Is Recycling Utter Rubbish? : TreeHugger

The Financial Times is the UK's version of the Wall Street Journal, not a venue where we would expect to find radical positions on environmental issues and reducing carbon emissions. We are often impressed about how far ahead the UK is in environmental awareness, but Richard Tomkins, Consumer Industries Editor for the FT, has really surprised us in an article questioning the value of recycling. Like many in the UK, he suggests that climate change is the most serious environmental threat facing the human race, and that "When you think of all the energy consumed (and hence, carbon dioxide emitted) during the recycling process - householders driving their empty wine bottles to the bottle bank, lorries collecting the bottles and taking them to the recycling plant, the washing in hot water and the removal of labels, all before the reprocessing can even begin - it is plain that recycling has environmental costs as well as benefits." Then he gets radical with his 10 point program. Actually, first he suggests we should just buy less. "Recycling bits of packaging is as nothing compared with the vast savings in energy and resources that could be made if people bought fewer products. The biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions is the energy used to manufacture and deliver the goods that end up in our homes - furniture, kitchen equipment, televisions, toys, computers, clothes and food. You do not need to recycle if you do not buy anything in the first place." That is not particularly good for the economy, so he then goes on to the 10 Points:

1Never, ever, fly on an aircraft again. Air travel is enormously damaging in terms of climate change and any government that genuinely cared about the environment would be pricing people out of the skies with unbelievably high levels of taxation on air travel. As it is, aviation fuel is completely untaxed internationally and governments almost everywhere have encouraged the proliferation of cheap flights, making air travel more popular and more environmentally damaging than ever.

2 Call on the government to ban incandescent light bulbs, which turn 90 per cent of the energy they consume into wasted heat. Instead, everyone would use the newer compact fluorescent lamps. Admittedly these are green in more ways than one, enveloping their unfortunate users in a ghastly green glare but the energy savings would be colossal - enough to shut down a power station or two.

3Switch to a diet of ready meals and McDonald's. It takes much less energy to make a mass produced meal than to assemble all the ingredients at home and cook them yourself. It also produces less waste. If you can take yourself to a centralised meal distribution depot such as McDonald's, so much the better, as long as you leave the 4x4 in the garage and take the bus.

4 Speaking of gas-guzzlers, obviously you should trade in your 4x4 for a Toyota Prius. But even trading it in for an ordinary family saloon would save as much energy in a year as your household would save if it spent the next 400 years recycling glass bottles. Then again, if you care about climate change, what on earth are you doing driving at all?

5 Sell the second home. Just think how much environmental damage is done by the duplication of household goods. Even worse, just think of all the journeys that the second home generates. It is bad enough if you drive there and back each weekend but if you are using cheap flights - really, are you trying to destroy the planet single-handed?

6 Lower your standards of personal hygiene. Apart from the energy that goes into making the goods we buy, the next biggest source of energy consumption in the home is hot water. So, shower once a week at most and wash your clothes less often. If anyone complains about a funny smell, blame global emissions.

7 Forget, for a moment, the edict about cutting consumption and buy a whole new set of domestic appliances. Modern washing machines, dishwashers and dryers are much more energy efficient than the old ones, and the environment will benefit in the long run, assuming you resist the temptation to fly-tip the old machines.

8 If you must buy any other manufactured product, make sure it comes from a country that uses renewable energy sources, such as Sweden, not fossil fuels, such as China. It must also be made out of renewable materials, such as wood, not non-renewables, such as plastic. In short: the only place you can shop is Ikea.

9 Consider joining the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a so-called deep ecology organisation that believes we should phase out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed. Then reject the idea. What, after all, is the point of saving the planet if there is no one left to enjoy it?

10 Recycle if you like but do not kid yourself that it will make a lot of difference. The ugly truth is that saving the planet really will mean sacrifices, however much we may like to pretend otherwise. The old rule applies: no pain, no gain - for the environment, as for everything else. ::Financial Times (subscription required) via our old favourite, ::Environmental Valuation and Cost-Benefit News

via treehugger.com

Interesting article on recycling from the Financial Times.

