D12

Sorry, have to resend so you can read it!!

I found this assignment really funny because my family is very environmentally conscious. I was at Thanksgiving dinner for about an hour before my Mother started talking about recycling. She mentioned how she hated the East Coast recycling systems, because they never had any public bins to recycle cans and bottles. She then proceeded to talk about how atrocious New York was with its recycling. I found this conversation amusing, because I did not even have to bring up the subject of environmentalism and global warming. Here was a typical family conversation about the environment.

My family normally looks at recycling as the best most efficient way to save the environment. I brought up the fact that recycling did produce waste and that the system was inherently flawed. They liked this point, but I still said it was the best method we have currently.

I discussed Braungart and McDonough thinking that we should not waste but rather should look at new ways to produce from biological and technical nutrients. My family was very receptive to this argument. It was easy talking to them about the environment, because they agree on all these perspectives we’ve been discussing in class. They liked Braungart and McDonough’s argument, but did not think it was very realistic. We are cynical and so we believe that the system of consumption and waste or “cradle by grave” is too strongly grained in the foundations of our society. My mother thought that product to services was a great idea, but would never actually happened.

I also discussed with them Maniates viewpoint of the “Trinity of Despair.” My mother thought it was a really good point that social movements don’t occur by popular support. Civil Rights was a struggle by the African American community, but most of America was in support of segregation. She thinks that the problem here is that global warming is calling on the world to change their entire foundation. Segregation was an easy fix, if you think about it. It didn’t cost a lot to integrate people. But for the United States to change from a coal and gas emitting country to a green emitting country, it is going to cost large amounts of money and affects all businesses across the board. With that to consider, and the fact that international cooperation has been very difficult to achieve-global warming is a problem with many hard decisions that need to be made.