(no subject)

I was working on my paper earlier tonight when I wandered over to my bed and fell asleep for half an hour or so. I woke up, got a bite to eat, and went back to bed, where I've lain, sleepless, for half an hour. I guess that means I'm going back to working on my paper.

I'm really hoping to be close enough to another draft by the end of tomorrow that I can use Sunday to work on other school stuff and relax a bit. It looks like some members of my panel may be getting together for a writing session next weekend; that's a positive thing.

Sustainability musings

Elaborating on a comment I made to cmcmck:

Thinking more about this kind of thing lately, I've been pondering the thought of the choice to purchase more sustainably and ethically produced goods as a choice that comes from a position of privilege.

I want to say that everyone should be buying ethically sourced, ethically produced, etc. products. But being able to do so is something of a privileged position. Money is finite. I'm on a limited budget, and there are many people in worse financial condition than I am, who have to choose between things like decent food and rent, or medicines. People need to be personally sustainable (that is, fulfill their responsibilities to meeting their environmental, financial, and social needs) too!

These are tough issues. In my personal benevolent dictatorship, I would mandate as near to full accounting of costs in these arenas as possible and make producers responsible for the issues they create. Everything would cost more money, and people might have to make do with less. But people are pretty adaptable, and I suspect that systems would have evolved to try to take care of people who don't have the means to provide for themselves, just as there are systems in place now that (very, very imperfectly) do just that.

But right now, when cheap, unsustainable products are out there and available, I don't think I have the right to tell anyone else how to balance the myriad factors involved in making purchasing decisions that are personally responsible and responsible to their families, as well as to the world at large. The world is so complicated.

But I do think it's important to at least make people aware of this kind of thing so they can make a fully informed decision. And I also would support government policy that forces great corporate and business accountability, and that thereby produces higher costs in the retail market in general. But that would force consumers to spend more money. Is that contradictory? Is it applying institutional-level force toward buyers in the same way that I object to at a personal level? Maybe to some degree. But I also feel that requiring something like that from *everyone* is more fair than calling out individual people for some perceived failing in their ethics.