Thoughts on ecology, reductionism and capitalism

I have spent the last few days with my parents and submitting applications for different after-school positions. No, I'm never going to have a job...I hope. I haven't sat down to write recently, and I'm not sure why. But, I have been reading. Deep Routes: The Midwest In All Directions is a book I picked up recently, one that my friend, Sarah Lewison--an artist, activist, and professor at Southern Illinois University--has contributed to, along with other community organisers, academics, and artists from the Midwest. The book is about radical activism based in the Midwest, and a key theme of the book is territoriality and connection with place. Connection with place is something deeply lacking in a world in which we constantly seek upward mobility. While "settling down" is something I don't agree with, I wonder how our constant mobility obscures our ability to see connections between the our daily choices and their multidimensional outcomes. Indeed, what is the ecology of choice? 

Reductionism is the foundation of current expertise, education, and capitalism. Reductionist thinking gives us only thinly cut slices of complex pie. In a globalized world, we know very little about the roots of the products we buy, or the roots of the food we eat. Instead, we are made to think of dollars and cents, and when we valuate using the great reductionism of money, we tend to undervalue. Writes Claire Pentecost in Deep Routes,

Capitalism is deracinating: it must separate anything of value from its roots in order to convert it into a sign that can be efficiently circulated and exchanged. It reduces both needs and desires to a system in which the fungible and often proprietary signs of value trump the organic ecology of values. In this deracinated circular flow, the universal equivalent--the sign that makes all commodities exchangeable--is money. Whatever we need and love may have inherent value, but under capitalism, anything and everything is reducible to a monetary sign of value. This is efficiently paralleled by informationalism, a paradigm of knowledge in which value is reduced to an isolated register that can be exchanged as pure sign. In these ways capitalism and its companion informationalism are constitutionally deterritorializing. 

Ecological thinking is a powerful antidote to reductionism, even when not applied to the "environmental" reduction; it allows us to see connections and understand the roots of the choices available to us socially, politically, and economically, whether at the voting booth or in the aisles of supermarkets. Our capacity to think ecologically fully appreciates and takes advantage of our vision, foresight, and creativity. Yet we are stuck by constantly narrowing and reducing the scope of our questions and investigations into the failures of capitalism and public policy in public health and the environment. Pentecost continues by writing,

...our food paradigm reduces the value of a food to those elements that can be easily read as quantifiable information. We are trained to think of nutrition in terms of a handful of vitamins and minerals. So we grow acres of corn, which are deemed to be all the same in quality, process them to extract their exchange value as oils, starches, sugars, and materials that can be used industrially for glues and plastics, reconstitute some of those ingredients by adding certain readily identifiable vitamins and minerals--and voila! It serves a food. But it ignores the complex nuances of human digestion, and does so tragically in the light of the misery and disease propagated by the "American diet."

Indeed,

How can we pour millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into our environment and not think that we will be poisoning ourselves, as well as all that makes our existence possible and palatable?  

What do you call it?

If a problem is "environmental", does that mean the environment needs fixing? That is what it seems to imply to most people. That is what drives the ecomodernism stance of continued technologisation, of continuing down a path of trying to find abundance and infinity in a finite and fragile world. And that is what drives geo-engineering projects...that it is not our behaviour that is at fault, but rather the ways in which the environment around us changes in response to our behaviour that is the real issue. Therefore, we feel that human intervention in the environment is what the solution should look like.

But what fundamentally needs to change? The environment? Or how we behave? I would say the latter, for an environmental problem exists only if we've created it (like pollution in water, like climate change), or if we perceive it (like the threat of hailstorms and tornadoes). Yet, if we call a problem "environmental" without also tagging the word "social" with it, then we fail to address the true causes of the problems.

This goes back to what I was trying to say in my last post. What we call things matters in how we perceive them. Words and names have the capacity to connote, and depending on our backgrounds, words bring to the surface a plethora of emotions, feelings, thoughts, and actions. Consequently, there are associations that I would not make, because they are incommensurable, because the existence of one thing makes the other impossible (or close to impossible). For example, a drastic re-envisioning of the world would be one in which food we eat would not be, as Michael Pollan states, marinated in crude oil. In an ecologically sustainable world, food that travels fifteen hundred miles before it lands on your plate just would not exist. Ecologically sustainable food provided to you graciously by Exxon? No, thank you. More and more "environmentally-friendly" cars that constantly require newer and newer materials and more and more material extraction from the Earth? No, thank you.

Associations matter. If I call something collaborative rather than competitive, that would at least provide some rhetorical force to collaboration. Customs, on an individual scale, and customary international law on a larger scale, are rhetorical forces. They associate practices with social relations, and consequently outcomes. (Of course, many of these customs need to change or be altogether done away with.)

