Treelon? I don’t think so.

My dad is a very eco-centric guy. He got solar panels on our old house, and when we moved to the Amherst area he made sure to pick a house with solar panels. He has a garden where he grows most of our vegetables, a compost bin for compost, and a few bee boxes for honey. He leases his cars, so he gets a new one every 3 years, and the last 4 of them have been electric. Except, this year, when his lease was up, he instead went all out and bought himself his dream car: a Tesla. For such an eco-friendly guy, getting a Tesla seems like, an elaborate practical joke, or something?

Tesla loves to brag about how eco-friendly they are. See: https://www.tesla.com/impact/environment
Lots of data, blah blah blah, electric cars are better for the environment, graphs and charts, etc.

Better for the environment carries such weight to it. Am I helping the environment by using it? No – it really means electric cars are the lesser evil. They say clearly in that report: “Gas cars: 70 tons of CO2e released into the atmosphere; Electric cars: 30 tons of CO2e released, assuming current global grid mix.” And yes. We have plenty of data to show us that it is more a lesser evil than a net “better.” But Tesla’s hypocrisy, in particular, is what people always seem to neglect. Do you know of the other companies Elon owns? Do you know where the profits of Tesla are funneled into? There’s Tesla and newly Twitter, sure, but then there’s SpaceX and the Boring Company. SpaceX, in case you didn’t know, is a rocket and satellite company. Need I tell you how much that emits? But the Boring Company, most famously known for their Flamethrower (more oil?? why??), is just fucked up. His whole “hyper loop” idea? That’s not Tesla. That’s Boring Company.

What do they do at the Boring Company?

They manage and operate tunnel boring machines, which are essentially massive ramrods to destroy rock and make tunnels. The dude hates the environment so much he is literally pummeling it with oil powered crap and then launching oil powered crap off of it and then producing his cars in oil powered crap and then selling them to people like my dad and convincing them that Elon and Tesla’s missions are “dedicated to the environment.”

Mooo-ving Around

Note: Photo will be uploaded later this week, but this idea struck me when I drove by it on the way home and I had to go with it.

Just around the corner from Hampshire, on S Maple St, there are several small farms along the road (2 of them even have ice cream stands!) These farms are mainly occupied by corn stalks and grazing cows – both of which, under human control and consumption, produce quite a bit of waste. We use only the fruit of the corn stalk, and “throw out” the other parts of the plant. To maintain cows, we have a constant cycle of planting, grazing, shitting, repeat. But that’s also what makes this “waste ecosystem” unique in comparison to cities. The waste produced from the corn stalks and cows is put directly back into the cycle to continue sustaining both – extra plant parts become compost, and manure is used as a rich soil. There is very little leftover waste, if any at all – it can all be pumped right back into the system, and without leaving a mark. Well, almost.

Like I mentioned in class the other day, a huge problem I see with waste management in general is the constant moving around that we do with the waste. It seems to reach up to a dozen locations before reaching its final resting place. Evidently, there is concern for the carbon emissions produced from the transporting of the waste. And unfortunately, even the farms are not safe from playing into this game. The distance that the waste will travel on a farm is not much more than a city block (apparently 1 city block = 1.6 acres, cool). But in that small space, the tractors that are transporting the waste are moving at a fraction of the speed of a regular on-road vehicle, and the oil the tractors run on produce tar-black smoke (most tractors use diesel). So, it appears that the farms are still producing plenty of environmentally damaging waste – but due to its state of matter, the physicality of the waste being produced on farms is not immediately noticeable.

Really rescued this one

Rescue something that seems useful to you that was placed in a waste bin/bag/dumpster. Post photos of the object and where you got it from if possible, and describe both of these. What was the experience of retrieving this object like for you? What from the readings this week (and earlier) can help to explain why this object has been treated as waste? Could or should it have been treated otherwise?

This plastic micro-SD card container that my new micro-SD card from Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com shipped in was going to be thrown out by me, but thankfully I swooped in to save the day and stopped me from throwing it out, foiling Jeff’s evil schemes. I could have thrown it out, but it instead is perfectly useful as storage container for a full sized-SD card! Now I can store all of my pictures of micro-SD card containers in a safe container, where it will take the elements a very long time to destroy it (because it’s plastic!). Besides that, I am particularly squeamish – I still struggle to pick up my 15 year old dog’s poop, even with a glove on and a poop bag, and I have a history of passing out at sights of bodily fluids – I don’t find vomit very funny in comedy. I am conscious of my avoidance of the failure to actually retrieve something from a bin/bag/dumpster, but I have a get out of jail free card for this one B-)

I also want to reiterate my dedication to upcycling, particularly with scrap tech or various mechanical parts that I can handle in a way comfortable for me. The 3Rs – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – are fundamental, but misleading to the actual process. Yes, we should reduce our production, reuse our materials, and “recycle what we don’t use,” but how? Reducing and Reusing are themselves forms of recycling – and can translate to downcycling, which is the reduction and conversion of materials, like plastic and paper that are labeled “made from recycled material,” and upcycling, which is the reusing of materials in other projects, whether that be technologically, artistically, etc.

