Author: Mark Lennon

Yes, the oil spill in the Gulf is a really bad thing, but I wish they taught statistics in high school.

Because statistics tell you that is was just a matter of time until we had a catastrophic spill in the Gulf.  There are thousands and thousands of oil and gas wells in the Gulf, each one with a very small probability of failing.  BP and Deepwater Horizon drew the short straw.

It’s particularly disheartening to hear the blame being piled on BP.  As if, yeah, BP would cut corners so it could drive its share price down by half.  And secretly plot months if not years of public relations nightmare.  And cunningly position itself to pile up tens of billions of dollars in liabilities that will stretch on for decades.  Check for the insider trading; I’m sure the top dogs at BP have been shorting their own stock.

Statistics said that if you keep drilling in the Gulf, eventually you’d have a catastrophic spill.  The problem is the drilling in the Gulf.

The problem is the succession of “leaders” in Washington and Concord and 49 other state capitals who have failed to devise sensible energy policy in nearly four decades since the first oil crisis.

The problem is nationwide fuel economy that hasn’t improved in 20 years.

The problem is policies that encourage and manufacturers who push and consumers who buy SUVs and pickup trucks that they don’t need.

The problem is policies that promote cars and trucks and airplanes over other ways to move people and products.  (For example, policies that say gas taxes can be used for roads and nothing else, or policies that say our most urgent transportation priority is to build 20 miles of eight-lane highway so more cars and trucks can travel easier.  Those would be New Hampshire policies.)

The problem is every state that decides not to use local resources to produce electricity, but to rely instead on oil and coal and gas that are produced far away, in places like the Gulf.

The problem is every family that buys, heats, and air conditions a 5,000 square-foot home.

The problem is every new house that’s built without solar panels on the roof.

The problem is every person who decides that the way to enjoy a lake or pond or ocean is to drive a motorboat, or the way to enjoy winter is to drive a snowmobile, or the way to enjoy the woods is to drive a four-wheeler.

The problem is every company that opens an office accessible only by car.

The problem is every local planning board that has allowed or continues to allow development of strip malls and big boxes and suburban corporate campuses, promoting sprawl over cluster.

The problem isn’t the driller.  It’s the well, because statistics said eventually a well was going to fail.  And there’s plenty of blame to spread around for the well.  Almost all of it is right in the mirror.

I spent a couple of weeks in the Bay Area last month, mostly in Silicon Valley.  For someone who’s lived in New England for many years, and particularly for someone who tries to notice the different ways that different people interact with their environment, it’s a different kind of place.

There are no people.  A space alien looking in on Silicon Valley would say to himself (or herself, or itself, whatever  a space alien is), “What are these strange metal creatures that live on this planet?”  There are, to all appearances, nothing but cars in Silicon Valley.  You can go entire days without seeing a human being, except, if you’re lucky, a rare sighting of a person rushing from car to office or car to store, or vice versa.  There are tens of thousands of office buildings; no people.  Hundreds of thousands of houses; no people.  I suppose if the space alien had a sensitive protoplasm-meter, he/she/it might pick up the bits of protoplasm in the strange metal creatures, or occasionally a flash of protoplasm scooting from the metal creature to the larger fixed enclosures we call buildings.  They’d probably think it was some kind of contaminant.  The absence of people is really bizarre.

No people, lots and lots of cars.  There are a LOT of cars driving around the Bay Area, all the time, on parallel interstates just a couple of miles apart, and on all the roads in between, going every which way.  There is a LOT of pavement, and a LOT of cars.

But not so many SUVs and pickup trucks.  Way different than New England.  Maybe because we have winters and people think they need four-wheel drive.  Maybe because people in our suburbs hang on to the rugged settler thing and buy pickup trucks.  I don’t know, but there re a lot less SUVs and pickups in the Bay Area.  There are more Priuses, but still not a whole lot of Priuses.  And outside of that, there’s not much evidence that people are paying much attention to mileage.

When you do see people, it’s a monoculture.  I stayed in a hotel next to a place called the Great Mall.  I went looking in the Great Mall for a book.  Outside the Great Mall it looked just like every other place in California:  lots of cars, no people.  Inside the Great Mall, there were lots of people, and I was the only Anglo.  Like, the only Anglo.  Thousands of faces:  85% Latino, 14% Asian, 1% other, including me, and I might have been all of the 1%.  A couple nights later I went to dinner fifteen miles away in Los Gatos, where it was 95% white, 4% Asian, 1% other.  (Except in the restaurants, where the Latinos worked.)  On a macro scale California may be culturally diverse; on a micro scale it’s as diverse as a cornfield.

Houses too.  My God, how do people live here?  Thousands and tens of thousands of acres of identical houses on plots of land barely as big as the house.  No front yard (just driveway); no back yard.  No side yards – hell, you have to keep your windows shuttered because your neighbor’s window is five feet away (unless you build a fence, which most people seem to do).  This is bizarre and incomprehensible.  If you’re not going to have any space anyway, why not just join the houses together like old-fashioned row houses.  Saves a lot of energy.  Saves a lot of building materials.  Doesn’t make a whit of difference for privacy, if anything gives you more privacy, and if you added up the smidges in between you’d have enough land for some open space and parks.  How do people live here?  I don’t have a clue.