What is required is changes in language and diction. We need a new vocabulary to describe the world around us. It would be nice if that vocabulary wasn't hijacked by those who profit most from keeping things the way they are. But I'm not holding my breath on it. Therefore, we must associate things that are commensurable, and avoid associating things that are not. We are avoiding the issue if we do the latter.

Opening spaces for ourselves

Honestly, I am pretty tired (for now, at least...but I don't think I will be rejuvenated any time soon) of talking about the role of "government", "industry" and "education" to addressing the problems we face. We always hear from the industrial and corporate world, "Well, if the governments only did this, this and this, things would be okay," or "We need to deregulate," and so on and so forth. Government, on the other hand is dependent on the private sector more than ever before, whether it is for election campaign expenditures, taxes, war machinery, or whatever. Education seems to be the default answer to everything...and it's true. I do not disagree with that. Education (which to me means at bare minimum being equipped with knowledge and communication, cultural, analytical and critical skills that we can distill into critiques, appreciation, and wisdom to advocate for change, take action, tear down oppressive systems and forge ones, big or small, based more humane and ecologically sensitive values, and being able to live at peace with ourselves, our families, and communities...and not just something that provides us with a resume so that we can get a job...it is clear that this isn't what our government thinks of the role of education) seems to be the default fallback for all conversations: "If we only educate people differently, or better, things will change." Well, no duh. But education and changes to it also take time to unfold, all the while while ecosystems are being destroyed, waters polluted, and more and more people getting obese by eating shitty food.

And so, I hear this government/industry/education discussion all the time...and barely anything changes. For example, let's talk about something that we all relate to--food. You all probably know or have heard of Jamie Oliver, the sustainable and healthy food advocate from Essex. His awesome work and efforts have won him great recognition and publicity--a TV show, and the 2010 TED Prize. I encourage you to watch his talk below.



Oliver is energetic and passionate. Watching his talk makes you want to jump up and do something. Oliver has done a tremendous job at figuring out systemic problems in food production and service in the US and elsewhere, and has talked passionately about how government and corporations need to change. In response, he gets something like this: "Tomato sauce on pizza is a vegetable, says Congress." Now, I don't want to hear about the lobbies, about government intervening in our lives, and such. We all know about this. And so given this mess, what can we do? How can we open spaces for ourselves to create movements, change or tear down "the system", find the chinks in the armor? I am inspired by JR, a photographer, graffiti artist, activist, and winner of the 2011 TED Prize. Watch his amazing talk below.



There seems to be something so unique and different and exciting about JR's approach to awareness and engagement. It seems that his approach touches at something deep and fundamental and raw. And clearly, he is changing communities, and the world. I wonder, how can we jump on a different wagon of engagement and activism, rather than the same, old approaches that always seem to get diluted?

Taking matters into their own hands

(A little tired to type much, but I wanted to share with you some inspirational things going on in Haiti.)

Peter Wenz writes in his essay Environmentalism and Human Oppression, that 

[s]pecialization and the division of labor make people more interdependent, as they depend on others to meet needs outside their own specialties. Carpenters, for example, depend on farmers and butchers, as they in turn depend on carpenters.

Vulnerability is the other face of interdependence. People on whom we depend for life's necessities are people who have power over us. Foragers, for example, depend on others in their group for cooperation in life's basic tasks. But because everyone has similar skills and available natural resources are adequate, no subgroup can control or limit the rest of the group's ability to accomplish their goals. Dependence does not make individuals vulnerable when cooperation and needed resources are so widely available. In addition, foragers know personally and individually the people on whom they depend. This fosters interpersonal bonds and builds confidence that needed cooperation will be forthcoming.

Our culture has tended to specialise more and more, brand us, bin us, reduce us to numbers and statistics. Indeed, our economies are based on specialisation. And when we specialise, we give proxies--we rely on others to fulfill needs. As soon as we give proxies, we lose our ability to have adequate control over what is done with our confidence. (Bruce had some interesting comments on specialisation that you can read here.)

We can all agree that Haiti has been thoroughly screwed over by colonialism and imperialism and the resulting poverty. Haiti has had to rely on foreign "aid" for a long time now. But, in places that are destitute are found the most inspirational individuals and collectives--individuals and collectives that need no charity, individuals and collectives that are taking matters into their own hands. It is us that should be learning from them. Watch this slideshow, narrated by photographer Bear Guerra, about the essay Peasant Bounty by Ruxandra Guidi, from the July/August 2011 issue of Orion, which is about a communitarian peasant movement in rural Haiti, called the Mouvman Peyizan Papay, in which farmers address issues of food sovereignty in addition to food security. (You ought to read the essay, too.)

Bear Guerra — "Peasant Bounty" narrated slide show from Orion Magazine on Vimeo.

