david |
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I just came across this proposal for stringent monitoring of eco-town residents:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/26/ecotowns.ethicalliving
Obviously the intention – achieving one-planet living – is a good one. However, the means highlight the huge political implications of such comprehensive monitoring. Who collects the data, and what happens to it? To what extent does the state (or other authorities) have the right to dictate personal behaviour on sustainability grounds?
This fear, imo, underlies a lot of public ambivalence towards environmental policies: the “nanny state” argument. Previously, I’ve dismissed this concern, but this proposal has really crystallised the potential problems for me. No-one (or not most, at least!) wants to live in a Big Brother society.
Behavioural change seems to be key here. If we’re relying on behavioural change to achieve emissions reductions, then the state can justify monitoring and intervention in citizen’s personal lives. If all our technology is low or zero-carbon, however, it’s not a problem.
Thoughts?
Rethink what we thought was a given
shane
isn’t the road to hell paved with good intentions?
As our ability to calculate or “monitor” our own carbon footprint increases, so increases our ability to precisely document and quantify our every move. look at our discussions on personal carbon allowances, food/material footprinting and your comments about GPS for transport emissions. logic would say, what are the use of carbon quoters/allowances if they have no insentive or punitive measures attached, but then the worrying continuation of this logic is how can we possibly have any national and international quoter system of this type, without having a robust and “verifiable” method for declaring/monitoring every purchase and movement.
It’s a scary thought, some belief that quoters should only cover home energy and transport, perhaps leaving more room for personal freedom, but others think including all of our consumption is the only way. many prefer to live a low impact life and forgo the monitoring process, but then the quoters aren’t designed for you/them.
Our logic scaled up from different angles seems to come up with contradictory ends. i can’t belief that i’m saying this, but perhaps we need to disregard normal logic and personal desires, and except a temporary change to our preferred evolutionary route of more freedom. I think underpinning this question of personal freedom is also the question of regional/national/international organisational and power structures. it’s ironic, in a time where the tendency is for our political systems to shift, theoretically, the power to the people, perhaps our best/fastest solution is a dictatorship.
It’s not the fact of my data being accessible by others that bothers me, it’s who’s behind the democracy/dictatorship and what they do with the information. i’d have less of a problem giving over my freedoms if i believed in the power structure. Conversely, mass carbon/material consumption is just a symptom of our organisational structures which is a symptom of our internal state, so we need a pretty big shift all round.
If we don’t have a big shift voluntarily (and i’m not talking about tinkering with our current state and desires), doesn’t our logic tell us we will have a forced shift motivated through catastrophies, and what would are personal freedoms look like then?
no solid answers but a time to rethink what we thought was a given.
Shane
p.s. it’s not just on sustainability grounds are ability to monitor and the quantity that we monitor everything in every aspect of life is growing, possibly exponentially. On a million year time scale, i see our monitoring as a necessity for the next hundred years, as we re-train ourselves and reharmonise. After that we can rely on the little voice within to let us know when were doing something that is out of sync. until then we kind of need to re-evaluate every aspect of our life.