Sunrise, Sunset

Although I'm not terribly happy about this photo (I generally avoid power lines and try to frame photographs without stray house bits, like the corner of the gable on the upper right), it and its companion below represent this post rather nicely, and were taken on the same day about a week ago. The "Sunrise" shot (above) was taken from the front porch with my new iPhone 7.

The "sunset" shot, taken in the back yard, also includes power lines, so there's an additional aspect of symmetry; I usually stand atop chairs and other furniture to try and avoid them. However, I wanted to submit something to Skywatch Friday for the first time in ages [as usual, thanks to the crew--and do go see what folks from all over have posted], so here we are; what you see is what I got, and I'm making do.

As I am with all manner of things these days. I will not be viewing any of the inaugural festivities tomorrow, and since the weather should be warmer, will instead be doing some early garden prep, reading some Wendell Berry and Joseph Wood Krutch, and watching a couple of episodes of Netflix's wonderful adaptation of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. I can't imagine anything more appropriate, given the state of the Union. Thus, the photos seem to hold out a little promise for a not completely bleak future, but I won't be holding my breath.

Despite my usual less-than-optimistic view of things, I've decided to find ways to muddle through the next four years. I'll be rethinking and redesigning my website (and changing the name from Owldroppings to Owl's Farm; this blog will be linked to it), clearing out the detritus in the garage and attic (in case we decide we just can't abide Texas any longer), and finding more ways to live more sustainable lives.

Inspiration for all this has come from several places, including my new subscription to Australia's Slow magazine, ecopoets like Krutch and Berry, and even the latest issue of American Craft. The editor, Monica Moses, has written a wonderful little essay on the role of craft in keeping one's sanity in uncertain times: "The Tough Make Art," in which she describes her own plan:
 

Like a lot of us, I’m looking for ways to cope with the discord, to feel hopeful again. I’m returning to the basics: eating well, exercising, trying to sleep, spending time with loved ones. But I’m also doubling down (as the pundits would say) on art. (American Craft, Feb/Mar 17, p. 10)

My own map of the next few months includes efforts to accomplish much the same sorts of things, including the art part. Her sentiments are in tune with much of what I read among the thoughtful writers whose works I frequent, now that I find myself sticking to the Arts & Life section and the funnies in the Daily Poop,  and the Books and Trilobites sections of the New York Times. Never have I felt more grateful for the library we've amassed, because it should prove most valuable over the next four years, reminding me that sanity might well prevail.

So, for what it's worth, here's what I have in mind:

Eat Real Food. I stole this designation from my Whole Foods Market newsletter, which offered its customers meal plans in several categories. But it's really what I've been trying to do for years, with the help of Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman and others. I've become rather more serious about it since my retirement awarded me with more time for contemplating and planning. We also recently invested in a smaller refrigerator, which facilitates consciousness of how much we buy and where we have to store it. It's also a terrific deterrent to food waste. The Beloved Spouse gave me Lidia Bastianich's new book, Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine, and The Big Book of Kombucha for the holidays (plus Cooking With Loula, a lovely Greek cookbook I noticed while shopping for other people's gifts). I have always loved cookbooks that are more about history, philosophy, and culture than technique, and these are all inspirational additions to the "food" segment of our aforementioned library. Over the last two weeks I've spent more time planning meals and enjoying the process than I'd been able to do for several years.

Get Real Exercise. The realization that the new, pricey drug I'm taking is likely to prolong my life significantly (and my favorite cardiologist's reminding me that exercise won't do squat for my cholesterol but will do massive amounts of good for my brain and overall well being) has made me more conscious than ever of movement. What finally got me perambulating the neighborhood was the death of our sweet dog Woody last summer. His brother Arlo no longer had a reliable source of exercise, so I started walking him, dropping him off at the house when he got tired, and then continued on my own several times a week. TBS would join me on weekends and holidays, and we've gotten to know the topography of the neighborhood better than we had in the previous sixteen years. Over his winter break from teaching we kept up the dog walking, but neighborhood exploration slacked off due to weather and family obligations.  But a movement-tracking app on my phone has helped keep me from being completely sedentary, and as the weather warms up and I get into the garden more (as I plan to this afternoon), I should hit the "active" category much more frequently (now "lightly active" rescues me from couch potatohood). The goal is to use my body better, get stronger, and get out much more.

Make Stuff.  Some time ago I bought a lovely journal with a William Morris design on it (actually, a sketch for a wallpaper design) in which I've been writing down and sketching out ideas for art books and other little projects. I'll try to get some of these done--including the redesign of my web pages. But I've been wanting to go back to painting and "making" things,  which I haven't done since my children were small. This includes working on the house and garden--painting and plastering and staining and the like, along with general homekeeping, mending, knitting, and quilting. Using one's creative juices seems to be a particularly satisfying way to make it through trying times.

Write More. Having received my first rejection slip (for a story in a science fiction anthology), you'd think I'd have sworn off any desire to publish more than for myself  (and my one or two faithful readers). But I've decided to do what I used to urge my students to do: take the criticism to heart, and use it well. I'm not sure I agree with all of the comments, but I'll have them in mind when I revise the story and submit it somewhere else. I also need to work on More News From Nowhere, and to go back to the old-bats-in-space novel I started working on a couple of years ago. I actually posted on the Cabinet recently, and have lots of ideas for more entries. Letters to friends are on the list, too.

Read Even More. I probably read more than I do anything else, but now that I've made it through the entire run of Midsomer Murders twice on Netflix, I've got no afternoon distractions from the telly. TBS and I have stuff we watch when he gets home (because he's too brain dead after teaching to accomplish anything more impressive), but when I'm not out moving and growing things, I have a huge stack of books to begin or to finish. And then there's always Cat-watching time in the garden, which will need to be extended as the weather improves. Emma likes company when she's out, and I can't leave her entirely unsupervised. In  addition, there's nothing quite as peaceful as watching a cat and a dog snoozing away in the afternoon sun.

This is all very ambitious, I know. But since I'm too old and tired to be politically active any more, if I get even a little of it done, I'll have accomplished something. And so, Dear Reader(s), may the future be better than we have any right, at this moment, to expect.

It's The Oikonomos, Stupid!

Organic harvest sample, 2016

Although I’ve already addressed this issue at least once previously, I’m getting really tired of seeing organic farming practices and preferences for organic food beaten up as misguided or even as a kind of pseudoscience.

A question on Quora, for example, that showed up on my feed recently, asks “What are some examples of pseudoscience in day to day life that even educated people aren’t aware of?” One of the two answers includes a list of “all kinds of nonsense that highly educated people believe,” the first of which is “Organic food is healthier.” The question is an old one, I think, and the answer was updated a year ago, so (admittedly) this isn’t exactly news. I pretty much agree with most of the other examples (claims that gluten is bad, vaccines are bad, etc.), but this and the “GMOs are bad” example are based on a shallow understanding of both the principles of organic farming and the nature of objections about GMOs (see the above-linked essay, "It's Not the Science, It's the Ethics").

Then, from the normally quite sane New Scientist  comes a snarky article by Michael  Le Page, “Care about Earth? Ditch Organic Food”  (Dec. 3, p. 21). In fact, the article is about the idea of labeling food for climate impact (like carbon footprint), which doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me, nor would it to most organic “foodies.” But Le Page’s complaint is about how organic farming doesn’t help wildlife, because of lower yields which require more land to produce—and in the tropics this means cutting down more rain forests. He also states that “organic food also results in higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional farming.” Boy would I like to see the evidence for this, considering the fact that conventional farming relies on petrochemicals for fertilizers, and organic farming uses existing manures (green and animal-based) rather than manufactured ones. But the premise that in the tropics, organic farming is less productive than conventional can be argued against (see the results of a long-term study by the Swiss research institute FiBL) and my primary objection is that he just doesn’t "get" the basic reasons for organic practices in the first place.

