Critical Exponent

Add Turkey Slaughter to your calendar for tomorrow?

So prompted GMail in a recent e-mail thread. The occasion: a demonstration Knox and I were attending at a local farm to see how turkeys get killed.

This all started way back in the summer, when friends of ours on Capitol Hill decided that (why not!) they would raise turkeys for Thanksgiving. Knox and I were game. We bought into the co-op, and sporadically visited the turkeys as they grew. Now, with Thanksgiving around the corner, all the co-op members are getting ready for the kill—except we’ve not really done this before.

Knox, however, managed to find a post on Craigslist for a free-range farmer who allowed folks to purchase his birds and kill them on the spot. We attended one such event as mere spectators. Knox’s agenda was learning how to become our turkey butcher (I’ll be blissfully working at the time). My own purpose for going was to test my ethics in facing the source of my animal food.

And so, there we were, watching tukeys get knocked out, killed, and prepped. I’ll spare you the (slightly) gruesome details. I will note one, though: the magic step is the plucking. Take the feathers off the dead bird and it becomes instantly recognizable as a food item.

Tomorrow, Knox became the turkey-killer-in-chief. As for me, I think there ought to be better ways for animals to die. I’ll be edging a bit closer to vegetarianism once again.

It takes a lot of effort to fix what is broken—the more complex the system, the greater the effort. Blame entropy.

I was reminded of this truism today when we went to the Salmon Days celebration in Issaquah. That we need fish hatcheries and salmon ladders speaks to the fact that we have overfarmed this fish. I am just as guilty as anyone, of course. Perhaps this is another instance of the free market failing to account for externalities. I dunno.

At any rate, it was fun being at the fair. I enjoyed seeing salmon still swimming upstream in a creek that must once have been teeming with fish.

It was also quite interesting to see so many flesh-and-blood Republicans walking around, carrying their McCain-Palin signs. I don’t get what they think that ticket will accomplish, but they’re the reason Washington state, overall, leans only slightly Democratic.

Words of hope, courtesy of Jared Diamond’s opinion piece in The New York Times on consumption trends across societies:

Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates.

A recurring ideal in our house is sustainability. We want to have as small a foot print as possible on the natural world, and indeed to leave our physical and social environment better than we found it. Our decisions are very deliberate (can we keep our buying to a minimum? can we resist the urge to drive when alternatives exist?). By the standards of our society, we’re doing well, though we harbor no illusion that we are either trailblazers or paragons of consistency. We are still more dinky guppies than granola hippies, and the tension between the two is at times exhausting (must we process again?). Such is the price we pay for conscious living.

We have big plans to make our new house more green: edible garden, native plants, solar panels…. We took the first step this weekend, when we set up our very own vermiculture system. Yes, that’s right, we purchased (there’s that consumerism!) a worm factory. Red wiggler worms, it turns out, excel at digesting many kitchen and yard scraps into castings that make a very valuable compost and a nutritious “tea” for garden plants. We’ve set up the wigglers in their new home and fed them. Now we just have to wait, see, and fine-tune.

We also started work on our back yard. We planted a big lilac tree (obtained free on craigslist) and a winter currant bush (obtained cheaply from the arboretum). We moved some of the shrubs from the front garden to the back, and we topped it all off with fresh wood chips from the neighborhood tree recycling program (they delivered a whole steaming pile of them to our door!).

L’chaim!

This Orion article captures the anxious guilt I feel that I am not doing enough, that I never can do enough.

Check out walkscore.com.

Last month, The New York Times had an article on ultra-small houses. Worlds apart from the McMansions infesting suburbia, these dwellings appeal to those who seek an inexpensive, sustainable solution (either for a primary residence or a vacation home) with minimal impact on the environment.

Small footprint and simplicity? I can get behind that!

“We hold these truths to be self-evident” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “that all men are created equal”—and yet this Founding Father believed that blacks were inferior. Jefferson tried to limit slavery in the new nation, and yet he owned about 200 slaves, of which he freed two in his lifetime and five upon his death.

How to explain this contradiction? Was he simply content with a policy of gradualism? Did the “Negro President” know he depended on the additional 60% weight given to the slaveholder vote under the three-fifths compromise? Or was he simply unable or unable to give up the slaves that buttressed his extravagant, indebted lifestyle?

Troubling questions, these, and still debated by scholars more versed in his life than I. Today’s tour of Monticello gave us a fascinating glimpse into the life and mind of a great statesman, philosopher, and citizen farmer—and an all-too-human portrait of ideological inconsistency.

It’s sobering to ponder that we too are rationalizing our stand on an issue that is also very much ethically urgent and on which future generations may judge us harshly. We pay lip service to preserving nature for our grandchildren and to living sustainably, but in reality few of us actually practice what we preach. My biking notwithstanding, I certainly am not, not with the cross-country road trip or the jet-set life, the non-regional food and the foreign-made clothes. Just like we puzzle over Jefferson’s ambivalence on an issue that is now so clear, so too may observers two centuries hence puzzle over the divide between our rhetoric and our deeds.

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.

Remember Jim Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies? He was the one that the Bush administration tried to silence after he gave a public warning that the current rate of fossil fuel use will make the earth into “a different planet.”

Hansen’s work is the subject of an article in Technology Review that explains how danegrously close we are to the point of no return. Look at this graph. It appears that every 100,000 years, small oscillations in the earth’s orbit cause minute changes in the amount of, and larger changes in the distribution of, sunlight on the earth. These changes caused natural fluctuactions in carbon dioxide levels, which in turn led to temperature fluctuations on the order of 5°C, enough to change ocean levels by 100 meters. It appears we are in the middle of such a natural fluctuation right now.

Now look at the very right edge of the graph. Carbon dioxide levels have skyrocketed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This is clearly not part of any natural cycle– and is a harbinger of dire consequences:

Owing to greenhouse changes we have already incurred, Hansen told his audience in San Francisco, Earth’s temperature will rise about 0.5 ºC in the next 50 years even if we stop burning fossil fuels today. We’re on a slippery slope: we could cross a threshold that leads to a drastically different planet, half a century before knowing that we’ve done so. Hansen believes we are horrifyingly close to such a threshold, and that we will cross it if we don’t change our greenhouse ways within the next few years.

Earth is now passing upward through the highest temperatures of the past 12,000 years, and the half a degree that is already in the pipeline will bring temperatures within half a degree of the high points they have reached only a few times in the past two million years. During a warm period about 120,000 years ago, for example, sea levels were probably five or six meters higher than they are today.

Running future emissions scenarios on a GISS computer model, Hansen finds that if we remain on the path he calls “business as usual,” temperatures will rise between two and three degrees this century, making Earth as warm as it was about three million years ago, when the seas were between 15 and 35 meters higher than they are today. There go many major cities and the dwellings of about half a billion people.

The current issue of Technology Review is dedicated to the climate crisis and how the technologies exist to slow down human-induced climate change: time is running out, but it’s not too late yet.

Finally, to the skeptics who refuse to accept these conclusions and are happy to proceed with business as usual, I offer this: No one debates that modern technological advances, and in particular industrialization, change the environment (think strip mining, deforestation) and pollute the atmosphere (think smokestacks) and the oceans (think chemical effluvia). Surely all those byproducts will have some sort of effect, don’t you think? It’s not impossible that the scientists who have spent countless careers studying these phenomena could be wrong, but are you willing to take the chance that maybe, just maybe, they’re right? If we as a species clean up after ourselves and leave the natural world no worse than we found it, then, and only then, can we rest assured that climate fluctuations are not due to our activities.