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.