We interrupt the soap opera to return to our regularly scheduled raving.
Bill McKibben has written some interesting-sounding books an articles that I, for the most part, have missed. But he sounds like he's making some valid points, especially for our day and times.
McKibben was recently interviewed in Velocity, which is normally a very lame local “entertainment” newspaper published by the Courier Journal. This interview is one of their few forays into anything approaching meaningfulness.:
Many of us grew up believing that being an individual and acquiring as much as possible were two things that would make us happy. Your book says just the opposite. Why are growth and individualism no longer making our lives better?
It's only in the last few years that economists and sociologists have begun to collect data to support what has been the gut feeling of a lot people for a long time -- that money doesn't bring happiness. It seems to be that money does bring satisfaction up to a certain point, but that that point was reached long ago for most of us in the Western
world...
Since that point, "more" has led to a loss of connection with other people (and) a loss of community, and that's driving down our sense of satisfaction. We have bigger houses farther out in the suburbs (and) that isolates us from other people more. We have, on average, fewer friends. We visit with people less. We have to work harder to pay for these big things… We should start thinking more carefully about what we want rather than just assuming we want more.
You believe the pursuit of prosperity should be more local and that cities should produce more of their own food, generate more of their own energy and create more of their own culture and entertainment. What's the benefit of this?
I spend most of my life dealing with very large-scale environmental problems, especially climate change/global warming. If we're going to deal with those problems, we need more localized economies than we have now. We can't be shipping every bag of food 2,000 miles to get to our plates.
Also, I think we are suffering a lack of neighborliness because of the scale of our economy. We have a restaurant here in Vermont that only serves food that comes from right around here, and they put out a bumper sticker that said, "Think globally. Act neighborly." I think that's a very good slogan.
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Bill McKibben's latest book is called Deep Economy and is coming out any day now, if it isn't out already. I like what he's saying and the way he's saying it, or at least of what I've read so far.
Many times, when some of us talking about living more simply, we are accused of being Luddites and forcing people to live in ways we don't want to live ourselves.
McKibben seems to be making the points that,
1. It's not a matter of some leaders forcing anyone to live a certain way, it's a matter of circumstances forcing us to live in certain ways. We have to live within our means is not a mean-spirited attack, just a statement of reality.
2. Our hyper-consumerism isn't making us happy, anyway. There will be joy found in learning to live within our means.
Seems reasonable to me.
28 comments:
It does sound reasonable, but as always with these feel good stories, the devil is in the details.
For example, when you ask folks to only eat or sell what's grown locally it sounds great but it has uncomfortable consequences. Folks in Montana wont be eating fruit for half the year. Starvation would be rampant since the amount of land required to grow food locally would be much higher than what is used now because the big agricultural companies can grow it much more efficiently. Just a couple of examples.
He also mentions that moving into the suburbs isolates us. I couldn't disagree more. I have lived, at various times in my life, out in the sticks and there was a greater sense of community there than any city I've lived in. Proximity fostering community is a fallacy. What is isolating us is the losing of our our national and local identities. We are no longer taught to think of ourselves as Americans or New Yorkers, we must think of ourselves as separate entities divided by race or class at odds with those different than us. Isolation is the fruit of multiculturalism and class consciousness.
E.F. to the contrary, the "eat local" (within 50 miles) movement has been growing (no pun intended) and discussed in the media. It is quite "do-able" and restaraunts in major cities in Canada, the U.S., and Europe are now advertising their food as "locally grown."
E.F. mentions that agri-business grows "more efficiently." Yes, with oil-based fertilizers, genetically modified plants, cramming chickens and cows into tiny pens and other horrors, the big agri-business farms are more "efficient,"--and the food is less safe and the environmental problems are horrible.
We could and probably will find some middle ground: Most food grown locally and with farmers' markets cutting out grocery chains, the quality of food improves, family farms are saved, etc. For that which "must" be shipped, switch from trucking things from California to New York to a "hub-spoke" system of rail and local trucks (and the trucks then switched to bio-diesel, ethanol, etc.).
Isolation is not the fruit of multi-culturalism (diversity is a wonderful thing) nor of class consciousness. The failure of all classes but the ultra-rich to BE class conscious is leading to the most rapacious form of capitalism since the gilded age--hardly a source of community.
