Trees, Fire, and Economics

From Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket, a cool link to an environmental filter blog: Treehugger.com. Styled along the lines of gizmodo, it mixes substantial information on items like recycling glass and Forestry Stewardship Council certified furniture, to goofy items like cooking food in your dishwasher, to more mediative essays like this piece on Sarah McLachlan's World on Fire Video.

This last bit is interesting. McLachlan's video is pretty amazing. For one thing, I like the World on Fire song. But this is definitely an original way to make a video. Instead of spending the $150,000 that it would take to make the video, McLachlan is videotaped just sitting in a chair strumming. This is intercut with flash and video to illustrate where they spent the $150,000 instead--things like a 12 room clinic in Kibera, Kenya, a years worth of running costs for an orphanage in South Africa, and schooling 145 girls in Afghanistan for a year. The interesting bit is that the producers thoughtfully broke down the $150,000 cost--for example, $200 for a proudction assistant's labor for a day. The Flash is very well done.

Fundamentally this video is a guilt trip. It hinges on the argument that made Peter Singer famous during the Bangladesh famine of 1971: most of us spend our money on stuff instead of on charity, and when you remove the distance, these can be seen as morally wrong choices. Would you not save a drowning child from a shallow pond if it was mildly incovenient to you? The Singer argument says that not giving charity is equivalent. To make the guilt trip strongest, the example is almost always a comparison between exorbitantly priced American goods ($3000 for catering a day's shoot? Who eats that much? Are they dining on caviar?) and very, very cheap services in a place like Africa. But it's a guilt trip that only works a few times. The question unanswered by the video is--what to do with all the artists who aren't working because their wages are being given away in charity? The self-righteous answer is they could go work for charities, but that's a bit over the top coming from a successful musician, and so McLachlan probably wouldn't even dream of saying it. But it would be nice to come up with a really good answer, a way of widely harmonizing people's need for creativity, self-fulfillment, and dream-following with a more just global economy.

I'm not a philospher and I can't fundamentally defeat Singer's argument nor McLachlan's video, nor do I want to. Less stuff, more charity, sure. But truthfully, it's an unrealistic point of view to apply wholesale to all of society, and I think acknowledging that respectfully might be a helpful step towards coming up with a more widely acceptable solution--or at least more easily adaptable one. Even Treehugger wants you to buy stuff--advertising for sellers of stuff is a big part of how they finance their blog. In fact, when Robin blogged them, he wrote,
"I love TreeHugger’s unabashedly commercial sensibility: “Consumers also rely on the directory to help facilitate their buying processes.” And they have helpful categories for gifts under $100, gifts under $50, etc."
I just had a birthday and got a bunch of wonderful little presents from my friends--so who am I to ask people not to spend their money on stuff? Denying the affectionate impulse that goes into buying things when you have a little cash is not pragmatic. Got to find a workaround, a more tenable compromise.

I am convinced that such solutions exist, mostly because I'm a bleeding heart optimist. The ideas just need to be found or grown. Another friend Robin (I have no lack of friendly Robins) wrote me the following today:

"Talk about values... we have a serious problem with economic values in this country. And I'm not sure what to do about it -- I seriously don't know who has the right ideas, if there are any."

I choose to take that as a good sign. If ideas aren't close at hand, that means they might still be hunted or grown, and they have not necessarily already failed. Time to go hunting.