Pointing the Finger

I was reading the book Cunt (Inga Muscio) again last night and had a thought. If you aren’t familiar with the book, it is a feminist book that attempts to reclaim the term “cunt” as a woman-positive word. I was reading the chapter on rape and abuse, and she finished it by suggesting that if women loved their vaginas, really loved them, they would not be so inclined to allow the silence and shame in regards to rape and abuse continue. The thought is, that if you really love something, you will stand up for it. What allows women who suffered rape or abuse to remain silent, and not to run out trying to find their attacker and kick his butt to kingdom come, is often a feeling that somehow they are at fault, or that they deserved it, or some kind of convoluted psychological analysis that leaves them feeling helpless and victimized but blaming themselves, not the perpetrator.

We have this problem in general, in our culture. We blame the victim. An author whose book I am in the middle of reading was attacked last week while in the middle of giving a talk- attacked by people who were supposed to be on her side. On the radio and online, people blamed her for the attack. Oh, she deserved it. Oh, she brought it on herself. She is a slight, middle aged woman with a spinal disease that renders her body very fragile. She was talking about the harm that agriculture does the environment. And for that, she deserves to be attacked? Really? She brought it on herself?

The point I am aiming for is that this happens in the environmental field, too. Environmentalists very often blame themselves for allowing the environment to be destroyed, or something. Like somehow they are personally responsible for deforestation, because they use toilet paper. They may be against deforestation, they may dedicate their entire lives to eradicating deforestation, but somehow it must be their fault that it continues. I myself am often guilty of this supposition. I have dedicated my entire life to trying to stop the destruction of the environment, but it hasn’t stopped, and there are many times when I despair and blame myself.

There are two reasons, I think, for this tendency. First, we are taught to take it personally. Recall the ending to An Inconvenient Truth. If you haven’t seen it, basically you are given a list of things you personally can supposedly do to stop climate change. They include things like changing light bulbs. I have spoken before on this blog on why I don’t believe for a minute that changing light bulbs will stop climate change. But this is common: most environmental books, most documentaries, most news reports, all end with what YOU are supposed to do to end climate change. Not once (at least in conventional circles) does someone say, you know what, I bet there are some things major industrial polluters could do to stop climate change. Not once does someone say, wow, I bet if those big polluting factories shut down, that would really help at least slow down climate change. Because it is clearly our fault. It’s because of what we’ve done, not because of what the big polluting factories have done.

The second reason is related. I’m reminded of the scene in Grapes of Wrath where a neighbor comes along and tells the family they have to leave their farm (and I am majorly paraphrasing here, because I don’t have a copy), because the land has been foreclosed or something. A company owns it now. The family asks, well, who is this company? Who are they, so we can go shoot them? And the neighbor answers, they are no one, they are just a company. There is no one to shoot.

We have this idea that companies, or corporations, or the government, or NGOs for that matter, are these entities that have no faces. How can we hold them accountable, if we can’t find someone to shoot (metaphorically)? When people first become conscious of environmental devastation (for many of us, this happens when we are children), they want to lash out at someone, anyone. And they realize that major corporations are a pretty big source of the problems. But how do you stop a corporation? Who are they? And so we blame ourselves, because the prospect of attempting to defeat a corporation is just too much to handle.

But it is not your fault. It is not my fault. It is THEIR fault. And a corporation is nothing but a group of people acting together. They have faces. They have names. They have no more power than they are allowed- and by hiding behind an “entity”, as they call themselves, they have an awful lot of power right now. But we have NO reason to remain silent and shameful, about rape or about the rape of the environment. If we love our environment, truly love our environment, and stop beating ourselves up because we sometimes have kind of a shaky relationship with it, we will do anything in our power to stop the abuse. Won’t we? Or are we too afraid of a bunch of random people who are too afraid to make their individual identities publicly known?

Rapists get off because they are sure the women they rape will not speak out against them, and that even if they do, they will not take matters into their own hands to make sure that rapist can never rape another woman again. Corporations get off because they are sure people will not actually speak out against them, and that even if they do, they will not take matters into their own hands to make sure that corporation can never rape another woman, I mean the environment, again. They are so certain of their power that they count on our fear and our own sense of powerlessness to keep us from acting.

But we are not powerless. If we really love our land, if we can love ourselves enough to stop blaming the victims and start blaming the perpetrators, it’s just a matter of finding the right person to shoot.

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Surprise, Surprise: An Expansion

I realized, after posting on the recent death of a Sea World trainer, that I might not have been entirely clear on the subject. At the time, I was so pissed I couldn’t see straight, and that unfortunately leads to posts dripping with sarcasm and not really addressing the issue at hand.

Let me start with why this issue hits so close to home, for me. I wanted to be a marine biologist growing up. I wanted to be a lot of things, like most kids, but it was always a toss up between some kind of artistic career (art teacher/ fashion designer) and marine biologist. Specifically, I wanted to be a dolphin trainer. I have been nothing short of obsessed with the ocean and specifically dolphins for as long as I can remember. They are intelligent, arguably more intelligent than humans (they haven’t destroyed the planet, after all). And they seem to symbolize, for many people, something which is inherently lacking in our civilized lives: a freedom, a joy in living which is somehow expressed by a dolphin’s careening leaps above the waves.

My desire to be a marine biologist was thwarted by two things: an aversion to cutting dead things up in biology class to study them, and the realization that dolphins are not happy in tanks. It is highly deceptive, the dolphin’s smile: no matter what their mouths twist up at the corners, and it gives the impression that they are pleased as punch to swim in circles all day and leap out of the water for the entertainment of screaming visitors. But if you have spent any amount of time near captive dolphins, and I have spent long, long hours sitting by the window at the National Aquarium in Baltimore gazing at these magnificent creatures, you will begin to understand the ineffable sadness in their eyes. You can watch them swim around and around and around their tank between shows, always the same circle, as if they are pacing, frantically, looking for an exit, looking for something that isn’t there. There’s nothing in those tanks. They are solid concrete. They must be infinitely boring to a creature with an intelligence on par with most humans. I mean, think about it: how would you react to being kept, for your entire life, in the same room, with absolutely nothing to look at except blank concrete walls? There is absolutely no justification for that kind of torture.

The main arguments I’ve heard in favor of keeping marine mammals in places like Sea World (and performing for audiences) is that it promotes conservation efforts. I’ve used the same argument myself, in favor of the Baltimore aquarium. And it’s true, these places do a lot of great work to save the oceans, and to educate people as to why the oceans are worth saving (though this should be so blatantly obvious it appalls me that we NEED that kind of education). But is that a reason to keep marine mammals in captivity? And not only to keep them in captivity, but to force them to perform over and over again for human audiences?

I could maybe tolerate the argument in favor of rescuing injured marine mammals and nursing them back to health before re-releasing them into the wild. But most people seem to think that just because places like Sea World participate in conservation efforts, it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether or not whales are kept in captivity. In fact, I’ve heard the argument that whales should be happy to be in captivity, entertaining humans, so that more people will be inspired to save whales. The thought is horrifying. If you applied the same argument to a human, say, if you proposed keeping children from Darfur in captivity to entertain and inspire Americans to donate money to end the civil war in Darfur, the uproar would be nearly unanimous. But most people also think humans are more important than animals, which, when it comes down to it, is why whales are in trouble in the first place. And really, so long as that attitude prevails, whales will continue to be in trouble: oceans will continue to be polluted, whaling will continue, climate change will continue unabated and we’ll all be screwed.

