The recent headlines about Toyota got me to thinking about waste.

Consider the economic loss of $1.1 billion per month to Toyota’s operating profit. Or look at the waste of a great brand like Toyota’s. And then think about the waste of people’s lives related to these malfunctioning auto systems. Considering that our media is inundated with messages about Toyota cars and our own safety, we humans must really care about loss of human life and the losses due to injuries. Or do we?

According to the World Wildlife Fund we humans are causing an elevation in the extinction rate of all species of between 1,000 to 10,000 times more than normal. Water pollution causes about 14,000 deaths a day. One thousand Indian children die every day from diarrheal sickness. Over 650,000 people die annually in China of air pollution.

No one is exactly sure what is causing the Toyotas to accelerate nor the Prius brake systems to fail. But I’ll bet we know what is causing our water to be polluted, air pollution in China and the rapid loss of species especially in rain forests of the world. Toyota doesn’t know exactly what is happening because it is a very complex systems problem. People designed the systems for Toyota and people’s heads will roll. I think we know what is altering our Earth’s systems…people. Whose heads will roll.

If we are talking about the waste of human life in the Toyota conversation, then we have some misplaced priorities. The amount of attention the story is receiving is totally disproportionate to the problems of the world.

We in the economic North care about Toyota and are demanding action. We just don’t care enough about deaths and damages elsewhere to act. We value what we see and “own” because we can personalize it. We objectify that which we cannot see and do not own, because we can categorize problems easier than we can attempt to fix them or take responsibility for them when they are seemingly so far away.

The contrast between how much we are “invested” in discussing what is really a minor problem versus how little attention we are paying to many major problems should deeply disturb us. What is happening in the world’s jungles, what is destroying whole complex life systems, and what is killing huge quantities of people daily will be far more lethal to all of us than what happens to our cars. Cars are artifacts of our designs. Designs are expressions of our intentions. Intentions are guided by our paradigms. The world would gain a lot more by us checking our paradigms than us checking our brakes.

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http://weatherhead.case.edu/