Tag Archives: Sustainability

Learning to eat

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Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual is the action-item, CliffsNotes version of his In Defense of Food. A very quick read, it contains 64 rules of thumbs for eating more healthily. These rules emerged from his own research as well as from soliciting reader comments on the New York Times’ Well blog. To get a flavor (ha-ha) for these rules, you can see Pollan’s twenty favorites here, though they did not all make it to the book.

More detailed reviews of the book can be found at The Huffington Post and at The Moderate Voice

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.”

Fishy

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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.