Want to Save the World? Sustain This

PUBLISHED JULY 6, 2023

Another one of those stop-the-world moments that make so many rational people want to get off: In researching a feature on commercial real estate that ran in last month’s issue, I stepped into a puddle of eco-babble that I simply was not expecting, and still can’t comprehend.

Turns out, one of those pricey new luxury apartment complexes we see everywhere these days was offering website guidance to prospective tenants on how to fully engage in the sustainable lifestyles their site was promoting. In addition to hectoring people about in-apartment composting (the smell will no doubt go over well with dinner/movie dates) and making your own body butter—there’s such a thing?—or shampoo, since we all have so much time on our hands, I came across this little gem:

“Living without waste means not producing trash in the first place. And you can do this by avoiding new purchases.”

If there’s a greater testament to the civilizational decline that will bring down a nation built on free enterprise, risk-taking, and capitalism itself, I can’t think of it.

Avoiding. New. Purchases.

Who knew it was just that easy?

Look, there’s plenty to be said in favor of sustainability. But here’s a little knowledge bomb to drop on those whose environmental fervor is tinged with moral panic: Capitalist countries practice it a whole lot better than the socialist paradises like modern-day China and Cuba or the Third World misery of a Chad or Congo.

The fact is, half a century after the first Earth Day, the air and water quality in the U.S. has improved dramatically. We’re not perfect, but we’re getting better all the time. With the exception of a few choice neighborhoods in the urban core—litter and gun smoke seem to be a popular lifestyle combo there—we’re pretty good about keeping the place clean. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone like Iron Eyes Cody on the side of a highway, crying over a sack of garbage tossed at his feet.

An outfit called Resources for the Future noted on the 50^th anniversary of the Clean Air Act that  “despite the quadrupling of the gross domestic product since 1970, air quality across the United States has improved substantially . . . [atmospheric concentration of] fine particles declined 41 percent since 2000, ozone fell 32 percent since 1980, and lead decreased 99 percent since 1970.”

A couple of years before that report, researchers at California-Berkeley and Iowa State University analyzed data from 50 million water-quality measurements collected at 240,000 monitoring sites throughout the U.S. between 1962 and 2001. Their findings? Most of 25 water-pollution measures showed improvement. Dissolved oxygen concentrations were up; fecal coliform bacteria counts were down, and the share of rivers deemed safe for fishing increased by 12 percent between 1972 and 2001.

Tree cover, you ask? Well, says the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, forest growth in the United States has surpassed harvest for nearly a century. By 1998, tree growth exceeded harvest by 43 percent, and the forest cover was 380 percent more than it had been in the 1920s, the FAO declared.

Being environmentally conscious is a good thing. Being an obsessive nutcake won’t move the needle.

And, to get back where we started, I’m going to suggest that there is nothing “sustainable” about paying $2,600 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in Kansas City, America. That’s pushing $2 a square foot, by the way, almost what you can expect to pay for the average flat in New Jersey. Even with the run-up in home values, even with the spike in interest rates, you can still get into a decent three-bedroom house today—with a yard to do your composting—for a third less than that.

So be earth-friendly, yes. But don’t get carried away with it. In the final analysis, a zero-waste environment, which is unattainable on its face, implies zero need for trash trucks. Or trash truck drivers. Or the guys running along behind them for block after block. Which is OK, I guess, if we’re going to embrace the ethos of those who see nothing but environmental disaster being imposed on the world by “dirty” industries. You know, the same types who glibly suggest that the trash haulers learn how to code.

Which ties into other current events of note: Amazon, Netflix, Meta, and Lyft are just a few of the big players who kicked nearly 160,000 tech workers off their payrolls in the first quarter of 2023.

Maybe those coders should learn how to sling trash bins . . .