You're right that survival isn't driving the fledgling corporate sustainability trend, but profits really are. Cradle to Cradle describes over a dozen companies who worked with McDonough and Braungart to develop sustainable products and services that are all profitable, and in many cases are more profitable than traditional cradle-to-grave style products. From these companies' point of view, the survival/green aspect is a good marketing strategy, but that's about it. They're only really interested in upcycling for its profitability.
You might be surprised by the book. McDonough and Braungart aren't doomsday environmentalist types, but fall much more on the industry end of the spectrum, arguing that industry and the economy are just as important as the environment. Their point is simply that it's in industry's best interest to promote upcycling and green design.
And one nice thing about upcycling (McDonough & Braungart strongly object to current recycling models) plastic is that it frees companies from the variability of the oil market. Having a ready supply of pure and perpetually reusable plastics will help keep product costs down -- the grandparent can't possibly be suggesting that pumping from deep oceans or making bacteria produce plastic will be more efficient than melting and remolding pure, ready to use existing plastics. The key is just ceasing to churn out tainted plastics like PVC and turning instead to a model using purer technological ingredients from the start.
I had the opportunity to talk with McDonough at a design conference last year, and he pointed out that plastic futures were steadily rising. I don't know if that's still true, and I'm too lazy to check now, but regardless companies are going to be looking for steady plastics supplies, and upcycling makes the most economic sense.
Really? Maybe that depends on where you live and the health of your local city. Where I live, the suburbs are certainly seen as white (and are looked down on as deathly boring and bland by everyone except the overprotective soccer-moms who flock to them). But the city itself is seen as very diverse (and diversity encompasses white people, too, you know). There are predominantly black areas, and predominately immigrant areas, and predominantly old Italian areas, but for the most part everyone is all mixed up. It's rather nice. You might want to actually visit a city sometime; you'd probably be pleasantly surprised.
And regarding the grandparent's point, if I were deciding between two similarly qualified applicants for a job, I would certainly look much more favorably on the candidate who grew up in an urban area surrounded with people who have a wide range of different values and beliefs and backgrounds than on the candidate who grew up in a pretty little subdivision surrounded by lots of identical middle to upper-middle class families with 2.5 kids. Clearly I'm a bit biased and suburban dwellers are a bit more diverse than I'm depicting them to be, but there is nowhere near the diversity (in race, ethnicity, religion or lack thereof, age, and most especially class) in suburbs as you will find in a city. There's more to doing (most) jobs effectively than sheer number of degrees or your ability to write solid code (or whatever). The abilities to communicate with different types of people, to understand what different types of people want in a product, and to think creatively are pretty useful skills, too, if harder to quantitatively measure.
And I think you might be underestimating them. I visit a couple of game bbses whose users include a lot of fairly computer-clueless twelve year olds (clueless as in "RAM? I have more than enough RAM to play this game. 80 GB, to be exact"). And yet when you ask them, the majority of these kids are already using Firefox. They've picked up from their friends at school or from more knowledgeable users on various bbses that IE is the reason their computer keeps getting infected with spyware and slowing to a crawl, and that Firefox will let them spend more time using their computer and less running cleanup utilities. And they're wonderfully matter of fact when they talk about it -- of course they use Firefox. They're not idiots, are they?
I realize that these kids aren't representative of all computer users (if nothing else, it's a lot easier to reeducate kids than their parents...), but I think there is a reasonably widespread growing distrust of IE. I do agree, though, that if the new version of IE is more secure there will be far fewer immediately recognizable benefits of switching to Firefox, so next year's twelve year olds will likely just use the browser pre-installed on their new computer.
I fail to see how slapping the word 'marriage' onto same-sex unions can benefit anyone. It's a mostly religious term, and, as a matter of simple linguistic household, shouldn't be redefined willy-nilly. I don't run around redefining words such as strong, courageous, friend, priest, bigot, nature, nurture, science, coward, cowboy, soldier, or king based on whether or not I want those words to apply to me.
