Nerd's Eye View

What's the greenest way to move?

2010-10-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

I moved halfway across country this summer from Boston to St Louis, and I used it as an opportunity to take stock of what I own vs. what I need and to find new opportunities to reduce my resource footprint. Here are some of the things I found out.

Moving is an environmentally taxing ordeal. Although green products and services are increasingly popular in seemingly every domain, I found environmentally-conscious moving services to be surprisingly rare. Most of them are concentrated in California, New York, and New England. In addition, it was hard to get a sense of how to compare different moving options. How much of my total moving footprint is comprised of how much stuff I have, how I pack it, and how I move it? As with a lot of green living ideas, there are a lot of tips floating around but very little actual data on whether those tips actually make an impact, how big of an impact, and which ones are the most important. My sense is that the biggest factors are how much you move and how your stuff is transported, taking as given the distance of your move.

After searching for as much information as I could find, I took a three-pronged approach to my own moving method: 1) giving away as much stuff as possible to people who could use it, 2) buying reusable containers to store my stuff during moving, and 3) using the greenest method possible to move my stuff.

I gave away and donated as much stuff as possible to friends and through Craigslist, giving several gallons of used cooking oil to Biodiesel@MIT, donating used eyeglasses to the Lion's Club, and books and DVDs to the Boston Public Library.
There are a couple of companies that rent out reusable plastic containers (similar to the ones grocery delivery services use) for moving, but they are localized to Boston and California. Thus, instead of buying or reusing cardboard boxes, I purchased 21 reusable plastic containers online that now serve as handy storage bins in my new home.
I rented a moving container from PODS, which was both very convenient and which I figured might be most efficient given that the company has discretion over how and when to ship the container instead of having one single truck that goes from source to destination. The other option I considered was renting a spot in a trailer from a company like Broadway Express, an option I would guess is also more efficient than renting an individual truck.

After exploring green moving and doing the best I could with my own move, I'm left with more questions than answers.

What's the most fuel-efficient moving method?

Driving your own moving truck across country
Hiring movers to drive a truck across country
Renting space in a large trailer that will be trucked across country
Using a portable storage container like PODS

What's the best way to pack your stuff?

Buying new cardboard boxes made of recycled material (obviously the boxes themselves will be more energy-intensive, but this has the benefit of reducing the risk that your stuff will get damaged, and having uniform boxes helps to pack more stuff into the same amount of space)
Buying reused cardboard boxes through some of the services below
Renting reusable plastic containers (only available in select areas)
Buying reusable plastic containers

Is it better to sell your furniture and other stuff you will need and buy another set of furniture (used or new) at your destination? Or is it better to keep all of your stuff and ship it over a long distance?

Here are the resources I found on green moving:

General article on green moving:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/garden/22moving.html

Green moving companies:

(Directory of green moving companies) http://greenmoversusa.com/
(Boston) http://www.gentlegiant.com/moving-companies/moving-companies-new-england/moving-companies-boston-ma.aspx
(New York) http://www.moversnotshakers.com/
(New York) http://www.serenitymovers.com/

Green moving supplies:

(Rent reusable plastic moving bins, LA and Orange County only) http://www.rentacrate.com/homes.php
(Recycled boxes and other moving supplies, based in Austin and San Antonio) http://www.ecobox.com/
(Rent reusable plastic moving bins, Boston only) http://www.lifetotes.com/

Recycling / reusing old stuff:

(Boston) Donate books and media to the Boston Public Library: http://www.bpl.org/general/policies/collectiondev.htm
(Boston) Donate used cooking oil to Biodiesel@MIT: http://web.mit.edu/biodiesel/
Recycle your old shoes: http://www.nikereuseashoe.com/
Donate working electronics, educational supplies, and unopened, unexpired medical and hygiene supplies to MADRE, an international women's human rights organization http://www.madre.org/index.php?s=3&b=9&p=61
Donated your old eyeglasses and unexpired contacts

Green moving tips

Carbon challenge update 2

2010-03-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

Update 4-21-10

The recycling bins are back! On my quest to recycle, I've also noticed that Boston University has put up several bins on Commonwealth Avenue, for those jogging on the Boston side near the BU bridge.

Update 3-26-10

Here is a picture I took of the washed-up debris a few days ago.

Also, I've gotten word that DCR is planning to replace the recycling bins in May. Thanks, Chuck, for forwarding their reply! Admittedly, I was too lazy to email them myself, but I am thrilled that you did.

From: "Parks, Mass (DCR)"
Date: March 26, 2010 7:35:03 AM PDT
Subject: RE: recycling bins along river

Good Morning,

Thank you for contacting DCR. The recycling bins that are along the Charles will be put back in early May.
Bill Hickey

DCR Community Relations

Original post:
It's almost spring again in Boston. The weather is beautiful, and now that I've found a job and am on my way toward graduation, I can get back to thinking about the important things in life. Although I took a break from my carbon challenge for a while, I've again resumed picking up empty bottles for recycling during my jogs along the Charles river.

Here are a few updates on things I've noticed

There were heavy rains last week which have left a thick layer of recyclables and other debris along the Boston side of the river. Easy pickings for recycling vigilantes!
I've saved an estimated 100kg of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by collecting bottles since beginning my carbon challenge almost one year ago. That's about 2% of the average person on Earth's annual carbon footprint - small but significant, if the calculation is correct.

Regardless of how accurate this back-of-the-envelope number may be, I enjoy the feeling that I'm doing something (however small) to make a positive impact in my own community. Hundreds of people enjoy the esplanade every day, and I hope that more than a few of us think of its stewardship as our shared responsibility instead someone else's job.
As has been the case since I started noticing these things, the vast bulk of trash in the bins along the trail consists of beverage containers - soft drink and water bottles, iced and hot coffee cups, and occasional beer and liquor bottles. I may be in the minority, but I still find it odd to see so many people walking around constantly sipping things.
The recycling bins have again disappeared along the Esplanade.

I first saw the bins after the food festival sponsored by Whole Foods last summer (around August?). I remembered seeing them for several months on the Boston side of the river, but starting a couple of months ago, the bins have disappeared. Help me inquire about getting the recycling bins back by emailing the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

The fight for the soul of China

2009-06-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

This past week, I made my annual trip to Arkansas to visit my parents, and in my travels I read Out of Mao's Shadow, an incisive and provocative book by Philip Pan that intertwines the history of China since the Cultural Revolution with the stories of a number of individuals who have pushed the limits of authoritarian rule to advocate for human rights and political freedom. The format of Pan's book is akin to that ever-popular genre of indie film (resulting in films that rarely live up to their own self-seriousness), in which seemingly unrelated characters play out individual sagas that eventually intersect to reveal a greater theme.

Last Wednesday, just as I was engrossed in Pan's book, I learned that my uncle Wang Xiaorou had died of a heart attack on a train between Shanghai and my hometown of Changchun. Unlike the subjects of Pan's book, my uncle lived a rather ordinary life largely unscathed by run-ins with the Party, but one just as deeply marked by the vast historical shifts documented in the decades since Mao. And to me, dabo represented the best of China. A high school student at the time of the Cultural Revolution, he was one of the millions of youth who joined the Red Guards, some of whom staged armed conflicts in Changchun and around the country in the mid 1960s. Then, during the rural re-education movement in which my grandparents and other intellectuals were targeted, he joined my father and their entire family for several years of labor in the rural farmlands around Changchun.

I remember as a kid that whenever my parents and other adults would get to talking, the conversation almost always came to the wenhua dageming, but it was not until recently that I had any inkling of what a chaotic and dangerous time my parents lived through. After one of the greatest famines in human history instigated by Mao's Great Leap Forward, along with waves of violence and persecution, China was finally opened up under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, and my father and several brothers came to the United States to earn their PhDs and a better life.