The real issue with a place like Sea World is that it encourages the notion that whales are there for whatever purposes we devise for them. They’re there for our entertainment, they’re there for our education, whatever you want to call it. They are there for human purposes alone. The purposes of the whales do not come into question. And I bet if you could ask one of these whales who have been in captivity their entire lives, would you rather be swimming free in the ocean or jumping out of a chlorinated swimming pool for the entertainment of humans who are probably not going to leave the theme park much more educated than they were going in, the whales would probably vote on the ocean. After all, it’s not like Sea World has thus far managed to end the threats to whales in its over 50 years of existence. If it had, I might be much more prone to agree with those who argue that a conservation program is reason enough to keep intelligent mammals in captivity.

There’s absolutely no reason why we should not be inspired to save whales by seeing them in their natural environments. But then again, as I said in my previous post, we keep ourselves in captivity, and seek to rationalize this at every turn. So it’s not in the least a surprise that we seek to rationalize the continued captivity and enslavement of marine mammals. After all, if we started to argue that whales have the right to enjoy freedom and joy in their lives, we might start to question whether we (humans) deserve the same.

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Forget Shorter Showers

Forget Shorter Showers

This is so spot on I almost don't feel the need to comment on it, except I think a lot of people might be confused by the message. But take a look at that statistic: if EVERYONE in the US did ALL of the things Al Gore promotes at the end of Inconvenient Truth, they'd still only reduce emissions by 22%.

22%, people. That's not exactly ending global warming.

It's not that it doesn't help. It's not that we should all go around leaving all our lights on all the time, because yes, the old saying "every little bit helps" stands true. It is, however, why I don't beat myself up when I take twenty minute showers.

I am not releasing billions of tons of carbon emissions into the air. Industries are emitting billions of tons of carbon emissions into the air. Now, whenever I've pointed this out to people, and suggested possibly shutting down industries, they usually reply with cries of horror and "no, that's not possible!" They then go on to tell me that it's me: the industries are producing all this stuff for me. Well, no, not really. Vote with my dollars? I do. I don't buy anything. Seriously, I really don't buy anything, except every once in a while a new pair of underwear. Oh, and soy milk, I still buy soy milk. But that's beside the point: I don't want the industries to keep producing things. I never asked them to produce all these (mostly) useless things. And yet somehow its supposed to be my fault that the industries keep emitting tons and tons of carbon and pollute the water and all the rest.

I get really, really tired of the arguments that put all the blame on consumers. Even if you stop consuming, which is next to impossible, because you are an animal and you have to consume SOMETHING to stay alive, you will not stop carbon emissions. You will not stop aquifers from drying up. You will not stop the production of millions of tons of waste. You really won't even make a dent- not compared to industry, government, and military uses. But you certainly aren't going to see Al Gore on TV telling everyone to take out industrial plants. Can you imagine? He'd be thrown in jail, or at the very least discredited and never heard from again. His supporters, after all, own many of the very corporate industries that are causing quite a lot of the pollution. Hm.

None of this is to say you don't have any power as an individual. You have quite a lot, as a matter of fact. But you can be guaranteed that any action that is condoned by people who stand to make money off it probably will not stop the destruction. Just a thought.

Also I love the phrase "systematic misdirection." I think that sums things up quite nicely.

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Chickening Out

So yesterday I butchered a chicken.

Actually, I cleaned a few chickens- I didn’t do any killing because it requires a firm hand and a steady stroke, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get all the way through the jugular quickly enough to prevent the chicken from too much pain.

Are you grossed out yet? I hope not.

I’ve been a vegetarian for about 9 years. And this week I ate a piece of chicken. It’s been an ongoing internal debate for months now- or possibly years- ever since I started spending time with people who raise chickens. And with chickens. And then started thinking to myself- well, why not, really? If my primary reason for not eating meat is that I disagree with the conventional method of raising and slaughtering animals, and here I have found a community of people who raise chickens in a sustainable, humane way, what are my reasons for not eating meat?

I really didn’t have any. I’ve never been much for the “its cute, so you can’t eat it,” sort of argument, because while animals are very cute and deserve to live long happy lives, there’s a line in there somewhere. Lions certainly aren’t contemplating whether or not the zebras are too cute to eat.

But clearly part of what makes us human is our ability to reason about things, sometimes endlessly. And so I decided that if I was going to eat a chicken, I wanted to meet the chicken. And I wanted to witness every aspect of its life, from birth to death, and let the chicken tell me if it was really ok. I spent hours with these chickens- held them, pet them, watched them run around in their outdoor pen, eating bugs and watermelons and grains. I found that chickens aren’t very talkative creatures.

When the time came to watch the chickens die, I was afraid I’d be grossed out. I was afraid I would throw up or something- and I was very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. But my friend told me something very wise: no one has to be good at everything. And that includes killing. I’m very good at making clothes. He is not. He’s very good at raising and killing chickens. I’d probably be ok with the raising- but there is no reason for me to be ashamed that when it came down to it I didn’t actually cut their throats.

I did, however, clean the carcasses, pulling out guts with my bare hands, plucking the last few feathers, cutting off the feet and the head- oh yeah, I did all that. And all while standing around chit chatting with neighbors and friends from my co-op and their kids, who were fascinated by watching us pull out perfect little hearts and lungs and livers, and wanted to pick them up and feel them and see how they worked. At first it was weird- but within a few minutes we were comparing techniques and laughing and joking, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to stand there yanking on chicken guts.

However, when it finally came to eating a piece of chicken, I still hesitated- I was kind of afraid I just wouldn’t like it, and all of this would be for nothing. My friends roasted a chicken, and I sat down with four adults and two children. Having sat down at the “kids” end of the table, the adults sort of forgot that I was having a significant moment, and left me to my thoughts while I stared at the piece of chicken on my fork, wondering if it was the chicken I had sat and held for a good half hour a few weeks ago. The six year old next to me finally asked what I was doing. “I’m thinking about this chicken, and how it lived, and whether it had a good life, and thanking it for giving its life so I could eat it,” I said.

“Of course it had a good life,” she said, “I got to pet it.” She then proceeded to devour an entire chicken wing.

And so I ate the chicken. I like the dark meat better, by the way.

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Just a thought…

A new 1/3-ounce, 18-karat gold ring creates about 20 tons of mine waste.
Source: IdealBite.com

So, just to do some quick math… there’s 32,000 ounces in a ton, and a ring is only 1/3 of an ounce… that’s about 1,920,000 times more waste than there is metal in the ring. Yes, about TWO MILLION TIMES more waste than metal in the ring.

Short story, buy vintage or recycled jewelry. Seriously. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how much better for the environment it is not to ever, ever, buy new jewelry- not to mention all the social atrocities associated with the mining industry. Just an estimate- and this is from a friend who’s visited and seen a mine in Africa, won’t mention which one, first hand- is that mining workers have a ten year lifespan, once they enter work at the mine.

If you think about it, we have to have enough metal above the ground- MORE than enough, considering how long we’ve been mining, to have more than enough to make jewelry for every person on earth. Not to mention the vast number of metal objects that make it into the trash (landfills)- aluminum and tin cans, pots and pans, even the little metal bits on pens that get thrown away. What I’d like to see is all the current manufacturers of all those products that use metal declare they will no longer use virgin (new) materials- but that they’re going to find ways to recycle all the millions of tons of metal that have already been mined. I’m sure if they started mining landfills they’d hit paydirt.