No one is proposing to redefine marriage along the lines you suggest. To use one of your examples, we're not saying "listen, everyone, now 'cowboy' is a verb meaning 'to arrange festive floral bouquets," we're saying "let's expand the definition of 'cowboy' to also include women who herd cows and men and women who herd water buffalo, llamas, and other large meat-producing grazing animals." Languages aren't static; this type of shift happens all of the time, even if an interested group isn't pushing for the change. As numerous other posts have mentioned, 'marriage' at various times has meant a legal and/or religious bond between a white man and a white woman, a legal and/or religious bond between a man and a woman of the same race, and a legal and/or religious bond between a man and a woman of any race. Proposing that the concept be expanded to include a legal and/or religious bond between two adults of any race or sex isn't that much of a stretch. And humans are rather clever creatures who adapt to small changes like this very easily; expanding the definition of words isn't going to make us suddenly unable to communicate.
I would have wished that the more vocal people among the gay would have the courage to choose their own words...
The problem with this suggestion is that marriage isn't just a religious institution, but a legal and social one. Telling someone "I'm married" communicates a commitment to one partner, a status as a responsible adult within the wider community, a recognition by the government, and possibly a recognition by a religion. Telling someone "I'm unionized" or whatever would communicate only governmental recognition; the social recognition conferred by the word "marriage" would be entirely lacking. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on marriage and won't as long as people can be married without religious blessing in governmental offices. But note that no one is stating that your particular religion must include gays in its marriage ceremonies. We're just asking that your particular religion's understanding of marriage doesn't dictate either the government's or other religions' understanding of it.
No, an idol is by definition any god that isn't God (the one whose name appears in little capitalized letters in every Bible). The golden calf was an idol, but so were Baal and Asherah (the god and goddess of two other local religions). So even if we were literally worshipping all crucifixes, that wouldn't be idol worship, since they're representations of the "correct" god. If we were to declare that one particular crucifix was unique and especially holy, though, and started to worship it rather than what it represented, that would be elevating it to the level of a (new) god and would be idol worship.
And if you read what I wrote previously, I think you'd realize that I do not believe every word of the Bible to be literal truth. I agree that it's been changed over history, and that even just reading different translations can give you a completely different understanding as to what's an abomination and what isn't. I was simply arguing based on the assumption that it all is truth, though, because that's what conservative Christians do. Saying "the Bible is inconsistent and irrelevant" is easy for them to dismiss, but using it to support one's own views might get them thinking. But perhaps I'm just overly optimistic.
...part of faith is the idea that there are some things whose correctness is established by God, and not subject to my review or approval. When my conscience interferes with my faith (as it does here), I believe that my conscience is malformed.
I'm a Catholic too, and, for what it's worth, I have a completely different response when my conscience differs with what you refer to as "faith," but what I would just call the Church's teachings. Personally I find faith to be a lot bigger than either the Bible or the Church and not nearly so dependent on humans with human prejudices. I'm not trying to write off the importance of the Church's collected wisdom -- I love the Church's age and ritual and commitment to its beliefs (even when I disagree with them) and efforts to make the world a better place. I simply acknowledge that humans are fallible, even those who devote themselves to a lifetime of service to God, and I feel strongly that the oft repeated statement that homosexuality is a sin is one of these mistakes.
I started reading the Bible this Lent. Admittedly I'm only up to 1 Chronicles (I'm a slow reader; so kill me), but so far I have only read one explicitly antigay verse (and one calling the wearing of women's clothing by men to be an abomination, if you want to count anti-transgendered verses, too) and a couple of hundred forbidding the worship of idols. Even if God inspired every single word in the Bible, clearly he's more interested in preventing idol worship than in condemning gays. I realize that there aren't millions of idol worshipers running around today for the Church to vent its righteous fury on, but I fail to understand why this one lonely little verse, and the one other I know of in Paul's letters, makes gays the enemy of God. If we were to go by a simple count of words devoted to each abomination, eating pork is far worse in God's eyes than sleeping with someone of the same sex -- so why does the Church act like those in favor of gay marriage are seeking to destroy all morality?
I don't know. Maybe I'm just upset that if I were to fall in love with a woman and want to marry her in my church, it would be forbidden, whereas I could marry any unmarried non-blood-related man there for any frivolous reason I chose without a word of objection from anyone. Your commitment to your faith and the Church leads you to oppose any change to its current marriage rules; my commitment to my faith and the Church envelopes me in a constant struggle, because I know the Church only values me so long as I toe its silly homophobic line. So I do agree with you that civil and religious marriages should be established as separate institutions, but I hope that someday the Church will take a good look at its teachings and decide to extend the sacrament of marriage to gay partitioners, too. Civil marriage is obviously a more pressing issue for the majority of gays, but having part of yourself perpetually denied by your religion can be as bad as lacking all of the rights granted by civil marriage.