Michael, your posts always contain factual errors that are easily correctable, it makes it hard for one to take you seriously.
For example, you state our current food supply is less safe than locally grown stuff. You'll remember that last year's spinach contamination happened on one of these 'local' organic farms. Millions of people are fed every day from the produce of large agri-business farms and we get contamination scares once every couple of years maybe? Here's an article that will debunk every myth that you may hold dear concerning your holy grail of food production: http://www.monsanto.co.uk/news/99/july99/300799_edinburgh.html
Isolation is not the fruit of multi-culturalism (diversity is a wonderful thing) nor of class consciousness.
Nice statement, anything to back it up with? I listed several reasons why it is so, you listed none. Just another tirade against the evils of capitalism.
I would be concerned about how local economies would affect the poor. For example, I know that mass produced food shipped long distances is what you are talking against, but this mass-produced food makes it cheaper per pound. Also, the idea of having food available only local seemed to decrease competition as well, allowing for price increases.
This doesn't invalidate your point, because a reasonable argument can be made that higher prices are worth the results of maybe more sustainability. Although it seems that local, smaller companies have the tendency to be less efficient in producing food.
I think there is a trade-off between less expensive food and some of the more intangible values you mention, but not everyone has the luxury of buying local so they can feel better.
Now, I am all for local grocery stores and local entertainment, restaurants, etc... But I don't see this as something being done on the government level as it can eliminate choices.
"I know that mass produced food shipped long distances is what you are talking against, but this mass-produced food makes it cheaper per pound."
Not much time, but just to point out that what this mass-production does is make food artificially cheaper. We can Walmart our food prices by spending up all our petroleum products to get it to us, by not paying for the expenses and damages caused by these mass-produced methods.
If last year's spinach contamination had happened on a "local" organic farm, it would not have made national news. It was not a local farm. It was a farm that shipped produce nationwide, and it was not all organic.
Thanks, Deb, for the correction.
Do you have a source for that?
Eben, thanks for the comments, but I really think you need to reconsider your sources. You said:
"Here's an article that will debunk every myth that you may hold dear concerning your holy grail of food production: http://www.monsanto.co.uk"
Do you know who Monsanto is?
EF, the link you provide is sponsored by Monsanto. Asking Monsanto whether agribusiness food or organic food is safer would be like asking General Motors whether it would be a good idea to buy a new car.
I read through the article. Just about everything in it is blatantly untrue. If you pin Monsanto and their flunkies (universities whose ag departments it funds) down to it, you will see that those 'facts' are nothing more than a play on words. Sure chemically grown vegetables are no different than organically grown ones, so long as you only test a few target vegetables and limit you definition of 'nutrition' to a few things.
This isn't the direct subject of Dan's post so I won't go into the details here, but this same list of 'debunking' is used by most Depts of Ag and such that have a monetary interest to appease Monsanto.
I received a comment from "sushil yadav" and you're welcome to come by here to visit anytime.
I removed the comment because it sounded a little fishy and because of a broken link, so I wasn't entirely sure it wasn't spam.
Sushil is from planetsave dot com if someone wants to see for themselves.
EF said about another commenter:
"your posts always contain factual errors that are easily correctable, it makes it hard for one to take you seriously."
And, again, I appreciate you coming by and adding to the conversation, sometimes raising valid points. But when one makes a personal statement such as this and follows it with links to the very agri-industry in question, well, that sort of thing makes it hard to take one seriously.
But I suppose it's entirely possible you didn't know who Monsanto was, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
For the record, beware of any info coming from Archer Daniel Midland (ADM) and Con-Agra, as well.
The point has been made - and it is at least partially valid - that these agribusinesses have made it possible to "feed the world" as well as making it possible for us to have oranges and strawberries year-round. No one is denying there is some truth to that.
The questions aer, though, is this wise? Is this sustainable?
We can "feed the world" of approaching 7 billion people (up to 9 billion in the next generation according to the census people) because of the usage of petrofertilizers and petroleum to package and ship these foods around the world. But we all know that petroleum based products will not last forever.