But being the oldest of the family, my uncle stayed behind to take care of my grandparents and pursue a career as an electrical engineer. The 1980s and 1990s saw lean times for Changchun, an industrial city in China's rust belt which was hit hard by the dismantling and privitization of state-owned enterprises. Life was uncertain, with massive unemployment and salary stoppages that often lasted several years for those lucky enough to retain their jobs.

But my uncle's sense of optimism was not dampened by the hardships he experienced during these decades of upheaval. With an easy smile and quiet graciousness, he was a man untempted by the quick profits and shady dealings that have enriched so many during the past decade of privatization, relying instead on the the hard work, technical rigor, and unimpeachable personal conduct that I grew up thinking were the hallmarks of the Chinese work ethic. About ten years ago when he was in his early 50s, my uncle helped found the Chaoyang Testing Instruments Corporation, which produces high-precision industrial testing equipment. Riding the economic boom of the 1990s and 2000s, business steadily grew as the company attracted foreign investment, expanded operations, and achieved millions in revenues with my uncle at its helm.

However, I also have no doubt that he understood the compromises necessary for living a normal life in China. My parents often regale me with stories of the pervasive corruption that infests every facet of daily life. "Giving gifts" and trading favors is customary for every transaction from getting your child into high school to receiving medical care. And although I find the majority of ordinary Chinese in my parents' generation to be extraordinary earnest and principled, no one is innocent of feeding the entrenched system of bribery, fraud, and guanxi.

Indeed, most of the subjects of Pan's book also begin as mild-mannered, ordinary Chinese who while struggling under the burden of injustice, initially dare not challenge the status quo. But eventually, the nagging discomfort of living in a system so rife with contradiction, repression, and corruption finally becomes an urgent drive to take a stand against the seemingly insurmountable Communist machine. What makes Pan's work great are his deep insights into the inner forces which drive his subjects and his understanding of the convolutions and internal inconsistencies that have defined both the Chinese Communist Party and the larger society in the last half century

As this great yet mortally flawed nation continues its rapid march onto the world stage, the big question is, who will win the fight for the soul of China? Will it be honest entrepreneurs like my uncle, who are taking advantage of the economic freedom Deng Xiaoping and his successors have fostered, but who know better than to challenge the Party's rule? The idealists, who are driven to action by the corruption and injustice that poison all aspects of society and tyrannize the lives of millions? The thoroughly despicable party cadres and shady businesspeople who continue to fleece the public? Or perhaps worst of all, the fattened little emperors of the younger generations whose moral, physical, and intellectual laziness would put the most jaded American slacker to shame?

The battle is too close to call at the moment, and Pan's ambivalence is palpable in the book's final chapters, which leave murky the ultimate impact of its heroes on the course of China's future. Despite the hopeful theme throughout the book of the power of the individual to affect change in one of the most authoritarian regimes on Earth, the fundamental lesson is that change is anything but inevitable, and much more effort is needed to push forward the craggy boulder of reform. In the end, paraphrasing from Paul Collier's excellent book on international development, perhaps the best we can do is to recognize that even in the most corrupt and oppressive societies, there are still many heroes who fight for justice on pain of grave personal sacrifice. And we must support them as much as possible in their struggles against great odds.

Ode to a blue planet: my love of the ocean

2009-05-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

A small handful of occupations seem to captivate the minds of young children - medicine, space, and, of course, marine biology. I was one of the marine biology kids, dreaming of studying the Great Barrier Reef in Australia along with my childhood friend Katie Shapley. I still fondly remember one of my favorite books growing up, a story of a hermit crab called Pagoo who started out as a tiny plankton and survived the many perils of ocean life to a reclusive adult with a handsome shell. As I grew up, I found the exactitude of mathematics, and later the social relevance of economics, more suitable to my intellectual disposition, but I never lost my early fascination with the ocean.

My interest in the sea has been rekindled by a confluence of factors lately. A few years ago, I discovered the Blue Planet, a DVD set produced by beloved naturalist David Attenborough for the BBC. The series contains spectacular footage of ocean life, including vast silvery shoals of sardines, glinting as they’re snapped up by dolphins, killer whales on the hunt, and my favorites, the otherworldy denizens of the abyss.

The proliferation of excellent podcasts on the web has also fed my curiosity. My good friend Ari Daniel Shapiro, who recently graduated from oceanography at MIT, is now an independent radio producer and host of an awesome podcast on ocean-related research called Ocean Gazing, which I’ve been listening to intently. Fascinated by another podcast I heard from ocean luminary Sylvia Earle, I eagerly snapped up the new National Geographic Atlas of the Oceans from the campus library. A massive and unwieldy tome, it contains a wealth of cutting-edge science and eye-popping images of the ocean, and reading it before bed in the last few weeks has brought back memories reading encyclopedias as a kid.

With all the reading I’ve been doing, perhaps the biggest thing that has changed is my view of seafood. Although I’ve been quasi-vegetarian for nearly fifteen years now, a big fraction of that time I’ve felt fine about indulging in the occasional seafood meal. One thing that has always struck me as funny about the vegetarian movement is the inconsistency of the distinction between animal flesh and foods derived from animals, namely milk and eggs. Although most vegetarians consider seafood verboten, eggs and dairy are staples of the standard (ovo-lacto-)vegetarian diet as most people understand it. But why the distinction? It doesn’t seem obvious that chickens and dairy cows suffer any less than fish or shellfish caught by fishing lines. Furthermore, the negative impact of large-scale farming on the environment has been well-documented. In fact, many farm animals living in industrial farms seem to suffer more cruelty and contribute even more to environmental degradation than wild seafood. I don't know whether seafood or dairy exacts a hire price on animals or the environment, but I think that consciencious omnivores should push for greater understanding of the true impacts of our food instead of sticking with traditional categories.

In any case, although I have largely avoided milk and egg products, until recently I’ve been more accepting of eating seafood because of my perception that that fish suffered less pain than livestock and that livestock practices were particularly cruel and polluting. But that view has gradually changed over the years. First of all, the characterization of sea life as cold and unfeeling is clearly incorrect, especially for two particular species I used to enjoy: squid and octopus. Although much is still unknown about the intellectual capacities of these mollusks, what is clear is that they are far from the mindless blobs that we typically think of invertebrates as. Scientists estimate that octopuses might be more intelligent than dogs, and recent reports of octopuses who escape from their cages and taunt their caretakers hint at a mischievous intellect beneath those alien-looking eyes. When I think about a dish of squid or octopus, I no longer imagine the briny sweetness and delicate texture of their flesh, but picture sensitive, intelligent creatures jetting about in the twilight depths, whose mysteries we have barely begun to fathom.

The second reason I’m much more hesitant about purchasing seafood is that fishing is vastly under-regulated, with destructive and inhumane practices still rampant (see this damning report by the Economist). The seas still represent the most devastating tragedy of the commons on the planet, and it breaks my heart to learn of how little respect for life is reflected in our fishing practices. Trawlers bulldoze whole ecosystems before they are even described by science. Many common food fishes can live for decades – orange roughy up to a century or more, and as this Nature paper documents, stocks of large predatory fish have already declined 90% relative to pre-industrial levels. We have but the faintest idea of what kind of awareness and memories that these fish have, yet we thoughtlessly plunder them – along with thousands of tons of “bycatch”, which are dumped back dead into the ocean or used for low-grade fish meal or fertilizer. In general, I try not to be a bleeding heart when it comes to animal rights, but something about our callousness toward sea creatures truly stokes my ire. Perhaps humans, after all, are the most cold-blooded creatures to roam the sea.