Even if organic food were “healthier” (whatever that entails; he seems to think that it isn’t, but the jury seems still to be out on the general question ), that’s not even the main point. The real reasons for choosing organic foods over conventionally grown, or organic milk over conventionally processed milk (etc.) lie in an ethical concern for the basic economics of human life. In order to support my own claim, however, I have to provide a bit of an etymology lesson.

The word, “economics” comes from the Greek oikos (home) and nomos (usage, custom). The old high school course for girls, “home economics,” is thus something of a pleonasm, but never mind. Economy is fundamentally about much more than finances, hedge funds, and the GDP; it’s about how we live in the world. Eco-poets like Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, Joseph Wood Krutch, William Morris, and Wendell Berry have all written about the relationship between human beings and the planet, and their influence can be seen in the growing interest in living in such a way as to ensure a viable future for our descendants.

Modern human beings don’t have a great track record for home-keeping (hence my skepticism about our ability to safely modify genes). We’ve plundered the planet seeking metals and fossil fuels to create the industrial societies that have radically changed our impact on climate, land use, and water in the geological microsecond of the last two hundred years.  It shouldn’t be surprising that an increasing number of thoughtful people (especially those with children and grandchildren) are trying to find ways to create a sustainable future against mounting odds (and obstructionist politics).

So, when folks suggest caution in adopting genetically modified organisms, asking that products containing them be labeled, they’re not necessarily tossing science out the window in favor of scary predictions by Luddites and Saboteurs. Some GMO seeds, like Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant corn, allow more significant use of pesticides on corn crops, and I would genuinely like to know if a corn product I’m buying has had a close encounter with glyphosate pesticides like Roundup. Of course, I think there are other reasons to be suspicious about our ability to safely and effectively mess with plant and animal genes in the first place, so I’d just as soon know. All labeling does is to alert me as to whether or not a product has been modified, and if so to allow me to decide whether or not to buy it. I’d be even happier if labels could tell me why the company thought genetic manipulation was necessary in the first place: higher crop yields, higher nutrient values? Maybe. Better pesticide resistance? No.

Calling this kind of suspicion (or skepticism, actually) “pseudoscience” suggests that all GMOs are fine, pose no potential threat, and that we should just sit back and let Monsanto do what it wants. Associating people who choose organically produced food with people who believe that psychic powers exist or that Intelligent Design is actual science tars legitimate researchers in food ecology  with the brush of the anti-intellectual fringe that’s already gaining more and more political power.

I’m painfully aware that there does exist a kind of war on science being promulgated by those with religious and political beliefs that enable them to ignore the data and the evidence for evolution, climate change, vaccine safety, and other such issues. The anti-intellectual climate in this country is what made me retire when I did, and what makes me so pessimistic about our future. But those who pooh-pooh organic practices or GMO skepticism, dismissing those who question received doctrine as “anti-science,” are committing the same logical errors as the climate change deniers. All we ask is that people look at the evidence. In many cases (as with the FiBL study named above), legitimate scientific data are out there. The notion that we should “ditch organic food” if we “care about the planet” is both smug and ludicrous.

Being pro-science would seem to require an open-minded approach to explanation and experiment. Unless there are substantial data to suggest that organic practices are harmful to the well-being of the planet (to the planetary oikonomos), we should probably embrace anything that feeds us without destroying the ecosystems that provide our sustenance. The kinds of farming and gardening invented in the neolithic (and are thus thousands of years old) may not be able to efficiently feed vast urban populations—but the principles that are embodied in organic food production and other sustainable agricultural systems may help us to avoid the collateral damage inflicted by fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture (and unthinking use of chemicals in home gardens)—some of which (such as endocrine disruption in children) is only now being discovered and studied. Lowering our carbon footprint (both individual and cultural) is an important part of the equation, but so are reducing our reliance on chemicals that kill pollinators and may have long-term, as-yet-undiscovered health consequences.

I'm not asking for political correctness or for tiptoeing around the tender feelings of tree huggers like myself. Tell it like it is, by all means; but be willing to accept the healthy skepticism embodied in sustainability movements so that the damage done by the real anti-science goblins likely to exert their influence in the next four years won’t be irreparable.

Earth Day 2012, Part 2: Living Here, Living Now

 

 As an antidote to yesterday's depressing assessment of the State of the World, I thought I'd offer a second look. I seldom stay down for long, and it didn't take much to set me on a more optimistic track this morning.

After slogging though the Sunday edition of the Daily Poop, I picked up the February/March edition of Mother Earth News (in preparation for a day in the garden), and read this from the "News from Mother" column:

These days, if you find yourself feeling negative about the future of humanity, you may find some solace in looking at the past.

Well, looking at the past is something I do for a living, so the invitation is a natural for me.  In fact, my Art History 2 lectures just last week focused on conditions in nineteenth-century England at a time when folks like William Morris, John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites,  and other admirers of the Medieval world were all themselves looking to the past for better models of how to live.

As the Mom article pointed out, however, there are many aspects of human life that have actually improved since both the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century: life expectancies are way up, violence is (amazing, but true) way down, and we're generally kinder than at any previous moment in recorded history.  We don't hold slaves, we don't sanction cock fights, and we generally don't kill people we don't agree with (even though we might talk about doing so during election years).

The article ends with an acknowledgement that we've still got a way to go, but instead of throwing up our hands in despair (which is what I probably seemed to be doing yesterday) it notes that we actually have examples of how we've improved things in the past:

. . . looking at what we've achieved, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think we can solve present and future challenges. We can live on this planet in a sustainable way. We can preserve its health and vitality for future generations. And we can make the lives of future human beings even better than the lives we lead today--we have a track record for that kind of achievement.

So, instead of whining about what we haven't accomplished since 1970, perhaps it's time to note that some significant changes have occurred, and to relish them rather than keep complaining about what we still need to do. At least for today.

For example, when I first became a vegetarian back in the late seventies, I did so because I didn't like the way animals raised for food were treated.  I figured that if I couldn't take the responsibility for killing an animal myself, I didn't have the right to eat it.  Eventually, I relented when my kids started insisting that they were being deprived, but we still ate meat sparingly, and I did the best job I could in finding humanely treated animals.  Nowadays, we still eat meat infrequently, but when we do there are numerous outlets from which we can buy "happy" cows, pigs, and chickens.  I can buy eggs that are expensive but come from chickens raised more like the ones we had when I was a kid.  I'm quite willing to pay a premium to do so, even if it means that most of my diet needs to come from grains and vegetables (all organically and/or sustainably raised, some home-grown).  In truth, however, we could largely solve our national obesity problem by doing just that: changing our diets substantially, and weaning ourselves from overly-processed foods.

When I drive to buy my food, I can now do so in a fuel-efficient car that sips gas and causes far less particulate matter to enter the atmosphere than any car I've ever driven.  The good thing about high gas prices is, after all, that manufacturers are producing more and more automobiles with higher and higher levels of fuel economy and lower emissions.  These days I'm watching the highway fill up with hybrid cars, even though in this part of the world pickups will probably rule in perpetuity.

Advances in medicine, although expensive, mean that I got an extra twenty five years with my father, and have myself lived eighteen years longer than I might have done (and another three years than I might have from the valve problem).  New drugs have kept me essentially healthy, and will probably prevent my daughter from ever having to endure bypass surgery at all, even though she shares my crappy genes. Cures for various cancers are being developed, and we've already seen declines in occurrences based on improved ways of life; as drugs and diets and living habits improve, fewer people will have to suffer from them, and those who do may well see even more cures developed in the next several years. 