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You're right that survival isn't driving the fledgling corporate sustainability trend, but profits really are. Cradle to Cradle describes over a dozen companies who worked with McDonough and Braungart to develop sustainable products and services that are all profitable, and in many cases are more profitable than traditional cradle-to-grave style products. From these companies' point of view, the survival/green aspect is a good marketing strategy, but that's about it. They're only really interested in upcycling for its profitability.
You might be surprised by the book. McDonough and Braungart aren't doomsday environmentalist types, but fall much more on the industry end of the spectrum, arguing that industry and the economy are just as important as the environment. Their point is simply that it's in industry's best interest to promote upcycling and green design.
And one nice thing about upcycling (McDonough & Braungart strongly object to current recycling models) plastic is that it frees companies from the variability of the oil market. Having a ready supply of pure and perpetually reusable plastics will help keep product costs down -- the grandparent can't possibly be suggesting that pumping from deep oceans or making bacteria produce plastic will be more efficient than melting and remolding pure, ready to use existing plastics. The key is just ceasing to churn out tainted plastics like PVC and turning instead to a model using purer technological ingredients from the start.
I had the opportunity to talk with McDonough at a design conference last year, and he pointed out that plastic futures were steadily rising. I don't know if that's still true, and I'm too lazy to check now, but regardless companies are going to be looking for steady plastics supplies, and upcycling makes the most economic sense.
Isn't "urban" a whitey code word for "black"?
Really? Maybe that depends on where you live and the health of your local city. Where I live, the suburbs are certainly seen as white (and are looked down on as deathly boring and bland by everyone except the overprotective soccer-moms who flock to them). But the city itself is seen as very diverse (and diversity encompasses white people, too, you know). There are predominantly black areas, and predominately immigrant areas, and predominantly old Italian areas, but for the most part everyone is all mixed up. It's rather nice. You might want to actually visit a city sometime; you'd probably be pleasantly surprised.
And regarding the grandparent's point, if I were deciding between two similarly qualified applicants for a job, I would certainly look much more favorably on the candidate who grew up in an urban area surrounded with people who have a wide range of different values and beliefs and backgrounds than on the candidate who grew up in a pretty little subdivision surrounded by lots of identical middle to upper-middle class families with 2.5 kids. Clearly I'm a bit biased and suburban dwellers are a bit more diverse than I'm depicting them to be, but there is nowhere near the diversity (in race, ethnicity, religion or lack thereof, age, and most especially class) in suburbs as you will find in a city. There's more to doing (most) jobs effectively than sheer number of degrees or your ability to write solid code (or whatever). The abilities to communicate with different types of people, to understand what different types of people want in a product, and to think creatively are pretty useful skills, too, if harder to quantitatively measure.
And I think you might be underestimating them. I visit a couple of game bbses whose users include a lot of fairly computer-clueless twelve year olds (clueless as in "RAM? I have more than enough RAM to play this game. 80 GB, to be exact"). And yet when you ask them, the majority of these kids are already using Firefox. They've picked up from their friends at school or from more knowledgeable users on various bbses that IE is the reason their computer keeps getting infected with spyware and slowing to a crawl, and that Firefox will let them spend more time using their computer and less running cleanup utilities. And they're wonderfully matter of fact when they talk about it -- of course they use Firefox. They're not idiots, are they?
I realize that these kids aren't representative of all computer users (if nothing else, it's a lot easier to reeducate kids than their parents...), but I think there is a reasonably widespread growing distrust of IE. I do agree, though, that if the new version of IE is more secure there will be far fewer immediately recognizable benefits of switching to Firefox, so next year's twelve year olds will likely just use the browser pre-installed on their new computer.
I fail to see how slapping the word 'marriage' onto same-sex unions can benefit anyone. It's a mostly religious term, and, as a matter of simple linguistic household, shouldn't be redefined willy-nilly. I don't run around redefining words such as strong, courageous, friend, priest, bigot, nature, nurture, science, coward, cowboy, soldier, or king based on whether or not I want those words to apply to me.