Ranting aside, sustainable fishing does exist, but it’s incredibly hard to find trustworthy indicators of such practices when making purchases. The Monterey Bay Aquarium produces an excellent guide to sustainable seafood, but even as a knowledgeable consumer who has spent quite a bit of time doing research and examining labels, I find it nearly impossible to find seafood I can feel good about purchasing. Although I’ve been encouraged by the trend toward consumer awareness of food systems and practices, it seems that labeling and regulation of seafood has fallen far behind that of landfood, and the clean image of seafood among conscientious consumers seems to make it a particularly worrisome blind spot.

References:

The Blue Planet

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Planet-Seas-Life-Special/dp/B001957A4E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1243285643&sr=8-1

Economist survey of the oceans
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12798458

The National Geographic Atlas of the Ocean
http://www.amazon.com/Ocean-Illustrated-Atlas-National-Geographic/dp/1426203195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243289434&sr=8-1

“Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities”, Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm, Nature, May 15th 2003
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v423/n6937/full/nature01610.html

“Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services”, Boris Worm and others, Science, November 3rd 2006
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5800/787

Ari Daniel Shapiro
http://aridanielshapiro.wordpress.com/

Pagoo
http://www.amazon.com/Pagoo-Holling-C/dp/0395539641

Interview with Sylvia Earle on On Point
http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/02/sylvia-earles-life-aquatic

Carbon Challenge update

2009-05-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

I haven't been picking up bottles lately, both because I've been busy with work, and also because the water levels have been up and nearly all of the bottles on the shore have been washed away. But the tally's at 50kg saved from recycling so far, and running.

In any case, here are a few things I've noticed:

There are a lot of little baggies around the trail and sidewalk with brown doo inside.

If you're going to take the effort to put it in a bag, why not go all the way? Boo to pet owners! I've always been deeply ambivalent toward pet ownership. But that's a story for another day.
It's abundantly clear that nearly all the trash thrown out by pedestrians consists of drink containers - coffee cups and soft drink bottles. Although I think that the recent backlash against bottled water is a little bit reactionary, one observation in particular sticks in my mind:

What would the world be like if every person on Earth insisted that all of the fluid they drank had to come from a bottle?

So many of us are moving toward this extreme that bottled water is not just a fashion or a pet cause anymore.
I read this excellent recent piece in the Economist recently about waste and the environment. And even if I'm not saving energy by recycling, it made me feel better about disposing of the bottles and cans rather than letting them wash into the ocean.
There need to be more trash bins and (at least some) recycle bins on the Charles river trail, especially on the Cambridge side.

Who's in charge of this? The Memorial Drive area seems to fall within the purview of several jurisdictions: MIT, the State of Massachusetts, and the Department of Conservation and Recreation. But my sense is that the latter exercises practical oversight (not least because DCR was the organization that had my car towed several times!). So send them an email to see what they can do about putting more trash bins and recycle bins on the trail.
I've always wondered why it was impossible to actually redeem deposits in the city of Boston.

Now I can recycle on campus (although not in my dorm!). But the first year I lived in downtown Boston I spent literally months seeking out every grocery store in town trying to find a place I could get my deposits back, or at least recycle the bottles I had. The Shaw's in Back Bay does take deposit redemptions, but at some absurdly low daily cap of 100 bottles or something like that. It must be some kind of scheme to get around mandatory deposit laws.

Update on my aviation carbon challenge

Thanks to Jessica, Jason, and Chuck for taking my aviation carbon challenge, saving a whopping 14.4 metric tons of CO2 (I used the Atmosfair calculator to get these totals)! Check out the sidebar on this blog for a running total of the savings from this carbon challenge. Obviously, I can't take complete credit for these commitments for conservation, but I'd love to have more excuses to give away copies of my favorite David Attenborough documentaries. So I'm looking for more challenge-takers.

On a related note, I watched this excellent lecture by Sloan professor Rebecca Henderson the other day. The theme was how to get organizations to accomplish positive change for sustainability. But several of the lessons apply equally well to our personal lives:

Don't perpetuate negative values

We can all point to forces beyond our control (e.g. our car-centric cities, the geographic disperson of our families and friends) which cause us to adopt resource-intensive lifestyles. But most of us have more discretion than we think to make changes and to reduce our own roles in perpetuating these environmentally costly social norms. All social change begins with an individual, an individual who at some point realized that she had the power to make a change in her own life.
The only way to make change is to get started

You can't learn to golf like Tiger Woods by watching videos, and we can't make the world more sustainable by watching An Inconvenient Truth. We have to get down to it. Rebecca talks about two paths toward change: revolutionary and incremental. The first way involves completely overhauling the way we do things, and starting over from scratch. The second way involves tackling the low-hanging fruit (e.g. long-distance travel, for many of us) and building on incremental success. Both paths can work, but both involve getting our sneakers dirty and truly Walking the Talk.

Update on my Walk the Talk Challenge

2009-04-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

I've now added a widget to the left sidebar of this site that will track my CO2 savings from recycling bottles.

And for those of you who would like to join me in greening while jogging, I've noticed that the best picking grounds for bottles on the river trail are on the Boston side of the river between the bridge and the boathouse area. The currents seem to deposit the most bottles there.

Walking the talk: environmentalism gets personal

2009-04-05T13:04:00.000-07:00

For several years now, I've been involved in the student environmental movement at MIT, one of whose main themes is Walking the Talk - being the change we want to see in the world. And it hasn't escaped my notice that while we earnestly endeavor to create a more sustainable campus and society, we as individuals continue to behave in ways which are intensely costly to our environment. Despite our genuinely good intentions, as affluent Americans our status quo of convenient travel and ubiquitous disposability is the most resource-intensive lifestyle on Earth (worse, I might point out, than many of our red-state counterparts. If rampant divorce is the evangelical moralist's bugbear, air travel is the environmentalist's).

Decadent though it is, this is our normal, and to resist it all seems tantamount to rejecting membership in normal society. But the more I work on Walk the Talk on campus, the more untenable becomes the gap between what I preach and what I do. So not long ago, I decided that as an academic in the most rarefied, tweed-patched corner of America, I feel safe enough to step off the beaten path and try to walk the talk in earnest. Here's one of many ways I've found to take matters into my own hands.

Almost every day, I jog along the scenic trail that runs on both sides of the Charles river between the Science Museum and the Harvard Bridge, taking a break from my research and listening to my favorite podcasts. Casually at first, I started noticing how many full or partially-full beverage bottles get tossed out onto the grass and sidewalk. I mused at our exorbitance in not only purchasing so many bottled drinks, but tossing their contents before they even pass our lips. And at first, I saw these bottles as just another holdover of a lifestyle that must soon vanish in the face of climate change, just one of innumerable environmental misdeeds that I'm no longer surprised by.

But one day, I picked one of the bottles up off of the ground. It was a sealed, unopened bottle of Poland Spring water, in the new "Eco-Shape" container. I carried it home, washed it, and put it in my department's communal kitchen where someone happily took it. In time, I found another unopened bottle and also gave it away. And a few weeks ago, it finally occurred to me that I could also do something about all of the empty bottles lying around. Whereas for so many hundreds of jogs, the bottles on the ground were just a part of the landscape that I barely noticed and felt no connection to, I realized that even though I didn't litter them, I was still a party to their presence in the environment.

Today: water bottles set out for participants in a benefit walk

So I started bringing some of the plastic bags I've been stowing (don't we all have a hidden stash?) along on my jogs. I don't pick up every single bottle I see, but just the ones that are easy to reach when I'm almost back to campus where they can be recycled. Even so, it's amazing how quickly my bags fill up. It takes barely 5 minutes out of a jog to pick up a bagful of bottles - far less than the time it takes to browbeat a colleague about drinking bottled water - and it's surprisingly easy to run with a bag on my arm.

