Category Archives: Climate Change

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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Kingsolver's Vegetannual

I wasn’t interested in gardening when I was growing up. It felt like an obligation when I would much rather be living in my head, playing with thoughts and ideas, reading, programming.

As an adult, though, I am more and more fascinated by it. On a personal level, it’s a good break from being inside my head all day. It is also a chance to be mindful by focusing on a simple activity, and to be attuned to the wonder that is the complex system we call life. Philosophically, it makes sense to break the pernicious cycle of store-bought food from all over the world, always available, intensively farmed: the production cycle of these foods often damages local ecosystems, increases global pollution, decreases bio-diversity, and exploits workers.

Of late, there has been renewed interest in eating well and sustainably. Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is yet another offering to this particular audience. In this book, Kingsolver uses the chronicle of her family’s resolution to eat mostly home-raised and local foods for an entire year as a springboard for discussing food sustainability in general.

While this experiment was made easier by the family moving to a farm where they could devote significant time to agriculture, Kingsolver inspires both the back-yard gardener in me to try heirloom varieties to keep them in circulation, and the urban dweller in me to be more conscious about local and free range products in the supermarket.

The book has a companion website with recipes and local food resources. I found it enjoyable and inspiring, and recommend it to anyone thinking about eating and living more responsibly.

Cash for Clunkers?

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I think the Cash for Clunkers program is misguided. Yes, it will stimulate the economy insofar as it encourages people to buy cars and keep the auto industry rolling. I don’t think this is the best thing for society as a whole, though.

Given that the current financial crisis was caused by people getting over their heads in debt, having a program that encourages people to buy more and get into more debt seems like a bad idea. People who would have made do are now getting new cars in order to make use of this great offer. Government largesse, however, does not cover the full cost of the vehicles, so many folks are quite likely spending more money than they otherwise would have.

By effectively lowering the retail price of the vehicles, the government is also distoring the true social costs of car ownership. If anything, car prices don’t reflect all the externalities of their manufacture and disposal. This program is further sheltering individuals from the true costs of their consumption decisions. The cars for which the subsidies apply are supposedly greener, but given that people already have functioning cars, it is not clear to me that the environmental costs of manufacturing new ones and disposing of the old ones are outweighed by the expected gains in fuel efficiency, particularly given that our consumer society gives these cars a very short lifespan before a new model “must” be purchased.

Moreover, it is becoming more and more obvious that the environmental crisis is coming to a head and will impose lifestyle changes on us during our lifetime. Now would have been a good time for the government to use this stimulus money not to prop up what could arguably be called a luxury industry that contributes to the problem by promoting an expensive lifestyle, but rather to encourage viable, practical, and attractive public transportation across the country.

For both fiscal and environmental reasons (and arguably ethical reasons as well), the government should be leading and inspiring us to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

Beyond greenwashing

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Switching to energy-efficient lightbulbs and fastidiously recycling is all well and good at home, but to really effect the urgent change that we need to avert the imminent climate catastraphe, we need to systemically change the way we do things—which means the way business does things. This is the message of Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution by Auden Schendler.

Schendler intersperses his call to action with anecdotes from his experience as director of sustainability at the Aspen Skiing Company. Yes, a luxury ski resort that is figuring out that its long-term livelihood depends on the health of the planet!

The book offers insight into what it takes for business to go truly green (beyond “greenwashing”), though I thought it had limited value for me as a consumer. Still, it’s an interesting read, and a necessarily urgent one for businesses and policymakers.

Earthaven

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I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few years about issues of sustainability: humanity is living beyond its means in terms of energy consumption and nature preservation. The Washington Post Magazine has a cover story on an eco-village in North Carolina called Earthaven. It aims to be sustainable, although it’s not quite there yet. It is impressive, however, how consciously people live as they try to minimize their energy consumption. Is this for everyone? No, at least not yet (can you imagine American communities living by consensus?). But some of the ideas being tried out there will sooner or later have to be adopted by the mainstream if we truly want to preserve our planet for future generations. As the article notes:

Cities, where most of us live, are where the battle for energy efficiency has to be won. Fleeing to the woods isn’t an option to begin with. There are not enough resources in the world to allow all 6.5 billion (or 8 or 9 or 10 billion) people to live in their own little Earthaven, says John Anderson, an engineer with Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder, Colo. And because of their density and higher use of public transportation, cities can actually have a low carbon footprint per capita. “One of the least carbon-intensive places on Earth is Manhattan,” Anderson says.

Downer

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I’m normally a cheery guy, but I have to admit I’m pessimistic about the future of the planet. Just today I woke up to read about polar bears dying. We humans have just been exploiting the planet willy-nilly for our short-term gains without thinking about the global picture or our responsibility as stewards.

Maybe it’s just an accident of Western-led industrialization, but I’m more inclined to think it’s part and parcel of human nature. Perhaps in any context, a pocket of humans who exploit nature are at an advantage in terms of technology and material comforts, and their numbers grow by both reproduction and affiliation. Moreover, it’s the ultimate tragedy of the commons: we all share the planet, hence we all bear the negative externalities. Thus, a pocket of eco-friendly sustainable-living humans will not reap immediate rewards and its numbers will not grow in the same (almost viral!) fashion—and numbers are what it needs to make a dent by crowding out the polluters.

It’s too bad, because I expect that, within my lifetime, the environmental crisis will grow to proportions we cannot ignore. Not even our affluence will shield us.