Whether you suspect cheap petroleum will only be around for 10 more years or if you think it will last 100 more years (scientists don't), this method of feed billions is going away.
What will we do when cheap oil is gone?
It is very reasonable to question if our lives are sustainable and if our hyperconsumption is desirable.
One final point. Chance said:
"But I don't see this as something being done on the government level as it can eliminate choices."
1. No one here has yet to say anything about doing something on the gov't level. This is (or could be) first and foremost a matter of personal responsibility.
2. Having said that, when faced with an issue with possibly devastating results that arose at least partially when we, the people (ie, gov't) encouraged or allowed our representatives to make hyperconsumption a matter of policy - and thus widespread and deeply ingrained - it may take we, the people (ie, gov't) to make some countering policies.
You're right, I have no idea who Monsanto is, but it's irrelevant, there are a dozen links from Google alone that point to articles that highlight the non-benefit of organic food, that was simply the first one listed. Here's an alternative: http://www.food.gov.uk/news/newsarchive/2003/jun/cheltenham
Going to locally grown food is a pipe dream. If you honestly believe that you're going to get a reversal of the last 100 year's worth of agricultural development so that we can revert to a more agrarian society then you're not being realistic.
The link in the previous comment got cut off, here it is:
http://www.food.gov.uk/news/newsarchive
/2003/jun/cheltenham
"Going to locally grown food is a pipe dream. If you honestly believe that you're going to get a reversal of the last 100 year's worth of agricultural development so that we can revert to a more agrarian society then you're not being realistic."
Eben, I think you're misunderstanding. I'm not saying we ought to go to more locally-dependent economies (although I think we ought), I'm saying we won't have a choice.
I'll try to find some reading material to post, but our agri-industry-centric food economy can not continue without cheap oil and cheap oil can not continue much longer.
Your british source does nothing to discount the notion that we ought to be more dependent upon more sustainable food. In fact, it concludes:
"We all have a duty to our grandchildren to work towards more sustainable ways of producing our food.
The Green Revolution has brought us plentiful and affordable food, but at an environmental cost."
This is true and one of the points of the post. Thanks for validating that.
Concerning organic food:
The organically grown food averaged 63% higher in calcium, 78% higher in chromium, 73% higher in iron, 118% higher in magnesium, 178% higher in molybdenum, 91% higher in phosphorus, 125% higher in potassium and 60% higher in zinc. The organically raised food averaged 29% lower in mercury than the conventionally raised food.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/Organic/organicstudy.cfm
In 1993, a study was carried out at the Doctors Data Lab in Chicago. For two years specimens of similar varieties of organic and conventional produce were collected. The final results portrayed organic produce to have twice the nutritional content of the conventional on a fresh weight.
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/organic/62515
Of 27 valid comparisons of the mineral and vitamin C contents of organic and non-organic crops, 14 showed significantly higher levels in organic produce while just one favored non-organic.
http://www.organic.lt/en/pages,id.132
Organically grown produce was higher in most minerals and vitamins and lower in potentially harmful nitrates, which result from nitrogen fertilizers. The greatest differences among all vegetables tested were in magnesium (organic was 29 percent higher), vitamin C (27 percent higher), and iron (21 percent higher). In fact, organic food had higher amounts of all minerals tested, although the difference was not always statistically significant because of small sample numbers. Organic crops had 15 percent fewer nitrates than conventionally grown foods and appeared to also have lesser amounts of toxic heavy metals.
http://www.chiro.org/nutrition/FULL/Organic_Food_Is_More.shtml
And this one which explains why there is so much misinformation about organic food, it's because the researchers are paid by the chemical companies to conclude that there is no difference.
I've even repeatedly received this erroneous information from Agricultural Extension offices and Professors of Agriculture at “reputable” State Universities...although one Professor, probably safely tenured, told me in hushed tones that “of course, most of our funding comes from chemical companies.”
http://www.living-foods.com/articles/organicn
You find fault with studies supposedly financed by chemical companies and are perfectly comfortable with studies paid for by believers in organic food. So tell me, do you only eat organic?
