It's so hard
doing the right thing and even then it could be wrong.
ECOLOGIC
Brian Clegg
Eden Project Books, $34.99, pbk
Review by Clive Trotman
Own-label products at the supermarket are boringly packaged
to save money and make them cheaper, right? Wrong.
The unattractive packages are intended to dissuade customers
from buying them.
Why would they do that? To nudge customers into buying the
same thing with attractive packaging, expensively advertised
for a higher profit margin.
So if you really have some discretionary spending you might
as well pay a little extra still and buy "fair trade" goods.
The extra goes to impoverished villages in developing
countries, helping them to become little businesses, doesn't
it? Well, not exactly.
The supermarket views "fair trade" as a premium brand concept
and may pocket most of the extra price.
Oh well, your money's doing some good, because at least "fair
trade" crops are environmentally friendly, surely? Sorry,
wrong again.
The forest clearance for a village operation might be much
greater proportionately than large-scale intensive
agriculture.
That's how this book reads.
Page after page challenges one's cosy view of the simplistic
balance between vested interests and the environment.
Recycling is one of the many topics to be torn apart.
The reality is that much recycling is of dubious worth but
politically promoted as an attack on the bogey of big
business.
Glass and aluminium are sometimes marginally worth the effort
and costs, if the effort is provided free-of-charge by
ratepayers and the costs are taken from them by dictatorial
councils.
A visit to a smelter or a paper mill speaks volumes as to why
recycling is a tolerated nuisance.
Glass maybe, for the lower grades, yet a huge amount is not
recycled in the sense of being moulded back into bottles, so
new disposal methods are being sought such as crushing for
road fill.
The environmental costs of trucking salvage hundreds of
kilometres, or shipping our problems to distant countries,
are conveniently omitted from the equation.
Unsurprisingly, many households simply put the rubbish in the
rubbish.
The author wades into some of the contradictions of organic
food (leaving aside the scientific absurdity of the name).
Apparently, crops labelled "organic" may legitimately have
been treated with chemicals as toxic as copper sulphate
fungicide, whereas potassium chloride - good for fruiting -
is banned (it's much the same as table salt).
More subtly, it turns out that repetitive mechanical weeding
wastes fuel and disturbs the soil to speed the release of
greenhouse gases.
Brian Clegg's thought-provoking book is not about taking
sides, but about learning to weigh up all the evidence
objectively.
The knee-jerk response may well not stand scrutiny.
Why waste energy importing tomatoes? Well, it just may cost
more energy to grow them locally in heated greenhouses than
to import them from where they grow in the open.
Why not ban the ubiquitous supermarket bag? Because it's been
tried.
They are widely recycled as domestic waste bags, but without
them, people buy heavier-gauge plastic bags.
And so on.
Now, about global warming . . .
- Clive Trotman is a Dunedin science writer and technical
arbitrator.