Guest blog #22: Julia Petty on expanding the definition of "waste" in food

Our nation’s food system produces more waste than simply trash and food scraps.  Avoiding food packaging is still a valuable step in alleviating some of the negative environmental impacts that consumptive choices can make, but there are more factors to consider when grabbing your midday snack or preparing your next meal.  Although this may evoke a higher degree of responsibility, it should come as somewhat of a relief, especially to those who live in cities where food packaging is unavoidable; it means there are other ways of reducing your impact.  For instance, suppose we expand the definition of “waste” to include, in addition to packaging waste, all the other harmful byproducts that are created in the ways that our country produces food, as well as the wasted resources that go into the process. We, as a nation, rely heavily on industrial agriculture – large, highly specialized farms that run like factories, completely dependent on large inputs of fossil fuels through the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2008). Although this system has been considered highly “efficient” because of the mass amounts of food it produces, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “A new awareness of the costs is beginning to suggest that the benefits are not as great as they formerly appeared.”

Industrial agriculture creates a multitude of unintended, long-term costs. Take, for example, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Michael Pollan describes these cattle feedlots in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pokey Feeders, the CAFO that Pollan visits, is home to 37,000 cows. CAFOs serve two main purposes: to make meat cheap and abundant, and to help dispose of America’s corn surplus.  Although these may seem like positive goals, they have caused some alarming effects.  As Pollan learns from animal scientists, virtually all cows in feedlots are sick to some degree or another.  Because cows are naturally grass-eaters, all health complications can be linked back to their corn diet. Not only is it unnerving to think of eating meat that came from a sick cow, but those same cows are fed a slew of liquid vitamins, synthetic estrogen, and antibiotics to counteract the high incidence of illness.  In addition to these inputs, Pollan reports that, with the summation of all the fossil fuels (in the form of pesticides and fertilizers) that go into growing the corn that feeds the cattle, each feedlot steer will have consumed the equivalent of thirty-five gallons of oil from birth to slaughter weight.

Not only do feedlots require deleterious inputs, but the outputs can be just as harmful. Manure, usually a source of fertility for crops, becomes toxic.  Farmers don’t accept it as fertilizer because the nitrogen and phosphorous levels are so high that it would kill crops. Instead, it sits in waste lagoons throughout the property. From there, the toxic manure, also laden with heavy metals, hormone residues, and strands of E. coli ends up waterways downstream causing reproductive deformation in fish and amphibians.  What’s truly unbelievable about all these heinous CAFO effects is that they are completely avoidable through alternative ranching methods:

"Raising animals on old-fashioned mixed farms…used to make simple biological sense: You can feed them the waste products of your crops, and you can feed their waste products to your crops. In fact, when animals live on farms the very idea of waste ceases to exist; what you have instead is a closed ecological loop…One of the most striking things that animal feedlots do…is take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all)." From The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Is Pollan calling all readers to become vegetarians? No. And neither am I. What’s important to understand is that somewhere in the search for “efficiency” and maximized production, concern for the actual effects of the way we grow our food has been lost, especially when it comes to the environment.  

~Julia Petty

Traveling at home: A bike ride through farmland

This summer, Matt and I signed up for a farm share through a community-supported agriculture programme. We started receiving our shares from Needle Lane Farms, from Titpon, MI, a couple of weeks ago. I feel fortunate to have access to such a wonderful programme. If you aren't providing yourself with food, knowing where something as basic as where your food comes from can go a long way in envisioning a different future for our neighbourhoods and communities. I truly believe that. So, I wanted to go and check out the farm, to actually see the food that I eat be grown and cared and tended for.

Matthew (different guy) and I decided to bike out to Tipton, which is around thirty miles from Ann Arbor. Matthew is from Tecumseh, which is just on the way to Tipton, and so we decided to see his family and check out the farm on Saturday, and bike back Sunday. On the way there, we of course got sidetracked and ended up in Milan, itself twenty-plus miles from Tecumseh, where we stopped for a beer and a root beer and a grilled cheese sandwich at Original Gravity Brewing Company.

The taps at Original Gravity Brewing Company

We eventually ended up in Tipton, and there met Beverly, my farmer, her partner John, and Zane, an energetic six year old who lives on the farm and helps out. Beverly, who is five months pregnant with her first, said that Needle Lane Farms is a third-generation, seventy acre farm, with all organic, non-GMO produce. Beverly, who graduated from Michigan State University, knew from a very young age that she wanted to take care of the farm, and so recently, she bought it from her father. She showed us around the farm, talked about the various kinds of soil, the plants, and her philosophy. I pick my share up from Morgan & York in Ann Arbor on Tuesday afternoon, and she mentioned that she wakes up at five a.m. that very day to pick the vegetables to make sure that they are as fresh as possible. One thing she said struck me - "When I go to bed at night, I feel really good." I sincerely appreciate her efforts, and could not ask for a more thoughtful person to be responsible, truly responsible, for the food that I eat and feed to others.