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Kipple

Having just moved (again), I find myself facing the same dilemma that faces me on a fairly regular basis. I have way too much junk.

Most of us don’t realize this until we go to move it- then suddenly it springs from unexpected corners- shoes we thought we lost years ago, miscellaneous boxes of papers and unwanted holiday gifts and things we put away thinking there would be need for them one day. And usually, because we’re rather in a hurry to move, we don’t take the time to sort through all these things, but just throw them all in a box and stash them in the closet at the next location.

This is what Philip K. Dick calls kipple. Well, he’s not specifically referring to the stuff that appears when you move, but the general accumulation of completely useless things. It seems to multiply. It seems to slowly creep ever onward until every last bit of space has been occupied by something.

So why do we have so much stuff? It is a question I ask myself on a regular basis. How did I end up with such a vast collection of candle holders, for example? What is all the stuff in my junk drawer? And is it possible that tupperware can actually breed (but not the lids)? I would blame a lot of this on obligatory gifting (the fact that people who barely even know you, including relatives who are only vaguely associated with your family) feel the need to buy you something for Christmas, but that doesn’t explain how so many random gadgets I never use and am not sure of the purpose of ended up in my junk drawer.

The real question, though, is what to do with all this stuff. Some things you can donate to Goodwill (or, here in Chestertown, WIN, Nearly New, or Hidden Treasures). But what about random bits of junk? What about the four or five extra screws that came with a piece of furniture but won’t fit in anything else? What about broken electronics, and extra cell phone chargers without the phone? Broken necklaces? Random plastic gag gifts? What about the things that its possible someone would want, somewhere, if only you could figure out how to connect the thing with the person?

And so we have landfills. None of us have enough time to somehow figure out how to get all the random things we have to the right places, and the right people. We do our best, certainly, we have yard sales and you get rid of some of it but at the end of the day there are just things that no one wants. No one knows where they came from. They can’t be recycled, because there are too many varied component parts and it’s too energy intensive to separate them.

What are we supposed to do with all of it, aside from throw it away? My vote is to stop producing it all in the first place. And make it commonplace for you to turn in old electronics when you buy new ones. And stop using so much packaging. I bought a set of speakers from amazon.com the other day, and when they arrived they were three boxes deep- as in they were in a box inside another box inside another box. And then held in place by Styrofoam, which is not recyclable unless you have the kind of quantity you can ship overseas (and even then, is that really environmentally friendly?).

It’s a conundrum, certainly.

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The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

Reality Sandwich: The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

It reminds me of the much passed around Stephen Colbert segment titled, appropriately, “The Word.” Specifically the one on Wikipedia. In it he points out that if everyone goes online and changes something on Wikipedia- for example that numbers of African elephants are in fact rising, not declining- then technically, for all the vast majority of the people in the world know- it becomes true.

The same holds true for all environmentalists. Our arguments have literally NO power- because we can say anything we like. We can talk endlessly about climate change, we can show a million charts and graphs and statistics, and the funny thing is, so can the other side. Everyone knows, nearly from birth it seems, that statistics can be manipulated to say anything you want. And so they have no power. You can list the tonnes of carbon in the air, spout percentages of increase until you’re blue in the face, and then someone will come along and point out that no, if you calculate the numbers in another way the increase isn’t so much, that there have been increases in the past, and so on and so forth until no one has the faintest idea who to believe. Another, less volatile example would be nutrition facts- we are back and forth from one year to another about which nutrients are good for you or bad for you and which foods you should eat and which leave out- to the point where most people refuse to believe any nutrition claims they hear, because they know perfectly well that they will change in the next few months, depending on the current fad.

This is not to say that some people won’t believe it- there are many who, among the constant barrage of messages, will cling to almost anything that comes into the mainstream media. Many people panicked over swine flu. But as the author of this article points out, many more just yawned and went about their lives. There have been so many crises- so many pandemics- so many scares about this and that, that it’s the least we can do to even pretend to pay attention to it.

So, if we are to supposedly to save the environment by changing the consciousness of the populace (as most of environmentalists will say- we can’t have change without changing the general attitude toward the environment), and at the same time the general populace is tuning out everything we say, how exactly are we supposed to bring about change? It’s something of a pickle. I think this is a rather valid point:
“When environmentalists focus on cost-benefit analyses and study data rather than real, physical places, trees, ponds, and animals, they end up making all the sickening compromises of the Beltway…Visit a real "mountaintop removal" operation and you know that there is no compromise that is not betrayal.”

It’s quite true. Visit the reality- put it right up in your face- and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get someone to pay attention. It doesn’t always work. I always wondered how anyone who had watched someone die of lung cancer- this was while I was in fact watching my grandfather suffer from the disease, the result of years of smoking- could actually smoke cigarettes. But I met people again and again who, despite looking the prospect of that debilitating, most unpleasant of deaths straight in the eye, weren’t in the slightest swayed from their determination to smoke a pack a day.

As the author points out, we fear that authenticity. We don’t want to look it right in the eye, because once you do, the elaborate web of illusions built up for you from birth begins to crumble, and your life becomes one mess of attempting to untangle reality from the “ubiquitous matrix of lies.” It’s not an easy task, and most people would rather stay in the matrix, though it leaves us with a sense of loss that can never quite be identified, and which we drown in via any number of mind numbing devices.

But there are some who are ready to hear- and it is to these people, the people who are tired of the status quo, tired of spin, tired of images and brands and the false tripe that’s surrounding you, everywhere you look, that we (if we wish to be successful as environmentalists) need to speak to- and not with more spin, not with more hype, but with the naked, simple truth- as plain and straightforward as possible, which means, as much as possible, without words (ironic to be writing this on a blog), but in the real world, where we can touch, and smell, and taste, and feel- the few senses that have yet to be entirely co-opted by others than ourselves.

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Money Money Money

Reality Sandwich: Money, A New Beginning

There are two important (related) points I want to address from this article:

We have a growth economy (in fact, an exponential growth economy) and a finite quantity of resources upon which that economy is supposed to be based. This is undeniable.

In a growth economy, we must constantly have more things if there is going to be more money in circulation- in other words, in order to grow, we must have more things to sell. If you look at our society, it is based almost entirely on the privatization of things which were once free (such as clean water), and the constant invention of new things to spend money on (for example, “upgraded” technologies, which renders the old versions obsolete).




This causes two problems: first, that in order to continue to grow, our economy encourages phenomenal amounts of waste. If you reuse something for ten years instead of buying a new one every few months, there is no profit to be made, as a long lasting reusable item subverts your need to constantly make a purchase. The same principle demands the constant use of more resources to produce the new items.

Second, it traps you into a constant cycle of accumulation. I’ve talked about this in terms of major environmental groups previously on this blog. When you constantly require additional funding to stay afloat (literally to stay in business- to maintain your employees and programming) a vast percentage of your time is spent on accumulating money in order to do this. Now imagine if we were secure, and accumulating money was unnecessary- that same amount of time spent on fundraising and grant writing could be spent on immediate, tangible applications, such as going out and quite literally cleaning up a stream.

