Greetings, my friends
The recent seasonal glut of useless holy-days and material profligacy, coinciding as it did with the somewhat lacklustre conclusion of the great international conference upon climate change in Copenhagen, has prompted me to devote a few words to that ubiquitous topic of scientific and political debate of these latter days, viz. the threat posed by over-indulgence in immediate pleasures to the quality, and indeed to the very existence, of future life upon this planet.
It is not, I must confess, a subject which greatly exercised my mind when I was living—nor, I would add, the minds of any of my contemporaries. With the advantages of hindsight, one may perhaps say that it should have done. It was, after all, over the span of my lifetime that forces such as those of wind, fall of water and expansive power of steam began to be harnessed in the service of industry and manufacture upon a scale previously unimagined, and that improvements in agriculture and husbandry, founded upon practical experiment, began to encrease prodigiously the quantity of food which could be taken from an acre of land. We acknowledged the benefits of these novelties—we did not foresee the dangers they posed if relentlessly pursued to their natural conclusion. Indeed, on occasion, I argued for an encrease in the stock of instruments of mere enjoyment, on the grounds that, the richer a community, the better secured it is against hostility and famine. I did not envisage a day when that stock might grow to such proportions as to itself pose a threat to the community.
If I failed in my lifetime, however, to anticipate the environmental problems in germination, it does not follow that the rational principles I espoused are without relevance in addressing those problems now that they are grown to ghastly fruition. The fulcrum of my ideas was ever the principle of utility—the belief that a right and proper action is one that promotes the greatest happiness. I consistently endeavoured to apply this principle to the political questions of my day, but I did so with regard to the happiness of the greatest number of the living . In the matter of the environmental issues now upon the carpet, it is evident that the calculus should be extended to include the happiness of those yet to be born.
Important as this subject is, a hasty and an incompleat consideration is all that in this place can be allotted to it, because to sift it to the bottom would require a work on purpose. I shall therefore limit my remarks on this occasion to some observations upon the curious emphasis given, as a solution to the environmental ills of the world, to what is dubbed ‘recycling’. The word, indeed, is one which has become almost as ubiquitous as those other staples of the soi-disant environmental propagandist, ‘natural’, ‘organic’ and ‘sustainable’—and, to my eyes, has come to be almost as devoid of meaning.
The principle, mistake me not, is one that I wholeheartedly endorse. Indeed, it might be said that that the provisions I made in my will to have my own remains preserved as an Auto-Icon, and the wider proposals I drafted to turn the dead to the beneficial account of the living, constituted an argument for ‘recycling’: I have written of these on a former occasion. When I was planning my pauper industry-houses (a project which sadly never came to fruition), I contended that there was not any species of refuse, animal or vegetable, that had not its value—in the shape of manure at the worst—and so, I argued, it ought to be among the objects of regulation to take care that not the smallest portion of such refuse should ever be thrown away in waste, but all should be preserved, collected, and employ’d. The corresponding principle I named the No-waste principle, or the Refuse-employing principle, or the Save-all principle. I was, as I have stated, thinking principally of animal and vegetable waste, but it is self-evidently also true that the recovery of raw materials from disassembled and degraded manufactured articles will tend to require less effort, be less costly, and to consume less energy, than the harvesting of those same raw materials from their natural sources.
Nevertheless, a man need hardly be in possession of a higher degree in some abstruse branch of the physical sciences to comprehend that a far greater saving could be obtained by the re-use of such articles without disassembly; and a saving greater still by refraining from their manufacture at the outset.
Yet we (that is to say, you—I rest complacent in my conviction that the ‘carbon footprint’ I generate in my present habitation provides scant matter for public concern)—you are ceaselessly exhorted by the agents of government, in the public prints and elsewhere, to ‘recycle’ your discarded goods, as if that action alone will save the world from destruction. Scarcely ever are you encouraged to desist from purchasing those goods in the first place. On the contrary, for every public notice or advertisement urging ‘recycling’, a dozen advocate the purchase of the latest HD this or Blu-ray that, a Go-Go Hamster or a suite of tubular-steel kitchen chairs, with the implicit promise that it will transform your lives immeasurably for the better.
This state of affairs could be changed with a few strokes of the legislator’s pen, to introduce fiscal measures to foster the repair, restitution and re-use of old articles, rather than the purchase of new. The commencement of the new calendar year has seen the restoration of the rates of Value Added Tax to their accustomed levels, and it is perhaps an appropriate moment to consider the anomaly of the tax raised upon building work. At present, V.A.T. is levied on repair and maintenance work to standing buildings at the standard rate of 17½ per Cent; while the erection of new buildings is exempt from the tax. The outcome of this distinction is that, not infrequently, the owner of a decayed building finds it cheaper to raze the entire structure to the ground and build afresh, rather than to take more modest—and less wasteful—measures to repair the existing fabric. A campaign has been waged for several years to urge the Government to address this imbalance, but it has, so far, fallen upon deaf ears. As rubble and refuse from demolition accounts for some 17 per Cent of the national quantum of waste, the case is of no little significance; but similar fiscal changes could, in theory, be framed to lengthen the life of almost every article of your quotidian existence, from the furniture in your homes, and the stoves that heat them, to the motor vehicles you drive, and the computers on which you labour.
Why, then, is such legislation not introduced? The answer is clear. It is because the adoption of such policies, although they would without doubt benefit the future environment, might harm the economy of the nation, by reducing the market for freshly manufactured articles. The danger then is that men and women would be thrown out of employment, to face indigence or destitution. Such an outcome is by no means inevitable: the experience of those nations, such as France and Spain, that have encouraged the maintenance and repair of buildings though fiscal measures is that employment, and tax yield, have in fact risen. However, the fear is there, and the matter now becomes one of sinister interest: no administration, no administration-in-waiting, that has its eye upon the next election—be it a few weeks or a few years into the future—would willingly put its name to any measure that might lead to such pernicious consequences. A token action to reduce waste is undertaken, through the clarion call to ‘recycle’; while a blind eye is turned to greater and more destructive evils, viz. unnecessary construction, manufacture and purchase.
Ah, but, you may say, at least a token action is better than none—at least recycling can do no harm and may do more than a little good. On the contrary, I reply, if a man is encouraged to believe that he has performed his public and environmental duty by placing a few discarded newspapers or wine-bottles into the correctly-coloured plastic sack, and so is enabled with a clear conscience to set off to the Brent Cross Shopping Centre to purchase a new suit of clothes or X-box for which he has no real need, a greater harm results than if he had buried his rubbish in a hole in his garden, but then remained guilt-ridden at home.
Death gives one a sense of perspective, and it seems to me that you must begin to take a longer-term view of the ills of your society. The economic recession through which the world is currently passing may, by reducing demand for manufactured articles, have done more to prolong life on earth than any amount of recycling; but, if the green shoots of recovery are indeed now beginning to be seen, their tendrils may yet grow to exert a stranglehold upon mankind. The time for half-measures is past, and ‘recycling’ is nothing if not a half-measure.
I remain, your ever laborious and devoted servant,
J.B.