As much as I might rail against technology, I'm always aware of what I owe to innovation. We have lived in an old house (celebrating its 90th birthday this year) for the past twelve summers, relying on its solidly-built bones and dual attic fans to help keep us cool.  We've gotten by with three small air conditioning units for three rooms, and have stayed relatively comfortable.  This year, thanks to tax rebates and technological availability, we're hoping to install a geothermal heating and cooling system, in part to replace the aging gas furnace installed when we bought the house.  The plan is to wean ourselves as much as possible from fossil fuel consumption.  Of course, even ten years ago, this option would have been a mere pipe dream--so our fuel consumption options are improving rather rapidly.

These changes are, in truth, rather insignificant in light of the challenges that lie ahead.  Big Oil is still in charge, Big Consumption is still the economic model, and much of the world still has no access at all to any of the improvements we enjoy.

War, pestilence, pollution, and greed are all still there, lurking.  But we may be getting better at ridding ourselves of their threats--or we could be, if we can figure out how to meet the challenges of educating our kids well enough so that they can ensure their own futures.  As much as I complain about how little my students know, I can't help but think that they'll work it all out, as long as we can help them develop the tools. 

Image notes: this shot was taken facing east one evening last month with the Nikon D80.  We've had an abundance of rain this spring and the skies have been lovely.  Yesterday's post features a view west, probably taken later that same day.

Useful Work: A Labor Day Meditation

As I mentioned on Thursday, my query about the origins of Labor Day last week elicited no correct answers, which doesn't really surprise me given the general lack of historical knowledge evident among the rising generation. Coincidentally, I showed a video on art between the wars (Robert Hughes's "Streamlines and Bread Lines" from his American Visions series), adding to the number of synchronistic experiences my students and I have been noting this quarter. Students were struck by the similarities between current circumstances and those that produced the WPA--but we were pretty sure that nobody would be willing to do much to put artists to work today. Nor do art and craft as "useful work" (in William Morris's view, the opposite of "useless toil") quite fit into our current political preoccupations.

Several headlines screamed at us this week, scaring the bejeezis out of common folk, but reflecting the realities presented by today's labor market. The "news" that no new jobs were created this month should actually come as no surprise, given the fact that corporations have figured out how to squeeze more hours and more work out of fewer people, and for lesser-skilled jobs have opted to seek labor from beyond our shores from those who will work for pennies.

Why should any of us be shocked by this? Those Americans who have jobs seem to be so afraid of losing them that they will work extra hours at no increased pay. Nobody likes unions any more, it seems, and "collective bargaining" has become code for "socialist policy" (although few actually know anything about what socialism is except what the far-righties tell them), so the over-worked and underpaid will likely not find their lot improving any time soon.

His Holiness, the Governor of Texas (HHGT), who is now running for President, touts his job-creating record in the state, neglecting to mention just how many of these are minimum-wage (of which he disapproves) labor involving fast food and cleaning up other peoples' messes. Yes there are high-wage, high-tech jobs in Texas. But our fair state also boasts a miserable educational record, and had I more time to check into it, I might find that many of those graduating from higher ed institutions consist of foreign students who will be taking their skills back home.

I frequently snort, impolitely, that my students know how to use all manner of techno-gizmos, but none of them know how to fix them. So if something goes wrong, they've got to call "Peggy" in Mumbai for tech support. Should something major happen--like the big EMP I keep promising--there aren't that many people around here who could figure out how to get the grid back up, let alone manufacture the toys to which we have all become addicted and upon which we have all become dependent.

But instead of properly educating our students (to think both creatively and critically) and putting them to work devising ways to fix the country and save the planet, and instead of valuing trades like plumbing and woodworking and home repair, we seem to be training people to be CPAs and tax lawyers whose main job is helping people to get out of paying their share of keeping the country running.

It's worth noting that even though no jobs were created last month, many of the potential job creators were sitting on their corporate earnings (which are in many cases at record levels), presumably "jittery" about the market. The simple equation is this: people need jobs to earn money to pay for stuff, and the stuff is being made elsewhere rather than here where it's consumed. But the companies that make the stuff don't want to have to pay a living wage because it would cut into their profits. Americans, its seems, won't work for crap wages, so I guess it's our fault that so many are unemployed. You hear it all the time: there are jobs out there for anyone who wants one. Yeah. Try supporting a family on 20 grand a year these days.

All this has been said before, and I really don't have the answers because thinking about it makes my brain hurt and raises my blood pressure. Other people, like Paul Krugman and Juliet Schor and Warren Buffett, offer solutions that nobody wants to hear, but might help turn things around. My only suggestion involves figuring out a way to get investors to stop treating the stock market like a casino and start putting money into promising, necessary industries with potential to help rather than harm--like alternative energy, local farming, regional grids, and less destructive forms of transportation. But as long as Wall Street is fueled by fear, rumor, and hedge funds, nothing will change and things can only get worse.

The President is scheduled to reveal his plan to get Americans back to work on Tuesday. I have little hope that it will address many of these issues, and I'm absolutely confident that the far-righties will shoot it down like so many clay pigeons being flung across the skeet range.

What we really need is meaningful work that serves a genuine purpose, whether it's farming sustainably, repairing necessary equipment, managing waste, educating young people, building thoughtfully, manufacturing responsibly, or simply finding ways of promoting the common good. What we don't need is more fast food, more cheap and/or disposable tschochkes, more expensive toys, and more ways to speed up environmental degradation.

Here's to a future in which workers are paid what they're actually worth, rather than what some over-paid CEO thinks they should earn; where we focus more carefully on needs rather than on desires or on what advertisers try to convince us that we absolutely must have; where people live comfortably without reducing the probability that their grandchildren will have to suffer from smog, drought, or other hazards that could be avoided if we change our ways now; where our representatives actually recognize that no state is an island unto itself, and that what we spew into the air or the waterways affects us all; and where people think carefully, evaluating innovations and choices instead of simply adopting the next big thing.

Happy Labor Day--especially for those who remember why this day was set aside in the first place.

Image credit: "Fruit Store," a Works Progress Administration poster created between 1938 and 1941, via Wikimedia Commons. I thought it fitting to use a poster that promoted something I'd love to see more of: fruit stands full of local produce.

Inspiration Nation

It all started with a romp through my blog roll, trying to catch up on what other folks were doing. I tried to go through the list again this morning, to find out where I'd gotten the link, but couldn't find it. So the credit ends up going to Stan Cox himself, whose book Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) opened up yet another path of inquiry for The Farm.

I've actually dealt, obliquely, with the topic of air conditioning (or the lack thereof) on this blog in the past (there are some eleven posts that mention it; use the search field if you're interested). Always interested in folks who share my concerns, I bought the book for the iPad. Before I'd finished the first chapter, I'd decided on a new series of posts about civilization and its discontents, roughly organized around the four ancient elements: air, earth, fire, and water.

Before I begin the musings, however, I wanted to acknowledge the many bloggers and other writers whose work continues to fuel my own, and who provide me with philosophical support. Some of these, like Wendell Berry and Herrick Kimball are grounded in the Christian agrarian traditions associated so closely these days--accurately or not--with our Founding Fathers (only some of whom were farmers). I've been reading Berry for twenty-five years and make sure I buy his books in hard cover as much as possible because they get re-read frequently. He's decidedly not fond of digital technologies, so eschews the blogosphere--but that's fine with me. Kimball, however, whom I've only recently discovered, has a whole slew of blogs. My favorites of these are The Deliberate Agrarian and Agrarian Nation (which inspired the title of this post).