I can fit more than 20 containers into a single bag - up to 50 if I find enough conveniently-squashed aluminum cans. If I pick up bottles twice a week, that's 2000 bottles a year, amounting to about 489kgs of CO2 saved by recycling (assuming this consists entirely PET plastic, see calculation below. Incidentally, recycling aluminum saves nearly twice as much energy). It's not much, but the more important impact of this small step is the way it's changed my perspective. I'm often more concerned with conceptual issues than local ones, and I tightly optimize my life to make the most out of every day. For the most part, that means trying to get as much research done as possible. But now, jogging isn't just about me. It's not just a way for me to think of new research ideas or to relieve the stress of grad school. Now, it's my own small way of taking responsibility for my local environment and community, and hopefully it's a step toward a lifestyle that truly reflects my values.

Picking up bottles has also made me think, and ask. During the rather dry winter this year when the riverbank was low, huge piles of bottles washed up on the Boston side of the river, right next to the dirt trail carved out by joggers. How did all of these bottles end up in the river? Are they mostly thrown in from passing cars and careless pedestrians? Or is this the confluence of all of the bottles and cans from the streets of the City, washed down storm drains and headed toward Boston Harbor and into the open ocean? Where do they end up and how do they impact the chemistry and ecosystem of the oceans?

My bottle-picking habit has also stoked a penchant for covert citizen journalism. Just a few days ago I came upon a promotional team from City Sports who were giving away free bottles of drinks to joggers on the trail next to Memorial Drive. Expecting to see bottles strewn about the area the next day, I took some pictures with my cell phone. Fortunately, the salespeople didn't leave any trash behind, but now, I've got my eye on them. Tomorrow, I'm going to check out whether the walk-a-thoners I encountered today left any debris behind.

My Walk the Talk Challenge

Working in the environmental movement, one quickly realizes that the most powerful way to help the planet is to engage other people. Even if I reduce my own carbon footprint to zero (which would be nearly impossible), that's only 20 tons per year of CO2 out of global emissions of 30 billion tons. In contrast, accomplishing a 20 ton reduction by encouraging small changes in a large number of people is eminently achievable, and can even be an enjoyable experience for everyone involved.

Thus, to all my friends, I'm issuing my own Walk the Talk Challenge to you. For most of us, air travel represents the single biggest source of carbon emissions which contribute to global climate change. Every passenger-mile on an airplane accounts for .4 to .6 lbs of CO2, meaning that a single intercontinental flight can amount to thousands of pounds of emissions (compared to an average 6 tons per year for the average person on Earth).

My challenge to you is to forgo one intercontinental flight this year that you would have otherwise taken, and write about it in the comments section of this post. At the end of the year, I'll see how many people have taken on this challenge and compute our total CO2 reduction, which I bet will add up to a tidy sum. As an added bonus, I will give as a gift to every person who takes on this challenge a DVD from David Attenborough's "Life" series. The documentary series decades in the making explores life on Earth in dazzling detail and represents irrefutable proof of why our environment is so worthy of saving.

Calculation

From David MacKay's excellent electronic book Sustainability Without the Hot Air, I estimated that one plastic bottle takes 0.7kWh of energy to produce. From the NRDC, recycling one PET plastic bottle saves about 57% of the energy it takes to produce it, or about .4kWh. One kWh of electricity produces about 613 grams of CO2, so the result of this calculation is that recycling one plastic bottle saves about .24kg of CO2 emissions. Quite a large amount, if you ask me!

References

Bottled water has become a major battleground in environmentalism, and there are a wealth of resource to learn more about how bottled beverages are made, their environmental impact, and the their energy content.

The latest research on the energy implications of bottled water:
P H Gleick and H S Cooley. 2009
A recent article from Sciencenow about the latest research in the energy content of bottled water
Jeffrey Morris, "Recycling vs. Incineration: An Energy Conservation Analysis," Journal of Hazardous Materials 47 (1996), pp 277-293.
Sustainability Without the Hot Air - David MacKay

The nonparadox of voting

2009-02-09T14:05:00.000-08:00

For a long time, I've been irked by the often-repeated economic "paradox" of voter behavior. Since an individual vote is very unlikely to affect the outcome of any election, the story goes, it is irrational for people to take the trouble to vote. This argument has been propounded time and again by such popular economists as Steve Levitt, among countless others.

But this is neither a sensical notion of human motivation nor a particularly economic one. Preferring to cast a vote rather than abstain does not violate the fundamental axioms of economic behavior any more than preferring pistachio to vanilla ice cream. Yet economists continue to waste ink over why such behavior persists.

The answer, to me, has always been simple. Culture and our moral upbringing simply instills in most of us a preference for voting which makes us feel good for contributing to the public good. And recently, serious researchers have finally demonstrated this commonsense principal in experimental data. Hopefully this study and future ones along this vein will once and for all put the thoroughly non-paradoxical "Voter's paradox" to rest so we can focus on more important matters.

A quartet of black leaders

2009-01-21T08:02:00.000-08:00

I probably have no business writing about black leaders. I'm an outsider if not a stranger to black culture, and sad to say, I barely even have any black friends. But several media pieces have caught my eye lately, and on this rare January more pregnant with the promise of hope than of after-Christmas sales, perhaps I'll take some liberties.

I have certainly taken an interest in politics rather late in life. When I was little, history just seemed like a collection of dry facts, and politics even worse - just people conniving to outdo each other with secrets and compromises. But politics has begun to grow on me, as both a necessary evil to get things done in the world and as a window into the human condition in all of its tortuous glory.

It's hard to watch a film like Streetfight and not be drawn in by the treacherous struggle of local politics. The two subjects have great names to run for office. Sharpe James - born to be plastered on a lawn sign - and Cory Booker. James is a recognizable villain - a crooked machine politician evincing telltale signs of paranoia and ruthlessness who, true to form, was convicted in 2008 for five counts of fraud involving abuse of his position.

James seems to me an archetypal black politician in the mold of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (who both appear in the film in support of James), someone who lived through the civil rights era and no doubt endured hardships and overcame tremendous obstacles, but whose ideals have worn threadbare along the way. They exploit their seemingly inexhaustable street cred to enrich and entrench themselves, often at the expense of their constituencies.

What's truly sad is the twisted manipulation of people like James of their own constituencies, subverting and setting back the progress of their own poor communities. To me, the most compelling footage in Streetfight were the interviews with Booker campaign workers who wear forlorn looks of shame when discussing the wicked contradictions of James's campaign jabs. How can we teach our children to get good educations, and then call them white when they do? If James's cohorts had the chance to send their children to Yale and Stanford, wouldn't they do it? Such cutting logic is lost on James's supporters, who in several scenes resorted to simply screaming "Sharpe James" in the face of all opposition. But threatened by physical intimidation, social pressure, and worse employed by the James campaign, it's hard to blame them for giving in.

It's hard to judge Booker objectively from the film. The filmmaker clearly sides with him, because of the two candidates only Booker woudl submit to filming, and Booker presents an immensely camera-ready persona and polished rhetoric that no doubt comforts the film's intended audience of well-heeled liberals. But with that caveat in mind, Booker seems to be what he appears, and I recognized as my own his fervent conviction to make good on the sacrifices of his parents and grandparents for the betterment of society.

Booker won the 2006 mayoral race in a landslide against James lackey Ronald Rice, and he has gained media attention during the Obama campaign as a proponent of the "racial deliciousness" of America, a subtle argument for non-assimilation that appeals to me for its oddball cheesiness yet hidden subtlety. He is clearly a politician with no small ambition and self-regard, but in the muddy melee of local politics as portrayed in Streetfight, he stays above the belt. Regardless, Streetfight is an exhilarating watch, whether you're a student of local politics or want some insight into the workings of a provocative rising American leader.

