scholarly journals Recycling as a Crisis of Meaning

eTopia ◽  
2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Liboiron
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Industrial Processes ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Cutting Out ◽  
Good For ◽  
Crisis Of Meaning ◽  
Environmentally Sound ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Primary Unit

In laymen’s terms, recycling is “good for the environment.” It involves “doing your bit” to help “save the Earth.” Yet, recycling requires high expenditures of energy and virgin materials, and produces pollutants, greenhouse gases and waste; it creates products that are “down-cycled” because they are not as robust as their predecessors, nor are such products usually recyclable themselves. Of the fifteen to thirty percent of recyclables that are retrieved from the waste stream, “almost half” are buried or burned due to contamination or market fluctuations that devalue recyclables over virgin materials (McDonough and Braungart, 56-60; Rogers, 176-179; Luke, 115-135; Rathje, 203-7;MacBride; Ackerman; EPA; Grassroots Recycling Network, Taxpayers for CommonSense, Materials Efficiency Project and Friends of the Earth). Furthermore, recycling infrastructure creates a framework where disposables become naturalized commodities instead of allowing practices of waste redesign, reduction or elimination. How is the schism between the popular perception of recycling as “good for the environment” and its less environmentally sound industrial processes maintained? By critiquing the visual culture of recycling campaigns, I argue that the meaning of recycling has been decontextualized, narrowed, and naturalized, thus functioning as a commodity sign.That is, recycling has been “abstracted from [its] context and then reframed in terms of the assumptions and interpretive rules of the advertising framework” through which it is promoted (Goldman, 5). I identify three main characteristics of the recycling commodity-sign. First, the individual, rather than government or industry, is represented as the primary unit of social change. Secondly, recycling is depicted as an act that ends at the blue bins, cutting out the industrial side of the cycle. Finally, recycling is symbolized as something that benefits the environment “in general” rather than as a specific form of waste management. Overall, I argue that recycling, instead of being a solution to environmental or waste crises, in fact constitutes a crisis of meaning that allows environmental degradation and derisory waste practices to continue.

Geographical aspects of the diffusion of passive houses

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Kozma ◽  
E. Molnár ◽  
K. Czimre ◽  
J. Pénzes
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Renewable Energy Resources ◽  
Passive House ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Passive Houses ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Geographical Locations ◽  
Over Time

Abstract In our days, energy issues belong to the most important problems facing the Earth and the solution may be expected partly from decreasing the amount of the energy used and partly from the increased utilisation of renewable energy resources. A substantial part of energy consumption is related to buildings and includes, inter alia, the use for cooling/heating, lighting and cooking purposes. In the view of the above, special attention has been paid to minimising the energy consumption of buildings since the late 1980s. Within the framework of that, the passive house was created, a building in which the thermal comfort can be achieved solely by postheating or postcooling of the fresh air mass without a need for recirculated air. The aim of the paper is to study the changes in the construction of passive houses over time. In addition, the differences between the geographical locations and the observable peculiarities with regard to the individual building types are also presented.

Individualism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serene J. Khader
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
Gender Division Of Labor ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
Transition Costs ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Ideological Assumptions

This chapter argues that independence individualism, a form of individualism that is the object of decolonial feminist critique, is conceptually unnecessary for feminism, and in fact undermines transnational feminist praxis. Opposition to sexist oppression does not logically entail individualism. Adopting the specific form of individualism called “independence individualism,” which holds that individuals should be economically self-sufficient and that only chosen relationships are valuable is likely to worsen the gender division of labor and obscure the transition costs of feminist change. The perceived relationship between independence individualism and feminism is traceable to ideological assumptions that associate capitalism with liberation from tradition, and tradition with patriarchy. The concept of independence individualism is arrived at by examining the justificatory discourses behind ostensibly feminist policies that proclaim the value of the individual person while harming “other” women.

Living within Limits

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrett Hardin
Keyword(s):  
Population Control ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Population Problem ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Garrett Hardin ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Free Flow Of Information ◽  
Flow Of Information ◽  
Original Thinker

We fail to mandate economic sanity, writes Garrett Hardin, "because our brains are addled by...compassion." With such startling assertions, Hardin has cut a swathe through the field of ecology for decades, winning a reputation as a fearless and original thinker. A prominent biologist, ecological philosopher, and keen student of human population control, Hardin now offers the finest summation of his work to date, with an eloquent argument for accepting the limits of the earth's resources--and the hard choices we must make to live within them. In Living Within Limits, Hardin focuses on the neglected problem of overpopulation, making a forceful case for dramatically changing the way we live in and manage our world. Our world itself, he writes, is in the dilemma of the lifeboat: it can only hold a certain number of people before it sinks--not everyone can be saved. The old idea of progress and limitless growth misses the point that the earth (and each part of it) has a limited carrying capacity; sentimentality should not cloud our ability to take necessary steps to limit population. But Hardin refutes the notion that goodwill and voluntary restraints will be enough. Instead, nations where population is growing must suffer the consequences alone. Too often, he writes, we operate on the faulty principle of shared costs matched with private profits. In Hardin's famous essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," he showed how a village common pasture suffers from overgrazing because each villager puts as many cattle on it as possible--since the costs of grazing are shared by everyone, but the profits go to the individual. The metaphor applies to global ecology, he argues, making a powerful case for closed borders and an end to immigration from poor nations to rich ones. "The production of human beings is the result of very localized human actions; corrective action must be local....Globalizing the 'population problem' would only ensure that it would never be solved." Hardin does not shrink from the startling implications of his argument, as he criticizes the shipment of food to overpopulated regions and asserts that coercion in population control is inevitable. But he also proposes a free flow of information across boundaries, to allow each state to help itself. "The time-honored practice of pollute and move on is no longer acceptable," Hardin tells us. We now fill the globe, and we have no where else to go. In this powerful book, one of our leading ecological philosophers points out the hard choices we must make--and the solutions we have been afraid to consider.