It’s yet another way to look at sustainability. Let’s look at one of my favorite examples again, water. One way or another, we have to pay for water. Even if you refuse to buy bottled water, which is thus far the ultimate in privatization of water, you still have to get it from somewhere (a tap) because it certainly isn’t clean enough when it’s running in a stream or something similar. There are methods of collecting and purifying your own water, but these are typically discouraged, looked down upon, or made otherwise difficult, if not outright illegal. So we get our money from a tap, the cleaning of which is paid for typically by a municipality, which pays with our tax money and the like. If you have your own sink, typically you have a house or apartment or something around it (which you had to pay for), or even if you are getting water on the go, you need some kind of container to put it in (which you had to pay for). Water is by no means free. We must accumulate some sort of material good to grant us access- whether it be a whole house or a Nalgene bottle. Take a minute and imagine someone in a tribal society with a Nalgene bottle. What the hell would they do with it? They’d have to haul it around all over creation. If water were simply available, clean and without pollutants…

Well, possibly you can see what I’m driving at. The destruction of the commons, as it is typically called, has deep reaching consequences for our environment. If everything is privatized, it is no one’s responsibility- who is to blame for the polluted air in the vicinity of a power plant, as we’ve asked before? The plant, or the people who purchase power from them? And when it comes down to removing the pollution, who should pay? And who, ultimately, pays when the people living nearby (regardless of whether they purchase power from that plant or not) suffer from exposure to pollution?

Something to consider, certainly.

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Green Elitism

Is Rural Green Living an Elitist Illusion?

I didn’t just post this because they use a Monty Python picture in the article. I swear.

No, I was actually just talking about this recently with some friends (my friends are so nerdy that we typically sit around talking about things like the true definition of sustainability). Hybrid cars are great and all, but I can’t afford one. Most people I know can’t afford one. I typically use the word “inaccessible” for most “green” innovations. Many argue that new green technologies will eventually trickle down, but I honestly don’t think we’ve got that kind of time. Products trickle down as newer, better innovations come along, but that can take decades- and it means that there will be even more sustainable products on the market, leaving those with the least money using outdated, inefficient models.

Additionally, how green is it if the majority of the population simply can’t afford it? It means only a small percentage can go green, leaving the rest of us… well, not green.


This article presents a good point, and turns it about a bit. Not only can “green” products be labeled elitist, marketed as they are to people with money (Whole Foods is a great example of this. I dare you to find a Whole Foods in a depressed area), but those toting the green products tend to look down on those who are lacking. There’s certainly a “greener-than-thou” attitude among a lot of the environmental advocates, comparing notes on whose wardrobe is more organic, who has the newest, most efficient car, who has the fanciest fair trade furniture. And that’s great and all. It’s better than all of those same people driving gas guzzling sports cars. But what about the part of the population who doesn’t have the disposable income for that sort of shopping?

That’s where you encounter what this article calls “the rural poor,” and by extension, I’d imagine, the same group in urban areas. When people have less money (and I think college students, at least the ones I hung around, sometimes have a similar experience, even if it’s temporary), they become very innovative in their attempts to cut out expenses. For those in rural areas, especially in the UK, which this article refers to, they’ve likely been practicing sustainable methods for centuries. A hybrid car would be completely ridiculous in that situation- as would a reusable grocery bag, or organic cotton shoes, or any other of the trappings of middle class greenism.

It makes you, I think, really question what sustainability is. I personally don’t think it has anything to do with products whatsoever. Some may be “greener” than others, and may be improvements in terms of damage done to the environment- but if we’re really going to be sustainable, I think improvements are just not going to cut it. We need to rethink how we approach everything in our lives, and that, I believe, means cutting out the consumerism all together. What’s more sustainable, after all- solar panels, or not using any electric at all? Oh, I know how most people will react to this- I get labeled a luddite all the time- but I’m not suggesting we all go without electric, as I’ve said before. I’m just suggesting we take a long, hard look at the things we call “green” and ask if they’re really helping save the environment, or if they’re really just helping us feel better about ourselves- while we maintain the exact same lifestyle that got us into this mess originally.

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The Bottled Water Debate

I’ve recently been privy to a series of emails from various college dining services purchasers and the like, all debating the relative merits of banning bottled water from campus, as they call it. To be more accurate, they should say, to stop selling bottled water in campus retail locations. There’s no way they can “ban” bottled water from being brought onto campus from outside sources.

To me, this should be a no brainer. Bottled water is one of the most wasteful inventions in history. Americans throw away sixty million water bottles PER DAY in the U.S. Sixty MILLION. Take a moment to picture that. And arguments that recycling can eliminate this problem are a load of BS. Barely a quarter of the bottles produced in this country are recycled. The obvious and very simple alternative to this extraordinary quantity of waste is to stop selling bottled water. However, the industry, including a number of college retailers, argue that they wouldn’t stock bottled water if people weren’t buying it. However, this is another ridiculous argument, and one that you hear to justify everything from fast food to underpriced sweatshop clothing- “well, people are buying it.” People would probably buy crack if you started selling it in retail locations, but you don’t see anyone doing that, now do you?


To an extent, there is some validity to this argument. People ARE buying all the shit out there on the market, and the people selling it are making money off it- so they keep selling it. McDonald’s would not continue to exist if it weren’t raking in billions of dollars every year. But who’s to blame, really? You can blame consumers for being uninformed and not thinking about their decisions. You can blame the industries for aggressive marketing, especially to children. Hell, you can blame every aspect of this society for making people into consumers, and leaving them with no choice except to be slavishly dependent on what they can purchase- and for being driven to look for the lowest price out of necessity. If we still knew how to grow our own food, and still had access to clean water, things like fast food and bottled water wouldn’t even be issues.

But we are currently trapped within the confines of a consumer culture (for the time being), and that leaves the question: do we stop selling bottled water, or continue in this vein? Stopping selling water would clearly eliminate an enormous amount of waste. But if colleges stopped selling bottled water, they would be required to install more water fountains, so that students continue to have access to water- and that, and this is the key, costs money and does not make any profit for the college.

The various people at other colleges who have weighed in on this like to laundry list excuses like, “tap water isn’t as high quality as bottled,” which is patently not true in most cases (tap water is more strictly regulated than bottled, the problem comes with poor plumbing at the college itself, which is fixable), and rambling about how they only want to offer the highest quality products to their students. I honestly would not be so irritated if they would just come right out and say they don’t want to lose money.

No, if they really cared about students they would be more interested in providing the cleanest water possible- in a form far more accessible than expensive bottled water, ie public fountains at more regular intervals. And if they cared about the environment, it wouldn’t even be a question. But, like people everywhere, they refuse to acknowledge their real motivations- instead attacking the environmentalists for not also attacking bottled soda (uh?).

It comes down to the same thing that is ALWAYS an issue, and is at the heart of every environmental argument: if we all had access to clean water, would bottled water be in any way successful? Is it within our rights as human beings to continue to access one of the basic necessities of life without paying an arm and a leg for it? It hearkens back to the public bathroom issue. The trend right now is to make you pay for everything, basic necessity or not. The perfect consumer is one that doesn’t have any other options.

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Green Blowjobs

EcoGeek - Interview with Paolo Bacigalupi

This guy is just fantastic. I've largely stopped reading scifi in recent years, but scifi authors generally have the ability to look sharply at our own culture by exaggerating it and setting it just far apart that we can look at it from a perspective we can rarely turn on ourselves. Ursula LeGuin is a great example of that. I haven't read any of this guy's books, but from what he says in his interview, I think I'm going to have to. I'm going to be eternally indebted to him for inventing, to my knowledge, the term "green blowjob." That just about sums up my opinion of most of the green products being pandered to us on the market these days.


