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?  

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

On our obligation to nature

I wonder whether the state of society and environment that we are faced with has been inevitable since the very beginning of the human species. We are faced with massive challenges of health and futurity. All the world and all the species that comprise it are at stake. Glaciers and watersheds and trees are at stake. These are the systems that support us, and that nurture us in ways we are unable to fully understand. The Earth will of course continue to exist with our without us, regardless of the environmental destruction we are causing through our careless behaviour. Yet I wonder, are humans behaving in a way that is natural? Are consolidation, economy and industrialisation natural outcomes of our mental capacities? Is the consequent environmental degradation associated with those social constructs a natural outcome?

I think back to defining moments in our history, and wonder whether it just had to be this way. We have been evolutionarily graced with mental capacities and abilities to communicate and feel emotions (not to say that other species aren't graced with these features), as well as the ability to used these abilities to dominate our landscapes and ecosystems. Therefore I wonder whether environmental degradation by a species capable of thinking a natural thing. I think we can trace the roots of much environmental harm to the settling of people. People chose to spend time in a single place, and plant a seed, and hope that it grew into a plant that fed them, rather than let nature do that for them. Yet hunter-gatherers survived for many hundreds of thousands of years, successfully. I would not be typing this blog post if they didn't survive. These groups of people were social, and they had customs and rituals. They would move around in search for what nature provided them. In fact, with agriculture, we have in some sense tried to play nature. Agriculture of course has led to segregation of efforts, and time to do things other than search for food. If you think along the lines that I have, this inevitably leads you down the road of humans extracting too much from a place, and not being in harmony with a place that is expansive. Wants inevitably grew over time, and contact with people from elsewhere made us want what they had. People from one place set out to conquer people from another place, with weapons and violence. They did so because they wanted the control of resources to satisfy their wants. Time passed, and consolidation of power happened because people have been able to use coercive power to wield control. Consolidation happened not only in government, but also in the the ability to provide necessities of life - water, food and shelter. All of this has led to environmental harm, as I've discussed previously in the blog.

Many might say from a religious or ethical standpoint that nature was created for us, and therefore our control over it is axiomatic. Some might say that we are just another animal species, and that since we've been graced with such amazing capacities, we are just implementing those capacities in a way that ensures our survival and comfort and pleasure. Yet I do feel that we cannot think of ourselves as just another species out to survive for ourselves. The argument of survival of the fittest just doesn't hold water in our world. I believe, as Wendell Berry has alluded, that there comes a point in the spectrum of mental and emotional capacities that we assume the burden of obligation - the obligation to be kind and respectful and caring to what it is that sustains us; we have an obligation to nature. Our societies and communities are full of obligations and defined by them - taxes and trust and e-mails and phone calls. In some sense, we cannot call ourselves human if these obligations didn't exist. So why not make the logical leap to an obligation to nature? Such an obligation will not allow us to think that what we do - clear cut forests, build massive artificial lakes, construct tall buildings - is natural. Progress in the way we've defined it cannot be assumed to be natural. Our mental and emotional capacities place on us the burden of defining our societies and communities and priorities with reverence, consideration, respect and wonder for all it is that surrounds us. We are obliged to do so.

We are not materialistic enough

Wendell Berry argues in Home Economics that our Western culture is not over- "materialistic," but rather not materialistic enough. This is because materials, "the stuff of creation," are cheap, and therefore, we don't value them. He argues that the way our economies are set up, we cannot afford to take care of things, because labour is expensive, time is expensive and money is expensive. But because materials are cheap, they are disposable and fungible, and it is not worth labour, time, and money to take care of them. Furthermore, in a capitalistic economy, an economy of transience, there is an inherent drive to make more money by selling more. Consequently, there emerges two kinds of materialism, one which values materials (cultures built and centred around low to middle-class income earners), and the other that does not (the world's rich and elite, which includes us, in the US). Indeed, we can think of cultures and communities that don't have that much, and therefore are more likely to take care of objects, respect them, and repair them to prolong their use and existence, as more materialistic. The world's middle income class, which earns between $700-$7500 per family member, like the poor, are frugal, use many objects that are antiquated by Western standards, and continue to use them through repair and recycling.

