Lose Some, Waste Some, Then Find a Better Way
Several months ago, a new Apple store opened in New Haven, and now, hardly a day goes by that the store is not filled with at least two or three customers, examining iPads and laptops. Not infrequently, one of these customers will leave the store with a sleek white box containing a new computer, and will return home to transfer files and get back to work. But nowadays, few Americans are buying their first computers, which means that for every visit to the Apple store, another visit is being made to the basement or the back corner of the linen closet, where abandoned keyboards sit on top of an old tower or monitor.
In his book Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed, and a Sustainable Future, environmental studies professor Saleem H. Ali explores the way in which computers provide the quintessential example of our destructive patterns of resource consumption, which many, Ali writes, liken to a river, with raw material flowing downstream until it is lost to us, at the dump or in the back of the linen closet.
“There is little doubt that rising human consumption of materials is our most seminal environmental challenge,” Ali writes, but he also acknowledges the way in which our lust for material goods—treasure, as he puts it—has shaped human civilization since long before the gold rush. Rather than attempting to reverse this long history of resource use, Ali proposes that we employ our awareness of it to look for creative ways forward.
Instead of simply following the currents of the river, we must work towards a “lake economy,” in which we use resources with an eye towards their reuse, maintaining a stock of materials that can constantly re-circulate as long as input and output is efficiently controlled. As an alternative to eliminating computers from society because of the ways in which they use plastic, metals, and energy, why not create technologies that allow for the more painless replacement of parts, so that an upgrade consists of replacing a chip without rendering an entire machine outmoded? Ali asks. It is only through such creative solutions that we may satisfy our need for “treasure” without compromising the needs of the earth.
