"End of Suburbia" Reflection

The film, "End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream", basically talks about how America had suburbs after WWII, which leads to a huge amount of use of resources later on. Creating suburbs was a good idea. It provides the soldiers to have quiet place to live, since suburbs are far away from the urban world. However, because of that, people living in suburbs have to drive in order to get nearly anything.

Unlike "Enron: Smartest Guys In The Room" this film doesn't really inspire people. It only does the job of reminding people the problem we are all facing. It is undeniable that transportation plays a huge role in most people's life. We need it to go to from place to place and, even for the ones that have markets right near by their homes, the markets, themselves, need transportation to get all the goods. In order to save time and so we can use spend more time doing something else, vehicles become a very helpful technology. Only problem here is that most them need oil, and oil is finite. To be more realistic, it "is" going to run out pretty soon.

What could help save the situation? A lot of scientists and engineers are now working on trying to find something else to replace oil. It would be good to have an infinite amount of replacement, such as solar power. While we are either still finding the solution or waiting for people to find one, there are things we can do to help at least save a little bit more resources for all of us to use in the future. Although it costs money, I always prefer to take public transportation. I mean, even if we drive ourselves, we will have to put money into the gas station anyway. So why not just use the public transportation that is always there running in the circle? A lot of people have been asking me why haven't I started practicing driving and get a license yet. Yes, I usually say it's because I'm lazy. but other than that, it's because I don't think it's a must. Look at me now, I can still get to go to many different places by walking, biking, or taking the public buses. When I'm in my internship up in Taipei, MRT really saves my life. Even if I need to go to somewhere that is not in Taipei, MRT doesn't go to, and has no bus stop, the worst case would be calling a cab.

We have tons of scooters here in Taiwan and those drinks oil like a beast. I guess most Taiwanese would prefer to buy a scooter is because of its price and it's easier to park a scooter. The problem with scooter is that it can not carry a lot of people. I have seen some Taiwanese can put 3 or even 4 passengers on one scooter but I'm pretty sure not everyone is able to achieve that. It is usually either one or two people on a scooter. Compare with cars, which usually have between two to four people in one vehicle, a scooter only has about half of a car's opacity while it could use more oil than some cars do.

The major problem here in Taiwan is that we don't have a very well designed public transportation yet, except for Taipei. Places like Tokyo doesn't have this kind of problem. Tokyo has an extremely well designed subway that decreases pollution and cleans up the roads. Better public transportation will help save more oil.


image: drew from a friend, Sarwar Z. Khan.

Organic. Organic? Organic!

After watching the film, The Smartest Guys In The Room, about Enron's fake and reading the chapter "Big Organic" from the book, written by Michael Pollan, called "The Omnivore's Dilemma" I start to find it difficult to believe in everything I from from advertisement and labels.

The name "organic" is a like a diamond ring word; it pretty much adds on a lot more value to a product when it's on its package. I am not the type of person that cares too much about eating "healthy food". I eat McDonald's even when I have already learned that it is "unhealthy" to human bodies. However, the name "organic" still stands out to me. As long as a product bares that name, it means that it got the reason to be more expensive than its competitors.

What does it mean when something is organic? There are many ways to address this term. I would put it as "when something is fresh, clean, and without any other chemicals." Now, the chapter of the book pointed out that when something says it is "organic" it probably doesn't really mean "it is organic" What it's saying is that the companies didn't "lie" to us. Instead, they hide the details from the consumers. I remember when Tina and I were working on the "green business presentation" Ms. Gruber once came and warned us that even when a company says it is a green business and it produces organic products doesn't necessary mean it is the type of "green" we are looking for. Come and think about it, if everything on the selves came from local farm without any pesticides, how would they menage to get that many farm? The process of making organic products is definitely industrialized. At least most of them.

This is pretty similar to Enron's case in some ways. Most of the "green business" out there would tell the consumer how green they are, but most of them wouldn't show the in depth details of how they do things. What's similar is that both Enron and the companies that have the title "organic" hide behind a name or numbers to attract more buyers. The difference would be that Enron just made up everything there. they even made up the numbers that they hid behind. As for most of the green business, they just only gave the broad idea of "organic" but specific details of how they menage to do it and get there.

image source: http://www.nextnature.net/?p=2012