The End of the Line

-Where I could have improved-
About three times during the block I forgot about bringing my plate and cup to a meal. I probably should have given myself a couple exceptions to the rule so that I didn’t have to feel guilty for not adhering to my original goal of NEVER using a non-reusable plate, cup or eating utensil. What was nice about Colin Beavan’s “social exception”--the idea that he could make an exception to his mission if it were to meant to sustain his friendships and relationships--was that it prevented asceticism, which would be a hindrance to his project (Beavan, 140). By doing this, he was not forced to alienate himself from his friends and could simultaneously continue his project. I don’t want to make a social exception in the same way as Beavan necessarily because eating out with friends could easily be an excuse to blow off the project entirely. I do think, however, that it is important to use the lived ethics project as something that can become a part of my dialogue with my friends and family. Hopefully my project can serve as a model of emulation and can motivate others to be environmentally sustainable in other ways as well.

-Conclusions/What this means for me and for others?-
I plan to keep doing my project because I have now gained the support of the Benjis and Preserve staff. I’ve had good conversations with staff at both CC dining locations and they support my mission wholeheartedly. I have tried to spread my project to my friends and it has been incredibly difficult. I had a great conversation with Mario from Benjis who said that he would prefer that Benjis eliminate the use of paper plates too, which I found to be particularly interesting. I think the next step in the project is to find more ways for CC students and staff to be less wasteful and more sustainable, especially in their eating habits. Sinnott-Armstrong posited the argument that governments, rather than individual moral actors, are the primary actors responsible for fulfilling duties to their citizens in the realm of global climate change and environmental protection. Governmental incentives, however, should exist to make citizens want to drive a hybrid over a gas-guzzler, says Sinnott-Armstrong. While I don’t necessarily agree that individual moral responsibilities don’t exist, I do think that incentives for being more sustainable and eco-friendly are necessary. That is precisely why I think that incentives for CC students--such as the April Energy Challenge--can be fantastic for driving more students and citizens to fall in line with their environmental ethical values.

-What I have learned-
My lived ethics project has taught me a lot about my own life and environmental values. Before this class I had a general idea about my environmental ethical views, but I didn’t realize how out of touch I was with them in practice. What this project has taught me is the importance of individual ethical drives. So often we trade environmental responsibility for efficiency and convenience in our daily lives. The decision to use a non-reusable item over a reusable item demonstrates this ethical dilemma. As Colin Beavan pointed out from Heather Rogers: “some 80 percent of our products are made to be used only once. As trivial as that paper towel might seem, it points up a multitude of individual and cultural choice we make every day, choices that mean we are sucking resources out of the planet and sending them to a landfill or incinerator, having barely used them” (Beavan, 48). Every choice we make has costs that add up over time; that can either mean that we get stuck in daily routines of extreme wastefulness or of efficiency and sustainability. Hopefully we can foster those sustainable daily routines. My project to use only reusable plates, cups, and eating utensils, as well as not print out anything during the block, has taught me the importance of individual choices and how a small change in my life--even the least inconvenient change--can have a significant long-term effect.

My gear (the knife went missing today):



Quotes from Beavan: Beavan, Colin. No Impact Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

Finding an Answer

-Is the change in my life from my Lived Ethics project actually preferable to my previous daily habits?-
In my last blog post I started thinking about the environmental impacts of eliminating the use of plastic and paper cups, plates, and eating utensils in my daily eating habits. Using my own ceramic plate as a substitute for plastic and paper plates does have its own environmental costs; the use of water and cleaning solution is necessary on a semi-constant basis. I measured with a measuring cup how much water I used in a day to clean my plate (cleaning solution was used for this plate). I used two average days--Monday and Tuesday of this week--in order to record how much water I using. On Monday I used roughly 7 ounces and on Tuesday I used about 3. If I didn’t bring my plate around to my meals, I would have gone through about 2-3 paper plates a day (considering my normal routine of Benjis and the Preserve). It is hard to measure the impact of using water and cleaning solution against the impact of using paper/plastic plates. I am certain, nevertheless, that I have at least moved a step in the right direction towards eliminating very wasteful eating and drinking products, from plastic plates and forks to Styrofoam cups.