State of Maine Bans Use Of LEED In State Construction : TreeHugger

via treehugger.com

There are a number of ways to look at this. On the one had you might take the view that Maine has taken a stand against the limited, check-box methodology of LEED and the narrowness of its approach.

On the other hand, you could equally take the view that environmentalism has been scuppered by political lobbying by companies with a vested interest.

Abandoning LEED without replacing it with an alternative is not the solution though. It's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Possessive Apostrophe: Why You Shouldn't Care

So a while ago there was some furor when it became public that the city of Birmingham, England was planning to drop apostrophes from street signs. The general response from the Anglophone public seemed to be that this was a clear sign of the apocalypse and the apostrophes must be defended at all costs.

Really, people? Really?

Language Log has posted before about the illogicality of word rage, and apostrophe obsession is one of the reasons I refuse to read Eats, Shoots and Leaves no matter how many people recommend it to me. If you (in general, not Lynn Truss specifically) are going to suggest, even humorously, that people who misuse apostrophes should be mutilated or murdered, you obviously need to get a different hobby.

Because I'm going to tell you a little story.

Old English--the language that the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes spoke when they showed up in Great Britain a few centuries back--had cases. If you have studied languages like German, Russian, Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit, you know all about cases and can go hide under a table and cry for a bit. If you don't know about cases, well, they're just changes that you make to nouns and adjectives--new endings, usually--based on what those words are doing in a sentence. A subject gets one case, an object gets another, and so on.(They're why modern English makes a distinction between I and me.)

Cases have two functions: one, they make it clear what words are doing in a sentence, even if you've gone and put them all out of order for artistic purposes, and two, they make the people trying to learn your language hide under tables and cry. (Because they don't know what case they're in, or how they got there, or how to get out of it again, and just when they think they've got it sorted they discover it's a special case with an irregular stem. Not that I know anything about this, Russian secondary locative.) I suspect that Old English cases were used as a form of psychological warfare against the Welsh, possibly in retaliation for the initial mutation.

Now, specifically, Old English had a genitive case. This case is the ancestor of Our English's possessive form: it let Old Englishmen (and -women) tack one noun onto another to indicate a relationship between the two. The ending for the Old English genitive was -es, pronounced, rather logically, as "ess." It gave us words like:

"king" = cyng --> cynges /kyNes/, where /N/ is the "ng" sound and /y/ is basically German ü
"cat" = catt --> cattes /kates/
"fish" = fisc --> fisces /fiSes/, where /S/ is "sh"

So you could say things like "cynges catt" for "The king's cat," "cattes fisc" for "the cat's fish (which she is eating at present)," even "fisces cyng" in the event you discovered that fish had royalty. Straightforward, right?

Well, somewhere on its way to becoming Middle English, Old English cases started to fade away. The vowels turned to schwas and then the schwas dropped off, like sixth fingers after you've tied a string around the bottom for a while. (Yes, that's a gross analogy, but I'm standing by it.) The consonants in the endings mostly fell off, but not all of them; /s/ is in fact a very persistant little bugger that hung on, though it sometimes changed to a /z/ in order to blend in better with the new neighbors. So those words up top became the more familiar:

king --> kings /kiNz/
cat --> cats /kats/
fish --> fishes /fiSez/

Wait a minute! you cry. Why didn't the vowel disappear from "fishes"? Well, because "fishs" is stupid. No, really; /s/ belongs to a family of consonants called "coronal fricatives," and if you try to pronounce two of those in a row, you will naturally insert a little schwa vowel in between to distinguish them. (The coronoal fricatives are /s z S ch/ and /Z/, which is like the "z" in "azure" and kind of marginal in English.) If the two consonants had just merged together, or if the /s/ had come off, there would've been no genitive distinction whatsoever for those words, and that would've been odd and problematic, the kind of breaks in pattern that speakers tend to intuitively fix via analogy (kind of how kids try to say I brang it on analogy with I sang it). So for words that ended with coronal fricatives, the vowel in the genitive ending hung on, to keep the two consonants on either side from encroaching on each other.