Reading Kimball's most recent articles on Agrarian Nation sent me back to the iPad, because one of the first things I did when I got it was to download all the old-timey cookery books and home-keeping volumes offered in the Free section (through Project Gutenberg). These include luscious stuff like Things Mother Used to Make: A Collection of Old Time Recipes, Some Nearly One Hundred Years Old and Never Published Before (1914); The Healthy Life Cook Book (second edition) by Florence Daniel (1915); Culture and Cooking, or Art in the Kitchen by Catherine Owen (1881)--and more. No doubt I'll be able to scare up even more on Free Books, but haven't yet taken the time, probably because I'm too busy reading interesting blogs where other people introduce me to even more old stuff.

I also read a considerable amount of material on Peak Oil (The Oil Drum, ASPO), including Sharon Astyk's blogs (Casaubon's Book and The Chatelaine's Keys) and books (Depletion and Abundance, A Nation of Farmers). The combination of technical discussion on what I really think is going to happen at some point in the not-too-distant, perhaps-even-before-I-die future, and Astyk's comments and advice (as well as the stuff she links to) is almost enough to keep me busy all of my waking life. Unlike Berry and Kimball (as much as I admire their work), Astyk's perspective resonates with me because she's Jewish, a woman, and unerringly practical.

While I'm on the topic of practical advice, I would be grievously remiss were I not to mention Ruth Stout (just Google her), and Helen and Scott Nearing. They are all, alas, dead now, but their legacies live on thanks to the digital universe--at least until the grid goes down.

No paean to self-reliant agrarianism would be complete without mention of The Mother Earth News and the Whole Earth Catalog, both mainstays of my early leanings in this direction. You can now get almost the entire run of TMEN on CD (1970-2010), cheap (60 bucks). Somebody on eBay probably has the whole thing in paper. In an unpublished short story I wrote a few months ago, an entire community manages to survive after an EMP because somebody had squirreled away all her back issues.

Many years ago, in a graduate class called (I think) "The Future As Present," we were asked to give an oral "book report" on a publication we considered essential. One of my fellow students almost caused our instructor to enter a monastery (or at least to retire early) when she reviewed David Macauley's Motel of the Mysteries. I didn't help matters when I chose the Whole Earth Catalog. The inspiration of this particular choice was a sort of vision of having a copy of the WEC on hand when the apocalypse came. See? I was thinking ahead even twenty some-odd years ago.

I'm looking forward to looking outward for a while. I've been so internally focused on my own discontent for far too long. And the weather has been great, my garden is beginning to flourish, and I'm getting way too comfortable. The first essay, on Air, will show up as soon as I finish Stan Cox's book and get my notes organized. Meanwhile, I heartily recommend his book, and the stuff I've linked above.

Image credit: I couldn't resist a bit of artistic nostalgia here. After searching on the Commons for historic agriculture photos, I found one of Carl Larson's sweet paintings of farming in Sweden.

What Should we have for dinner?

With apologies to Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), the responses to Saturday's pig rant prompted me to reflect on the whole question of vegetarianism again--an exercise I seem to undergo on a fairly regular basis. Before my latest bit of navel gazing, I had last spent some time on the issue when I bought Pollan's book last year. For an overview of modern American eating habits, it hasn't been surpassed, but I've since found a couple more perspectives to add to the list, and his question ("What should we have for dinner?") is still at the heart of it.

I'm pretty sure that my first "stint" on a meatless diet was prompted by my respect for my grandmother's near century-long vegetarian life. She lived to be 104, but she stopped eating meat at about age 10, after the calf she had been raising showed up on the dinner table. She loved the fact that I'd stopped eating meat at about the same time that I started having babies, despite the fact that my intentions weren't all that pure.

As I mentioned in the last post, I had decided that if I didn't have the cojones to kill an animal, I had no right to eat it. This was brought on in part of a growing distaste (both physical and philosophical) for anonymous meat--even though the kosher chickens and beef I had been consuming were relatively humanely killed. But the less pure reason was sheer laziness. It's a pain in the tuchus to keep meat and milk separate, and even before meat became off limits in the house, we'd been eating less and less fleishig, and more and more milchig.

My reasons for keeping kosher in the first place weren't primarily religious; they were more communitarian than anything. I wanted anyone, from orthodox Jew to gentile to be able to eat at my table. I also liked the mindfulness involved with maintaining the ritual cycle during the year, especially at Passover, when spring cleaning takes on enormous significance, and favorite china and utensils come out for that one week. It marked the true beginning of spring, and always meant great food and company.

But as my community began to change, and fewer and fewer Jews were part of it (philosophy of technology doesn't attract many Jewish students), food-related rituals became decreasingly significant. The children began to hanker for meat, loudly. They famously leaned over the meat counter at the supermarket, and pined audibly. I couldn't take the little monsters anywhere without their commenting about how utterly deprived they were.

So I began by introducing chicken, trying to get organic ones even though we were by then living on grad student income, while I tried to complete enough of a degree to get a job after ten years of being a stay-at-home mom. Even then I was still focused on the humanity of meat-eating, and still having trouble reconciling myself with carnivorism (I know; that doesn't seem to be a word).

One of the points GEM raised in response to "A Pig's Tale" is especially relevant here. A particular strain of American meat-consumption involves a large dollop of sentimentality about animals. We do not eat dogs or cats or--for the most part--horses. We don't eat many rabbits, and I don't know anyone north of the Mexican border who eats guinea pigs. We seem to be okay with swine and bovine species, less so with sheep and goats (although folks do eat lamb and cabrito, in much lower numbers than other meats). Birds come in a variety of species, but not that many folks eat once-considered delicacies such as starlings (abundant though they are) or pigeons, or even doves and quail (except in season, and when you know someone who shoots 'em; though I've bought frozen quail from Central Market, and eaten it roasted at Papacito's). It's as if the cuter or more symbolic the animal is, the less likely we are to see it on the menu. Anywhere.

People eat less veal than they once did, because the way it's generally processed is so abhorent to many of us. I will, however, happily munch down on μοσχάρι (calf) in Greece, knowing that a few days ago it was nursing on a hillside while its mother grazed contentedly. Foie gras is off the list for those of us who don't like the idea of force-feeding an animal (not to mention the fat involved). But that's about as far as our concern goes, unless we end up on a highway next to pig transport or drive by a feedlot (or what I call a "feedlot dairy") where the stench is enough to put you off your own feed for weeks.

I used to be swayed by the idea that a vegetarian diet was more sustainable than that of an omnivore (we're none of us exclusively carnivores). But an article in the June/July issue of Mother Earth News, "The Truth about Vegetarianism" (an excerpt from Lierre Keith's book, The Vegetarian Myth) pretty much blew that presupposition out of my comfy little intellectual cosmos. Reading (albeit slowly) Green Barbarians had already alerted me to some of the problems associated with vegetarian substitutes for meat proteins (things like soy), but Keith's essay made me feel a bit more comfortable about the role of meat in human diets. As usual, balance seems to be the key.

Now, I'm admittedly as sentimental about animals as the next guy. Witness my sobbing fit on the highway last week. And I still would have a lot of trouble killing a critter--even though I've got a perfectly sustainable crop of fuzz-tailed tree rats just asking to be made into squirrel stew (and maybe a nice winter hat).

But human beings have evolved alongside the animals they eat, and some of our sentiments stem from that very fact. Folks don't (usually) eat dogs, because dogs were probably just about the first domesticated animals and were useful to hunters (as hunters were useful to dogs, apparently). Yes there are cultures where this relationship doesn't hold as much sway; I can't count the number of puppies that went missing during "dog season" in Taiwan. And I laughed knowingly when the "Good Dogs" sign in the first episode of Firefly clearly didn't refer to frankfurters.

