The Tug of War – Ethical vs. Economic Decisions

Are your Eco Decisions for You or for Others?

This is the first in a series of articles on connections between the environment and our personal life choices. As a twenty- five-year macrobiotic, my mind and heart are fused in belief. I will examine eco-lifestyles, the green washing phenom, the paper plate or dishwater dilemma, and the new evolution of triple bottom line for corporations. As the words “green / socially responsible / vegetarian” disappear and become redundant to “life”, change will have charted the right course.

Eco/Health/Animal rights are just a few of the dialects and lifestyles people choose. You never know when you are sitting next to “one of those” crazy left wing, sign carrying hippie beatniks of lore. NOT. That crazy may just become you. Or President Clinton in his recent disclosure on repairing his health.

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I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about “eco-pieties,” the perceived “wisdoms” accumulated by people who want to make the world better, but don’t want to think too hard or put themselves out too much while doing it.

There’s a constant push-pull between what is environmentally “best” and what is economically sensible. Sometimes, I’ve found, the “best” environmental solution isn’t as obvious as some might think, or isn’t best in all situations. On top of all that, money does matter for lots of folks, and affects the decisions they can, or want, to make. What decisions are hard-coded in your life? Ought there be at least one?

I am forever sick of sensationalist media outlets and brands touting propaganda and subsidy driven marketplaces intended to change our perception of healthy choice in food, drink and practice. Where’s the beef Clara? Everyone knows dairy kills.

So, how to make the world better, and do it in a reasonable way? To start, you should gather information, real and scientifically defensible information, so you have a better idea what you should do given your personal circumstances. It’s a lot like what my company does for its clients for data centers, gathering hard data about the market they’re interested in, so they can make rational decisions based on evidence, not emotion and hearsay. But too often, people don’t do the homework. They want the easy answer, not the right one.

The steak sits on the plate at Mastro's. Perfectly seared. $78. And the question that ruins every good meal for a systems thinker: what did this actually cost?

Not the menu price. The water. The grain. The methane. The land that used to be forest. The antibiotics that are breeding superbugs. The migrant workers in the processing plant who can't afford health insurance. The real price of that ribeye is somewhere north of $400 when you externalize the costs that the market has decided to ignore.

The fork feels heavier than it should. The napkin is Egyptian cotton. The sommelier is approaching with a Barolo that costs more than a week's groceries for the family that picked the grapes. And the tug — the actual, physical sensation in the chest — is the war between knowing what's right and wanting what's good.

The structural problem is not individual willpower. It's incentive architecture. We've built an economic system that makes the ethical choice more expensive, less convenient, and socially awkward. The person who orders the impossible burger at a steakhouse dinner is making a political statement whether they want to or not. The system forces the choice to be visible.

The honest admission: knowing the numbers doesn't always change the behavior. Sometimes the steak wins. And sitting with that contradiction — being a person who can articulate the full environmental cost of industrial agriculture and still occasionally order the ribeye — is more honest than pretending the choice is easy.

The war between ethics and economics is not won. It is waged, daily, at every table.