Matthew

Zane

Beverly, John, Zane, and Matthew

An important piece

 

The ride to Milan to Tecumseh and back to Ann Arbor was on the order of seventy-five miles - seventy-five miles of small towns and open farmland and barns and horses and azure sky. For miles at a time, we were the only people on the road; we biked down the middle of the road. We biked through Cone, Britton, Morseville, Clinton, Macon and a bunch of other little towns, quaint and idyllic. It is really nice living in Ann Arbor, where nature and pasture are never too far away.

Barn along the way

Downtown Tecumseh

What we take as a given

I would like to continue some of my thoughts from a recent post on giving up, but from a different angle.

It is clear that we live in a culture, of wastefulness and violence. Our culture is wasteful of and violent towards what our Earth provides for us, and wasteful of the potential that lies within each one of us to take bolder actions, to move us away from the destruction and violence. Yet it seems that given all of the information we have, all the data we've gathered, there is still the belief that if we just continue what we've done so far for a little while longer, we'll be able to extricate ourselves from the mess we've created. If we turn the knobs just a little bit here, make oil extraction just a little bit more efficient there, and buy organic apples shipped half way across the world, we feel that this should suffice. Unfortunately, it will not suffice. Fortunately, we can do something about it. What we need to think about most importantly is what we take as a given, and what needs to be made obsolete, in society and culture, and in our individual lives.

What we take as a given deeply affects how we choose to address the problems that face us. If we take industrial capitalism as a given, that limits the solutions and options available to us in our decision-making. If we take coal-fired power plants as a given, we may be left only with efficiency options. However, among those making larger-scale decisions, what is debated is not a restructuring of society, of culture, but the tweaks that can be made such that we can stay the current course. It is evident to me that the severity of the issues hasn't be comprehended by those most powerful in our society. (Or maybe they choose to turn their backs on the issues because it is their choices that have caused these problems.) At the same time, many individuals feel that it is okay to use chemicals on our foods, and drink water laced with hormones. What does this mean for us, those that do not support what is going on, those that know that more needs to be done, yet are still affected by the negative outcomes?


I believe that we need to free our minds from what we've been taught to accept. We must question and view with skepticism everything that is thrown at us, because what is being thrown at us is disrespectful of our lives, our health, our world. Of course, this is easier said than done. Yet it is doable, possible, and necessary. While I hope that people can break from from anthropocentrism and extend the moral community to include the environment, even if you are anthropocentric, and don't even care about the environment, think about how you are feeding your very children food that is sprayed with chemicals (that don't necessarily wash off) that are potentially carcinogenic, that the air they are breathing can lead to asthma. Indeed, a simple thought like so can lead down a path of powerful introspection, the outcome of which is outward choices that can make a difference.

The more we have, the more we waste

Our society has created for us an illusion of plenty (to borrow the title of Sandra Postel's book on water scarcity). Indeed, if we were to look at the lawns of the households in Phoenix, we would think that there is plenty of water to go around for all of us, and plenty to spare, so much so that everyone can own uncovered swimming pools in the driest and hottest parts of the country. (Given even a rudimentary understanding of thermodynamics, you would think that there would be a massive amount of evaporation and loss.) When we go to a grocery store, we see plenty of food, so much so that we buy food not only for today, but for tomorrow, and the next week. Much of this food goes to waste; Americans throw away more than 25% of their food. Based on calories, the National Institutes of Health put this number close to 40%. When you walk into an electronics store like Best Buy, you would think that metals and plastics will continue to be abundant, so much so that you don't mind adding another LCD TV to the one you already have. A stroll through the corridors of Home Depot make you feel insignificant compared to the amount of wood neatly stacked. There must be plenty of trees out there. So plenty, in fact, that cutting one down shouldn't matter. Maybe cutting down two shouldn't matter..or three, or four...

But the issue is a serious one - not only are we maybe over-producing food, or not equitably distributing it, but we are spending massive amounts of energy, and using so many chemicals and so much water to produce that food, and that waste. As I mentioned previously, one quarter of freshwater used in the US goes into food that is thrown away. Electronics are thrown away as soon as new models appear, with little regard to what goes on to produce each cell phone in our pockets, each computer on our desks.Our society has surrounded us with the illusion of copious, even infinite amounts of things we can burn or throw away. When you have a lot, you don't mind spending it, losing it, or throwing it away. Indeed, the value of a small amount is lost. If I've bought four radishes, one radish going bad won't make me lose sleep.

Professor Princen has written at length about the idea of sufficiency, which is a huge step forward from efficiency. When we look at the Earth from space, what we see is not an overflowing, unbound teeming of life, but the finiteness of the space in which all life as we know exists - the thin layer of atmosphere, the brown of the land and the blue of oceans. Yet for some reason we think that within the finiteness of our Earth, we can grow, materially and monetarily, unboundedly. We have founded everything we rely on on finite sources, on ever scarce sources. But we (or the corporations and government...you can always blame them =)) have put on blinders to that finiteness. I encourage you to think about scarcity and finiteness. One thing that each one of us can do is value what we have, and treat each and every thing we have as precious. Whether it is a cup of water, or a dollar bill, or a drop of oil. Many of these things are never coming back. The least we can do is appreciate.