But since not all land is suitable for farming, and since Big Agro has made the traditional farm model more and more difficult to pursue, perhaps what we should be focusing on is how to eat more lightly on the land, how to minimize human damage to the planet by eliminating chemical farming, and how to feed ourselves without practicing animal-torture--all of which can be addressed by truly sustainable practices on farms and ranches. I can no longer take comfort in the idea of smug vegetarianism, because raising soy crops may be every bit as problematic as raising grain-fed beef.

This is a vastly complicated problem. But nothing's solved by ignoring the fact that enormous amounts of crop land are being used to grow soybeans and corn that are not being used for food, and even what is may not be all that good for us. Ellen Sandbeck opened my eyes about the problems of plant sterols and other drug-like qualities in soy products, and Lierre Keith has now reinforced that by alerting me to the role that thoughtful, humane animal husbandry can play in a world that respects nature rather than simply exploiting it. None of this is easy, and it certainly isn't cheap. But think what we could do for local economies if we said no to monocultures, genetically modified crops, and factory animal farming, and yes to pastured meat and dairy products, organically grown produce, and hand-raised poultry and eggs.

I can only hope that the more positive effects of the economic downturn--the return of victory gardens and the rise in city chicken populations--can be maintained, and that we don't settle for tortured pig parts and grain-stuffed beef simply to keep our expenses down. We can surely make meat a smaller part of our diets, enrich the rest of it with locally-raised produce and dairy products, and decrease our dependence on monocultures like soy and corn. In addition to being not all that nutritious, cheap food is morally very expensive.

Image credit: Julien Dupre, Farm Girl Feeding Chickens, painted some time before he died in 1910. From a photo by "Daderot" via Wikimedia Commons.

A Pig's Tale

It all started the other day when I was on my way down to school for a department meeting and got stuck in traffic. And I do mean stuck: in the middle lane, with exits backed up, and with nobody the least bit interested in providing me with space to move over and get off. So I sat there, and both Vera and I were fuming, because her mileage was plummeting. We started off the most recent tank of gas with an mpg average of about 58. Since I tend to drive only when I have to, that means two thirty-mile trips per day, four days per week--and not much else.

By the end of the traffic jam, we were down to 52. Yeah; I know people who would kill for that, but for us it's disappointing. And it took an hour and forty minutes to go thirty miles.

But that wasn't the worst of it. For some considerable chunk of that 100 minutes, I moved along side a truck transporting pigs to an abattoir. The temperature on the highway had to have been 102F at least, and the poor pigs were becoming ham before they were even dead. Some of them poked their noses out of the grating, trying desperately to get some fresh air. Some were fighting. Some were biting the metal grille on the side of the truck. Fortunately for me, Vera's recirculation system works splendidly, so I didn't have to breath pig perfume; but I was so upset by this experience that I burst into tears right there on Central Expressway, and sobbed uncontrollably for a good ten minutes.

There's nothing like the spectacle of abject suffering to open one's eyes to the ultimate insensitivity of modern "civilized" human beings. How could we possibly allow another creature to suffer like that, just for a cheap pork chop?

That night, as I downed a bratwurst at the ball game (rationalizing my enjoyment by noting that this particular pig had not died in vain, and that it would probably be the last mass-processed pig product I ever ate), I discussed the problem with the Beloved Spouse and my daughter, and reflected on the Culture of Anonymous Meat.

Mind you, this is essentially what led me to my vegetarian days when my children were growing up. For fourteen years I ate no meat except that which had been killed by friends, or fish that had been caught by relatives. I've actually got nothing against eating meat; rather, I thought that unless I had the guts to kill it (or at least knew who killed it), I didn't have the right to eat it. Later, I tried to eat organic and/or sustainably raised meat and poultry, which has become easier and easier to do. Sometimes "all natural" is the best I could do, but I've at least tried to be conscious of what I was doing. Eating responsibly has, at the very least, to include being mindful of where your food originates and how it's processed.

I think that one reason this situation was off my radar is that 1) my vegetarian years were also Kosher years, so pigs didn't factor into any consideration of carnivorism at all and 2) the pigs I'd known in Taiwan lived happy, sloppy lives before being swiftly dispatched not far from where they'd been raised.

Coincidentally enough, this morning I was reading an old issue of the British version of Country Living (August 2008), which featured an article on commercial pig-farming in England, and noted that "The pig, along with the chicken, is the most abused of all farm animals--sheep graze year round and cows only overwinter in a barn, while most pigs live in concrete prisons" for their entire lives. And while neither sheep nor cows are particularly gifted intellectually, pigs are pretty bloody smart--which makes their torture all the more alarming. All this mistreatment leads to "bland and flabby" meat "devoid of character," according to the author (smallholder Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall)--and (to prevent infections in close quarters) it's laced with antibiotics. So why are we eating this stuff at all?

Perhaps it's because we're just ignorant of how bad things really are. After all, many of us are now aware of how "milk-fed veal" gets treated and haven't touched that in years. So I'm hoping that most people are just uninformed. But if it's willful ignorance, more people need to be stuck beside a pig-transport on a hot day. Without air conditioning.

Complacency is in some ways a coping device in a complex, problem-ridden world. I do harbor hope that most people tend to wake up when faced with information that exposes that complacency (things like vast oil spills, perhaps). So in case anyone reading this isn't quite up on the nature of pig farming in these United States, or if you don't believe me about how bad factory pig farming is, read this article from BoingBoing (Big factory pig farms are some of America's worst polluters)--but don't go there unless you're prepared to be horrified.

None of this is necessary. For information on bettering the lot of pigs, and sources of humanely raised pork, see the following:

• Hog Production Alternatives, from the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service (a project of the National Center for Appropriate Technology).

• US Wellness Meats (all kinds)
  
  
• Niman Ranch All Natural Meats (with information on husbandry practices)
  

If we choose not to pay attention to the problem, I fear for our future as a species even more than I already have been. A culture that decides to torture animals for expediency is capable of all manner of atrocities--as we have, come to think of it, seen all too frequently in the past.

Image credit: Sow and piglet, by Scott Bauer, via Wikimedia Commons. At very least, this mom seems to be out rooting--something factory-farmed pigs don't get to do.

Hybrid Driving

Not long after my post about the conversation in response to Derrick Jensen's article in the current issue of Orion Magazine on activism (Is Resistance Futile?), I had to take my nine-year-old Honda Civic into the dealer to get it fixed up enough to pass state inspection. As I waited for the bad news, I started lurking in the showroom, poring over brochures on new Civics and Insight hybrids. When the "counselor" (no lie; that's what she called herself) came in to tell me that they needed to do a $200 smoke test to determine what was wrong with my fuel line, and that it would take a couple of hours, I went outside to enjoy the weather and look around the lot.

After a surprisingly long time, a salesman came out to see what I was interested in, and proceeded to let me test drive the two models I was most interested in: the new Civic hybrid, and the Insight--Honda's answer to Toyota's Prius.

The Civic didn't drive much like mine, it was a bit larger, and considerably clunkier. The Insight, on the other hand, is a dream to drive, and its cockpit is almost identical to what I'm used to in the old Civic. The best part, though, is that this car acts very much like a mobile video game, with pretty lit-up displays (mostly blue and green, but with some red and amber) designed to teach one how get the best fuel economy possible.

By the time the counselor came back to give me the estimate ($2K, including the new timing belt I'd been warned about last year), I was signing papers. So the sales office paid for the smoke test, and I turned over the keys.