Dan, I know there's nothing that would ever convince you that humanity isn't doomed, doomed I tell you, from it's reliance on oil and that peak oil isn't, like Armageddon and the Second Coming, always Just Right Around The Corner so this link is probably a waste of time:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=021307A
So when are you two going to ditch your cars, take up horse back riding, move to the country and grow your own food? Or is it enough to enjoy all of today's modern comforts while you blog about the impending world-wide catastrophe?
"I know there's nothing that would ever convince you that humanity isn't doomed"
Didn't say we're doomed. I merely pointed out that we are heavily dependent upon a finite resource for our economy. I went on to point out that it is not responsible to plan on a future closely tied to a finite resource.
You have offered nothing to make me think otherwise. So, why would I change my mind that it is neither moral nor wise to continue to bet our future on a dwindling resource?
As to my driving and living, well, I ride bike and walk many, if not most places I go. I live my life within a small circle so that I'm not dependent upon cars. I try to grow some food and buy some of my food from local farmers.
I'm trying to wean myself from irresponsible living but am far from it. I hope to improve with age and practice.
And why do I do this?
Because it strikes me as only responsible. Lord (and future generations) forgive my irresponsibility.
Eben, not only do I eat just about all organic, I rarely eat anything I didn't raise myself or catch or gather in the wild.
It's easy to have the cornucopian attitude when far removed from the source of one's food. Not so here. Feed corn is now selling for about double what it was last year mainly due to so much corn being bought up for motor fuel ethanol plants. The difference hasn't yet shown up in the supermarket or Burger King, but it will.
Because of the very cold weather of the past few weeks, my large animals were beginning to lose weight. Grass is coming back now, but to spare the pastures for another week or so, two days ago I went to a farmer friend of mine and bought a 1200 lb bale of hay. He let me have it for the good buddy price of $30 and shook his head saying that was the break even price. It took $30 of motor fuel and chemical fertilizer to produce that bale of hay.
Suppose the fossil fuel for making the fertilizer and motor fuel were not available or were prohibitively expensive. The hay would not be available and I would have to reduce the number of animals I keep during such cold weather.
The entire world is on the brink of facing this problem. Modern agribusiness isn't a matter of our advanced knowledge or cleverness. It is because of the ever increasing use of fossil fuels for machinery and fertilizer. When petroleum and natural gas become limited in quantity and high in price, which is happening as we speak, the amount of food the world can produce by modern agribusiness methods will drop dramatically.
You say the world will not go back to the agrarian society of 100 years ago. Without abundant and cheap fossil fuels, it can do nothing but that.
Well, we've gone round and round on this peak oil business before so I'll let someone else more eloquent say it for me:
These facts, I am sure, will not make the least difference to the devotees of an imminent oil peak whose mantra has been to elevate the timing of an obviously inevitable event to a dreadful watershed of history, and whose insistence has been on pinpointing its largely irrelevant arrival. Irrelevant because once the extraction of conventional liquid oil peaks we will intensify our (already advancing) efforts to produce more non-conventional oil and to use more natural gas and accelerate the production of gas- and coal- and biomass-derived liquids.
Finally, a practical reminder: If there is an imminent peak of oil extraction, should not then the prospective shortage of that increasingly precious fuel result in relentlessly rising prices and should not buying a barrel of oil and holding onto it be an unbeatable investment? But a barrel of a high-quality crude, say West Texas intermediate, bought at $12.23/b in 1976 as a nest-egg for retirement and sold before the end of 2006 at $60/b would have earned (even when assuming no storage costs) about 1.2% a year, a return vastly inferior to almost any guaranteed investment certificate and truly a miserable gain when compared with virtually any balanced stock market fund. And a freedom-at-55 investor who bought that barrel at 30 years of age in 1980 and sold in 2005 would have realized a nearly forty per cent loss on his precious investment. Being a true believer in imminent peak oil may be fine as a provocative notion but not as a means of securing a comfortable retirement.
Yes, we have gone around about oil before. And yet, no one has ever told me what resource exists that will replace petroleum at the rates we’re using it. No one. Nothing. No real answer.
Some have suggested that “technology” will replace oil. That is, some magical, currently non-existent technology will be created and deployed to somehow replace the energy and usage we currently enjoy with petroleum.
No one has suggested anything else.
I’m saying that sort of dreaming is not responsible, nor moral.