On another note, I was catching up on back episodes of The Colbert Report over the winter break and saw two episodes interviewing prominent black leaders who both work to improve education in the inner city (Booker too was recently featured). One was Harvard Professor and economics wunderkind Roland Fryer, and the other was Geoffrey Canada, a community activist president of the New York nonprofit Harlem Children's Zone. So who was more articulate, wielding wit and science alike against the formidable Colbert - professor or activist? While Colbert handily trounced Fryer with a well-placed jab at his educational incentive scheme (in math problem form!), Canada never strayed the course and managed to deliver the most compelling 5-minute pitch for early-childhood educational intervention I've ever seen. Go figure.

The mysteries of sport

2008-08-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

I've never understood the point of sports. To me, the spectacle of the Olympics and the accompanying hand-wringing involving doping and underage gymnasts just bring out the logical slipperiness behind sport itself. And even if I'm perhaps extreme in my nonappreciation of sport, even professional sports commentators seem unable to muster logical theses (see this idiotic segment on Slate's political gabfest, usually a lively and entertaining debate).

While I'm an admitted square and tend to appreciate impeccable reason more than lighthearted entertainment, I at least intellectually understand the appeal of music, movies, the beach, etc. While science excites our rational intellect, music and art move our hearts and engender awe-inspiring beauty. Stories and songs expose the intricacies of human nature. Furthermore, I have no trouble understanding the sheer exhilaration of playing sports. But watching sports? I'm at sea.

I can see the entertainment value of going to a sports venue and having a good time. What I can't fathom is the diehard conviction of sports fans and the stupendous amounts of time, money, and intellectual energy devoted to fandom. Having lived in the home of the Red Sox for several years now, I can sort of understand team allegiances as tribal holdovers and a way of bonding in a time where group ties are disintegrating. But just as with college fraternity rituals, I feel there must be a better way of bonding with others than doing something together just for the sake of doing it (or liking a team just to talk about it with people). What is the logical basis of being a lifelong fan of a team you happen to live in the same city as, even if all of the players, coaches, and even owners change with time? Do people really believe their teams are the best when they objectively simply are not? Does it really matter who wins? I am also an avid gymnastics fan, and can appreciate the physical aesthetics of the human body displayed in elite sports. But that doesn't seem to be what compels most people.

Moreover, neither group ties nor aesthetic appreciation disentangle the logical quagmire of doping and athletic enhancement. The very essence of elite sports consists of pushing the human body to the limits of performance, and I see no logical reason why unnatural and sometimes unhealthful levels of training should be cheered yet drug use should be jeered. I'm certainly not first to point out the contradictions in distinguishing of "natural" versus "unnatural" athletic enhancement.

Thus, it seems that we'll never be able to extricate ourselves from the inalienable ambiguity of drawing a line when reality is as gray as gruel. Given that sport itself inherently consists of physical pursuits governed by arbitrary rules, the very act of training must exploit those rules to the fullest if a professional athlete wants any hope of competing. As the boundaries of human physicality are stretched ever more tautly, athletes jam themselves ever more tightly on the boundary of that arbitrary line. Who's in and who's out seems more and more often to be decided by urine and technicalities rather than in the thrill of a race. Even if I don't fully appreciate sport, I for one find this a dissatisfying state of affairs for one of the major pursuits of humankind.

In the end, perhaps my favorite sport of gymnastics wins the day after all. Long-derided for its emphasis on performance and subjective scoring by judges, gymnastics still relies on incredibly fine motor coordination for which drugs are (hopefully) little help for. Although the rules may be arbitrary and byzantine, they for once seem less ambiguous and capricious than the ICC's crazy doping rules. Nowadays, underage gymnasts committing government-sanctioned passport fraud seems almost quaint.

Gang Leader for a Day - a disappointing read

2008-07-05T08:40:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day, his third book detailing the lives of the poverty-stricken residents of Chicago's housing projects. I became a big fan of Venkatesh after reading his previous volume Off the Books, which meticulously detailed the ghetto's grey markets and illuminated in brilliant detail the economic lives of the poor. While Off the Books presented a largely objective account, albeit colored by vivid personal description, the present volume promised a rare personal account of what it's like to be an outside observer and documenter of lives so stunted by violence and poverty and a challenge to the very notion of academic objectivity in social studies.

But while the book is written in the first person and personal reflections about moral ambiguity and academic responsibility, with few exceptions the book carries the emotional heft of a college admissions essay. While Off the Books revealed penetrating insights through thorough documentation of the facts, Venkatesh is far less skilled at bringing to life the subtleties of his relationships with people of the Robert Taylor homes (admittedly, not a skill which is well-nurtured in the ivory tower).

Giving Venkatesh the benefit of the doubt, at first I thought he was being clever by narrating his first experiences venturing into the gang-controlled netherword in the voice of the naive, suburban-raised nerdy grad student he was at the time. However, the refrain "Naively, I thought X. I was wrong." continues to crop up throughout the book. Instead of taking the reader through his journey toward a truly formidable understanding of the community (which I don't doubt he has), he opts to flatly state (and restate) the fact that he used to be naive and leaves it at that. For example, in one of the book's critical passages describing the beating of an elderly squatter by Venkatesh's friend and key contact J.T. (who is also the central figure of the book and the leader of a local gang), Venkatesh states that he was disturbed but never lets the reader inside to really feel the suspense or revulsion of watching street justice meted out on the weak and defenseless.

Although Venkatesh may have started out as a naive grad student, it's evident that he became at least a partial insider and participant in the community he studied. Unfortunately, the the book's flat, detached reveals little evidence of this transition, and it contains embarrassingly artless passages such as his characterization of himself as an "edgy young Ivy league professor".

Aside from the book's frustrating lack of emotional insight, I found Venkatesh's own exploitation of the community quite troubling. While he explicitly addresses his selfish motives of obtaining material for his dissertation and openly admits that his quest for information made him as much of a hustler as any of the Robert Taylor residents, admitting to wrongdoing is not the same as owning up to it. Near the end of the book he does describe his gratitude to his subjects and his work on a writing class for a group of young women, but his efforts seem half-hearted for a community that has so little (even compared to his position as a graduate student) but yet so warmly welcomed and accepted him.

He mentioned several times the tight budgets he faced as a graduate student paying his way through loans, and during the several years he observed the community he ate countless free meals made by the community's matrons (most notably a woman named Ms. Mae). Although Ms. Mae refused monetary payment for his meals, I can't help but think that he could have found a way to repay her gratitude if he really tried. In the end, he seems truly saddened that although his work might someday help improve the lives of the poor, it would probably have little impact on the lives of the individuals he personally studied. Although this may very well be my idealism getting the best of me, also I can't help but think that he couldn't use his status, fame, and authority to try to remedy that injustice.

In the end, Gang Leader for a Day was a big disappointment relative to the high standards of Venkatesh's previous work. Although it may have fallen well short of what it could have been, however, it still represents an invaluable addition to the short catalog of books that treat the poor as real people instead of problems to be solved and seeks to gain a real understanding of their lives and their challenges. I remain a dedicated fan of this outstanding scholar and can't wait to read what he writes next.

Three films about love

2008-06-14T11:59:00.001-07:00

It's summertime, and love is in the air. My college friends are starting to get engaged, and I will be a bridesmaid for the first time in September. Although the circumstances which drive people to fall in love are often arbitrary and increasingly demystified by neuroscience, love that endures because of the ongoing and mutual choices of two people to care for each other - and not because of immutable chains of history or ancestry - is still a rare treasure. And of course, love is still the most potent source of inspiration for all literature, art, and film. Here are three films about love which present very different takes on the challenges and triumphs of modern love.

1) The Girl in the Cafe

This little-known gem from HBO Films is extraordinary in being able to carry off the unlikely combination of an odd-couple love story and brazenly direct political criticism with flair and charm. Unlike films like The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamond, the political aspect of The Girl in the Cafe doesn't involve any intrigue or action to move the story along, so it relies solely on the intricately-tuned performances of its stars and the eloquence of its script.