To serve our desire for new things, products that companies and manufacturers make are diseased with planned obsolescence. Tim Hunkin cites an anecdote of Henry Ford, who noticed that the crankshaft of his Model T was the only part that remained very much intact after the car had died. He therefore told his workers the make the crankshaft not as sturdy, therefore beginning the practice of planned obsolescence. However, thoughts on planned obsolescence date as far back as the mid 1800's. By reducing the time between repeated purchases, long-term sales can be somewhat guaranteed. The additional sales more than offset the additional costs of research and development, opportunity costs, and the labour required to maintain and service broken objects.

Alan Durning, in How Much is Enough?, argues for an economy of permanence, a throwback to the 1940's and 1950's, in which objects and products are created with durability in mind. Although sales will drop, and consequently the flow of physical resources and materials through the economy, the money value  of the services that people enjoy may fall little. Indeed, we don't buy cars just for the sake of having a car, but rather for the service that the car provides - mobility and accessibility. Indeed, a car then can be made a durable good. Furthermore, Durning argues that the total amount of work in such an economy is not likely to decrease at all. That's because the most ecologically damaging products and forms of consumption also usually generate the fewest jobs. In fact, high labour intensity goes hand in hand with low environmental impact. (One simple example is industrial agriculture versus community-based agriculture.) Repairing and servicing don't generally necessitate exorbitant amounts new natural resources, but they do require people to be employed. Of course, you can argue that such low-impact industries would "grow" less than high-impact ones. But you can't argue that continual growth is good. It is a matter of perspective - how do you generate value?

The ecologically noble savage

The Hadza appeared in the December 2009 issue of the National Geographic. In the wonderfully scripted article, Michael Finkel writes about one of the surviving hunter-gatherer tribes in Tanzania, the Hadza. This is a group that lives in the present. They do not have words for numbers greater than three, they "work" (i.e. hunt for food) four to six hours a day, and sleep when they want to. Finkel contends that they haven't adopted agriculture because it is so contrary to their present state of mind. Agriculture requires planning, and is inherently future-oriented. Yet, this group has survived for tens of thousands of years, and the Hadza speak an "isolated" language, Hadzane, one that has no relationship to any other language that exists in the world. Everyone eats the catch, and so the group can support no more than thirty or so members. The group is non-hierarchical. Members are free to leave and join other groups, and members of other groups are free to join theirs, but there seems to be population control as a function of the catch. Below are photos (by Martin Schoeller) I grabbed from the National Geographic's website. First is Onwas, the eldest member of the group. Next are some women working with baobab fruit, more important than the catch that men get. Last is Sangu, a young girl in the group. It seems to me that if these so-called "living fossils" are still surviving, tens of thousands of years on, eating bountifully and diversely (more so than say the average American), they have an understanding of their landscape, not only ecologically, but also as conservationists. The Hadza seem to fit almost all of the characteristics of a non-impactful people, or should I say a "non-trashing" people. Without a worry in the world, they don't have control over tomorrow, and don't want to think about tomorrow. If they want honey, they get honey from the beehives. If they want to eat a baboon, they find one, and make full use of it. They have resisted attempts by the government to "educate" them, and give them housing and "normal" jobs. Indeed, people from outside the bush have come to spend time with them during times of famine in Tanzania.

While having a conversation with Melissa last summer, I wondered out loud whether people of the past (or even of the present, like the Hadza) conserve the nature around them. Melissa mentioned that these people, that are potentially a figment of our imaginations, are termed "noble savages." Of course, it is clear these noble savages are/were more in tune with a particular landscape than a non-native, but does this understanding of their complex ecosystem compel them to make sure future generations enjoy the same bounty? We would all like to think so, and think of days when humans were one with nature. However, in the case of Native Americans, it seems like there is no evidence that they were any more conscious of conservation than the Europeans that killed them off. Krech claims that Native Americans were ecologists, but not conservationists. Indeed, the only conservation that did happen was "epiphenomenal," or conservation because people didn't have the means to not conserve. Since natives know (or knew) more about their surroundings, they used less of more, while non-natives used more of less. Yet once technologies from Europe, including guns, were introduced to Native Americans, they started over-harvesting, decimating local animal species, excluding beavers.

What do you think?