Letter to Larry

Such a pessimist. You won't like hearing this but the solution is right there in front of you. The hotels clean up the garbage because a) their guests have been educated or conditioned not to want crap on the beach, and b) because they can afford to pay to have it done. When everybody in Fiji is as rich and educated as the customers in the hotels, all the beaches will be as clean as the ones in the hotels.

The rest of the solution is in the evolution of our consumerism. My tenant is moving out because I have evicted her and has moved her internet access account to her new address. So I have been shopping for a new provider, either cable or dsl. It will cost something but with the latest and greatest it will be worth it. How much material will I be consuming with it every month? The electronic boxes are small light and an afterthought. The same is true of cellphones and all the ringtones and mpg bullshit that goes with it. The television I got last year has only a fraction of the materials my television had ten years ago. Most of what I paid for is HD which is fancy electronics, not material, and for loser football teams like the 49'ers, which is arguably a service and not a product.

With the decline in the size and material content of our goods the resources needed to transport them will decline as well. We still have to find more efficient ways to transport our ever-burgeoning asses from continent to continent because tourism is a big consumption item among wealthy societies. Education and medical care are also ever bigger items among rich aging populations and neither is natural resource intensive.

In the long run the pressure on the environment comes from low-tech more than from high-tech. We have to get the fuckers (other fuckers) out of their (our) carbon-belching mobiles and into something small light, yes, plastic, and non carbon-emitting. The possible future that does not involve the collapse of the world economy and large scale starvation, is not to go from our current mix of low and high tech to no tech, but to get the whole damned world on the highest of high tech. With luck we should be able to replace the main hardships in human life, want and disease, with bad technical support and failed fashion risks by the end of the century.