#Distraction From Extraction #4: Negativity Bias in Affective Picture Processing

Another blog descended from a morning tweet. As the global poor emerge in modest economic power, the "elective upgrade" of secondhand goods will result in lower repair rates. There are billions more discarded flip flop shoes in African streets and gutters today than when I lived there 30 years ago. But that just means the raw materials are building up in countries with lower wages - which, like repair and reuse markets of decades ago, represents an OPPORTUNITY for Recycling.

Like the repair export trade, that starts with undoing false, biased, and stereotypical imagery. The opportunity here is for the extraction industries to fund the cleanup in the place it is cheapest to do so.

Robin I

@WR3A

Been researching, meditating on, blogging about, intellectually debating, dialectically testing, and discovering truths about reuse and repair since 1977.

Elective upgrade (buy a new broom, donate the old one) works when world population is growing unsustainably.

#extractiontax

Flashback to 2015.  WR3A issued a press release that Agbogbloshie was largely a "hoax" (as far as a significant percentage of waste there being dumped by rich countries, it being a "pristine fishing village" twenty years earlier, it ever having received a sea container, it being remotely significantly close to "largest e-waste dump", or the scrap sector workers there being remotely involved in anything but collecting scrap metal, or the burning waste being significantly electronics rather than automobile wire and tires, or separation of copper from aluminum "by hand" being less environmentally sustainable than Big Shred in OECD nations.... etc).

Reuse advocate calls Agbogbloshie ‘a hoax’

That 2015 resulted not only in an Op-Ed from the NGO describing me a denier and apologist, but a targeted GPS tracker delivered to a non-public location, hidden inside a $150 laser printer (another sold that week on ebay).  And readers may recall that a year after, I was named, my clients were named, and shamed, in the NGO and MIT collaborative "Monitour". 

Fortunately, thanks to the 2013 Fair Trade Recycling Grant project ($469K project involving Memorial University, University of Southern California, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Peru), and a wealth of World Bank and IMF data on the history of the electric grid in Ghana, the outcome was a documentary in defense of the Geeks of Color and three books confirming my hypothesis. (J Lepawsky, A Minter, J Goldstein)

The question remains, how did Michael "Fishing as a Boy" Anane ever attract PBS Frontline, INTERPOL, German photojournalists, UNEP, and 1990s glam rockers to hype up a local auto scrapyard in a random African City as being the biggest e-waste story on earth for the next 5 years? His very claim completely discredited him, and any background check revealed the newspaper he claimed to work for does not exist. I interviewed Anane in person on 2 occasions, and when asked the source of his information, he cited the discredited NGO that promoted him to "expert". Complete boondoggle. 

Did you know this is an African's universal power supply for lightboard backlight remanufacturing?

Or did you think it was "e-waste"? If so, why?

DistractionFromExtraction 3: It's what we eat, not what we poop

Restaurant Industry A sells Endangered Species Platter.

Restaurant Industry B sells beef cattle.

Restaurant Industry C sells shark fin soup.

Restaurant Industry D sells foix gras and veal cutlet.

Restaurant Industry E sells organic beets.

Restaurant Industry F sells termite soup.

I like termites. They are a great source of sustainable protein, and they clear dead plant matter from forest and fawna. But I don't want them in the walls and basement of my house. The point being, I don't care about their excrement, I care about their source of consumption.

...

Imagine those restaurant industries form a Restaurant Industry lobby.  And now activist environmentalists have journalists asking about the ethics on the menu...

Suddenly the industry lobby funds a massive campaign for restaurant consumers to properly manage their poop the day after they paid for the meal.  And a crying Indian ad surfaces to show just how badly some consumers manage their poop.

#DistractionFromExtraction 2: It's The Extraction. Period.

We should be judged by future generations.

And we will be. I live in a kind of skin and mentality that puts me in front of those to-be great-great-grandchildren, who will read about us, watch documentaries about us, and talk about what we did here on earth, during our lives.

Let us not be bad ancestors 

A super intelligence knows that every page and word in a book exists at once. The current page, occupied by the Anthropocenes (A. Minter, 2016, "How We Think About Recycling Is In Need of Repair"), is behaving as if future generations won't matter, that pages of extinction, ocean pollution, warming will be somehow made up for by the relative increase in wealth in emerging markets (#Gapminder). That has merits, but only if everybody learns to respect science, and learns to care.

Relative intelligence unites conservatives and liberals, and puts conservation back into "Conserve"-ative, and non-cancelling liberal thought back into "Liberal". Example - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-fascinating-second-lives-of-stuff/

Tralfamadore

#DistractionFromExtraction - Don't Fall For the Pose, @GUARDIANECO

(original title "Why EPA Laws Revolve Around You, not Nature")

Why the blog is moving increasingly to Twitter.

#DISTRACTIONFROMEXTRACTION

#DON'TFALLFORTHEPOSE

#CIRCULARECONOMYDOESNTREVOLVEAROUNDYOU

It forces me to distill important thoughts to faster messages.

My most "important thoughts" are dissecting "narratives" into actual facts, opinions, and (yeesh) group-think. Hopefully the tweets attract the attention of people (swordfish) actually capable of reading and understanding articles like "Time Out of Mined" (when I take an important blog or two and find a Resource Recycling or Recycling Today editor to help me polish it to the point where the editor at least understands "the good point" idea).

Ironically, The American Conservative writer Addison Del Mastro gets it.