No one is proposing to redefine marriage along the lines you suggest. To use one of your examples, we're not saying "listen, everyone, now 'cowboy' is a verb meaning 'to arrange festive floral bouquets," we're saying "let's expand the definition of 'cowboy' to also include women who herd cows and men and women who herd water buffalo, llamas, and other large meat-producing grazing animals." Languages aren't static; this type of shift happens all of the time, even if an interested group isn't pushing for the change. As numerous other posts have mentioned, 'marriage' at various times has meant a legal and/or religious bond between a white man and a white woman, a legal and/or religious bond between a man and a woman of the same race, and a legal and/or religious bond between a man and a woman of any race. Proposing that the concept be expanded to include a legal and/or religious bond between two adults of any race or sex isn't that much of a stretch. And humans are rather clever creatures who adapt to small changes like this very easily; expanding the definition of words isn't going to make us suddenly unable to communicate.
I would have wished that the more vocal people among the gay would have the courage to choose their own words...
The problem with this suggestion is that marriage isn't just a religious institution, but a legal and social one. Telling someone "I'm married" communicates a commitment to one partner, a status as a responsible adult within the wider community, a recognition by the government, and possibly a recognition by a religion. Telling someone "I'm unionized" or whatever would communicate only governmental recognition; the social recognition conferred by the word "marriage" would be entirely lacking. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on marriage and won't as long as people can be married without religious blessing in governmental offices. But note that no one is stating that your particular religion must include gays in its marriage ceremonies. We're just asking that your particular religion's understanding of marriage doesn't dictate either the government's or other religions' understanding of it.
No, an idol is by definition any god that isn't God (the one whose name appears in little capitalized letters in every Bible). The golden calf was an idol, but so were Baal and Asherah (the god and goddess of two other local religions). So even if we were literally worshipping all crucifixes, that wouldn't be idol worship, since they're representations of the "correct" god. If we were to declare that one particular crucifix was unique and especially holy, though, and started to worship it rather than what it represented, that would be elevating it to the level of a (new) god and would be idol worship.
And if you read what I wrote previously, I think you'd realize that I do not believe every word of the Bible to be literal truth. I agree that it's been changed over history, and that even just reading different translations can give you a completely different understanding as to what's an abomination and what isn't. I was simply arguing based on the assumption that it all is truth, though, because that's what conservative Christians do. Saying "the Bible is inconsistent and irrelevant" is easy for them to dismiss, but using it to support one's own views might get them thinking. But perhaps I'm just overly optimistic.
I'm a Catholic too, and, for what it's worth, I have a completely different response when my conscience differs with what you refer to as "faith," but what I would just call the Church's teachings. Personally I find faith to be a lot bigger than either the Bible or the Church and not nearly so dependent on humans with human prejudices. I'm not trying to write off the importance of the Church's collected wisdom -- I love the Church's age and ritual and commitment to its beliefs (even when I disagree with them) and efforts to make the world a better place. I simply acknowledge that humans are fallible, even those who devote themselves to a lifetime of service to God, and I feel strongly that the oft repeated statement that homosexuality is a sin is one of these mistakes.
I started reading the Bible this Lent. Admittedly I'm only up to 1 Chronicles (I'm a slow reader; so kill me), but so far I have only read one explicitly antigay verse (and one calling the wearing of women's clothing by men to be an abomination, if you want to count anti-transgendered verses, too) and a couple of hundred forbidding the worship of idols. Even if God inspired every single word in the Bible, clearly he's more interested in preventing idol worship than in condemning gays. I realize that there aren't millions of idol worshipers running around today for the Church to vent its righteous fury on, but I fail to understand why this one lonely little verse, and the one other I know of in Paul's letters, makes gays the enemy of God. If we were to go by a simple count of words devoted to each abomination, eating pork is far worse in God's eyes than sleeping with someone of the same sex -- so why does the Church act like those in favor of gay marriage are seeking to destroy all morality?
I don't know. Maybe I'm just upset that if I were to fall in love with a woman and want to marry her in my church, it would be forbidden, whereas I could marry any unmarried non-blood-related man there for any frivolous reason I chose without a word of objection from anyone. Your commitment to your faith and the Church leads you to oppose any change to its current marriage rules; my commitment to my faith and the Church envelopes me in a constant struggle, because I know the Church only values me so long as I toe its silly homophobic line. So I do agree with you that civil and religious marriages should be established as separate institutions, but I hope that someday the Church will take a good look at its teachings and decide to extend the sacrament of marriage to gay partitioners, too. Civil marriage is obviously a more pressing issue for the majority of gays, but having part of yourself perpetually denied by your religion can be as bad as lacking all of the rights granted by civil marriage.