Robin's 35 Wedding Anniversary: A Memorable Insight (Holy Ghost Blog)

1. Will your unbaptised child burn in hell?

2. Will your uncertified laptop burn in Agbogbloshie?

The authorities certified my wedlock, and the authorities certify my reuse sales. Massive edifices of cathedrals were built on money from the paid certification of cemetaries, births, baptisms and marriages. 

Thirty five years is most of my adult life.  My partner is a Ph.D in francophone literature and director of the USA's most prestigious language institute. She also set up the Middlebury College language program semester in Yaounde, Cameroon (where I did my Peace Corps service from 6/1984-12/1986).  I'm enrolled in the Middlebury College Escuela de Espanol ahora mismo.  It's a small world.

When we were married in July 1990 in Toulouges, France (her parents Catalan hometown, outside of Perpignan) it was a long haul for a lot of Americans who attended, including my parents and my grandparents - Clarence and Lauradean Fisher of Ridgedale, Missouri.  Clarence is the inspiration for the chapter of Adam Minter's Secondhand - "A Rich Persons Broken Thing" - about the value repair can add. It was the thesis of  my international career, that knowledge to repair what someone else doesn't know how to repair is an honest economic tool, and the nations which exited poverty most quickly despite the "Resource Curse" were countries that repaired and refurbished and remanufactured at a mass scale.

But today's memorable insight from the wedding was another visitor from Columbia, Missouri, where I grew up until age of 5 (as my dad got his Ph.D in Mass Communications and Journalism).  I didn't know Pamela in Columbia, but met her in 1984 when we were both assigned to TEFL posts in the north of Cameroon (she was in the far north, Maroua, I was in the close north, Ngaoundal - 3 hours south of Ngaoundere by train. 

Pamela was my "best man".

So the anecdote from the wedding was about Pamela, an African American woman from Missouri, and her meeting my Mom, daughter of Clarence and Lauradean, who were all from Taney County Missouri.  And how much Pam and my Mom had in common from attending a Midwest/Southern American church.  Black church in the USA and Pentecostal Church from rural USA had a LOT in common.  Fire and brimstone, emphatic preachers, songs and clapping, interruptions of Hallelujah. From Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn we have a snapshot of the roots of these Churches....

"He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see. But it warn’t surprising; because he warn’t only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too, and had a little one-horse log church down back of the plantation, which he built it himself at his own expense, for a church and schoolhouse, and never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too. There was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South."

In particular, I remember my Mom and Pam both laughing about their earliest doubts about the church their parents were so intent on baptizing them into. In particular, the common practice of the "Holy Ghost" or "Holy Spirit" to inhabit the soul of a churchgoer who would rise, possessed, and speaking in tongues.

Mom and Pam both laughed about the same moments they asked themselves... "Of all the people in our congregation, why does God and the Holy Ghost always choose Mrs. Anderson to possess?  And why doesn't it ever 'possess; me or my parents??"

This was not a mustard seed of faith, this was the mustard seed of logic and reasonable doubt... and helps to explain why neither Pam (who also married a French citizen, Laurent, who also continued working in Africa for decades after they met during our PC service in Cameroun) nor my mother raised their own kids in a fire-and-brimstone church.

There's a pattern here, and it has a lot to do with E-Stewards and R2 Certification and the Charitable Industrial Complex - which this blog has always associated with temple of authority.

Environmentalist Spiritual Materialism vs. Cost Effective Circularity

This is a theme that - hopefully - runs deep in the tributaries and streams of consciousness throughout this blog... There is a limited amount of time and money to address the simultaneous and related emergencies of mass extinction, deforestation, climate change, toxic releases, and waste management. 

We will be judged, and should be, based on how our generation uses its limited resources as judiciously and economically as possible.  I started my environmental-spiritual aspirations with the premise that children yet to be born, whom I will never meet, and who will never know me, would judge all of us based on how we spend our time and resources, and whether we left them a better place, or a bigger mess.

