Measuring green-ness

I’ve been meaning to put something up about this thing for roughly a million years – as you can see, it’s been almost an entire lifetime (for some small people…) since I last posted. Better late than never. So:

Ken Musgrave at Fast Company design/business mag has made the argument for Why We Need a Globally-Recognized Unit of Green. He cites the complications involved with decisions about materials in the design process – i.e. is ‘virgin’ bamboo a better (more sustainable?) choice than, say, recycled paper. Well, growing bamboo is much less resource-intensive than growing wood for paper, while a recycled product uses less (or no) raw materials. Using recycled materials isn’t “free,” though, given the energy costs of recycling and other inputs that might be necessary to break down the fibers or what-have-you. The choice puts unrelated environmental issues up against each other, as we weigh deforestation versus energy consumption versus chemical inputs, not to mention the carbon footprint of shipping raw materials and finished products… It’s an absurd algorithm, and one you’d probably rather not wade through in the supermarket aisle.

Musgrave proposes a standardized unit that compiles all those factors into a single index. Somebody, presumably a third-party certifier of some sort, can measure each product’s impact in terms of all the aforementioned dimensions, weight them somehow, and generate a single composite measure: “We can even call the labels something catchy–like ‘Greenies.’” I’m picturing the equation of ramified green measures with compounding parenthetical statements:

Paper ((70% post-consumer recycled(recycled using X method(Xmethod requiring 80 tons of chemical Y(chemical Y treated via process A and securely stored in site Q(shipped by truck from Scranton(etc.))))))  –>

= 3 ‘greenies’. Ba-da bing.

In a certain sense this is the same logic as the labels on organic food, certified timber, and so on. I’ve described those things elsewhere as ‘labor-saving devices,’ that is, technologies designed to save us the consumers that difficult labor of making ethical decisions about our purchases. We don’t need to know which farm the tomato comes from, what kind of manure the farmer uses, or anything else about it – if it has the organic label, we have it on good authority that at least some bad agro-things weren’t done to it.

What’s different about the proposed ‘greenies’ is the potential incorporation of everything. Organic standards are (sort of) clearly defined, nowadays by federal statute, but really only in terms of some chemicals that won’t appear in the product. It’s good information, but certainly doesn’t tell you everything you need to know in order to decide exactly which product is really the most green. A bunch of grapes conventionally-grown in Virginia represents the consumption of some nasty chemicals, but how does that compare to the ridiculous carbon footprint of the organic grapes that must be flown in from Chile? Only ‘greenies’ can tell us.

Obviously, this is just a thought experiment, but the places where it runs aground are where it gets really interesting. An auditor looking to assign a ‘greenie’ number to those grapes needs to know how to weigh pesticides against carbon footprint, but that’s a value judgment that would necessarily vary enormously from one person to another. I’m quite inclined toward the idea that local-conventional might be a better net environmental choice than organic-transnational; but my partner has a lot of chemical sensitivities and weights the presence of pesticides quite a lot more  heavily than I would. For any set of tradeoffs that our hypothetical auditor would need to weigh, we could imagine a dozen competing perspectives.  And that’s just considering the consumers’ values – if we try to include those of producers, laborers, and innocent bystanders? It never ends.

Roxanne’s Revenge

UPDATED: All a hoax! But at least we got punked by Roxanne herself and not by some blogger – I don’t really hold it against her.

I don’t know about the “nature” in this story, but the “culture” is too good to pass up. Remember Roxanne? Well, that’s Doctor Roxanne to you, and she got it the hard way. This is a warm-feeling kind of story, and not (just) from  the hip-hop nostalgia.

Four Stone Hearth #74

Hey, it’s a carnival! Today I’m honored to host the latest edition of Four-Stone Hearth,number seventy-four in a regular series of installments rounding up the hottest (and thenottest) of the anthropological blogosphere. Or to be precise:

The Four Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focussing primarily on four lines of research:

• archaeology
• socio-cultural anthropology
• bio-physical anthropology
• linguistic anthropology
  Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth.

So, check out the home site, and if you’re interested in joining up, please write to Martin Rundkvist.

So down to business. This will be a somewhat non-linear review of the latest from the anthropology blogosphere thematically; we’ll see how that goes. To begin with, let’s talk about anthropology and a couple of high profile busts. In particular, the big corruption roundup in New Jersey this summer that netted mayors and wealthy developers and all kinds of good things, was driven in part by anthropological research. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ ongoing study of the global trade in human organs picked up on the tangled web of laundered money from the other end. Her detailed records on kidney ‘matchmaker’ Levy Rosenbaum helped the FBI catch and prosecute not just organ traders, but money-launderers throughout the network. I found this first via Lorenz, but there’s also a great interview on WNYC and a story on none other than FOX News. You can find some other links about it at the AAA Blog as well.

The other big bust news involves the trade in Native American artifacts. Starting back in June, the FBI began indicting residents of Blanding UT for looting on public lands. The same investigations have since spread well beyond Utah, and folks are starting to express concern about the way this bust was  conducted and what it will mean for the legitimate trade, for Native American craftspeople and tourism and etc. This one’s anthropologically fascinating, not just because it involves archaeological materials, but because it plays on some important tensions between public and private goods, the ownership of cultural heritage, and so on. Taking artifacts from private property, with permission, is legit; taking them from public lands is looting. Identifying the provenance of any particular item is exceedingly difficult, of course, and documenting and tracking permission is almost as bad. Teofilo, late of Chaco Canyon, has been following this story – maybe start with the latest and work back?

International Relations theory good for something after all?

That’s just a joke, by the way – I love IR, I do! Please don’t fire me.

But anyway, this post by D. Drezner on the Foreign Policy blog really gets down to the nitty-gritty. How would IR theory deal with a zombie invasion? And since I’m an anthropologist I’m forced to ask – could anthropology do better? I’ll add that I’m not apologizing for going off-topic here: considering a socio-political theory of zombies raises valuable questions about life and non-life, and hence is very nature/culturey. Really. So I encourage anyone reading to visit the original article (comments too) and come back here to propose a more anthropological/cultural take on the problem. Anxious potential victims await your guidance.

De Ole Folks at Home

I figured I’d share this New York Times article, because it’s pretty interesting, and because the subheading tells me it “raises the question of what now constitutes a natural body”. And how!