The story follows the now-well-treaded formula (see Once, Before Sunrise, etc.) in which an endearing but hapless bloke who meets a quirky, sexy, presumptuous girl and an improbable love story ensues. But this story is made all the more intriguing because the love is between positively geriatric Bill Nighy (AKA Davy Jones) and Kelly MacDonald whom I simply adore and who despite being 32 still looks every bit the ingenue. And the other twist is that Nighy's character is one of Britain's finance ministers, and his job takes both him and MacDonald to the G8 summit in Iceland where Nighy's party is trying to lobby for increased debt relief and aid to developing countries.

The first part of the movie moves leisurely, doting on every awkward pause and snorting stutter in the odd couple's initial courtship. And it manages to gracefully transition from playful flirtation to the strained intensity of the summit which brings up uncomfortable questions for both the lovers and the world leaders who are poised to fall short yet again on the goal of eradicating global poverty in our generation. Both Nighy and MacDonald deliver a few high-toned monologues strongly indicting the self-importance and temporization of international diplomacy. And although these speeches disrupt the film's otherwise-light touch, its message - that our current inaction toward extreme poverty obliterates any pretense of that we truly believe in social justice and equality - is one which I don't think we can hear often enough.

Yes, the story certainly sounds like a clunker that only the most hardcore bleeding-heart liberal could love, but somehow it all comes together in a beautiful treatment of the power of conditional love, which sees past age, class, and status to find deeper commonalities, and the power of unconditional love, to look past our immediate ties and treat with equal urgency the suffering of all people in need no matter whether they're our own children or people we have never met.

2) Before Sunset

Before Sunset is one of my favorite films, and it was actually the subject of my very first blog entry. Although its characters are vibrant and real and its classic storybook romance is incredibly affecting, the type of love the film portrays is something few of us ever experience.

It's prequel Before Sunset followed two young people named Jesse and Celine as they cavorted around Vienna in the most perfect film representation I have ever seen of love at first sight, of a Big Love that sweeps you away and changes you forever. But even Jesse and Celine themselves know that all that stuff - love at first sight, everlasting love - is bullshit, right? Most of the time, powerful infatuation does dissipate into something mundane and perhaps unappealing. But sometimes - in the movies especially, but even in real life - we do find real emotional connections.

As with most emotions, time typically dulls the ache of lost love, and by all reasonable means they should have moved on after nine years. Against the neurochemical odds, neither could forget the connection they had with each other, and the knowledge of what was possible undercut their ability to truly enjoy ordinary love. The story shows that if you do find a Big Love that works, don't let it go. But for most of us, finding fault with what we have because it doesn't match a romanticized view of love is a sure path to loneliness.

3) Sex and the City - the Movie

I don't mind enjoying SATC for mindless fun, but I have always found its portrayal of modern love to be thoroughly wrongheaded, if also unfortunately realistic. Although I was very entertained by the movie, its plotline only emphasized the selfish mistakes people make to destroy their own relationships.

For one, the film takes to an extreme the common practice of using gifts to show affection (which I have already criticized extensively). In a subversively comical turn which is utterly lost on the characters, the recurring symbol of Big's love for Carrie is ... a giant closet. But more importantly, the film illustrates my point that communication is the main reason people break up in relationships, and, well, it's not a very good one. In the pivotal wedding scene, the film's core storyline is triggered by the loss of a cell phone.

And when the disaster struck, Carrie does what so many of us do when confronted with relationship trouble - shut down, run away, and cut off all communication. In the end, the characters nominally learn the value of forgiveness and all is resolved, but the film did little to convey a sense that they gained any real empathy for each other. When Carrie cut herself off from Big after their wedding debacle, I couldn't help but think back several seasons back when she pleaded for forgiveness from Aidan after making a much bigger transgression. Similarly, Miranda is utterly unsympathetic to Steve in their relationship troubles even as she begged forgiveness from Carrie. Although everything worked out in the end, the characters all seemed just as self-absorbed and materialistic as ever and bound to have the same fights and make the same mistakes again.

The Rape of Nanking and my discontents

2008-06-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

I just watched the 2007 film Nanking last night, and the film – on top of the rankling historical details of the event itself – leaves much to be desired. The film is structured around the narrative of several Westerners who stayed behind in Nanking during the Japanese invasion in December of 1937 and who bravely protected thousands of Nanking citizens from the brutal onslaught of the Japanese. Since none of the 22 courageous foreigners is still alive, their diaries and letters are instead re-enacted by gang of semi-famous actors including Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway.

My first and primary reaction to the film was … This is it?? One of the most gruesome and under-explored episodes of recent world history and this is what you came up with? The premise of basing the film on staged re-enactments of interviews is ill-conceived, and the execution is mediocre at best. In between leaden readings of scripts based on the first-hand accounts of the expatriots are interviews with elderly survivors of the Nanking massacre, Japanese soldiers, and images and video taken during the massacre itself. By far the most compelling parts of the film were the interviews with survivors, who were between the ages of 9 and 22 in 1937. It’s the stories of the gentle, grandparently survivors that make the film worth watching – stories of wading through mountains of bodies in the street, being raped by Japanese soldiers at age 12, watching a mother and brother bayoneted and bleed to death while the child still suckled at her breast.

However, most of the images in the film are just shown as montages without context or indeed any information at all (when/where/what/whom they depict, to begin with), and many of them seem historically out-of-context and strung together haphazardly. For historical context as well as more in-depth interviews, the excellent documentary series China – A Century of Revolution provides a much more illuminating view of China’s tumultuous history in the last century.

What gets to me is not that this particular film is so mediocre – after all, mediocre films abound and I’m sure the film-makers gave it their best try. What gets to me is that this film is by far the best and most serious attempt at documenting a historical event of massive scale. Similarly, although I applaud the bravery of Iris Chang in writing her still-definitive Rape of Nanking and rue her personal tragedy, I can only honestly characterize her book as amateurish and naïve. Her writing vacillates between the wooden description of a college thesis and stilted outrage, and as many have pointed out, her research is incomplete and full of factual errors. Despite these flaws, Chang is rightfully celebrated for beginning to bring the world’s attention to the massive atrocities. What’s heart-breaking is that thus far, no serious author has followed her lead.

In all of the years which have passed since 1937, and indeed since 1997 when Chang’s book was published, a scarce few major works have been released about this historic tragedy which is so ripe for storytelling. Where is the epic Zhang Yimou film about Nanking? The expatriots documented in Nanking who set up a Safety Zone inside the city and saved thousands of lives hew closely to the archetype of Oskar Schindler. But where is the Chinese Spielberg? Where is the Chinese Ken Burns? Surely we can do better than the community-theatre-style readings of Nanking. In this new age of digital media, in which even the Communist government of China can no longer repress the voices of its citizens, I hope that Nanking represents the beginning of a massive wave of reckoning and documentation which does justice to the scale of the massacre instead of the dying gasp of a generation whose memory is fading quickly beneath the glare of China’s new century.

On the merits of documentation

2008-05-18T15:12:00.000-07:00

Since coming to grad school, I've developed a serious addiction to documentation. It all started innocuously when I decided during my first year that it was about time I learned LaTeX, and what better way to start than to type up all of my notes in LaTeX to be preserved in searchable, digital format.

When I graduated college it was incredibly sad to dump all of my painstakingly-collected class notes into the recycling. As much as I wanted to keep them, I knew I would never look at them again, and they would just collect dust as I lugged them across country. I was determined not to let that happen again.

Nowadays, I take detailed digital notes every day of all of my ideas and activities using a freeware program called SEOnote. Although standard word processing documents only allow you to take notes in essentially one dimension, SEOnote adds several more dimensions with a folder and tree structure which can embed links to external documents and the internet. Another application I use fairly often is Google Notebook. Embedded in your browser, Google Notebook allows you to save snippets of text and images from webpages for future reference. I use this mainly to remember books, movies, and music I read about on the web and want to check out later.