Some thoughts on control

One of the central themes that has come up to the surface in thinking about trash, waste, and ecological harm is the notion of control. Control comes in many flavours and shades, and operates (or not) at scales ranging from extremely macroscopic (large government, transnational organisations), to extremely microscopic (the self, our being).

At times we feel as if we are in control of our lives, and at times we feel like we must move with the macroscopic flow of our societies, regardless of how we feel. At the largest level, control operates at the scale of government and industry - laws and policies dictate what is acceptable and what isn't, what will be mass produced and what will not. In this situation, there is very little that each one of us can do. It is as if decisions are made for us; for example, the electricity we use will come from coal, and there is very little I can do to stop that. Either I can choose to be a part of it and use electricity, or I can somehow choose to opt out. (This I explored in a previous post a few days ago.) Another example is that of the large economy - if the "economy is down," society is down, people lose their jobs, and that means we as individuals are down. Many people feel that there is little that we can do individually to change the situation, apart from debate with people, and hope that the imaginary forces of the market do their thing. They feel that we have to wait and hope so that the "economy is up," and so that we can resume the normalcy of their daily lives. Indeed, it seems to them that we are in control of our lives when the collective we are in, our communities, neighbourhoods, and societies, are "stable" as defined through neoliberal economics.

What we've done then is given up the power of decision-making to people that work in government buildings and boardrooms. We have given them proxies to provide us with the only choices from which we must choose. We have become reliant on others. For example, if you are fortunate enough to have enough money to go grocery shopping, you have a large variety of things to choose from. Yet what is provided to you is defined by the proxies we (the collective) have given to others to make decisions for us. You are thus provided with foods sprayed with toxic chemicals, uber-processed, and full of empty calories. This outcome not only negatively impacts our bodies, but also negatively impacts the environment. Unfortunately, the choices we are being presented are those which will continue to degrade our land, our air, our water. (This is obvious with continued expansion of something like oil exploration.) What is left then is a very small space within we can operate and exercise control. We are left with only unpalatable choices. Now, while I cannot expect everyone to be an activist (that would be awesome, though), I can encourage people to make responsible choices for themselves and the environment in the small space in which they can exercise control. Most all of us, especially those who are able to access this blog, are completely and totally empowered to exercise more responsibility toward the environment in our daily lives, and serve as role models moving forward.

$2/day - On knowing what's out there

Brett asked me the other day if I wanted to go to a Phish concert this weekend. "They put on a really good show, I hear!" he said. In reply, I said that I couldn't, because I couldn't afford to (this week, at least) as I am living on two dollars a day. I realised that this was probably the first time I said no to something because I couldn't afford to go. As I mentioned previously, I have never felt the shortage of money. In our world today, what that means is that I haven't felt the shortage of the opportunity to experience something. It is clear to me that money provides opportunities. If you are wealthy, you can have a summer home in the British Virgin Islands. One of the primary reasons you are able to have that home is because of the doors opened to you, the access granted to you, because of the money you have. What that means is that money opens doors, and a lack of money tends to keep them shut.

I thought about this experience with Brett, knowing all well that the concert was actually going on, yet I couldn't go. I didn't feel bad about it, because I know I'll get the opportunity to go to a concert next week, when I'm not living on two dollars a day. But what if that opportunity to go to a concert never came back to me because I just didn't have the money to go to it? I started to wonder what it must be like then to know everything that is going on around you, yet being unable to access those experiences. I thought about what it must be like to be a homeless person sitting outside the Michigan Theatre, or Hill Auditorium, seeing people all dressed up going in, after eating at Silvio's or some other nice place. There are a couple of things you might be feeling at that point, I assume (I assume, because I don't really know.) - 1) you might have previously been able to afford to go to a concert and dinner, you know what doing that is like like, and you maybe miss doing so and/or feel bad about the fact that you can no longer afford to do so, or 2) you may never have been able to afford to do so, and so maybe you don't know what it is really like, but you know that it probably feels good to be able to afford to do so.

(Spoiler alert!) One of the most fascinating scenes of the movie Waste Land, which I wrote about previously, is the discussion that Vik, his wife, and his colleague are having when the time comes to decide whether or not someone that works as a picker at a landfill should be flown out to London for an auction, since the piece that is being auctioned (made by Vik) features the picker. Vik's wife is initially opposed to taking the picker to London. "How do you think it would feel to go to into this glamourous world for just a couple of days, and then end up going back to a landfill in Rio?" she asks. Vik then raises the valid point that if he was poor, and someone came to him with an offer to move out of poverty for a week, knowing all well that you'll end up back where you came from, that he would of course take up the offer. The picker does end up going to London, and sees the art piece featuring him fetch fifty thousand dollars at auction. In the same way, I suspect that some people that have been disenfranchised and have ended up living on very little money have actually had experiences they wish they could continue to have, yet are not empowered by money. (That is not to say that these people are not happy, because I don't really know. Maybe they are.)