Back when I was 17, I was thinking about how to direct my own career, spend my own life, as if I was personally going to be judged based on my own actions. Not that it was a bad place to start, but even then I was aware that my "shiny conscience" wouldn't matter much to a child born 500 years from now. If it did, I should have devoted myself to a Buddhist monastery, rather than to our society's collective resource conservation.

Let me propose that we will be judged, by future children or by the Singularity (AI), based on math... how much more sustainable was one rule or regulation over the free market. Primum non nocere - first, do no harm.

The Righteousness Trap: Do Ewaste Exports Pollute, or Empower, Africa?

The Righteousness Trap.

A problem recognized years ago comes into comically dramatic form in the Netflix Series "Tiger King". When megalomaniacs think their opinion is righteous, their followers and staff - and Big Cats and Export Markets - become collateral damage.

By Chris McAndrew - https://api.parliament.uk/Live/photo/bxXGHuLA.jpeg?crop=MCU_3:4&quality=80&download=trueGallery: https://beta.parliament.uk/media/bxXGHuLA, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67598764 Righteousness Trap

Lord Chris Smith [LCS] (Christopher Robert Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, PC, to be exact) inspired INTERPOL's Project Eden. He wanted to show he meant it, and demanded the prosecution of Joseph Benson. Over the course of Project Eden's 5 year mission, LCS ignored multiple studies that disproved his claim of "80%" waste dumping. He is not a bad human. He just got trapped.

He strives to be a righteous human. So righteous, in fact, that he gloried in others following him...

Into the Righteousness Trap.

The initial assumption - that Africans were coming to Europe to BUY Europe's worthless e-waste - paying thousands per container to prepare, ship, and clear it through customs - and then dumping 80% of it into a city landfill - was preposterous. There is no way that Lord Chris Smith or his team interviewed a single person in Africa's Tech Sector.  They had zero physical evidence of their public contention that 80% of these exports were for scrap.  They wallpapered announcements with photos of African children, and described African metal recycling community with words like "pawed at" and "primitive". To an experienced exporter and former Peace Corps volunteer like yours truly, Project Eden was fundamentally bigoted at the outset. 

Righteous environmentalists - like priests and ayatollahs - can become blinded by praise and pride. Unconscious of their institutional racism, they never checked whether junk in Agbogbloshie is decades older than what is being imported to Africa today. They never even took the most basic step - available in seconds via online World Bank data, to see how many millions of Ghana households had at least one TV set 15 years earlier, or to compute how many TVs would be "normally" in the junkyard.  They went directly to rewrite the rules to criminalize Joe Benson's business, and then spent five years making his life miserable and flagrantly declaring his guilt in the press.

Exports of functional and repairable electronics empowered Africans with the critical mass of users profoundly necessary since 1960 to support the infrastructure of electric grids, radio and TV broadcasts, internet cable, dedicated satellites, and mobile phone towers. If not but FOR #freejoebenson, Africa would not have been "EDEN", your holiness, any more than Joe Exotic was preserving tiger habitat. The control of the trade by one party is control of empowerment.

Do ewaste Exporters pollute Africa, or empower Africans?  

A handful of experts who knew next to nothing about Africa's Tech Sector, electric grid, mass communications, consumer demand, or scrap metal recycling sector were holding meetings and conferences with each other to write the rules for Africa. They decided their answer.

Dead Reckoning 5 : Inside the Risk Aversion Box (Jessica Olien / Slate)

Good article.   Bosses don't encourage underlings to think outside the box.  

 Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

Having dealt with it for years, I think it's a little more complex than a general native tendency, however. A large packet of society defers decisions (outsources) to a higher authority. Those authorities demand structure to order the size of the authority delegated to them, and tend to view "outliers" collectively as a threat to that order. The hostility to creativity is particularly intense when the question is "moral authority". In science, the "out of the box" thinker has scientific method and an option or hope to "prove" or "demonstrate" their alternative, creative, view. In religion, a creative morality is considered a threat but it's very difficult to demonstrate credibility with anything other than generations of experience (I did X, which the Priestatollah said not to, and no hair on my palms etc).