They gave me peanuts for the Civic, but sent me home in a loaner until the LX model I'd ordered in "Tango Red Pearl" arrived a couple of days later. Honda had some incentives going, but I didn't need them to convince me that I wanted this car. The EPA estimates on gas mileage run from 40-45 mpg, and the lower emissions alone would help me lessen my carbon footprint substantially--even though I had been getting between 35 and 38 mpg in the old car.

Although I'd been waffling about the need for a new car for several months, two additional components entered the mix when I read Jensen's article, and Sharon Astyk's new book, Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front.

Astyk blogs on The Chatelaine’s Keys and Casaubon's Book about sustainability, peak oil, and community. As a matter of fact, I'm going to recommend to the Orion forum that folks who are looking for advice on how to resist the current state of economic short-sightedness order this book. Astyk practices what she preaches much better than I do, and offers an appendix chock full of practical ways in which we can survive the unrest we've only begun to see reflected in our current economic difficulties.

I haven't really been ignoring peak oil over the last forty years, but it had rather become background noise, grinding on below the din of everyday life. I heard M. King Hubbert speak at Penn back in the '70s (during the first of our many moments of oil hysteria), warning that at some point in the foreseeable future we'd reach the moment at which oil supplies would be half gone. But rather than weaning ourselves from dependence on fossil fuels, over the intervening four decades we've become ever more dependent--not only on our own supplies, but on what we buy from foreign sources.

In the meantime, peak oil concerns have become entwined with a variety of doomsday scenarios and conspiracy theories, and most rational folk seem to have been ignoring the situation--even as our fuel costs roller coaster up and down the economic spectrum. The whole concept is getting harder to ignore, however, and books like Depletion and Abundance provide a sensible, constructive path toward forging communities that might be able to withstand whatever turmoil might ensue.

No longer very good at participating in any community beyond my classrooms, I have little time left over for the kinds of activism that Jensen and Astyk advocate. For as long as I've been writing this blog, I've nattered on and on about my small gestures at lessening my own dependence on various fuels, and my efforts to minimize any bruises I leave on the planet. Although I lack the physical and psychic energy to picket the bad guys or join anything, I have been trying to be a wise consumer, and buying a sensible car seemed like a decent thing to do; I consider it a little bit of an offset for the obscene number of Hummers I see on the highway. This will probably be the last car I ever own, so I thought it would be a prudent investment.

I also think it unwise to underplay the power of making sustainable economic decisions. For example, we've got an inefficient ten-year-old gas furnace that needs to be replaced, so we're looking into a geothermal heat pump. It's a costly change, but could well pay for itself within ten years in energy savings, and it doesn't use oil or gas. Solar panels are another possibility, although the number and location of trees on the property limits their efficacy. Upcoming necessary improvements to the house will all be made with sustainability and low environmental impact as primary considerations.

The fact that the entire state of Texas remains in denial about climate change and other environmental concerns doesn't help. But this particular town, at least, seems to be more and more open to "green" solutions, so it may be that moving to an old area of town full of recycled houses may not have been a bad idea in the end. And now that I can go 450 miles or more on a tank of gas, I won't feel quite so guilty about working thirty miles away from where I live.

Photo credits: I pinched the picture of the Insight from Treehugger; the opening "shot," Exxon Desert Tanker a "satirical image created in Photoshop to illustrate the concept of peak oil," was created by AZRainman and available through Wikimedia Commons and his Flickr Photostream.

Who Can Really Save the World?

I've decided not to post a Skywatch Friday photo this week, not just because I don't have one (the summer sky has been relentlessly blue this week), but because like many aspects of the new web technologies, it's become oppressive. Of course, this isn't the fault of the Skywatch crew, for whom I'm eternally grateful; they created a wonderful meme that's brought me new, like-minded readers, introduced me to some terrific blogs, and made me smile more times than I can count.

But as Thursday approaches each week, I find myself becoming increasingly anxious. What will I post? Is there anything in my photo library I can use? Since I tend to post thematically, what kinds of connections can I make? And then, except for the handful of genuinely interested folks, most of the comments aren't even as long as a text message, and I remember that the main reason for activities like these in the blog-o-sphere are to attract visitors (as well, of course, as to share lovely pictures of beautiful skies). If one is not that "into" jacking up one's web presence or dealing with gazillions of comments, the added attention isn't always welcome. I'll still post a shot or two occasionally, but I can't let skywatching become The Farm's raison d'etre.

That's not to say that I don't appreciate the thoughtful responses I've received--the ones that get the reasons, and hold similar views about life and the universe. I do. They've broadened my perspective and introduced me to some lovely people. And their dogs and mogs.

This morning, as I sat in my garden and opened my new issue of Orion magazine (which I received a week ago and haven't made time to read; there are always excuses, even when one is technically on holiday), I realized that I've strayed from my original path (topophilia, utopia, and dystopia), and have been plagued by twinges of guilt for several weeks.

I am not, however, free of guilt as a result of not being preoccupied by pretty pictures of the heavens. Instead, I'm more aware than ever of human frailty and the inefficacy of small measures in addressing the real problems that plague this planet. Derrick Jensen drives this home forcefully in his essay for the "Upping the Stakes" segment of the July/August issue of Orion: "Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change." If we are counting on doing this all by ourselves, he contends, we might as well give up now.

He's done it before. His masterful critique of the "simple living" movement in the May/June issue, "The World at Gunpoint" demolishes the individualist response to making change happen:

A few months ago at a gathering of activist friends someone asked, “If our world is really looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?” The question stuck with me for a few reasons. The first is that it’s the world, not our world. The notion that the world belongs to us—instead of us belonging to the world—is a good part of the problem.

Individuals, according to the new article, can't do jack squat to "save the world." But we're Americans, steeped in our radically individualistic ethos, and thus have, collectively, come to the decision (those of us who see the problem, that is; there are many who don't acknowledge any difficulties at all; America, they imply, is utopia as long as we've got our property and our guns) that recycling plastic bags and water bottles, taking shorter showers, and driving less will do the trick.

I think it's telling that so many of my students and colleagues, and so many in the various news media use "individual" as a synonym for "person." "Individuals" don't disconnect from one another, they exhibit "a disconnect" in the ways they respond to the world. Jensen himself uses this new noun in "Forget Shorter Showers":

We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect?

He goes on to point out that "actual living breathing individual humans" use less than a tenth of the water used by human beings in general--the rest is divided between industry and agriculture (Orion July/August 2009, 18). So much for my various water-saving strategies of shallow dishes in the garden to gauge the sprinkler, washing dishes without running water, and taking showers only when I go out in public.

Because I'm something of a hermit when not "on stage" in front of a class, I'm probably even more guilty of this blindness than the people who shop at the Container Store for storage but at least participate in municipal policy-making. I spend much of my time thinking about how I can lower my own impact on the environment, but my participation in anything political is limited to buying my electricity from Green Mountain or using Credo wireless service for my husband's cell phone. (I'm still a slave to ATT because of my iPhone choice, even though I held out against owning a mobile phone for years longer than most people I know.)

Now that I'm into my seventh decade on this planet, and beholden to economically and environmentally expensive technologies for my very existence (not to mention my never-ending dependence on the pharmaceutical industry to keep my arteries unclogged and my blood flowing properly), I am deeply troubled by the fact that I like my life inside the old wire fence of our little compound; I like my job, even though I've sold out to America's odd notion of corporate-based, for-profit education. But the idea of spending my limited free time in further activism (beyond my considerable involvement when I was younger) is nearly unthinkable. I'm just tired. Jensen himself wrote a rather eloquent essay on activism in Orion a few years ago (May/June 2006) called "Beyond Hope," which I highly recommend if you're young enough to get out there and do something about your own future.