Tapoo

What do your everyday behaviors around shit reveal about our culture, history, or power relations, broadly defined? You can use the main themes of the readings as a starting point if you wish, such as Gerling’s connections with indoor plumbing and colonialism and racial hierarchies, or Simmons’ resurfacing of utopian socialist thought from 19th century French theorists who saw shit as a resource, but feel free to excrete other shitty connections if you feel so moved.

In my few experiences with shit, two themes stand prominent for me: it is unsanitary and it is taboo. The unsanitary part makes sense to me. Just like any other bodily fluids, feces can carry disease and plague, because it is literally our bodies excreting the resources we don’t need and/or want. History is nothing short of examples of collapse due to mishandling of bodily produced waste (see Medieval Europe). The ladder theme, though, is very strange to me. I’m sure most are familiar with the children’s book Everyone Poops. As the Wikipedia page describes, “The book tells children that all animals defecate and that they have always done so. The book is intended to relieve shame and embarrassment around the act of defecating by explaining to children that it is a natural part of life.” Great! Except, why is there shame and embarrassment surrounding the act of defecating if it is a natural part of life? Where are these children getting the idea that poo is taboo? I believe the answer lies in a cultural understanding of privacy. In our historically unsanitary shit practices, relieving oneself was not done behind a closed door where no one else could see you, it was generally done as bathing was – in the group bathhouse, where everyone else in the family was also doing it. At some point in our refining of these practices to make them more sanitary, it became a more “private” event, potentially in an effort to dissuade the cross-contamination from the diseases that lurk within feces. Additionally, we have societally decided that the parts which produce these acts should be covered up at all times publicly. This is partially due to the sexual nature of the nether regions, but it also reinforces the idea that what goes on down there is taboo.

I’m a Collector

Examine the items in your immediate environment. Are there any particular things that you seem to have a significant amount of? (Include photos if possible!) Could someone make the argument that this is a form of hoarding? Are the existence of these items the result of a lack of cleaning routines, or is there a more compelling explanation?

I want to start off my blog post with getting the most burning thing off of my chest first, which is the DSM definition of “Hoarding Disorder.” The last of their criteria, in particular, is important to me:

F. The hoarding is not better explained by the symptoms of another mental disorder (e.g.,
obsessions in obsessive-compulsive disorder, decreased energy in major depressive
disorder, delusions in schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder, cognitive deficits in
major neurocognitive disorder, restricted interests in autism spectrum disorder).

I have a very silly brain. I’ve been diagnosed with OCD (not OCPD, which is associated with “neatness” and “perfectionism,”) and have had with me many obsessions throughout my short life; I’ve been diagnosed with major depressive disorder and bipolar type II, so I’ve had many periods where I have severely decreased energy; I’ve been diagnosed with the full scale of ADHD (both ADD and HD), so I certainly am not short of cognitive deficits (though I am short); and to top it all off, I’ve been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (with the most problematic terming they could have given it, “High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder, Formerly Known As Asperger Syndrome”), so my interests may indeed be quite restricted at times.

With this all in mind (pun intended), definitionally, I am essentially incapable of exhibiting Hoarding Disorder, yet have plenty of comorbid hoarding “behaviors.” Weird how that works.

In terms of how I see myself exhibiting these behaviors, looking around my room I can immediately gauge 4 of my collections:

1) My playing cards,           2) A fraction of my legos,     3) My books,                     4) The boxes from all of my family’s Apple devices

OrenShelf4 OrenShelf3 OrenShelf2 OrenShelf1

I call them collections because yes, I went out and collected them, but the term also implies a certain level of intention and sentiment. These items are important to me and contrary to the idea that they are the result of “lack of cleaning routines,” are curated and handled with care as to keep them clean and/or in good condition. However, if I had to rank them from least to most “hoarding like,” it would probably be as follows:

1) My books – this collection contains vast amounts of knowledge, information, and creativity, and can be shared for generations, but at the end of the day, most of the time they will just be piles of paper and ink sitting on my shelf.

2) My legos – each one shows a sense of accomplishment and each one is unique and took much time and effort to create, and their uniqueness comes with a variation of functions, but will have significantly less “future use” than the books, alongside the devastation that plastics have on the environment.

3) My playing cards – similarly to my books, most of the time they will just be piles of paper and ink sitting on my shelf. While each of the decks carries a unique art style to it, and collecting them as pieces of art is massively what has drawn me to them, all of the decks serve the same functional purpose. Because of this functional similarity, the collection feels more “excessive” to me.

4) My Apple boxes – these are, by most standards, considered to be waste. They are simply the packaging used to ship, protect, and present the products inside of them, and once those products have been taken out, they are just empty packaging waiting to be tossed. I’ve held on to them because of the sentiment they hold with them – getting an Apple product is always a big deal, they’re not cheap and they go out of their way to make it look fancy. I enjoy having a reminder of that, but of the 4 collections I’ve shown, it is the closest to what I would consider “pure garbage piling up.”