numbers

Paul Kingsnorth:

The impacts of a society predicated on boundless economic growth via boundless sensory stimulation are at least in some ways measurable. Visit this website, for example, and you can see a real-time counter which will tell you just how much waste has been dumped around the world this year as a result of this way of living. At the time of writing, the counter is reading 1.4 billion tonnes. It’s only September.

We can enjoy our little towns here in the richer bits of the world because the waste we generate through our excitable purchases of big-screen tellies, lego sets, foreign holidays, cheap clothes, cheap food and all the rest of it always ends up somewhere else. The dioxins and PCBs go into the water and soil, the plastic goes into the oceans, the carbon dioxide goes into the air. Fifty million tonnes of ‘e-waste’ is shipped every year to the poorest countries on Earth, which are least equipped to deal with it. But then they’re not really supposed to deal with it: they’re supposed to keep it away from us. We don’t know what else to do with all this crap, so we — for example — ship 4000 tonnes of toxic waste, containing carcinogenic chemicals, to Nigeria, and just dump it on the beaches. The same way we dumped 79,000 tonnes of asbestos on the beaches in Bangladesh, and 40 million tonnes of our poisonous waste in just one small part of Indonesia. The same way we run our old ships up onto the beaches in China and India, and leave them for the locals to break up — if they can. The same way we dump nine million tonnes of plastic into the oceans every year.

I unequivocally support the point Kingsnorth is making here, but … I really dislike this kind of numerically bludgeoning rhetoric. The problem, as so often, involves scale. One point four billion metric tons of waste is obviously a lot … but is it, you know, a lot? How even to think about these matters? Wolfram Alpha tells me that the earth weighs 5.97×10^21 metric tons; in comparison to that 1.4 billion isn’t even a rounding error. The mind boggles at these digits, does it not?

What would be a reasonable amount of waste for seven billion people to produce, an amount that would indicate ecologically appropriate living? Whatever the answer is, any number expressing it would still seem massive to us. If you cited it readers would be horrified. Or maybe just numbed, as they are by these numbers.

Richard Wilbur was right to warn his imagined prophet against invoking “the long numbers that rocket the mind.” Similarly, Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito reflects on the ways our attention is naturally drawn to smaller rather than larger tragedies — this, he thinks, is the inevitable, the human, “arithmetic of compassion.” A few photographs would serve Kingsnorth’s point better than the incomprehensible numbers he cites.