I just want to quote this section:

"One of the things I dislike intensely about technological fixes is that they often involve payment in order to replicate a natural service that once was provided free of charge by nature. Don't have clean water? One techno-fix is a water filter. Let's give a huge shout out to Brita filters, right? But then we all have to buy one.

"In India, middle-class households all have water filters... the poor go without. The other option would be to protect our water sources. But that's just not sexy. Using a technology almost automatically means we have to hire and pay a technology creator, which in turns creates an economic interest that does not actually care to remedy the core problem. If I sell water filters, I'm not going to be interested in clean water for all. That would kill my market of clean water for the ones who want to buy it from me. Once there's an economic interest, you end up with corporations lobbying tooth and nail to keep us from simply taking the most simple long-range planning steps.

"So no, basically, I think trying to find another tool to fix what we've already done with our tools, generally works out poorly. This has partly to do with the narrow way we approach environmental problems and our lack of foresight over cascade effects. And partly from seeing how talk of techno-fixes almost always defaults to a circle-jerk that's really focused on how we can keep enabling our ongoing stupidity. Another drink doesn't help an alcoholic, another toy doesn't fix our environmental problems. Either we deal with root causes, or we pay down the road. None of the ways we make, sell or trade objects are sustainable. The longer we deny it, the harder it will hit us."

-Paolo Bacigalupi

Amen to that. Nothing to add.

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Spring Break '09

I awoke to the sound of rain softly beating against the side of the tent. The sides of the canvas were damp, but I barely felt it, wrapped tightly in my sleeping bag. Somewhere outside I could hear a vulture rustling it’s wings, most likely eyeing the camp, trying to determine if it was safe to approach. I glanced up at the tent window, and saw that the sun had not yet risen. The sky was still a solid, deep gray.

Eventually the sun would crest the edge of the beach, washing the sky with a light pink haze, edged in brilliant red. By the time it had moved beyond the tops of the palms, we would all be awake, perched on the picnic tables eating bagels and slathering on sunscreen before the day’s activities. It’s not a normal college schedule, rising at dawn and falling asleep shortly after dark, but when the days are filled with volunteering, canoeing, swimming, and hiking, it’s best to get an early start, and by the time the sun sinks below the ocean and the moon has risen to bathe the campsite in pearly white, all we can think about is sleep.


Each day brought a new adventure: whether meeting a panther face to face (literally), and learning that panthers, cougars, and mountain lions are in fact the same species (who knew?), or clearing brush to keep a trail clear for other explorers, each day of volunteering exposed students to the ins and outs of the Everglades ecosystems, especially with an up close look at what doesn’t belong- the tigers, snakes, monkeys and other exotic animals at the Everglades Outpost, rescued after escaping from research facilities or being abandoned by people who thought keeping a Bengal tiger for a pet would be a good idea, or the invasive species that plague the parks and choke out native plants.

Students also entered the Everglades themselves, getting as close as possible to the water while canoeing through mangrove tunnels, feet away from alligators, wading birds, and the other denizens of the swamps and waterways that make up the 1.5 million acres of the Everglades National Park, where we spent most of our time. A night hike during the full moon brought us within range of a group of feeding alligators, animals which look like nothing so much as baking logs during the day, but which come out in numbers in the cool of night to thrash through the swamp, snapping their jaws on unfortunate fish with a sound like a trunk closing. It is a rare group that gets to see a “feeding frenzy”- and a sight not quickly forgotten.

On another day we were able to get even closer to the wildlife, spending an afternoon on a beach in Key Largo, resting before the long drive back to Maryland, soaking in the sun, and snorkeling in the protected bay, which sheltered numerous fish and crabs, which could be seen hiding among the roots of the mangrove trees. The sky remained a perfect, incandescent blue throughout our trip- the temperature a perfect 81∞ each day, and bliss to our group, having just come from the melting snows and blustering winds in Maryland. An afternoon spent lying under the shade of a palm, listening to the waves brush softly against the beach, and watching wisps of cloud skirt across the sky, drifting in and out of sleep, was a perfect conclusion to a week spent out-of-doors, as near to the land as possible, without cell phones (no reception) and only about two watches between the lot of us, telling time by the angle of the sun and our own growing familiarity with the Florida skies.

The Everglades are a lesson in ecology. The climate is somewhat different from what we have here in Maryland: only two seasons, wet and dry. We were fortunate to visit during the dry season, when there are fewer bugs, almost no rain, and a higher likelihood of seeing animals, as they are bunched together around the few remaining large pools of water. The Everglades itself is actually a very, very slow moving river- 60 miles wide and 100 miles long, twice as wide as the Bay but half as long. During the wet season, May through November, the area floods to form acres of wetlands and swamp, which serve an important role in buffering Florida from hurricanes and flooding. Much of the damage done to Florida by storm systems in past years has been the result of the destruction of many of the wetlands that once absorbed the flooding caused by storms. The park itself is protected under a number of preservation efforts- but this doesn’t account for the encroaching development that threatens coastal regions elsewhere in Florida and around the world.

On the last night before we returned to Maryland, we came back to our campsite tired and sunburned, to find the site surprisingly dark. All week the moon had been so bright we had rarely needed lanterns to find our way around, but on this night, the moon hadn’t yet risen, and we could barely see our tents as we stumbled out of the vans. A few steps out of the parking lot, however, and we all stopped dead in our tracks. Without the moon, the sky was overflowing with more stars than most of us had seen in years, or in some cases, ever. The Milky Way was clearly visible, as were thousands upon thousands of stars we could only imagine even in a place with as little light pollution as the Eastern Shore. A group of us, without any planning or discussion, sprawled out in the grass to look up at the breathtaking span, sharing stories about constellations we could identify, and making up our own when we ran out of ones we knew. One girl pointed out that the light coming to us so strongly had been traveling for thousands of years to get here- and in many cases, the stars that originally gave off the light had at this point burned out. Looking up at the sky, which wrapped around us in an enormous dome unobstructed by any building or even trees, it was easy to feel small, a tiny speck in a vast expanse, and at the same time immensely connected to it all: to the stars, and the palms, and the cry of a heron somewhere in the night; to the alligators, and the flowing river where it met the sea within view of our campsite, and to one another, lying on our backs in the grass.

View photos of our trip here.

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Inconsistency

Often in this job I find myself doing inconsistent things. It worries me, sometimes, that I’m not really sticking to my principles, that we are somehow compromising ourselves by attempting to work with companies or organizations I don’t hold with. For example, Coke. The Coca Cola company gives out a rather wide variety of grant funding to various institutions, and we have been known to apply for them. But- it’s Coca Cola. Coke is not an environmentally friendly product, let me tell you. Start with the fact that the main ingredients in Coke are derived from corn. Not to mention the number of questionable labor practices of the companies foreign arms…

But that you can research yourself. The point, really, is that very often we are susceptible to making major compromises to reach our ends- but is this the right way to go about it? Just because someone is offering grant funding, does that absolve the fact that they are otherwise one of the major polluters to the environment? A lot of major corporations, particularly the oil companies, try and improve their image by providing funding to alternative energy projects, planting trees, and all the rest of the highly marketable band-aid actions. And in the meantime, they march onward without changing their practices in the slightest.