Another factor which lead into my descent into my documentation obsession is that economics is an extremely soft science in the sense that the vast majority of its knowledge is embodied in tacit, unstandardized forms. Unlike mathematics, whose workings are laid bare to anyone who has the talent to understand them, success in economics still rests heavily on being in the know - knowing what kinds of data are available, what kinds of tools people are using, and what kinds of topics people are interested in.

Being an empiricist, I found it especially frustrating that many quite standard data sets are not well documented, and many researchers must be expending enormous amounts of redundant effort discovering and fixing known flaws. More documentation, codification, and standardization of knowledge in economics would go a long way toward increasing the rate of progress in our field and making the process of research fairer and more scientific. But alas, even comparatively cooperative academics are really fierce competitors at heart, and as long as personal advantages can be had by keeping data and expertise private, the field suffers as a result. In any case, the desire to codify and share knowledge on the process of social science put me in a documentation frenzy with the Sloan PhD handbook and a website of finance research resources.

Finally, another experience which has convinced me of the power of documentation is working with student groups, particularly MIT's campus sustainability movement which happily, has recently begun to build momentum. One of the hallmarks of any kind of student activity is meetings, lots and lots of meetings. But what has surprised me is that while we have ready technology to take and transmit detailed notes (i.e. laptops), most groups I have been a part of haven't taken full advantage of them. As a result, much of what is discussed at meetings is promptly forgotten, and even worse, most of the ideas that meetings are so great at generating never begin to be implemented. Given that we all have a natural tendency to dream up lofty ideas than to do anything about them, an organization in which meeting notes are not promptly distributed is an organization I do NOT want to be a part of.

Furthermore, any serious student movement suffers from serious institutional memory loss. When students are turning over every year, a huge amount of embodied knowledge and experience is lost without thoughtful and concerted effort toward documentation and codification.

To add some empirical evidence as to the merits of documentation, I recently read the very compelling story of how doctors and surgeons were able to dramatically improve combat casualty rates in the Iraq war through diligence, ingenuity, and yes, documentation. Reading about how physicians in the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad stayed up nights in the midst of fierce battle and chaos to enter 75 pieces of data on every casualty so they could track and adapt quickly to the needs of soldiers, I can't help but feel emboldened in my belief that documentation, in its mundane yet under-appreciated way, can do a great deal to make the world a better place.

An intellectual whirlwind of a week

2008-04-19T09:10:00.000-07:00

In the throes of the existential angst which often accompanies grad school, it's easy to take for granted the incredible privileges of being a student in Cambridge. This week has been a whirlwind - in addition to working with Caltech-esque intensity to prepare to present my research on Wednesday, I also attended two lectures at Harvard by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and have been attending the inaugural Millenium Campus Conference this weekend which has included an astounding lineup of luminaries in the global poverty fight including Paul Farmer, John Wood, and Amy Smith.

The conference opened Friday with Henrietta Fore, the current administrator for USAID, followed by keynote speaker John Edwards. Given that Fore is the Bush Administration's voice for poverty alleviation, it's no surprise that her speech was by far the most underwhelming of the entire conference. Her speech possessed about as much verve and urgency as an address to the Westchester parent-teacher association, and nothing in her manner or the content of her speech betrayed any true empathy for the world's poor. Still, it was interesting to get a first-hand look at the administration in (in)action on an important issue.

I had never watched an entire speech by John Edwards until yesterday, and now it's hard for me to understand his populist appeal. Compared to the numerous passionate and well-reasoned voices which followed him, Edwards came off as mannered and equivocating. What passes for charm in politics feels to me more like barely-tolerable self-satisfaction, albeit with a high-wattage smile. He started off by spending several minutes bragging about being on the Colbert Report on Thursday (which was brilliant by the way) with an un-funny re-cap of the jokes he made on the show. I was feeling hopeful when he talked about his inspirational experiences in Rwanda and other poor nations and emphasized how unimaginable some of their circumstances are even to the relative poor of the United States. But right after implying that all Americans are still pretty well off compared to the world's desperately poor, he went right on to draw a comparison to the 37 million Americans who experience hunger. Although I sympathize with the plight of poor Americans, hunger is a word that means two very different things in America and in Africa.

Edward's one real point was that although our next President must be a "visionary leader" (whatever that means) to lead the fight against global poverty, a key task for us was to build the political will to tackle the problem among the general populace. Certainly a valid point. But in perhaps his worst equivocation, he decried farm subsidies for the pernicious force of oppression that they are ... and then went on to talk about his proposal for revising the subsidies to include only farmers making less than $250,000 per year. Even if his revised subsidies could be passed and would not be gamed by multinational agricultural firms, they still seem like little comfort to farmers in developing nations living on a dollar a day whom he so eloquently feigned empathy for only a few sentences before.

In contrast, Amy Smith was a revelation. One of the visionary innovators of our time, the understated MIT professor dazzled the audience with matter-of-fact stories of how she has brought simple, incredibly cheap inventions to people in developing nations all over the world, engaging local communities and inspiring new generations of students to take on the challenge of affordable design. A $3 corn shucker which increases efficiency by 7.45 times, a $1 charcoal-cake press that helps turn corn cobs into usable charcoal. These are the innovations that will bring people out of poverty.

Friday evening, Stanford economist Paul Romer surprised me with an astounding and radical new idea for development: "opt-in colonialism". His idea is to create city-states which can take in inhabitants from poorly-governed nations which are not governed democratically by the populace, but controlled instead by external democracies such as Norway. These islands of good governance can not only bring growth to regions stymied by corrupt institutions, but may help usurp power from brutal regimes without direct military intervention. It's a crazy idea, but if any economist has the clarity of vision to make it work, Paul Romer just might be it.

Saturday's session opened with Paul Farmer, founder of an incredible organization called Partners in Health which brings health care to thousands of people in countries like Haiti and Rwanda. Farmer spoke out with ardor and reprehension against the use of concepts like sustainability and scalability to deny care to the desperately needy. While the nonprofit community has come to embrace the idea of social entrepreneurship and sustainability through commercialization, Farmer asserts that people should not have to pay for basic socio-economic rights such as safe water, food, and medical care, and discards the notion that people might value vaccines or bed-nets more if they had to pay for them. Farmer called for NGOs to work with the public sector - while it's much more difficult to coordinate with local governments to rebuild and staff existing facilities, he argues that it's much more sustainable in the long. In economic terms, NGOs must strive to complement the public sector, not substitute for it.

The education keynote on Saturday was given by John Wood, a former Microsoft executive who quit his job after a trip to Nepal and founded an organization which builds schools and brings books to children around the world. Wood was brash and hilariously funny, but although his speech was well-practiced and polished, in contrast to Edwards he really seemed to mean every word of it, and he never seemed rehearsed, jaded, or disingenuous. What Wood and the rest of the speakers emphasized was a model of intervention which empowers local staff and local people to innovate and help themselves out of poverty.

In contrast, a more traditional model of activism which I have long been critical of is that in which expatriates see a problem, decide what *they* think is the right answer, and then go to a country to try to impose their own solutions without empathy or understanding for the culture or the real issue on the ground. I personally have always felt uneasy about criticizing this approach since most people still mean well and I myself have not yet taken any meaningful action. But still, sometimes I wonder whether organizations driven by feel-good intentions might do more harm than good.

