What the Heck Does My Iced Tea Have to Do With Sustainability & Interconnectedness?

Last week Jaymi tried to demystify the humongous green concept of 'sustainability'. One particularly important thing she brought up is the interconnectedness and complexity of our decisions; and pointed out that to really understand the impact of our actions we have to look four or five steps down the chain for whatever action we're considering.

This can be done for any action and at a number of different levels: The ecological (or any other scientific discipline), the economic, the social/cultural/historic, the poetic/symbolic, the metaphysical/spiritual. All may use different language but ultimately describe aspects of the same interconnected and unified reality.

Sometimes these languages overlap, other times they seemingly have nothing in common, but in using any one of them, and excluding the impact and perspective of the others, you are abstracting the whole and getting only a partial view. It's all a matter of where you want to focus, concentrating your attention and intention.

So let's consider the glass of homemade iced tea I'm drinking as I write this. Any object can be considered but this one is close at hand and considering all that went into getting it to me, quite appropriate in the context of green and sustainability.

Organic, Unsweetened, Home-Brewed Black Tea

I brewed it myself from Harney & Sons Organic Assam black tea. It was purchased at the Harney & Sons store in upstate New York and brought it back to the city on a MetroNorth train. The water came from the NYC public water supply, which was heated on a natural gas stove. It is unsweetened.

This tea is cooling my body on a moderately hot afternoon in the summer and is allowing me to sit here in the sun and not use energy running a fan or air conditioning to make myself more comfortable. When I am done consuming this glass I will probably pour myself another, and sometime thereafter after it will pass through my body (another layer of interconnectedness on an entirely different scale) into the toilet.

In taking the tea back with me on a train for roughly two hours there was probably lower environmental impact that had the tea been sent by truck. The natural gas used to heat the water is relatively clean for fossil fuel and heated it more quickly than if I had a stove powered by electricity. I suppose I could have brewed it in the sun, but today I wasn't that prepared. Moderate tea consumption has health benefits; it also tastes good and provides some transitory happiness.

There's Sociocultural Value in Loving Tea & Environmental Impact

Let's go back and sit with the store in upstate New York for a second. That store stimulates the local economy, provides employment for, I'll make it up, fifteen or twenty people. It sells tea in a variety of container sizes as well as tea accessories and gifts which the owners think tea lovers will enjoy; it allows people to come in and sample teas from India and China; it sells light meals. It is owned by a tea packing company whose products are sold online, and in other stores throughout the United States. In short, this tea is supporting directly and indirectly an entire web of people, in a widely dispersed area.

All of it has an environmental impact and as well as social and health benefits that figure broadly into sustainability. Harney & Sons participates in 1% For the Planet, so there are decided benefits there too. There are the cultural impacts of tea and people promoting knowledge and appreciation of tea and its history, as well —harder to quantify but undeniable.

Tea Could Protect Tigers, Prevent Insurgency

The tea itself was grown in Assam, India —I don't know the exact location, but someone at Harney could undoubtedly tell me. Assam is a state in the northeastern part of India. The Brahmaputra River runs through it before turning south towards the Bay of Bengal and running through Bangladesh. The Kaziranga National Park is there, home to the endangered Indian rhino as well as providing sometime safe haven for Maoist rebels.

The growing of this tea provides income for another web of people halfway around the world. Sending it by boat (I'm presuming this...) employs still more people and adds another layer of environmental impact, though less of one than if it were sent by airplane.

This transportation may be the largest negative environmental impact of tea, but there are genuine social goods derived from it, one could argue environmental benefits associated with its organic cultivation as well. Perhaps even conservation and broader social benefits. Even if the trickle down economic benefits results in just one person not poaching a rhino or joining the Maoist insurgency, that's a decidedly good thing.

This could go on and on —and this doesn't even consider the history of tea, the psychological impact, the symbolic effects, all embodied in this glass —but let's leave it there. Every step of the way has its environmental and social pros and cons that need to be weighed if you really want to consider the interconnected nature of sustainability.

You Can't Just Consider One Aspect...

Do I expect everyone to think about everything they do at this level? Obviously not, and obviously not all the time even if you do occasionally indulge. You'd never get anything else done. One could spend a lifetime just contemplating one aspect of tea.

But what I do think is worthwhile always doing, always remembering is that when thinking about green issues and issues of sustainability, you can't just consider one part of it: You can't just think about the carbon footprint, or the water footprint, the economic impact, the social impact, the impact on wildlife, on energy usage. All too often if you focus in on one thing, what value there is in the others gets obscured.