This is another one of those what-do-you-really-value questions. Yes, tree plantings are generally a good idea, and they look especially good in a press release. But what’s planting twenty or so trees when the company that paid for them may be cutting down thousands more? We in the environmental advocacy business tend to get so caught up on funding that we fail to question where we get it from. Real community action, I suspect, is the kind that doesn’t require any money at all, except maybe to support the people doing it so they don’t have to work three other jobs in addition to community advocacy. No, funding, in the large part, honestly goes toward making things look good. Adverts, board dinners, and endless presentations and powerpoints and pages of plans. It’s the difference between doing a demonstration artificial wetland in a fancy wooden barrel as opposed to just using a bathtub- or whatever else may have been lying around.

I haven’t been convinced this is entirely necessary. And maybe this is why we overlook the failings of some of the funders we regularly beseech for more money: we know that we ourselves are failing to uphold the tenants at the heart of sustainability. What compromises are we really willing to make when it comes to the future of the world as we know it?

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Public Space

Over the holiday I went shopping with my little sister. Normally I do not do any shopping, unless I need something very specific, or am inspired to browse the dress section at Goodwill. I definitely do not go in malls, especially of the strip variety. But quite a few people gave me gift certificates for Christmas, and unfortunately they were for places I would never go of my own volition- Barnes and Noble and Borders. There’s actually a funny story there but that isn’t the point of this entry.

While in one of these places, I started thinking about bathrooms. If you are in the middle of a city, ninety percent of the time there is no place to pee. Think about it. All the bathrooms are locked up in people’s houses, or in restaurants that won’t let you pee unless you are a “patron”. We had this problem over the summer during Artscape, when the lines for the portable bathrooms were horrendous, and the heat made them impossible to get near anyway. Where in heavens name are you supposed to pee?

You may be wondering how this relates to the environment, but think about it for a minute. When did this become an issue? When did it become illegal to pee wherever you could, behind a bush, on a tree, what have you? (Also, why is it so satisfying to pee outside behind a bush when you’re camping?) In Europe, you even have to pay to use the public bathrooms (which leads to some inventive methods of getting around the system, let me tell you).

One of our biggest expenses, or at least for most of us, is for space. Simply to have space to live, we shell out several hundred dollars per month. Sometimes several thousand. For- space? (We call it rent.) This really seems illogical, if you start to think about it. When this country was first settled, you could tramp out to the Midwest and drop yourself down and call it your own. You wouldn’t imagine paying anyone for the land, so long as you could survive on it. (I am temporarily ignoring the fact that there were in fact people living there already.)

This has led us to become rather possessive of our space. This is my space. This is your space. Do not cross the line into my space. But what of the other spaces? Could this be the source of some of our inaction so far as environmental degradation to the ocean, or the air? It’s not “our” space, after all. We didn’t pay for it. Someone else will deal with it.

But our spaces intertwine- the air and water from neighboring spaces have an effect on what happens in your space, frequently invading in the form of rain and wind and temperature changes- the natural world disregards boundaries such as property lines, which are irrelevant when it comes to the natural course of a breeze. And why is it that we pay such attention to them? How is it that we’ve come to find it acceptable that we have to pay for space to live, and frequently find ourselves without a place to pee? It certainly doesn’t make much sense to me.

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King Corn, Pt II

Among the many, many things we discussed last night after watching King Corn- in what seems to be a constant and never ending discussion of the food system, and eating, and what to do about it all- one thing in particular stuck out. It’s all damnably complicated.

And that’s just it: a hundred years ago food came from the farm, to you, without a lot of steps in between, and food was, well, food. Not food plus 30 unidentifiable ingredients. Bewildering does not even begin to describe the number of food choices we have, not to mention the complexity of a system that moves food all over the globe to your plate, with a dizzying array of steps in between. This is why movies like King Corn focus on one thing, like corn- and even then can’t fit more than a small percentage of the issues into one film.

But I was struck last night by the context the filmmaker put this in. In many places, people have given up on trying to make sense of the overwhelming complexity of the food system, and taken matters into their own hands: joining coops, building gardens, right there in their backyards, even in cities, discovering alternative ways of growing and raising food that make sense for both us and our environment. Essentially, this is what all of us who protest “the system” are doing- taking things back into our own hands, making them into a manageable size, and handling them on a person or community sized scale, where we can make decisions that are best for the people in that area, and not- well, I’m not even sure who’s benefiting from the way we’re making decisions now.

That’s really the devilish thing about the mess we’re in, and, at least in my opinion, a large part of why there’s so much apathy toward doing anything to change it. When faced with something as complex as our current food system, it seems completely impossible to create any change. The web of cause and effect is too dense to untangle, and pulling one string leads to yet another knot of issues and tangles. You can’t blame farmers, who are just as trapped as we are, and are trying to keep their families fed just like the rest of us. You can try and blame the consumer, but it’s not like consumers stood up and said, yes! Give us refined sugar and nutritionless food! Destroy our environment and our health! Not only are consumers often not given much choice in the foods available for purchase, but they’re also bombarded on all sides by the mixed messages of the media, who can’t seem to decide from day to day what’s “best” to eat. And if you try and blame the corporations, someone will inevitably counter that they wouldn’t be making all these unhealthy food products if we weren’t buying them (though they spend an awful lot of money convincing us we want them).

It’s enough to make anyone throw up their hands in defeat. How can we ever get ourselves out of this mess if we can’t even look at the whole thing at once? Well, after our conversation last night, I’m prepared to offer at least one way out of the labyrinth. The beauty of this way out is that it is small, manageable, and widely variant depending on who and where you are: and that, in itself, is part of the solution, because diversity is what makes the world go round. It was trying to make everything the same that got us into this mess in the first place.

Step One: What do you value? What do you really, deep down, value, above all else? Your life? Your health? The lives of your loved ones? Once you know the answer to this question, you can answer every other question accordingly, and define your goals. Is cheap food, for example, still valuable if it compromises your health? Or is cheap food the ultimate goal?

Step Two: What are you going to do about it? You decide that you want high quality, nutritious food that will maintain the health of yourself and your loved ones. You know that this sort of food is whole food, not manufactured food products with their diverse array of unknown ingredients (which include any number of suspect chemicals), you know that food grown with consideration for the environment and the soil also happens to be higher in nutritional content (well, if you didn’t know that you do now), and you know that food grown this way is also less likely to be sprayed with toxic chemicals, and if it’s grown locally, will maintain more of its quality in freshness.

All right, you know all this, so what are you waiting for? You don’t know where to get it? Well, the food system isn’t offering it- and you could ask the supermarket owner, or the CEO of the food company, or the government for it, but that’s no guarantee- and more likely absolutely nothing will change. Or, you could go to the source: the land. Which is a little easier to do through the medium of the farmer. If there isn’t a farmer? Do it yourself. And before you start going on about time and money, I’ll ask you again: what do you value? What’s worth giving up, if the thing at stake is your life?

Of course, eating like this means large corporations can't make a profit off your hunger. If it turns out a more traditional diet is healthier after all, and they can no longer sell novelty food products, where does that leave them? Not to mention that whole foods come without packaging, and when grown locally don't have to be transported long distances, and when grown sustainability don't require massive inputs of petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers- but that's really just the icing on the cake.

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Deep Green Thoughts, Pt V

I tend to digress on the subject of environmental “ethics” and how we should act as human beings, because it’s such a broad, complex topic. I’m therefore going to back up a little and return to this idea of clean air vs. polluted air and the relative concepts of good and bad.

