An old car in the city of Cairo.
An old car in the city of Cairo. Courtesy of Ted Swedenburg

Before I begin, I must explain that this post has two primary sources and inspirations—one is "Cairo Nihilism: The Death of a Recycling City and the Rise of American Consumerism," a short essay by Maged Zaher, a local Egyptian-born poet who won the 2013 Genius Award for literature. The other source is Eric Schneider's and Dorion Sagan's book Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life.

One of the many observations Zaher presents in his brief but lyrical essay (which appeared in Arcade Journal, in an issue I also contributed to), and an observation he attributes to Maria Golia, a columnist for the Lebanon Daily Star and author of Cairo: City of Sand and Photography and Egypt, is that in the 1960s and 1970s, the final years of the Bretton Woods system of national economies and capital controls, Cairo was a "recycling heaven." But with the de-nationalization of the economy in the 1980s, it became an "environmental nightmare."

Zaher writes:

In the ’60s and ’70s, Cairo’s streets were full of revamped cars; cars that would only be found in museums in the US were functioning beasts in Cairo. Why? Because Cairo mechanics were miracle makers, and their miracles were a result of necessity due to a lack of resources.
I saw the same sort of thing in the Harare of my youth. The great mechanics around the capital of Zimbabwe often operated outdoors on some piece of land that had not been claimed by the state or individuals and were considered not just miracle makers but gods. They kept old cars going and going, often in great condition. (Note: The sermon about how new cars are more fuel-efficient loses much of its moral force when you realize that cars are becoming heavier and heavier.)

Now, in the West, it has become too easy for those in the environmental movement to blame our increasing climate problems solely on the consumption of fossil fuels. But the production of new cars is also very energy-intensive. Treating cars as easily disposable commodities is just as bad as burning fossils, which is why electric cars alone do not provide a great solution to the climate crisis. What we need, on top of a significant decline in automobile dependency, are more mechanics and fewer car dealers (particularly those who push new vehicles).

There has been lots of talk of the sharing economy, but almost no or very little talk about the repair economy, which has been shrinking since globalization was revived with a vengeance in the 1980s and transformed China into the cheap products factory of the world. (The first modern globalization was between 1870 and 1914.)

With this development, all manner of appliances become disposable, and all manner of repairpersons became unemployed. This has been a catastrophe of the first order. Globalization, which has little to do with comparative advantage and almost everything to do with taking advantage of price differences in labor markets (in short, arbitrage), has left us with a decimated repair and maintenance market. And many of the jobs in that once-thriving market were not globalizable. They tended to be very local, sustainable, and much more meaningful than factory work. Rarely are factory employees described as "miracle makers."

A thriving repair economy would also bring an urban system closer to an ecosystem. The amount of energy cities waste at present, however, make them more like feedlots, which tend to have lots of energy going in and lots of wasted energy going out. (This analogy is discussed in Jeb Brugmann's Welcome to the Urban Revolution.) An ecosystem is another matter altogether. Rainforests like the Amazon capture energy and recycle and degrade it extensively before it escapes. This is one of the reasons why, as Schneider and Sagan explain, temperatures above the massive rainforests tend to be cool.

Finally, a repair economy is also anti-capitalist in the sense that capitalism cannot function without great and heavily subsidized waste. Writes Peter Wilby of the New Statesman:

[W]aste is integral to what Robert Reich, in his most recent book, calls "supercapitalism". Unchecked supercapitalism produces waste as inevitably as it produces inequality, job insecurity, loss of community and so on.
Checked capitalism is always socialism.