As it turns out, what I "do" about all this stuff is to write. And I guess I even, perhaps naively, write about hope. Besides More News From Nowhere, I write other stories and am working on a science fiction novel about people who live differently than we do, in a universe where capitalism doesn't really exist, and people (not individuals) refuse to act precipitously. They think things through. They possess sophisticated technologies, but they don't use them to despoil planets. They don't sit around watching TV or playing video games all day; they interact with one another, they do useful work, they create, and they enjoy and explore the worlds they inhabit without screwing them up.

I'm now thinking of publishing this latest book (at least when I've decided on a name) in numbers, much like Charles Dickens did in the nineteenth century on the More News website. If I don't have the time and energy to join those in the trenches, perhaps the best I can do is to suggest alternatives, or at least discuss what others are suggesting, both on this blog and in my imaginary future universe.

Of course, my low-level sense of urgency may lie in the fact that I'm not exactly passing my bad genes (or the good ones, for that matter) on to a future generation. I have no grandchildren, and may never have them. That's okay with me, since a vast majority of the people who do have them don't seem to be all that concerned with anything but the financial condition of generations to come. They're worried about the deficit, but they're not all that worried, it seems, about what the planet will look like, or what kind of air these generations will breathe.

Okay; I'm through. For now. If you've managed to slog through this post and need some cheering up, check out Skywatch Friday. These folks are always good for a smile.

Photo credit: View of contour buffer strips on farm land in the United States, a conservation practice to reduce erosion and water pollution. From the USDA, Natural Resources Conservation Service page on the practice, via Wikimedia Commons. The future of water resources will depend on integrated water management practices in agriculture, and among other industries responsible for 90% of the water used in the world.

Limits to Growth Revisited

Saturday's article by Catherine Rampell in the Economics section of the New York Times sounded another encouraging note for those of us who have come to realize that constant economic growth spells doom for the planet. (A segment of the article was reprinted without a byline in the Dallas Morning News this morning, on p. 13A.)

In the essay, "Shift to Saving May Be Downturn's Lasting Impact," Rampel notes that "a culture of thrift" is emerging that may well last beyond whatever Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue determine signals a recovery. I've already noted that thriftiness and a real frugality (beyond the coupon-clipping, bargain-hunting at Nieman's Last Call norm already in place) have become more and more commonplace, and practices that resemble those engendered by the Great Depression are making their way into our collective modern consumer consciousness. But the longer the recession lasts, the more likely, it seems, we are to discover that saving gives us the same rush that buying once did, and that having the money to pay for something before we actually purchase it may become a genuine all-American habit. Even pop-culture Sunday paper mainstays like Parade Magazine are printing stories by well-known writers, like Alix Kates Shulman, about "Finding Joy in Frugality"--in which the author wryly notes that what used to be called stinginess is now considered a virtue.

But the real impetus for this post comes from an article I read in Seed magazine earlier in the year (Issue 20, February 2009): Benjamin Phelan's "The Ecology of Finance," which got me to thinking back to the '70s and the Club of Rome's publication, Limits to Growth (an update of which is available in .pdf with tables that compare 1970s predictions with data from 2000. A recent article in New Scientist summarizes the results of the newer studies.) Using the principles of ecology in order to understand the market offers a useful, if limited model. At its best it can provide some real insights into how economic systems resemble natural systems; like all useful metaphors, however, it doesn't fit perfectly, but where it doesn't, it might be even more helpful.

One of guys who does this best is Herman Daly, professor of ecological economics at the University of Maryland (and former senior economist in the World Bank's environment department). His 2008 special report for New Scientist, "Economics blind spot is a disaster for the planet," made the best use of the metaphor I've seen yet:

The economy is like a hungry, growing organism. It consumes low-entropy natural resources such as trees, fish and coal, produces energy and useful goods from them, and spits out high-entropy waste such as carbon dioxide, mine slag and dirty water. Mainstream economists are mostly concerned with the organism's circulatory system, how the energy and resources can be efficiently allocated, while tending to ignore its digestive system.

I should probably stress here (again; this is one of the points on which I rant frequently) that the root of both "economics" and "ecology" are the same: the Greek oikos, or "home" or "dwelling place." Economics refers to the nomos, "that which is in habitual practice, use, or possession" of the home, sometimes used in the sense of a law or convention. The logos in "ecology" is a little harder to pin down (it takes up five columns or two and a half pages in Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon), but the first examples of usage in Greek have to do with accounts or reckoning--keeping tabs on the home, in a way. But it's also the root of "logic" and of all those "ology" words that refer to sciences (geology, biology, archaeology) in the sense of "study of." Other definitions include "reason," "explanation," and "rule." (This is why we need to know where our language comes from--so we can actually understand all the nuances of what we're saying.) At any rate, both of these words involve knowing something about the world in which we live, as well as something about those who share it with us.

We are, of course--humanity itself--the perpetrators of limitless growth and the use of metaphors to describe it. The very notion of economic growth is based on an analogy with the natural processes of biological organisms. But beings have a finite existence: birth, growth, decline, death. Modern economic theory is predicated on a model of constant growth when it would better be served by analogy with steady-state systems. True sustainability requires both growth and death--not one without the other.

One thing to be said for us as a species, is that we're really good at taking over the oikos, because we do seem to like to spread ourselves around. Perhaps the most successful adaptive strategy developed by homo sapiens sapiens is our ability to fill an enormous variety of niches, and to take them over successfully, often to the detriment of existing occupants. This happens both on a biological scale, in terms of supplanting species already adapted to a given biome, but also sociologically, in terms of phenomena like the gentrification of city neighborhoods, in which original occupants are supplanted because property values rise and they can no longer afford to live there.

This latter success is frequently welcomed by city governments, especially if it results in the revivification of "blighted" communities. Sometimes inhabitants are shunted into low-income housing, but often they end up in homeless shelters or on the streets--or in jail. A better solution would involve moving into a neighborhood that needs to be revitalized and helping to improve and sustain it without tearing apart whatever might be left of the original community.

A good example of our adaptive abilities can be seen in the continuing dilemma--currently slowed by the mortgage crisis--of urban sprawl. Evidence of sociobiological "success" is apparent in the spillage of suburbs into deserts, onto mountainsides and into canyons, and onto flood plains. These at-risk habitats that owe their existence to the forces of nature (heat, fire, avalanche, seismic activity, flood, and numerous other events) are not particularly friendly to human beings, with our attachment to permanent dwellings and infrastructure, coupled with general ignorance of the processes that produce the sheer beauty that makes these places desirable in the first place.

But deserts need artificial sources of water to support golf courses. Hillsides, especially those populated with species of fire-climax vegetation (chaparral, jack pine, etc.) and the seductive banks of rivers, lakes, streams, and oceans all require constant management: fire suppression, or at least controlled burns, flood protection (dams and levees), artificial jetties, beach renewal, and myriad other engineered "solutions" to "problems" that wouldn't exist if people weren't trying to live where they really shouldn't, and if people who should know better weren't encouraging them to do so.

Unlike the effects of other "industrious" species, such as the beaver, human transformation of landscape seldom results in improvement in the ecological sense. Beavers dam streams and create meadows and feeding grounds for other species; but when we dam a river, we destroy indigenous habitats and force other species to adapt or perish. And we do it not to ensure our continued existence, but to magnify our comfort. The market for human commodities (houses, food, goods) is driven by desire, and we really need to be more conscious of how to accommodate our true needs without killing the proverbial goose. Or beaver. (Sorry, sometimes the metaphors get out of hand.)