Really, you could debate the existence of good and bad for centuries and not come to any conclusions. This is why we have philosophy. There’s nothing wrong with exploring the concepts, but when it comes to day to day actions, some simplification is necessary. Therefore, for the duration of this blog, I’m going to define good as promoting human survival (and by extension, the survival of most of the species we share the planet with) and bad as the opposite, something that contributes, on the large scale, to the demise of the human species. If we go back to the question of whether pollution is bad, then by these standards we can say it depends on the scale: pollution on the scale of one group out of hundreds occasionally burning fields is fine, while pollution on the scale of hundreds of much larger groups burning fields is probably bad.

We can take it a step further and go back to the original question, of whether or not it is wrong for the general human population (of this society) to live the way we do. If survival is our goal, then it follows we’re not in great shape. Take a power plant. We all, myself included, contribute to the construction and maintenance of power plants. We use electricity, after all. In return, those of us unfortunate enough to live next to a power plant suffer disease and poor health, which certainly hinders our chances of survival. I use “our” because I did in fact grow up next to a power plant- and ended up with a severe case of asthma, as did the majority of the kids I grew up with. Moving to the Eastern Shore has alleviated the problem to some extent, but I haven’t grown out of it, as one trip to the city, especially on a hot day, will set it off and have me sucking on my inhaler for the rest of the day.

Honestly, this makes me really, really angry. And why not? My health has been compromised. I will never be able to breath entirely freely, without fear of having an asthma attack set off by some unknown pollutant. And I’m not the only one, by any means, nor have I suffered much compared to the millions of other people on the planet compromised by human activities- look at the people of some parts of China, unable to go outside on certain days because of the acid rain. Or the devastation exposed by Katrina- thousands of people affected by living too near the industrial district, and thousands more put out of home and life because we, humans, destroyed the buffers (wetlands) that prevented tidal surges from destroying the coastland by building a city over them (not to mention the potential link between global warming and severe storms).

Why aren’t we ALL ragingly pissed off?

Well, it’s possible because we’re all the culprits. Who do you target when you get pissed about a power plant? Yourself? That not only won’t get you anywhere, but it’s counterproductive. There are plenty of direct targets, plenty of people who, whether entirely conscious of the consequences of their actions or not, still figuratively pulled the trigger. Or you could choose not to participate at all, which is hellishly difficult and usually doesn’t do much to change the fact that the majority of human activities are not only killing most of the other species on the planet, but are killing us in the process.

There are other ways. Really, though, the important thing- and the reason behind this long series of posts- is for you to work out for yourself what you hold dear. Define that, and then define good and bad, and what you are willing to risk to protect those things you hold dear. Look at the costs- not the monetary costs, but the true costs- and ask what electricity is really worth. What is beef worth? What is a housing development on top of a wetland worth? How many lives are worth a light that comes on at the flick of a switch?

Answer those questions, and you’ll be well on your way to your own system of ethics.

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Happy New Year

I’m going to borrow some New Year’s resolutions from one of my favorite books. These are the things I try to live by all year, not just at New Year’s. I try, very hard, to define my life by the things I want and want to be, not by the things I don’t want. It’s sometimes a subtle distinction, but one that makes a world of difference. If you can only define yourself by what you don’t want, then really at the center you have nothing. I know I tend to rip on the conventional take on environmentalism in these blogs, and so for a while I’m going to have a go at being more positive, and see if maybe we can’t fill that empty space with the things we do want.

This year I will walk every day in between the trees, I will make some celebration, I will love without fear, I will create beautiful things, I will lay in the sun, I will share what I have, I will open my doors, I will sing whenever I can… I will eat jam and sit on my porch and remember all the tiny joys that make up our lives, and use them as a bastion against my fears, I will hold onto my dreams and realize everything around me is made up of dreams, and that means every step I take is making a dream reality, and if we all make room for our dreams, the world will be beautiful. The world is beautiful, and I am grateful every day for living.

Happy New Year, everyone.

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On the eve of the new year... a Reality Check

Does the fact that you turn off your light for an extra ten minutes really make that much difference?

Overall, no. We’re not going to lie to you and say that the 10 kWh you saved are really going to prevent global warming. They are, however, going to get you and those who will see what you do and follow your example in the right mindset, and that is that we need to start taking responsibility for our actions. That’s right, I’m about to be perfectly honest with you:

If we aren’t going to have a huge collapse, whether economic or ecologically or otherwise, we (as humans) can not go on living the way we have been, as if there are no consequences to our lifestyle and complete disregard for the balance in which every other living creature manages to function. If you use more resources than are required to support your population, you die. Period. No way around this one, no easy technological fix that is going to let us replace petroleum with solar panels (which are, by the way, made from petroleum), we simply can’t go on the way we are now if we want the human species to survive. It’s a simple matter of biological feedback. It doesn’t take a scientist to see we’re not only shooting ourselves in the foot, but we’re steadily drawing the barrel up to our figurative head.

This does not mean we are all bad people. This is what all those “Green Thoughts” are about. We are in fact an “invasive” species. But here’s where we differ from phragmites: we can make the conscious choice to get back in balance. We have the ability to realize we are on a one way path down catastrophe street, and that the answer isn’t so much as to turn the car around but to get out of the car and walk away. Time to find a new mode of transportation. Time to find a new street.

And here’s where I’m hopeful. Humans are innovative. We are immensely creative, when we aren’t fettered by our fears and the blindness induced by our culture. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, after all. Humans actually lived for millions of years without upsetting the natural balance- and if any particular group of people happened to do so, they died out. Pretty simple arrangement. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, I’m referring to the people we frequently call aborigines, or tribal peoples. Where they are still to be found, and by that I mean still found living the way they’ve always lived without interference from our culture, they manage to do the same thing that elephants and birds and fish have done all along: live without upsetting the balance that not only allows other species to continue to survive, but assures their own continued existence.
But we can’t live like that! We can’t live like elephants and birds and “primitives”!
Ok, fine. See you in the afterlife.

Living like elephants and birds does not mean we have to go back to living in the woods. For one, this is completely impractical. There isn’t enough space on the planet for nearly 7 billion people to go back to living in the woods. What we do need to do, instead, is figure out how to live without using more resources than our landbase can support. That means no more fossil fuels, for one. But it also means that everything we do, and I mean everything, needs to be examined from the perspective of its long term consequences not only on us (humans), but on our landbase and on the other species that live there. If we want to ensure our continued survival, we need to consider our actions in terms of not their economic viability or their efficiency (short term consequences) but of their ability to help us sustain human life for as long as possible (presuming this is the goal). To preserve human life, you need a planet to live on. Simple as that.

So let’s return to turning off the lights. I’m not asking you to stop having lights. I’m typing on a computer, clearly I am not running around in the wilderness without any electricity, nor am I suggesting you do so. I am, however, asking that you think what having a light bulb means. For a light bulb to exist, there must be a source of electricity to power it. This can come from any number of places, but aside from nuclear, solar, hydroelectric and wind, they more or less come from burning things to make steam which then powers lots of little machine bits and makes electricity. These things are not necessarily bad, unless you’re burning things that you don’t have an infinite, renewable supply of, like petrol. They also have the nasty side effect of filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, and we all know what that means. The effects of hydroelectric power- meaning damming rivers- we all should know is bad for the environment. The fate of salmon should be enough to remind us that dams kill rivers, and everything that relies on those rivers, including, eventually, humans. As for solar and wind- well, you have to build solar panels and wind turbines out of something, and usually those things are mined and manufactured using, you guessed it, petroleum. Not an elegant solution. And anyone who argues nuclear power is a solution to the problem isn’t thinking in the long term, or is ignoring the fact that we can’t live on a planet filled with leftover nuclear waste.