-Ecofeminism-
The readings on ecofeminism last night made me think more about my Lived Ethics project and introspect on my own environmental values. Because we--humans--are socialized beings, our relationship to the environment around us is directly related to our understanding of who we are. The ecofeminist perspective involves an ethical shift away from attitudes of domination and towards a “conception of ethics as growing out of what Jim Cheney calls ‘defining relationships’” (Warren, 42). The ecofeminist position as articulated by Karren Warren stimulated my search for a philosophical basis for wanting to carry out a lived ethics project. When we throw out a paper plate or use a plastic water bottle wastefully, we rarely hear a human response telling us not to engage in that behavior, let alone nature responding ouch. The part of my project that deals with my eating habits shows that we need to develop a conscious towards the environment and recognizes the negative impacts our waste--which often ends up in environmentally degrading landfills. If 20% of the world’s trash comes from food packaging alone (as noted by Colin Beavan), I can’t imagine the impact of some wasteful eating habits in general.

-Diane Pei Wu & the death of a computer screen-
Casey Alexander wrote a particularly interesting comment on my blog the other day and it made me think some more about parts of my project. My computer had broken and I explained how it was inconvenient. She commented on how some people of our generation sometimes fail to realize how privileged they are to even have computers. She went on further to say that my lived ethics project might need to be expanded to be more inclusive (for the less affluent, for example). I think her point was well taken and it connected to the talk by Diane Pei Wu. I started thinking about how environmentally friendly practices can be burdensome and often times impossible for the resource-weak and less affluent populations. In such cases the cost-efficient product should almost always take priority over the more environmentally safe and expensive product. If Environmental Justice attempts to prevent minority communities from suffering from unfair environmentally degrading practices, it seems that it might be important to include attempts to provide cost-friendly or free solutions to their environmental problems.

Warren quote from: Karen J. Warren, “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism,” in Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, ed. Louis P. Pojman, Paul Pojman, et al. (Belmont: Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning, 2008), 33-44.

Beavan statistic from: Beavan, Colin. No Impact Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

Second Time's the Charm

Wednesday, April 6th:
So I'm on day 3 of my lived ethics project and by now I've started to realize that my project might seem a little harder than originally anticipated. If you haven't been following so far, what I am doing is as followed: I'm bringing my own plate, eating utensils, and cup/water bottle to all my meals. I am doing this in order to cut down on paper and plastic usage in my meals. I am also eliminating my use of the printer to print out papers for class and other activities. I have always preached to my friends and family to cut down on their waste and unnecessary use of paper and plastic goods. Because of my environmental values on how we should all contribute to minimize the impact of our waste on the planet, I underwent this mission.

But even though I thought this would be a very easy way to change my life, I came two original obstacles—forgetfulness and nervousness. This has how my meals have gone so far:

Monday:
• Breakfast: none
• Lunch: election day corndogs, no plates
• Dinner: Burger and fries on my own plate, no non-reusable cups used
• Snacks: nothing including plates, eating utensils or cups; many, many sour patch kids were consumed

Tuesday:
• Breakfast: nothing
• Lunch: chicken tenders and French fries on a paper plate ☹ (I forgot…), but no wax-lined paper cups used
• Dinner: brought my plate and cup
• Snacks: no plates, utensils or cups used

Wednesday:
• Breakfast: none, but was tempted to use Cheyenne Mountain Zoo cups and plates for a snack…
• Lunch: brought my plate and cup
• Dinner: cooked my own dinner
• Snacks: no plates, etc. used

So far I’ve done pretty well and hope I can keep it up. When I brought my plate to Benjis and asked them to put my food on my plate, I received some stares from the staff. At first it made me feel a little odd, but it ended up serving me a hefty amount of curly fries, something I can never reject. Talk about perks for being only a little more in line with my environmental ethical values on eating habits.

I thought today about the negative impact that my lived ethics project might have on the environment as well. I am switching over from using paper and plastic products everyday (specifically--cups, plates, utensils, printer paper) to more reusable and sustainable tools like computers and ceramic plates. But these require water and other cleaning costs. This means that I might also be expending a lot of water to clean my plates that could be otherwise thrown away and reused with paper plates. This alternative perspective does not seem sustainable, but I will try to monitor how much water usage I use in a day on my plates, cups, and utensils.

Furthermore, I thought that Terry Tempest Williams’ visit to CC was an important philosophical bolstering for my project. I could see how emotional she was about her presentation and could see how close a relationship she had established with the environment around her. Her poems on why she writes clearly exhibited her close relationship with nature. I am highly impressed with how she uses literature in order to try to promote conservation and wildlife protection. She serves as important model for my own project and other work I do in this class and the future. Her emphasis on the power of literature in effecting social and cultural attitudes towards the environment is inspiring. I hope that I can emulate her passion in my future pursuits to prevent further environmental degradation and tragedies to our global commons.

