one has. So if we told these very ambitious, very ecology-conscious people they were not allowed to solve problems only for themselves, it might leave them frustrated but I'm guessing they would vent that frustration trying to get the problem solved for everyone, like they should have originally. A town with 10% of its residents recycling is not really helping things. But the same town with 10% of its residents on the phone regularly to the city saying “why can't I recycle in this town?” might end up with 100% of its residents recycling.

Part of the reason we're in the ecological mess we're in is the failure of people to see the interrelationships between elements of the system. We reason about independent questions as if they do not relate to one another. In that light, personal recycling seems an unambiguous good because its cost on the rest of the system is not analyzed. But if the activity is taken in the context of a larger system, it isn't cost-free.

Yes, what I'm suggesting amounts to robbing the energetic, self-satisfied folks among us (which might sometimes include me, so don't get all huffy) of the smug satisfaction of doing it themselves and feeling superior to the ones who didn't. Tell them they're not allowed to do it that way in order to spur them to find better answers, a system that works for everyone, not just for themselves. We need answers that work for everyone, even busy or lazy or oblivious people. All of society has to be involved.

It's true that on this I don't really think anyone will take the part about making it a law seriously. But that doesn't mean I'm not serious when I suggest that it's a bad idea to rely on people to be super-ethical or super-energetic as the solution to a big problem like this. This is mostly just a thought exercise, to urge people to reconsider how they spend their time and to think differently about which actions are productive. The part about making it a law was just to wake you up and think maybe I was talking to you. Which I am. One oughtn't need a public law in order to ask oneself the question: “Does my spending my time doing cute little self-congratulatory things keep me from doing something that would have more impact?”

Some actions may feel productive and give us a sense of self-satisfaction while really doing little or nothing. In his book Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier coined the term “security theater” to refer to “countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.” When dealing with the ecology, let's not find ourselves needing a term like “Recycling Theater,” describing countermeasures to mounting environmental degradation intended to provide the feeling of having improved environmental quality while doing little or nothing to actually improve the environment.

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Originally published Nov 9, 2008 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, environment, recycling, recycle, public policy, environmental policy, suggestion, thought, law

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Also, the logo above was intended to be a little attention-grabbing. But my wife said I would attract more attention at Open Salon with pictures of “doggies and kitties” so here's my alternative graphic: