The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
it’s a thin strip of vitality on the Earth’s crust poised between an otherwise dead planet and the dead expanses of space. If the Earth were an apple, the biosphere would be no larger than the apple’s skin. The buyosphere is the lively sphere of commercial life that conditions much of the consciousness in the developed world. Sometimes, therefore, it seems like it’s a mall world, but the buyosphere is really just a small world inside the small envelope of the biosphere.
The Extensive Ecology of Stuff
A few of the artifacts in a dorm room make explicit allusions to nature: Posters of landscape art express our Romantic affection for nature, screensavers display natural scenes, and there are photos on the shelf from vacations to the beach or cabin. There may be goldfish or a houseplant or two, but all of the artifacts in the room tell stories of nature converted to culture. The textbooks are trees. The computers are silicon and hydrocarbons and metals. The clothes are cotton and leather and oil.
Everything in a dorm room is also embodied energy, which generally comes from sunshine stored in oil, coal, wood, or biomass. Embodied energy is the amount of power used to make a product and make it available, including the energy of agriculture or extraction, processing or production, distribution, and marketing. A T-shirt, for example, is made of cotton, so it embodies energy in the oil burned in growing the crop, including planting, tilling, and harvest. The shirt embodies the petrochemical energy in fertilizers and herbicides, and in manufacturing and shipping. Sooner or later, this T-shirt will be a rag—but it’s always energy incarnate.14
There is also disembodied energy in this room: Alarm clocks, TVs, stereos, coffee pots, computers, chargers, refrigerators, hair dryers, and vacuum cleaners are all grafted to the power grid. In apartments or in dorm suites, stoves and dishwashers, washers and dryers devour electricity, too. Electronic devices even consume as much as 50 percent of their electricity when they’re not in use, sucking “vampire power” or “phantom load” in standby mode. Mostly, though, unless we’re reading about Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison, we don’t think about electricity because it’s cheap and we’ve learned to focus only on its applications. Growing up in a culture of cheap energy, we have come to have what Wendell Berry calls “cheap-energy minds,” with expectations of electrical appliances constantly in our lives.
Planned obsolescence: The art of designing products that don’t last, either functionally or fashionably, so that manufacturers can increase sales. Disposable products are good examples of functional obsolescence, while fashion trends and the annual model change in cars are good examples of stylish obsolescence. On college campuses, new textbook editions create obsolescence as well.
Though it all seems solid and permanent, almost all of the stuff in a dorm room or apartment is also eventual junk, what some would call imminent obsolescence, some of which is planned. Laptops seem more solid than the electrical impulses that run through them, but they will be out-of-date in just a few years. Stylish new outfits will be unfashionable before the end of the year, banished to the back of the closet, the rack at the secondhand store, or the sodden mass of a garbage dump.15
The average American consumes more than one hundred pounds of materials a day, almost all of which is out of sight and out of mind. For instance, a fraction-of-an-ounce silicon chip resides in my computer, but the eighty-plus pounds of material involved in its production—silicon, water, chemicals, and coal or another energy source—occupy other spaces. The quarter-pounder Joe College ate for dinner is, as advertised, four ounces, but the burger’s inputs include about two pounds of corn and several gallons of water, not to mention topsoil, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and oil. A lot of the ingredients of our material world are immaterial to us, but not to the planet we inhabit.16
Many of the environmental impacts of our belongings come before they are even ours, during offshore production and global transportation. The products we buy are better traveled than we are, as one of my students noted. When closely considered, the movements of manufacturing—where raw materials from many countries are assembled in many other countries—are amazing. As another student suggested, the twenty-first-century assembly line is not confined to single factories: It spans both countries and continents, and we are the factory bosses, operating by remote control every time we swipe our credit cards.17
Remote control: 1) The device we use to control our TVs and other electronics; 2) The designs we use to control the world, socially and environmentally. Eating, for example, is a form of remote control.
At the store, a purchase is just a transaction: We trade money (or credit) for goods. But what happens at cash registers all over the world? When the clerk scans our purchase, it’s recorded in the store’s computer, which adjusts the inventory accordingly. Our simple payment drives the retailer to reorder, which drives the manufacturer to requisition more materials, which drives the farmer or miner or oil refiner to extract more from the land. As a result, the unnatural selection of the economy determines—as much as natural selection—which plants and animals will grow in which places on the planet. Human beings currently monopolize more than 40 percent of the Earth’s primary productivity, so our consumer “buyodiversity”—the desire to have more things available more of the time—affects the actual biodiversity of the natural world.18
Educated for Ignorance
When students first encounter this “problem of invisible complexity,” they’re shocked and amazed. They often note that they had no idea that they have such far-reaching environmental impacts. This ignorance is interesting. The United States boasts one of the best systems of higher education in the world, and yet its students and graduates still don’t know the basic facts about the artifacts of their daily life. To a great extent, American society socializes its kids by obscuring the true nature of their lives.19 In part, this is the logical outcome of a system of specialization and division of labor. Following the logic of Adam Smith, Americans have embraced the efficiency of a system in which different people are responsible for different productive functions. And this is good. We get brain surgeons and rocket scientists, accountants, artists, and college professors. It’s good, we think, when waste management companies collect our garbage weekly. But specialized responsibility can be a curious form of irresponsibility. In its most extreme forms, it can lead to what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” in which individuals do a good job in a seemingly harmless line of work, but unwittingly contribute to systems of injustice. We can see now that American slave owners and Nazi concentration camp workers were complicit with systems of evil, but it’s always harder to see the immorality of our own time. Most of us are not evil, but we’re not always doing good, because our specialized cleverness keeps us from being mindful of the potentially harmful consequences of doing a good job of consumption. In our rooms, surrounded by familiar things, we feel at home, but we forget that we’ve also impacted the homes of people, plants, and animals around the globe, for better and worse.20
American consumer ignorance is also the result of an economic system of comparative advantage. Historically, as different cities and regions of the country specialized in the products and processes that offered advantages in the marketplace, the social and environmental impacts of those methods of manufacture moved out of sight and out of mind. Home production of food, clothes, and furnishings was supplanted by factory production, and local tailors, cobblers, and furniture makers were replaced by factory workers someplace else. As a result, people lost the local knowledge of the consequences of their consumption, as well as the local cultures of care for neighbors and neighborhoods that regulated production, consumption, and disposal of wastes. More stuff came to consumers, and it was cheaper, but its real impacts and true costs increasingly