The light bulb itself isn’t much better. It had to be manufactured, with more stuff mined up from the ground, not to mention the energy required to convert raw materials into a light bulb, and then it had to be packaged, shipped, sent to a store (this is also not mentioning the resources required to build the manufacturing plant, and the equipment inside, and the equipment used to mine the materials in the first place, and the materials and energy that went into building the vehicles used for transporting raw materials and equipment and finished light bulbs), and finally, eventually, taken home to be put in your lamp (which went through a similar process). And this is STILL leaving an enormous number of steps out of the process. You have a house to put the light bulb in, presumably.

So when you turn out the light for ten minutes, does it make that much difference? Not compared to the process required for there to be a light for you to turn on in the first place. Does this mean you should just give up, and not care? No. It means every single one of us needs to rethink how we (as a species) are living, and whether this whole mess we call civilization is really working out for us in the long run. If, after looking around for a bit, you conclude, as I have, that its time to get out of the car and make a run for it, you will begin to think about things a little differently. It doesn’t mean you won’t turn out the lights when you leave the room- because no matter what, there’s no reason not to live responsibly- it just means you’ll see the bigger picture. You turning off your lights will not make so much of a difference as light bulb manufacturers coming up with a light bulb without so many unpleasant consequences for ourselves and the environment. And no, I’m not talking about CFLs.

On campus, this means turning out your light will not make so much difference as the college itself switching to a better source of power- and let’s pause to define better as one with fewer long term consequences for ourselves and our planet- and beginning to think about our practices in the long term. Individual actions DO make a difference, because all the so-called green power in the world will not make up for millions of people acting irresponsibly with their light switches- but we also have to see the bigger picture, and know that individual actions are not going to save the world unless we also make some changes to the heavy hitters. For example, residential water usage accounts for only about 13% of the total U.S. water use- the other 87% comes from agriculture and industry. Your shorter shower may save a few hundred gallons over the course of the year, but if we aren’t also working to reduce the amount of water used by industries, we’re missing the bigger picture.

It’s not impossible. We invented the light bulb, didn’t we? I have every faith possible that we are more than capable of uninventing it as well.

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Deep Green Thoughts, Pt IV

So, we had last established that humans are just as much a part of biological diversity as any other species. What does that mean in terms of the way we live?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize we have been squashing diversity for several hundred years now, if not longer. Take a look around the Eastern Shore. Massive plantings of corn do not lend themselves to much diversity- especially when other species are ruthlessly eradicated by means of herbicides. If you travel the country, you will find more of the same. Corn, corn, and more corn. At least half the food in the grocery store is corn based, if not more. We rely on it for everything. Now imagine for a moment a disease sprung up that targeted corn, and it all died. Uh oh. We’d be in big trouble.

This is the benefit of people all living in different ways. If some people depended on corn for their major food source, and some other people depended on potatoes, and a corn disease came along, not all the people would die out. The potato people might be able to help them out, or a new group of people would spring up in their place.

Now we’re back around to the question of what we do about all this. And the answer, at least in my humble opinion, is that there’s no one single answer. This is what I always tell other vegetarians when they come up with the idea that everyone in the country should go vegetarian. Clearly that wouldn’t work out any better than everyone in the country thriving off corn-fed beef. It would certainly help with the massive environmental damage caused by industrial cattle operations, as well as the numerous other concerns attached to factory farmed beef (this is such a well covered subject that I don’t feel the need to elaborate here). But if everyone went vegetarian- well, problem number one would be the dependency of most vegetarians on soy, which isn’t all that much better a crop than corn when grown in mass quantities- especially when grown as a monoculture. Same goes for most of the vegetables: massive fields of nothing but spinach aren’t going to solve the problem of needing to maintain biological diversity in order to survive.

By the same measure, there’s no silver bullet to the energy crisis. If everyone in the country installs solar panels, then yes, we will use less petroleum (ignoring the fact that solar panels, of course, require petroleum in their manufacture). But first, if we all started using solar panels the demand for the resources involved in the manufacture of solar panels would increase astronomically- threatening, I have no doubt, another slew of limited natural resources already taxed by our current means of energy production. Second, not every location makes sense for solar panels. Some places receive less sunlight (obviously). The same logic applies to windmills and biofuels and all the other “alternatives” they’ve come up with for energy production.

But there’s no one, single answer. Native Americans on the Eastern Shore of Maryland ate deer (among numerous other things). Native Americans in say, Arizona, did not eat deer. Because there were none. This may seem blatantly obvious, but then fast forward to modern America. People on the Eastern Shore eat beef. People in Arizona eat beef. They in fact eat the exact same type of beef, possibly from the same location, most likely distributed by the same corporation. When approached from the angle of biological diversity- and by extension, our own survival- does this make the faintest amount of sense? Keep in mind the possibility of a corn disease- and what happens when an area inhabited entirely by phragmites is suddenly deprived of sufficient nitrogen.

The pieces, if my narrative skills are at all functional, should at least be starting to form some semblance of a picture at this point. But let’s keep forging ahead, and see if we can’t make some sense out of the puzzle.

…to be continued.

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Disclaimers

Two clarifications in reference to the rather lengthy series of blogs under the title “Deep Green Thoughts.” One, when I say the planet can save itself, I mean the entire planet. Not life as we know it on the planet. If we fill the atmosphere with so much carbon that it kills off all life on the planet, the planet will still exist. If even some life remains, it will find a way to recuperate. An asteroid killed off all the dinosaurs and dramatically changed the climate, and life went on. The planet will be fine. We, however, require a certain climate to survive, and a certain set of conditions- temperatures that allow us to grow food, for example. Most of the other species on the planet share these needs for survival, so by saving the planet in a manner that allows us to survive, we are also saving it for the vast quantity of other species that depend on this particular type of climate to thrive.

Second, you will never, ever, hear me say humans are more important than the other species on the planet. I have never once in my life believed this. If this was in any way implied by my argument that it’s ok to save the planet so we can continue to live, it was unintentional. I believe all living creatures have a right to continue living. I also believe all living creatures will by nature compete, and some will live and some will die and that’s just how it is. The thrust of this argument, however, is not whether it’s right or wrong to deprive millions of other species the right to live, but whether it’s right or wrong for us to stay on a path that has us barreling headlong into our own destruction.

I don’t personally think it’s right to drive other species to extinction for our own gain. But more importantly, and this is where value loses meaning, I think it’s incredibly blind of us to drive other species to extinction. Take sharks, for example. Shark populations are plummeting, mostly due to over fishing. Considering most of them are slaughtered for their fins and thrown back in the water, this is a complete waste. But not only is it wrong because sharks have the right to live- but because if all the sharks die, we have taken out the top predator in the ocean. Which means all the fish that would have been eaten by sharks will breed out of proportion, and they in turn will devour their favorite foods, all the way down the chain to plankton, out of proportion. And do you know what happens if all the plankton in the ocean are devoured? They stop producing oxygen. And do you know where the vast majority of the oxygen we depend on to survive comes from? The ocean. So, from a human perspective, and we are human, it may be wrong to kill off all the sharks in the ocean- but more importantly, it’s incredibly stupid to do so.

We are all connected, and not just in the cosmic, spiritual sense, which is up for debate- but in very, very tangible and scientifically provable ways. Ignoring those questions just may cost us our survival.

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