This week has been a fascinating experience, and has given me much to think about.

$2/day - Some food, many thoughts

I met up with Paul (ultra-cool guy) this morning, and broke into a light sweat while sitting with him under the sun outside of Big City Small World Bakery. I told him about this week long project I started on, and he recommended making a trip out to By The Pound, another bulk food store in Ann Arbor. We went there, and I bought some groceries that should keep me going for the next few days...roti flour, cranberry beans, black turtle beans, and rolled oats for $3.63. I then made my way to the People's Food Co-op to get some vegetables, and I ended up getting some cabbage, carrots, onions, a lemon, and some rooibos tea for $4.42. Let's see how far these eight dollars go. (Now that I think about it, I didn't even realise that the carrots and lemon need to be kept in the fridge!)

As you may have thought to yourself already, the number of two dollars is largely symbolic and doesn't mean much to us here in the US. Really living on two dollars a day in the US is impossible, I would think. The poverty line in the US is about fifteen dollars per day per person (however that line is determined). What this means is that what fifteen dollars means to us here is not what fifteen dollars means to people elsewhere. This is obvious. What I feel though is that maybe the issues people face, regardless of whether they are poor here or poor elsewhere, are similar, the inability to stand up against the causes of their poverty, and the consequent feeling of powerlessness. Yet there are some differences, particularly when it comes to food.

Having grown up in India, I observed that the food poor people eat, if available, is actually nutritious. They eat hardy grains, rice and fresh vegetables; they just don't get enough of this healthful food. Many of the poor in India are not obese, but they suffer from being underweight or from malnutrition diseases like beriberi, pellagra, scurvy, and rickets. This is in stark contrast to what many of the poor in the US face - a lack of access to healthful foods at all, and an increased availability to processed, highly salty foods leading to obesity and other health risks. And so even though the social manifestations of what it means to be poor may be similar, the outward, bodily manifestations influenced by food, a basic necessity of life, change from West to East.

On that note, let's see what the rest of this day presents to me.

What we lose through "efficiency" - Jevon's Paradox and complexity

My previous posts (here and here) focused more on the less quantifiable aspects of "efficiency," such as taste and flavour, as well as balance in nature. Today's post is a more technical post, primarily focusing on energy and economics, following up on my last two posts. Humans have always had a tendency and will to make things more "efficient" - we would rather our shopping be done at one place, we would rather a computer simulation take half as long as it currently does, we would rather pay half of what we do for our heating bill. What we believe is that making things and activities more efficient will allow us time to do other things, or allow us to do more for less. In practice however, this has a perverse feedback associated with it - we may end up using more by making things more "efficient."

A recent article in The New Yorker by David Owen was titled, "The Efficiency Dilemma: If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?" Owen writes about Jevon's Paradox, which was first written about by a young English economist, William Stanley Jevons, in 1865. The paradox states that instead of using less by making things more efficient, we end up using more. This phenomenon is called "rebound." When the savings through efficiency are canceled out and overwhelmed by increased consumption, the phenomenon is called "backfire." When something becomes more efficient, the implicit price of it drops from a neo-classical standpoint (and we all know that the world runs, unfortunately, on neo-classical economics), thus spurring increased demand.

Owens gives a most wonderful example about refrigeration and air-conditioning, both energy-hungry processes. As refrigerators have become more efficient, refrigeration capacity in the world has increased multi-fold. Furthermore, the effects of better refrigeration are not limited to refrigeration only. We are tempted to buy more food to store in refrigerated conditions, and by the time we get to eating them, much of the food is spoiled anyway. Here, not only do we waste the energy going into refrigeration, we waste and throw away all of the energy, chemicals and resources that went into food production, through transportation, storage and agriculture. In fact, (and this was incredibly shocking to me), one quarter of US freshwater use goes into food that is eventually thrown away. As you may be able to tell, after a certain point, it becomes difficult to know what the true effects of efficiency gains are when moving to studying small systems to larger systems; issues only become more complex, becoming much more difficult to address. (I have written about complexity here, here and here.) Owen makes the point that, along with advocating for "efficiency," there must be other measures adopted simultaneously to make sure gains are not canceled out by increased consumption. Indeed, without further measures, you may be left in the boat of the United Kingdom, which has seen marked increases in "efficiency," but only increased greenhouse gas emissions.

