Notes from the End of Life as We Know It 3: The Cube

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

I have a confession to make. Our department, an institution that we would like to think of as a center of teaching on social justice and environmental ethics, an institution working to place itself at the cutting edge of philosophizing on the environment and the roots of the environmental crisis, is in love with our cube.

What is our cube? It is a neatly constructed, metal and plastic coffee maker. Its lines are very neat and precise so it is like the iPod of coffee machines. What does it do? It makes coffee that is meant to wow even the most moderately trained, civilized, white or pseudo-white palates. I must say, it does make wonderful coffee. It is the kind of coffee that makes one want to rush to the office because it delivers a well-being inducing aroma and a full bouquet for your taste buds. The cube offers a complex and complete experience to your every sense involved with taste and wakefulness. This is why we love our cube.

This quality of coffee is produced by a very special process. Properly ground coffee is packed in pods made of pretty plastic and foil. It's like a little bullet of joy. We load the bullet into a chamber, close the chamber and almost instantly flows the light brown, bubbly liquid and the warm aroma of a cozy day. The cube allows us to access the joy of coffee with such a simple process: all you do is load a bullet and liquid comfort emerges. What does it cost? The cube and its coffee pods were a gift, but if we paid for our cube coffee, it would cost 50 pesos a hit. More than that, our coffee leaves a trail of spent pods that are not reusable or biodegradable if they are at all recyclable. When I brought up this fact over coffee, we joked that we could get the pods and make them into Christmas ornaments.


So here we are, professed lovers of the environment, believers in the need to reduce, recycle and reuse, shamelessly producing non-biodegradable waste only for coffee that could be made in a less costly way. But, some will say that it is the most wonderful coffee that we could have on a daily basis! Why deny ourselves this simple joy? Isn't it worth the cost? After all the higher things in life have a greater cost. These costs are just things we have to live with. Besides, how much of this wasted pods do we produce in a day? Ten or so? And we can't even afford to buy the pods ourselves so we only have it now and then when our pod patron donates them to us. But the point is this—the pod is a product of a lifestyle and mentality which is convinced that the best things in life are worth the cost on our environment and our fellow humans. Even if it's the only wasteful thing we do, it betrays a kind of mentality we have, i.e. we are willing to produce waste for our comfort and perhaps to be blind to the possible effects of the technology we use if its gift is pleasurable enough.

If one thinks about it deeply enough, the cube’s coffee may cost much. Aside from the waste it produces, the cube also calls its users to sustain a moderately high level of income. In order to use and sustain the operations of the cube, we have to earn enough to spend fifty pesos a day for coffee. Plus, we have to be the kind of people who occasionally go to Singapore to get the pods. That's actually why we just wait for the donations of our pod patron to be able to use the machine. Most of us have chosen vocations that do not support such an income. But what vocations do support such an income? Does one need to use casualized labor, suppress the incomes of others for one’s bonuses, or avoid taxes to earn this income? We also have to wonder if the coffee that goes into this pod is acquired justly. To produce it, are farmers exploited? And we have to ask how much carbon is emitted for the coffee to be planted and then brought to the processing plants and then to Singapore and then to us.

Coffee is a simple but intense pleasure—and the cube makes it simpler to acquire and more intensely pleasurable for us. But how simple is that pleasure, really? Don’t we know by now that something as simple as coffee drinking can have repercussions on our environment and the well-being of the vulnerable people in the world? It is a simple machinery of joy but symbols much of why we have come to the end of life as we know it.

For coffee lovers, not all coffee is coffee. They have a deep scorn for instant coffee, and demand freshly picked and freshly ground coffee. In order to obtain “real coffee,” their suppliers will scour the world, grow the coffee in various areas to get the best results, and perhaps pay the growers prices lower than the coffee will be worth. To get great coffee, we produce much carbon transporting, if not in growing, it. To enjoy this coffee, you have to have a lifestyle that supports it—moderately high incomes to buy the coffee and the paraphernalia, the food and utensils that enhance the coffee drinking pleasure. What do we do to the world and what do we do to our neighbors just to perk up our day? There are ways to enjoy the pleasures of coffee in a manner that is less costly but coffee lovers would like to have this kind of coffee and are willing to pay the cost for it. Why is this so?

I think it has much to do with our tendency to benchmark our level of civilization with the West. I think the fact that this coffee tastes so good to us is because we have been educated by Western palates to believe that this is the best coffee. Palates are educated after all. They are not just genetically determined but are educated to understand and believe what is flavorful and what is good. Barako coffee that is boiled in a pot could have been the height of coffee drinking pleasure if we were educated to taste that. If we conquered the world too we could have set the kettle boiled barako to be the world standard of gourmet coffee. But we didn't and it isn't. Those who did conquer the world set a costly standard of coffee to be the best. We the conquered bought into their standards and have become complicit in the coming of the end of life as we know it.

Again we see how patterning our lives after the highly civilized world is contributing to the end of the world as we know it. So we have to think about how to turn this habit of benchmarking around.

The so-called developing world functions well at a third of the cost of the so-called developed world. UCLA professor of geography, Jared Diamond, notes this:

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. 


Or put another way:

The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.

Most of us prepare coffee without producing so much carbon and solid waste. Traditionally, the food we prepare comes without too much packaging and processing. Most of our produce comes fresh from local markets that source from local producers. We might not prepare the most sophisticated kinds of foods with the most cosmopolitan of ingredients but the food that we make has less of an impact on our world. Our impact on the world is still considerable mind you. We pour raw sewage into our waterways, we pollute our air with our fuel inefficient and excessive carbon producing vehicles, and we dump most of our solid waste in contaminating landfills. Plus our factories run without any form of environmental standards to regulate their pollution and we waste water as if it was abundant. However, in spite of this, we are still among those who are considerably less carbon polluting and resource consuming than the developed world.

The reason why we impact less on our world than the first-to-have-developed world is because our lifestyles in comparison are so simple. We don't have that much disposable income, we are not that technologically sophisticated, and we don't have easy access to resources, like electricity, that make it is easy for us to live resource hungry lifestyles. Since it isn't easy for us to waste, we don't do it as much. If we look at our traditional communities that are even less developed or civilized and sophisticated, they are living with even less impact on the world. However, they too are beginning to desire to live the civilized life like we do.

We truly need to rethink our lifestyles because if everyone wanted to live like Americans do, there is not enough world for it. There’s not even enough world to sustain European lifestyles which are considerably more considerate of the earth than the American way of being. And now that the world is warming, and we are faced with the catastrophic choices our resource hungry brothers have made, we have to rethink our pursuit of their life. We have to rethink our ways of making coffee, of transporting ourselves, and of earning a living because their ways have brought us to this. Maybe our ways can take us to our future. It is perhaps time to wake up and smell the barako brewing.