It's not that we can't be more sensible. We're perfectly capable of figuring out how to live more harmoniously with our environment. Human populations in the past have adapted to desert living, for example, with little impact on their surroundings. But most modern, industrialized nations have failed to limit their growth in any meaningful way, resulting in precipitous extinction rates and habitat destruction, in addition to the manifold increase in the use of fossil fuels and other limited resources which further stress our poor, beleaguered planet.

It's probably ironic (the word is highly overused these days as a synonym for "coincidental") that the economic downturn may in fact kick us in our collective butts and get us to rethink traditional market capitalism. Perhaps what we really need is an ecological analysis of the world economy to help ameliorate the current situation. As Phelan points out in his Seed article, the stock market crash of 1929 forced an overhaul of the financial system; some of these changes prevented the wholesale collapse of the world economy this time around. If only we could learn to use these big brains of ours to figure out how to live within our means, both economically and ecologically, we might not have to worry so much about how our grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to survive what we have wrought.

Photo credit: Earth at night, showing the spread of light-generating cities throughout the world. The image is a composite of hundreds of pictures made by U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellites Program (DMSP) compiled from October 1994 - March 1995. NASA image via Wikimedia Commons. For a better version, click here.

Taking Stock

It's hard to believe, thinking back to the earliest Earth Days I can remember (I have a poster I acquired in Philadelphia for Earth Day 1970), that it's taken us this long to recognize (on a large enough scale) the earth's fragility and our part in either dooming it or saving it. Not everyone is convinced, even now, but at least there seems to be a groundswell of recognition that we do in fact need to do something.

To some, "something" is ticking off the latest "10 Things You Can Do to Save the Earth" and then taking off for an Earth Day picnic in a mega SUV. Or attending and Earth Day event and then heading to McDonalds for a Happy Meal. Or something equally superficial.

Even though environmental issues are more visible, the issues themselves haven't been completely embraced as causes worth foregoing convenience for, or requiring any kind of meaningful sacrifice. Turn my thermostat up to 80 in the summer? Are you nuts? Redesign my lawn so that it doesn't require watering? My property values will go down! Etc.

I am, however, encouraged by the fact that more blue recycling bins are going out on the streets every Friday, sometimes even without the standard green bins next to them (our green bin goes out once a month if that). I'd like to set a goal of two blue bins a month and one green bin every two, and I think it's doable, now that I'm dead-set on not buying overly packaged products.

Last week's announcement that the Obama administration will allow the EPA to treat greenhouse gasses as pollutants is the best news this year. I'm thoroughly convinced that this economy can be restored largely by investments in lowering pollution (and devleoping the technologies that make this possible) and in alternative energy sources that will allow homeowners to increasingly produce at least part of the electricity they use. I'd love to see cities moving toward smaller, more centralized grids, but that may not happen in my lifetime. Still, I do see a glimmer of hope. Investing in the people and technological development to make these new possibilites work can go a long way toward reforming markets and providing a wide variety of new jobs requiring little re-training.

This year's Earth Day projects in the Owl household include expanding the kitchen garden, lining existing curtains and adding Roman shades with thermal barriers to windows that don't already have them. Our energy bills last summer and winter were already significantly lower than the previous year's, so it's clear that strategies like these can work even in an old, drafty house. We'll also need to have the fireplace looked at, so I'll be in the market for a fuel-efficient insert to make our cozy home fires cozier and less polluting. Butts to collect rainwater are also on the list of things to add--one for every downspout (although most of our gutters have finally been removed, we still have three or four downspouts that can channel water into barrels to help with garden watering when the rains don't come).

I don't really mean to belittle the "10 Things" approach, but we just can't stop at that. Real change requires real adjustment. We've grown lazy and spoiled, unable to handle the everyday realities our ancestors dealt with on a regular basis. The more we know about the food we eat and where it comes from, the more we particiapte in nourishing our own bodies, the more authentic exercise we get (yard work is really good exercise!), and the tougher we get about dealing with the discomforts of heat and humidity, the better off--and healthier--we'll be.

Happy Earth Day, Folks. Enjoy the festivities, but then go home, throw open your windows, and turn off the A/C until the temp hits at least 85 outside.

Photo: A snowy El Morro National Monument, New Mexico, taken in December of 2003.

Smaller, Better, Wiser

I watched a News Hour broadcast the other night about some of the things American troops are doing in Afghanistan to help win the war for hearts and minds. And although I do think there is a military role beyond blowing things up (accidentally or not), I was a bit disturbed by the description of some of the aid work U. S. Forces are engaged in.

PBS's Margaret Warner has been reporting from Afghanistan all week, and I appreciate the perspective she's providing. But in her Reporter's Notebook piece for the segment on the Nebraska National Guard "Sodbusters" Agri-business Development initiative, she describes their work as follows:

This is the soft side, the warm face, of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, an exercise in nation-building (not reconstruction but building anew) designed to help this agrarian society -- among the five poorest on the planet -- leapfrog into the 21st century. It's a tall order, in a country where the literacy rate hovers at about 25 percent. The gameplan is to help the Afghans develop the economic and social wherewithal to withstand the blandishments, ideology and threats of the Taliban and its array of insurgent allies.

For that, the Army and National Guard units have deployed ADTs and PRTs (provincial reconstruction teams), augmented by experts from the State Department and other agencies, to build bridges and roads and help the Afghans develop their skills at earning a living, governing and managing their own affairs.

This sounds well-intentioned and certainly indicates a more productive use of our soldiers. But it's also just too big.

Why are we talking about "leapfrogging" into the twenty-first century when these people have been denied, through both our efforts and those of the Russians, the gradual development of their own ways of life, and a more natural progress toward integration of tradition with new technologies? Why are we even talking "agri-business" here instead of sustainability?

In our own country the family farms that formed the backbone of the Republic are being driven out of existence by the Big Bidness Giant Farm Conglomerate types who worship at the altar of Monsanto and other chemical companies bent on genetic modification and patenting of seeds stolen from traditional farmers in other parts of the world. Why on earth would we want to subject Afghanistan to even more manipulation of their traditional ways of maintaining their land and their livestock than they've put up with since before the Soviet invasion?

For multiple generations, Afghan farming communities withstood drought and meteorological misadventure by using methods that worked for them. Part of what has made the Taliban successful in this region is that they don't threaten these ties to the past. (For a brief history of the bad policies--ours and those of the former Soviet Union--that led to this mess in the first place, see my post about Saving Ariana from a few weeks ago.) I had hoped that we had learned something from our mistakes, but it looks now as if good intentions are getting in the way of good sense. There are programs that show promise, but I can't see that trying to turn a neolithic economy into a post-nuclear agricultural machine overnight is going to win us any long-term allies.

Instead of building infrastructure these folks might not be able to maintain, encouraging wanton growth, and addicting farmers to chemical fertilizers and modern mega-farming techniques, we need to be starting small, and working within traditional parameters. "Infrastructure" should mean wells, low-tech sanitary systems, simple solar technologies (like solar ovens), reliable, renewable energy sources, and food-storage facilities--not fancy paved highways and bridges in seismically unstable areas.

Help these people do what they already know how to do, and protect the aid workers who are trying to build sustainable communities--rather than making them dependent on high-dollar foreign technologies grounded in foreign values. The wise path is not paved with concrete; it's worn by goats and sheep and herdsmen, and maintained by men, women, and children who have worked the land since long before our ancestors left the coasts of Europe have their way with this continent.

The last time I looked, we weren't doing such a great job in our own twenty-first century economy. Maybe we could learn something from the Afghanis.

Image credit: Northwestern Afghanistan, by Koldo Hormaza, via Wikimedia Commmons.