Many people I know who have worked for nonprofits in development seem to be doing it for their own goals - to enlighten their own lives and experience the excitement of *feeling like* they're making a difference. But when satisfaction comes from our personal goals instead of being strictly aligned with making the biggest difference for the people we are trying to help, people's interests drift, their commitment wanes, and promises go unfulfilled, undermining the precious hope of the people we are supposed to help. A prime example of well-intentioned hypocrisy is the story of how John Wood began his quest to bring education to the developing world. He was trekking in Nepal on vacation from his hectic job at Microsoft, and he came upon a dilapidated school building teeming with bright-eyed children eager to learn, but with a library that had no books. Moved by the school's poverty of resources, he vowed that he would return with books for the village. "Many people have come through our village," said the school headmaster, "and many have promised to come back with books. But no one has ever done it."

Although it is nice to imagine a kind of selfish altruism - whereby we can help others by helingp ourselves - sweeping the world and bringing all of us together to solve global poverty, I believe that this kind of movement can only succeed if selfish altruism is laid on a foundation of true altruism. Self-interest can be harnessed with great benefit toward good, and I believe that ultimately what helps others does bring meaning and happiness to our own lives. But self-interest is also fickle, and the exhilaration of "making a difference" is fleeting. If we rely on self-interest alone, we will all inevitably bore of making a difference and seek new thrills and new challenges before the long-term mission of ending poverty can come close to being realized.

The final keynote speaker, Ira Magaziner, probably put it best by saying that the happiness and satisfaction of his staff is a far lesser priority than the mission of serving and helping those in need. Since all of the leaders who spoke at the conference seem to agree that effective intervention must empower the local people, must entail sustained, lifelong commitment, and must work with local institutions, I am instilled with the conviction that this is the approach I must take when I finally find the right opportunity to take action myself. In the meantime, perhaps the best I can do is learn, develop usable skills and expertise, and raise money for the people who are truly making a difference.

Finally, my favorite quote from the conference was one put up by Amy Smith, from activist-priest Daniel Berrigan:

“One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something, and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.” — Daniel Berrigan

Darwin's nightmare - a film to remember

2008-04-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

There is a curious relationship between the quality of a film and its ability to remain in one's consciousness. Many decent and quite well-made films slide from memory almost as soon as they're over. But sometimes, a story is so striking that it stakes out territory in our minds, with images and sounds that crop up unbidden as we go about our daily lives.

The documentary which has had the most staying power is Darwin's Nightmare, a film about the social, economic, and ecological implications of the Nile Perch on the inhabitants of Lake Victoria region of Tanzania. It was a difficult film to watch not just because of the horrors on display, but because its largely composed of stitched-together interviews which meander, trail off, and seem to go nowhere. But several years after I saw it, it still often comes to mind whenever I think about poverty and economic development.

The film is full of arresting images - among them fish carcasses rotting in the sun - but the most memorable ones are of the Tanzanians themselves, nearly all of whom depend either directly or indirectly on the Nile Perch. They have the most penetrating eyes I've ever seen, with an intensity I doubt any method actor has ever matched.

Raphael (pictured above), a watchman at the marine biology research center whose image accompanied many promotions for the film, pierces the camera with his eyes as he nonchalantly reveals that the previous night watchman was murdered. Eliza, a stunningly beautiful woman who earns a living entertaining the foreign pilots who transport the Perch, acts as the emotional heart of the film. Early on in the film, she is captivating as she sings a song about Tanzania, even while being harassed by one of the Russian pilots. Later, we see her at night in her flat as she discusses her life and her dreams of saving money, getting an education, and getting a job in computers. Her eyes speak to a life of incredible hardship, yet they radiate warmth and intelligence and hope that things can get better.

Watching Eliza tell her story, I couldn't help but compare her to the relative poor in the United States. I've written before about my criticisms of focusing on relative poverty in this country, and Eliza illustrates why I feel that the absolute poor, who are mostly abroad, deserve a lot more of our attention. In the recent subprime crisis, the humanitarian focus has been on the hardships visited on people who lose their homes and are forced to declare bankruptcy. I often hear people describe their distress as not being able to give their kids the same clothes and toys as other children. But can we reasonably compare these hardships to the hardships of the orphans in Tanzania who sniff plastic fumes to dull the pain of sleeping on the streets (frequently suffering rape and abuse)? Even Eliza is better-off than those children, but selling her body to obnoxious foreigners is her only hope at escaping the crushing poverty cycle of the Perch industry. Of course, I don't know what Eliza would have done if she was able to attend community college in American earning, say $20,000 a year at a low-end service job, but anecdotally, most people with her kind of will to survive and succeed do - if they just had a chance. In contrast, how many American kids fail to take full advantage of the wealth of opportunities we have compared to Eliza?

It seems an injustice to people like Eliza to complain about how hard life is in this country when there is so much we should be grateful for. The people who have lost their homes in America may think they are at a dead end, that they have no way to achieve comfort and self-sufficiency, but they do. We all do, and hopefully there will be more films to remind us of how lucky we are.

If you haven't yet seen Darwin's Nightmare, I highly recommend it. It will probably not be what you expect, and you will probably remember it far longer than you think you will. And when you learn what ultimately happens to Eliza, you might feel like you've been hit by a bowling ball to the stomach.

More reasons for behavior change

2008-03-24T14:33:00.000-07:00

I've written quite extensively recently about why I think behavior change is a critical and perilously understudied part of the solution to global climate change. If a miracle technology could be implemented tomorrow which produced clean energy with no ill effects, then all of our problems would be solved. But in the meantime, every ton of carbon we produce today has an effective lifetime of thousands of years and will continue to increase the likelihood of severe weather, drought, and species extinction deemed likely if carbon output trends continue.

Thus far, almost all of the discussion about climate change has focused on implementing economic incentives to both reduce emissions (trading schemes or taxes) and encourage technological innovation (subsidies and research grants). However, I argue that the substantial emissions reductions necessary to mitigate the worst effects of climate change cannot succeed without behavior change - that is, changes in our behavior at any given level of prices and incentives.

Behavior change is important because we already have economic incentives to reduce emissions. Most activities that produce emissions already cost money, and there are already things we could do to increase efficiency. However, a recent study by McKinsey casts doubt that technology and incentives alone can save us - for there are many opportunities for saving money and saving energy using technologies which already exist, but which remain unutilized. As detailed in a recent post in the Economist , two types of economic frictions work to prevent carbon taxes and other incentives from functioning properly: difficulty monitoring energy use by individuals and separation between those who pay for energy and those who pay for energy reduction.

Both of these frictions are apparent at MIT, where I've been working to improve campus energy efficiency. None of us pays for the energy we use in our offices, labs, and classrooms. Indeed, even departments pay only a fixed overhead fee to MIT facilities which is independent of how much energy they actually use. Furthermore, even if we did want to implement incentives for energy reduction, measurement of energy use is coarse in both time and spatial resolution. Because choices which affect carbon emissions are made at an individual level, fully implementing incentives for mitigation would require accurate measurement of every activity we engage in that uses energy. In essence, this would entail full carbon surveillance along with complex calculations to separate out each person's contribution to things like building lighting and public transportation. This level of measurement is neither feasible nor desirable, so as long as we cannot fully measure each person's emissions, incentives cannot be enough.

Even where measurement is possible, the people who could benefit from incentives are often not the people who must invest in emissions reduction. Much of the cost-savings we could achieve using current technology involves investments in things like better insulation and fluorescent light bulbs. These items often cost more than energy-intensive alternatives, and savings are made up in the long run through lower energy costs. But in the case of a landlord and a tenant, for example, the landlord would have no incentive to pay for better insulation because it is the tenants who pay the monthly electricity bill. In a stylized economic model, the parties could just strike a deal whereby the investment is made and they share the gains, but in reality few people go to the trouble.

Undoubtedly, stabilizing carbon emissions will require investment in new technology and implementation of economic incentives. But because incentives for investment will never be perfectly aligned and measurement will never by perfectly accurate, loopholes will always remain. This gap must be filled by something which is too-often ignored by economists and policymakers alike - our collective will to do what's right, even when nobody's watching.