Posted: May 27, 08 12:12pm

Greetings Tier II members. I blog over at justcauseit.com on social and environmental issues and was hoping to get some feedback from other writers. I would happily trade feedback in return.

http://justcauseit.com/blogs/dan-h

Latest post in its entirety below:

Dwight Yoakam, E-Waste and the Universe

I was listening to my roommate’s iPod while building a fence around the patio last weekend. She’s a Montana girl and no stranger to country music. The shuffle went from a Devotchka tune to Dwight Yoakam’s “Turn it on, Turn it up, Turn me loose”. The entire song is about asking the bartender to turn up the volume on the jukebox to drown the memory of a girlfriend that broke up with him. It’s about living in denial.

In listening to the song (and trying not to chop my hand off with a radial arm saw), it occurred to me that there was an incredible parallel with the song, electronic waste and good old American consumerism.

This is not a criticism of Dwight Yoakam, country music, or Old Glory. In fact, I’ve become a recently converted Yoakam fan, much to the chagrin of my eye-rolling, Tulsa-born, country-music-hating girlfriend. I told her to get on the winning team and love her country for what it is and she threatened to kill me with a claw hammer.

So at the risk of bodily injury and cultural apostasy, I feel compelled to make the case of real connectivity, not the intentional, selective, overused bullhonk punch-word “community” that is so in vogue in the circles I travel. If Dwight Yoakam can be paralleled to discarded mother boards and cathode ray terminals in Asia, we are certainly in this together more than we think.

Maybe it’s because I just dropped 600 bucks at Lowe’s, or because the economy is tanking, but I was acutely aware of stuff. Not just stuff, but the sheer amount of it we demand as consumers.

Astute readers will recall William Forster Lloyd, the 19th century economist and perpetual long-face who came up with the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons, which, broadly paraphrased, is born of simplistic thinking that my little mess or consumption is too insignificant to sully the world we live in. Lloyd begs to differ: the stereo that gets tossed because of your 8-gig iPod, the old computer that is replaced by the newer one, all of these things in aggregate are tantamount to environmental destruction when we all do it, and we’re all responsible for it. Except Lloyd made his argument with cows and pastureland, not stereos with cassette decks and Emachines.

I think he's is probably right, but I think Dwight is too: living in denial is a lot easier than living in reality: Instead of feeling “lonely, crazy and blue”, we can just say f-it and turn up the damn jukebox at the local honkytonk, Circuit City or Sam’s Club. We can green-wash ourselves till we’re, well, green in the face. We can pretend that one of those computers that’s being dismantled right now, this second by some 10 year old in Sri Lanka isn’t ours. So turn it on, turn it up, turn me loose.

Later, on a different rain-soaked May afternoon, safely away from the radial arm saw and my hammer-toting assassin girlfriend, my new co-worker Meg and I rode our bikes down to the part of town no one ever goes to: the old waterfront. Back in the late 1800s, someone came up with the idea of filling Bellingham Bay up with garbage, fill dirt and anything else to make “land” that extends out across the tidal flats to create a deep water harbor. Gritty and bleak and as enduringly unhappy as Picasso’s Guernica, the area is a hodgepodge of marine industry, fallow purse seiners and the site of my visit: ReLectronics, the non profit that rescues old computers, TVs and pretty much anything with a power cord attached to it.

Gerry Mitchell, the Volunteer Coordinator, and our IT guy at the Volunteer Center where I work (you must get your very own IT guy – it’s so choice) gives us the tour. Among palletized and shrink-wrapped now-silent TV sets, gargantuan CRT monitors and dirty pre-9-11 PC’s, he details the process of the grave part of “cradle to grave”. Virtually everything we see will be broken down and reused. Here at ReLectronics, a new paradigm has been created: cradle to grave to incubator to cradle. It’s enough to make you spin right off the planet.

Standing there talking with Gerry, I was reminded of Jennifer Baichwal’s outstanding documentary Manufacturing Landscapes wherein the myth and scam of computer “recycling” is revealed. Where does your computer go when it gets recycled? 85% go to Asia where impoverished workers tear them apart for precious metals. Most of the rest of the computer winds up in a landfill or is burned in giant e-waste funeral pyres that blacken the air for miles around.

This is where ReLectronics comes in. This scrappy little non profit makes every company they work with sign an agreement that they will not take part in the boneheaded, culturally tone-deaf practice of keeping developing nations in line by ruining their environment and making sure their populations remain poor and undereducated.

Doing this makes about as much sense as Bush suspending his golf game to become one with the grieving families of war dead. But at least 43 can birdie on the links someday when his public life in the fake sunshine is over. E-waste is forever.

At ReLectronics, most of the items that come through are resurrected into new-used machines. A cadre of volunteers dutifully wipes hard drives, installs free shareware operating systems and sells the computers at a deep discount to people that otherwise could not afford them. They are like a digital, modern-day Robin Hood, scraping the largess from the large ass of America. Even though they receive thousands of pounds of dead and dying electronics every week, Gerry says they have a hard time filling half a trash bucket.

He looked down at the ground when he told me this, as if resolving an inner conflict. “We just don’t throw anything away. I can’t do that anymore.”

I looked over at the trash. Empty.

In all fairness to my new country music God, and with dear and due respect to the Homeland and my heavily armed girlfriend, we gotta be more like ReLectronics. We just gotta. No more messing around. E-waste is wrong. E-waste is farmed out child abuse. E-waste is the Gordan Gecko of Wall Street, the turn ‘em and burn ‘em embodiment of evil that would jolt any upright, sentient being with a beating heart into revulsion when it is dragged out into the light by films like Baichwal’s and the work of non profits like ReLectronics..

A friend of mine likes to remind me of the old adage “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

So I’ll guess I’ll end on a high note. In a 4,000 square foot warehouse in Bellingham, a bunch of people, working for absolutely no money, are really, truly indeed “changing the world”. And they could use the help of a few good volunteers.

Copyright Dan Hammill 2008