There are several questions worth thinking about here: Do we need things to be more efficient? What is so wrong with things being inefficient, especially from a personal time standpoint? What are we going to do with any efficiency gains that will come our way?

Trash, to me, seems like a natural outcome of this "efficiency," "centralisation," and "convenience" mentality.

The environmental impact of cities

In preparing for the course I will be teaching with a few other graduate students next semester, I have been reading a lot about the changing landscapes of urban areas. Some urban areas have declined (but are now being reborn) significantly, such as areas in the US Midwest (Detroit, Cleveland, Youngstown, Buffalo), some have been well bounded from the outset (Portland), and others (New York) have continued to grow in population. By 2050, half of the world's population will reside in urban areas. There is a line of thinking, from an environmental standpoint, that concentrating residents in urban environments allows for a more efficient use of resources - energy, water and electricity can all be used more efficiently.

This is a continuation of a previous post on cities - I started thinking about cities again because I am visiting my sister in New York City; she lives in Manhattan and is a fashion designer. In an article in the New Yorker from 2006, David Owen explains why everywhere should be more like New York. Manhattan is a place where you can have multi-million square foot buildings, with tens of thousands of people working in them, with per capita use of energy being much lower than in more decentralised and sprawled urban environments. Mass transit can be used to move scores of people with the same reasoning. What is interesting, however, is the emphasis in the article on energy. (In fact, many people narrowly think that the bulk of the environmental problem today is about energy.) What is not talked much about, which Bettencourt and West from the Santa Fe Institute point out, which is evident when you visit most any urban environment in the US, is the confluence of money and ideas from elsewhere. Ideas can include culture, food, drink, art and music. When you combine multicultural resources with people who have the ability to consume those resources, you have added a whole new layer to the environmental impacts of cities. This struck me when I went inside Eataly, a 50,000 square foot complex that cooks and sells everything Italian. 

I am not going to lie - I eat Italian food, and I love food from all over the world. But it is important to recognise the environmental costs of doing so. (Sam has, and she has gone local. Since I have been buying unpackaged foods, I have also been eating almost exclusively locally-grown foods.) Cities have now become dependent on other cities to provide resources for consumption, and therefore the impacts of the city are no longer contained to the region that the city exists in. This is a key feature of globalisation. Cities now have huge ecological footprints. A study by Folke et al. shows that large cities in the Baltic region of Northern Europe require inputs from land areas between 500-1100 times the land areas of the cities themselves. How do we reconcile growing and rejuvenating urban environments with diversity and environmental impact?

What we lose through "efficiency" - feedback

Tim told me this morning that in yesterday's post, I have confused industrialisation with efficiency. He says that we choose and want to be efficient in everything, including non-industrial agriculture and food production. I see what he is saying, and I agree with him. Maybe I have confused or not delineated between the two concepts thoroughly enough. What I am trying to get at is the notion of trying to get more for less (or more for the same amount of input), which is exactly what industrialisation is, and which is exactly what efficiency is. When we choose to apply fossil-fuel based energy and chemicals to agriculture, we think that we may be able to increase "yield," or the amount of output per area of land (which, I emphasise, is not true in practice). But the concept of "efficiency" is also the foundation behind genetic modification and the development of seeds and crops that are better able to survive given inputs of industrialisation. Through this process of increasing "efficiency," we deplete the natural balances of nutrients in soil and water, resulting in poorer tasting food. What is then lost is the experience of food - no one can deny that better tasting food makes you feel better, mentally and physically. If the notion of "efficiency" is to be applied to non-industrial agriculture, it would entail treating the land and what feeds it in a way that doesn't overburden it (exactly the opposite of industrial agriculture), and respecting the land enough so as to get the best tasting food.

To Eleanor's point that efficiency and industrialisation has allowed us to taste foods that only exist in other parts of the world, and that industrialisation feeds the world. There is a grain of truth in what she says, but I think what industrialisation is good at doing is underestimating the costs of itself. "Economies of scale" applied to industrialisation are good at providing "low-cost" food to people, but the costs, especially environmental and social, are completely neglected. When we go to Wal-Mart or Kroger, we do not pay for the costs of petroleum or lost livelihoods of small farmers. (Those costs are indeed covered by subsidies.) Furthermore, even though Americans have continued to spend less and less on food, and it is possible to get entire "meals" at fast-food restaurants for $2, the number of people going hungry locally and globally is still remarkable, and nothing that industrialisation "promises" can address that. It is also undeniable that industrialisation leads to a decrease in the quality of food, and it is debatable whether you can call industrial, fast food "food."

With the issue of flavour, I am speaking to the mental and social impacts that good tasting food can have. Maybe people will eat bad-tasting food if a gun was put to their head, or that was all that was available on a particular day. But once you have tasted good food, the smell, flavour and experience stay with you lifelong. I do not believe we have to sacrifice the quality of food for quantity - Cuba has resisted this sacrifice since petrochemical exports to the country stopped with the fall of the Soviet Union, through innovative approaches of biodynamism and organic urban agriculture.

