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.