scholarly journals Children’s Astronomy. Development of the Shape of the Earth Concept in Polish Children between 5 and 10 Years of Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Jan Amos Jelinek
Keyword(s):  
Mental Model ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Test Results ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Spherical Earth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
High Level ◽  
Cognitive Problems ◽  
Teaching Situations ◽  
Model Approach

The Earth’s shape concept develops as consecutive cognitive problems (e.g., the location of people and trees on the spherical Earth) are gradually resolved. Establishing the order of problem solving may be important for the organisation of teaching situations. This study attempted to determine the sequence of problems to be resolved based on tasks included in the EARTH2 test. The study covered a group of 444 children between 5 and 10 years of age. It captured the order in which children solve cognitive problems on the way to constructing a science-like concept. The test results were compared with previous studies. The importance of cultural influences connected to significant differences (24%) in test results was emphasised. Attention was drawn to the problem of the consistency of the mental model approach highlighted in the literature. The analysis of the individual sets of answers provided a high level of consistency of indications referring to the same model (36%), emphasising the importance of the concept of mental models.

An Opinion on the Assessment of People Who May Have an Auditory Processing Disorder

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (02) ◽  
pp. 097-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harvey Dillon ◽  
Sharon Cameron ◽  
Helen Glyde ◽  
Wayne Wilson ◽  
Dani Tomlin
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Auditory Processing ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Test Battery ◽  
Auditory Processing Disorder ◽  
Test Results ◽  
Hierarchical Approach ◽  
Clinical Efficiency ◽  
Impaired Ability ◽  
The Individual

We need to rethink how we assess auditory processing disorder (APD). The current use of test batteries, while necessary and well accepted, is at risk of failing as the size of these batteries increases. To counter the statistical, fatigue, and clinical efficiency problems of large test batteries, we propose a hierarchical approach to APD assessment. This begins with an overall test of listening difficulty in which performance is measurably affected for anyone with an impaired ability to understand speech in difficult listening conditions. It proceeds with a master test battery containing a small number of single tests, each of which assesses a different group of skills necessary for understanding speech in difficult listening conditions. It ends with a detailed test battery, where the individual tests administered from this battery are only those that differentiate the skills assessed by the failed test(s) from the master test battery, so that the specific form of APD can be diagnosed. An example of how hierarchical interpretation of test results could be performed is illustrated using the Listening in Spatialized Noise—Sentences test (LiSN-S). Although consideration of what abilities fall within the realm of auditory processing should remain an important issue for research, we argue that patients will be best served by focusing on whether they have difficulty understanding speech, identifying the specific characteristics of this difficulty, and specifically remediating and/or managing those characteristics.

Development of Web-based Technology for Environmental Engineering Education System

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 04-05
Author(s):  
Procopio Cocci
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Education ◽  
Education System ◽  
Environmental Engineering ◽  
Web Based ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Training Mode ◽  
Natural Information ◽  
Good For ◽  
Ecological Building

The objective of the ecological building instruction ought not just train understudies' natural information, the more significant thing is that it prepares understudies' natural ethics and structures the conduct which is good for the earth, and these must be shaped by training, in actuality. In the customary showing model of training, one instructor can just guide one practice simultaneously. With the improvement of organization innovation, instructor can control the distinctive practice exercises firing up in various areas or in various occasions by network. In light of the incorporation of viable need and intuitive qualities of condition instruction, the creator set forward an online domain training mode named "practice-intelligent partake in". The Core of this mode is to prepare understudies' natural ethics by training and to understand educators' guidance through organization.

Return to the Earth —It's Good for You!

1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (8) ◽  
pp. 365-365
Author(s):  
Harold D. Cardwell
Keyword(s):  
The Earth ◽  
Good For

scholarly journals Aging Human Populations: Good for Us, Good for the Earth

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (11) ◽  
pp. 851-862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Götmark ◽  
Philip Cafaro ◽  
Jane O’Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Human Populations ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Good For

Is natural openness or trade policy good for the environment?

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 657-684 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Yamarik ◽  
Sucharita Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Trade Policy ◽  
Factor Endowment ◽  
Trade And Environment ◽  
Population Geography ◽  
Limited Impact ◽  
Individual Effects ◽  
Good For ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Trade Share

AbstractIn this paper, we estimate the individual effects of natural openness and trade policy on air pollution. Natural openness is the component of the trade share (imports and exports as a percentage of GDP) attributable to population, geography and factor endowment differences. We find that natural openness reduces air pollution, while trade policy has a limited impact. The implication is that ‘natural’ geographic and endowment differences play a more important role than deliberate trade policy decisions in explaining the trade and environment link.

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