Or maybe your cry was: Wait a minute! Are those possessive forms or plural forms?

To which I say: Yes.

See, at this point there wasn't really any distinction between plural -s and possessive -s. Well, they were distinct in use, of course, but there was no need to disambiguate them in writing. Partly with was because most Middle Englishmen were illiterate and didn't care, and partly because there wasn't a standard spelling system anyway, and partly because...well, if they're not distinct in speech and this is somehow not a problem, why do you need to disambiguate them in writing? Seriously, this is not a problem 99% of the time; I have had more trouble making the distinction between "wight" and "white" in speech than between "students" and "student's." (Though I grant I am probably unusual in how often I talk about wights.) When was the last time you mistook a possessive for a plural or vice-versa? As opposed to any other kind of homophone? Go on, think about it for a minute.

But this does raise the question of where the killer apostrophes that everyone's so excited about came from, if they're not necessary. (And hint: they're not.) To understand, you have to remember that all the Old Englishmen were dead at this point, and the Middle Englishmen had only their own speech to work with. And what they had was the paradigm represented like this:

/kiNz/
/kats/
/fiSez/

At this point, the genitive/possessive was the only case ending left in English. And somehow, a large number of Middle Englishmen decided it wasn't an ending at all. They did a re-analysis of their language, and their conclusions looked something like this:

/kiNz/ = king his
/kats/ = cat his
/fiSez/ = fish his

That's right. They took the ending and decided it was, instead, a very oddly placed pronoun. And they wrote it this way. There are plenty of attested texts with phrases like "the king his justice" and "Moses his mercy" and even "the wife his child" even though that doesn't really make sense from a gender point of view. But if the -/ez/ in /fiSez/ is a form of the pronoun "his," then the -/z/ in /kiNz/ and the -/s/ in /kats/ must really be contractions of that pronoun.

And how do we denote contractions?

king's
cat's
fish his

And in the interests of consistency, that last eventually because "fish's" (our old friend analogy again) giving us the plural/possessive apostrophe rules we all know and freak out about.

(Where did the rule about plural possessives come from? The one that puts the apostrophe on the outside? Not sure; probably an attempt by eighteenth-century Latinistas to make English more "logical," for their own ideas of logic. Archbishop Lowth, I'm looking at you.)

So the possessive apostrophe was born out of a goofy-but-pervasive orthographical glitch. And its use was not at all standardized even into relatively recent times--Language Log cites a letter by Thomas Jefferson that doesn't use it once, and Tom was a pretty clever guy in his day. I'm not sure exactly when the apostrophe was raised to the status of shibboleth for the educated classes but it is definitely not a benchmark for the progression of the apocalypse. In fact, the "misuses" that some people love to spazz about--"CD's for sale," "I like taco's," "I Tivo'd it," etc.--reflect another ongoing re-analysis of how to use the apostrophe: as the marker of a morpheme boundary. (And the fact that this "misuse" is still perfectly legible, if unusual, ought to tell us something.)

That's why I don't have any problem with omitting possessive apostrophes in English. If it represented some kind of useful information or distinction--like the contraction apostrophe--that's one thing. (Though other languages seem to contract just fine without apostrophes, either.) But it's just an orthographic anomaly, somewhere between the persistence of silent "e"s on the ends of words and the elements of Shaw's "ghoti" in terms of its practicality, and I do not think the world will end if we quietly set it aside. Inertia and sentimentality are certainly not sufficient justifications to hang on to it.

(Strangely enough, the Internet cannot tell me if Birmingham actually went through with its apostrophe-elimination initiative, or if the council caved under backlash from enraged prescriptivists. Anyone from the area willing to comment?)

via mekennedy.hubpages.com

An erudite and very well-constructed argument about why you shouldn't care about correct apostrophe usage for possessive pronouns.

Contractions however are a different matter...