Thursday, April 7th: Slocum Spill ‘11
I have just gained first access to my blog post from my dead-screen computer. Now that my computer screen is broken and at the Apple store until Tuesday, I am operating off of my roommate’s computer. If I printed out my articles and wrote my notes on paper instead of on my computer, a lot of my problems after the computer spill could have been averted. This accident also tells us a little about sustainability efforts. Trying to be more sustainable—limiting paper use in this instance—can often be an inconvenience to daily life practices. I will tell more as the story unfolds. But for now I have gained a little more perspective into the darker side of the use of technology for something that could be substituted by paper products.

No More Paper Planes

Hello world,

I'm Philip Angelides and I've just started my Lived Ethics project for my Environmental Ethics class at CC. For a long time I've thought about how my own environmental values matched up to how I actually live my life. Cutting down on showers, paper and plastic use, and other things should be part of how I live, but, sadly, I still print out a lot of paper and do engage in unhealthy environmental practices sometimes. Why is there a disconnect between my values and how I actually live my life? That is precisely what I plan to explore during these next two and a half weeks.

In my project I plan to severely limit the use of paper plates, plastic and paper cups, plastic forks and knives, and printer paper. “No More Paper Planes” is what I like to call the project because no longer will I waste paper products (and plastic too) in lavish and unnecessary ways. This project has two parts: limiting the waste of my eating habits and also limiting my paper use for academic reasons.

The first part of this project will try to change my eating habits so I can become a more sustainable CC student. I intend to bring my own plate, cup/Nalgene bottle, and knife and fork in my backpack for all my meals. This project will replace the use of the wax-lined paper cups (at Benjis, for example), the paper plates that the food is put on, and the plastic forks and knifes. By doing this I will cut down on my own impact on trash production and get a step closer to being a sustainable eater/consumer. As time goes on I will record how many plates, eating utensils, and cups are saved and try to assess the environmental impact.

This project, however, extends further than myself. This project will attempt to bring others to follow my course of action. Because we are such a tight knit community and because every way we change our life can change the lives around us, I hope to bring a similar change in environmental practices to my friends and those around me. To bring more people closer to their own environmental values would not only help the world and bring benefits to the agent themselves, but it would also bring them closer to the community and allow for what Terry Tempest Williams calls “enlivened citizenship.” She writes, “We have a history of bravery in this nation and we must call it forward now. Our future is guaranteed only by the degree of our personal involvement and commitment to an inclusive justice." Only by bringing in others into projects to save our environment can we be able to have a more complete notion of democracy and citizenship at CC and the rest of the world. By coming to CC I willfully accepted my role as a CC citizen and I feel it is my duty to not only take from this school, but also be able to prevent my impact from being wholly negative. The first step in this process will be to limit my negative carbon footprint and limit my trash production.

The second part of the project will attempt to limit my paper use for academic reasons. I plan to do the reading for this class, as well as for other purposes, solely off of my computer. This will not only save a lot of paper, but it will make me more sustainable in the long run and make me have to only use paper sparingly. Like the other part of the project, I intend to rub off this practice on my friends; I do, however, anticipate a little more resistance on this part. As environmental virtue ethicists might argue, people who engage in environmentally virtuous practices can be a model for future action, change, and participation by others. I hope to use my own project to influence others to change their ways and, by extension, do the same for their friends. Only when we include and cooperate with others on similar community goals can we take the steps necessary to make our community better as a whole.

I plan to take this project step by step to get closer to my own environmental values. This has to do not only with my past and how I plan to correct the err in my ways, but it is also about how I plan to live and work in the future. I plan to work at Green America this summer and will work with National Geographic to try to force them (and other heavy paper users) to switch their magazine paper over to post-consumer paper. Because of this upcoming summer job I feel it is pretty imperative that I become closer to my environmental values about paper. When I graduate, as well, I want to know that my future living and eating practices will be more sustainable. This Lived Ethics project can be that first stepping stone for actually practicing my own environmental beliefs.

It is day one of “No More Paper Planes” and I’m excited to see how it goes. Peace out world,

-Philip Angelides

Terry Tempest Williams quotes come from:

Williams, Terry Tempest. "Engagement." Orion Magazine, July-August 2004.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/143/.