Cross culture is unfamiliar, by definition, and unfamiliar is risky.  People will tend to outsource authority, and authority will keep order by creating simple rules around things like culture, race, and language.

Where science is vulnerable is when a morality is attached. I'm not advocating for scientists to be immoral. But certain branches of science (e.g. Environmental) are susceptible to moral authority, which makes them more susceptible to Priestatollahs opposing creative thinking.

This is about risk aversion, cognitive risk, and perception of risks.   When a large group delegates authority, it doesn't need to know all the complicated stuff.   But when the complicated stuff is actually also over the head of the regulator (or moral regulator), the regulator feels risk of losing control or losing authority and tries to simplify.  

This is what is going on at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.  

The 2011 Cornell University paper is actually pretty short.

The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas

Jennifer S. Mueller - University of Pennsylvania

Shimul Melwani - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Jack A. Goncalo - Cornell University

Read the previous posts about our instinct to nurture, or externalized perceived risk.   Like Parents who think internet is dangerous, or dictators who think internet is dangerous, or E-Stewards who think trade with six billion people, in geographies as diverse as Lima, Penang, Soweto, Accra, Karachi, and Sonora, should be restricted via a simple moral rule (Basel Convention Amendment).

Memorial Day: Fear and Greed Part 1

The more I try to crystallize the issue in this blog, the more it is about trade and exchange between rich and poor.  The exchange is a value, and the fear of exploitation is a value.  Some make their value in the margins of exchanges they make, others make their money through their authority over those transactions.

Whether we draw two big circles on a map and call them "OECD and non-OECD", or seven circles for continents, or 193 nations, or circles which show cities and peasants in those countries, or draw lines within a city between the high property values and the ghettos, it's ultimately about the transfer of wealth and value.   When a rich man employs a poor man, or a poor man buys something from a rich person, or a daughter marries across an economic line, opinions and suspicions sharpen.

Is trade between wealthy and poor exploitation, or opportunity?  Who is the authority or referee?

Jim Puckett says in his interviews in CBS 60 Minutes and Frontline that the deck is stacked against the poor in any exchange.  The economic have-nots will be abused and worse off due to the trade of second hand goods.  This line of thinking has some friendly listeners in the "environmental justice" arena, and the anti-globalization movement of Seattle.

I was a critic of how the USA's most toxic industry - hard rock non-ferrous mining - moved to rain forests where no one complains about the cyanide, mercury, and other toxic runoff.  Those concerns brought me into the recycling field, in fact.  And here I am in a battle of wits with a fellow environmentalist over how our raw material policy should play out worldwide.

My concerns about hard rock mining, however, were never pinned on a false hope of economic segregation.  Boycotting and segregating people we are uncomfortable or uncertain about has led to many "trail of tears", and many burned bridges.  Doing the right thing means doing something, but it isn't to throw a garbage can through the collective window of the recycling industry.  Fair trade makes more sense, and is not something Basel Action Network should try to make people afraid of.

Tech, Toxics, and Ju-Ju:  Leverage fear, create authority

In his editorial response to my first widely published column, "We Shouldn't Have to Make that Choice" (reprinted in E-Scrap in 2009), Jim Puckett said that he didn't think Fair Trade meant "poisoning people".   Toxics is a scare word.  Jim was clearly trying to make people afraid of the economic exchange.   He tells people that replacing or upgrading a part is hazardous, toxic, polluting.  He knows he's wrong, he just doesn't recognize why he's doing it. It is not, as he claimed, about a "loophole" of reuse.  If it's resolved, his authority diminishes, and he's not ready to retire.

Create concern, especially visceral concern (photos of children).  Promote yourself as an authority to reduce this concern. Sell certification.   Profit!

You do not create "environmental justice" by creating a vacuum or boycott of trade.  Justice is, by definition, a judgement call, a negotiation, and a settlement.   You do not stop exploitation by labeling people and segregating them.