What we lose through "efficiency"

As an engineer that works in a combustion laboratory, I am constantly surrounded by the miracles of modern machinery. Let me tell you about some of the things around my lab. There exists a vacuum pump that can pull a large volume to near vacuum, to a pressure lower than exists at the higher reaches of the atmosphere. There exist fast-acting solenoid valves that have an open-shut cycle time of 2 milliseconds to capture with high accuracy and precision small volumes of gas to understand how fuels break down. There exist computers that can solve systems of very stiff differential equations to understand chemical kinetics. There exists lasers that emit photons with high spatial and temporal coherence. All of these gadgets, gizmos and machinery are made to operate as "efficiently" as possible - use the least amount of energy to get a certain amount of work out. This seems wonderful - planes now fly on 40% less fuel per kilometre than they did 40 years ago. Efficiency can work marvels with engineering, and in some sense, "save" the environment. But it can also wreak havoc on the environment and more primal attributes of our world.

My thoughts are flowing at this moment primarily through food, but one may apply this thought process to other forms of human behaviour. In our attempt to increase output of food, we have turned to fossil fuels and chemicals and genetically modified seeds to allow increased yields (although this is completely debatable, and more likely than not false) given the size of a plot. Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan eloquently speak to the degradation of land, the waste of farming operations, and the lives of ecosystems that are ruined because of industrial agriculture. But Chef Dan Barber lends another perspective to the voices speaking out against industrial agriculture. On Being, he speaks to something food has lost over time due to excessive chemical and biological modification - flavour. Indeed, flavour, an essential quality of food, is nowhere talked about amongst large scale agribusinesses and farmers. As I have written about previously, food, when cooked with love and thought, using the right ingredients, can open up minds and hearts, and remind people of days gone by. In our quest to produce large amounts of food for increasingly lower costs to the customer (although the true costs are not billed, nor are calculable), the social aspect of food surrounding thought, smell, taste and emotion has been systematically neglected and carelessly snipped out of the DNA, both of the food and of our culture. With the loss of native species of crops, plants and animals, these things no longer survive in our collective memories. In the end, bland tasting tomatoes are shipped thousands of miles to be served as poor substitutes to the miraculous tastes of nature...generating trash along the way.

Food packaging and trash

"For 365 days, every time Tim Gaudreau threw something away he photographed it...Everything photographed was his average, daily consumption. And most of it was food packaging (emphasis added)."

As I mentioned a while ago, I quickly realised, after starting the no trash-ness, that most of the trash I generated came from food packaging. As I also mentioned, the People's Food Coop and the Farmer's Market has been instrumental in allowing me to live trash-free. Another way to go trash free is to just grow your own food. I am most glad to say that the bumper harvest from Krista and my little farm yesterday has greatly contributed to my project. Take a look! Arugula, lettuce, radicchio, jalapeno, habanero, serrano, thai basil, sweet basil, and lemon basil...

Food from trash

Have you ever been dumpster diving before? I certainly have. One winter, I ate like a king every day - I dumpster dove at the local Trader Joe's. Wine, lemonade, cheeses, breads, micro-greens, oranges, cereals, flowers and so much more were freely available to anyone that cared to just wait until midnight when the last employees of Trader Joe's left after cleaning. That winter, I reckon I spent only $100 at an actual store (i.e. the People's Food Coop) on things like milk and butter.

I am reminded of this winter because yesterday, on the best show on the radio, The Story, Jeremy Seifert talked about his recent attempts at trying to reduce food wastage in America. He mentioned that more than 100 billion pounds of food are wasted each year in USA alone. I'm sorry, did you read that correctly? 100 billion pounds. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me, very conservatively, that that is enough food for more than 60 million people (assuming 180 lb people, eating their own body weight every 40 days). Well, that's a shame. On average, we throw away approximately a quater of the food we buy. Did you read that correctly? A quarter. What is it about the culture in USA that allows it to be morally and ethically acceptable to waste so much food? I can think of several reasons.
1) We don't know where our food comes from. Food just seems to magically appear in the grocery store. We don't know about the effort it takes to create food.
2) We have lost touch with nature and with the capacities of our bodies. Why would we throw away a whole head of broccoli if just one little part of it is bruised? Why do most people just superficially eat an apple and not just the whole thing (maybe barring the seeds), core and all? In the end, it is just all food, and your body can handle things being bruised...trust me.
3) We have a skewed understanding of what food is supposed to look like. This is similar to the previous point, to some extent. But further, who really cares if the carrot is two-pronged, or if the tomato is not a perfect ellipsoid? Your body doesn't...trust me.
4) We love laws. In the name of "public health" and "cleanliness" we have standards for what sorts of food are acceptable to be eaten and served and sold, and what not.