But San Francisco has hope.  Unexpected, especially for a person who lives in the middle of New Hampshire, but San Francisco is the one place that, environmentally and socially, offers the least glimmer of hope for a future.  So much easier and more efficient to provide services.  So much easier to provide transportation.  Practical without automobiles.  High housing densities that leave room for open space.  Multiple-story structures joined side to side, saving lots of energy.  Micro-scale polyculture rather than the color-coded monocultures in the suburbs.  As a city, San Francisco conserves the countryside and its environmental services.  Unlike the rest of the Bay Area, it’s a place and a model that might just survive.  Who would have thought it?

And it will all go away.  Maybe you get used to this if you live there, but looking at pictures at the earthquake in 1906 it’s hard to imagine that 2016 or 2026, or whenever it comes, will be much different.  Hopefully, when it does come, it will be in a series of survivable quakes and not one cataclysmic El Destructo.  One way or another it will be really, really bad.  Mother Earth will remind us, loud and clear, that “Sustainable” is at her whim.  That, I think, is the lesson we should live with every day.

The humanitarian crisis caused by the Haiti earthquake has fallen out of the evening news. But that doesn’t mean the crisis is in any way diminished.

At this point, four months after Haiti’s earthquake, the situation has been stabilized in terms of the most urgent needs for food, water, medicines, and temporary shelter. These supplies are flowing into the country and are being fairly efficiently distributed where they are most needed. Another top priority has been to repair roads and ports. You’ll recall from January and February the many news stories about supplies piled up at the Port au Prince airport, and hundreds of containers stacked on U.S. piers waiting for Haitian port facilities to reopen. This situation is improving. Port au Prince facilities have partially reopened, and containers are also being routed through smaller Haitian ports and through the Dominican Republic.

Now the focus shifts to long term reconstruction. The earthquake destroyed tens of thousands of businesses, and many hundreds of schools, hospitals and health clinics. Hundreds of thousands of homes need to be rebuilt and furnished for Haitian families. Several IRN partners are already on the ground building simple sturdy wooden residences, much more resilient in the face of a future earthquake than the mud and cement huts they replace. This effort will go on for years.

As structures are rebuilt, there’s equal need for furnishings and supplies to fit them out. Tables and chairs, bureaus, beds and mattresses for homes. Desks and chairs and bookshelves for schools. File cabinets and shelving and desks for businesses. Cabinets and exam tables and beds and a thousand other supplies for clinics and hospitals. Stoves, ranges, refrigerators, serving equipment for private and institutional kitchens.

In short, there’s critical long-term need in Haiti for surplus property that can be sourced from the U.S. I don’t want to beat the drum for my own organization because this is what we do, but every business and institution in the U.S. should remember, before tossing surplus into the dumpster, that there are people just a couple hundred miles from our borders for whom that surplus is, quite literally, a treasure. And they aren’t necessarily in Haiti; they aren’t necessarily beyond our borders. There are millions of people right here in the U.S. – families coming out of the welfare system, homeless people establishing new lives, families recovering from natural disaster or economic misfortune – whose need for furnishings to equip their lives is equally great. It should be painful for any American to know that usable surplus is being thrown away in America.

It’s hard for almost anyone in the U.S. to imagine what living conditions are like in Haiti. In the U.S. the average house size is about 2,400 square feet, for the average household of 2.6 people. In Haiti the average house size is about 200 square feet, for an average household of about 7 people. That’s more than twice as many people living in a home less than one-tenth as big. You almost have to stop and read that again: more than twice as many people, living in a home less than one-tenth as big. As Americans, we are among the most fortunate people on earth. It’s not much to ask that we offer our used but still usable furnishings to those who are among the least fortunate.

Company C in Concord, NH makes and sells high-quality bedding, furniture, and fabrics. Its products are made in more than 20 countries and sold to customers in twice that many.

Company C’s warehouse is a buzz-saw. Trailers and containers from U.S. and international manufacturing plants are unloaded daily. Merchandise is unpacked, racked, unracked, and repacked. Trailers and less-than-truckload carriers are loaded and dispatched.

Eighteen months ago Company C’s waste program was as simple as a hauler could make it. There was a 10-cubic-yard open top container for trash and another 10-yard container for loose cardboard. Each container took up a space on Company C’s loading dock. Their hauler wouldn’t take their bottles and cans or their office paper. They didn’t track quantities, so Company C had no idea how much they were throwing away and they didn’t offer any alternatives.

In late 2008 Company C asked IRN to take a look, and what we saw was opportunity. Most of their wastes were three recyclable materials: cardboard, plastic sheeting, and woven polypropylene “burlap.” Quantities were large enough to justify a vertical baler. The rest of their wastes were divided between bottles and cans, office paper, and periodic quantities of electronics, metals, batteries, excess furniture, and other miscellaneous materials. All recyclable, and we could put them all on a truck along with bales of cardboard and plastic.

The pieces came together in mid-2009. In the first six months Company C reduced waste disposal by 88% (compared to the previous 6-month period); recycled more than 11 tons of baled cardboard and plastics; recycled about half a ton of office paper, bottles and cans; and reduced waste management costs by 59%. The baler cost about $16,000. Over a 20-year life, Company C’s return on this investment is close to 60%. No small achievement.

An environmental success story, and in tough economic times a meaningful addition to Company C’s bottom line. All that, for asking some simple questions about trash.