Would you encourage the poverty-level family to purchase a McMansion based upon the “plan” of paying for it with lottery winnings that will “probably” appear?
No thanks.
That's not true Dan, I've suggested other current technologies. For example, battery operated cars. They exist now. They are less convenient and more expensive than gasoline operated cars but when that status flips they will be preferred. And the electricity could easily be provided from nuclear power plants.
I just watched a show on the Discovery channel about 3 weeks ago highlighting a Japanese university's electric car that could go over 200Kph and run for quite a while before a recharge, it's just exorbitantly expensive at the moment. And there are other projects like it in the works, all over the world.
Heck, back in the 80's I worked on a chicken farm who's every vehicle ran on propane. There are things out there, you just chose not to see them.
“That's not true Dan, I've suggested other current technologies.”
Yes, you have. What you have not (nor has anyone else) done is tell me what resource(s) you will replace oil with that will meet the current demand. There is no current technology or resource that exists in the real world that can match the amount of petroleum we currently use. Nothing even close.
Not even if you combine natural gas, electric cars (from what source will the electricity come from?), ethanol, etc, etc is there anything approaching enough to match current demand.
Also, the agribusinesses you were touting are able to generate all that food thanks to petrochemicals. What will they replace those with?
Alas, Dan's objection is all too true. Conucopians are always pointing to phantom technologies but not taking into account the numbers involved.
The world currently uses 1.3 cubic miles of oil a year. These are not practical suggestions, but only to show the scope of the problem. What are you going to replace it with?
If you replace it with nuclear, as you have suggested, it would take 3515 new nuclear power plants of 1.1 Gw each to replace the oil. This would cause a depletion of recoverable uranium within a few years.
If you replace it with hydro electric facilities the size of Three Gorges Dam, you'd need 230 more of them. There aren't that many places on the earth where you can dam up that much water.
If you replaced it with 500 Mw coal plants, you'd need 6700 more of them than are in operation today. Not only would that deplete the cheaply recoverable coal, the pollution would be unimaginable.
If you replaced it with those giant 1.6 Mw wind turbines operating around the clock at an unlikely 30% efficiency, you'd need 7 million of them.
If you replaced it with 2 kw PV panels, you'd need six billion of them and bright sunshine 12 hours a day year round.
You don't have those things nor prospects of those things. So Dan's question remains. When oil is gone or too expensive, what are you going to replace it with?
Actually, the problem with last year's spinach that made it so harmful was that it was shipped all over the country, making the outbreak harder to contain. I think it telling, Eben, that you site an article on a Monsanto website: Monsanto is one of the biggest polluters, and has a very vested interest in hybrid seeds, genetic manipulation, and oil-based fertilizers. It is hardly a neutral source of information. It's not in Monsanto's economic interests to allow people to notice how dangerous its practices are.
Sorry, folks. Sometimes I comment on a post without reading all the comments to find that many others have already made the point--in this case about Monsanto.
For more information on how difficult it would be to find a "replacement" for petroleum, here's a good link:
http://www.raisethehammer.org/index.asp?id=119
Where the author says:
A single acre of farmland consumes 19 litres (enough fuel to drive 342 kilometres in my car) of petroleum in fertilizer each year. The so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s, when farm yields tripled, was not a victory for improving the productivity of the land. If you measure productivity by energy invested, modern farms are actually quite a lot less efficient than their non-petroleum-enhanced forebears were.
The comments on this post brought up Peak Oil again, which is almost always dismissed as something people "believe" in rather than something arrived at by means of math and science.
It is also dismissed with the wave of the hand that "people have been saying we were running out of oil for many decades and yet we still have oil."
So in the "people have always been saying" department, I was reading a tribute site to M. R. Hubbert which included his papers and speeches in 1948 and 1956 (he actually formulated the Peak Oil linearization in the 30's). Just after his 1956 speech saying US continental oil production would peak in 1970, he was derided by all and sundry that said we had at least 200 billion barrels of reserve capacity and we'd be oil self-sufficient for several generations.
Fourteen years later US domestic production (lower 48) peaked exactly as Hubbert predicted. The "many generations" of oil before it peaks ended up being 14 years.
What people have always been saying for years is that there will be decades and decades of oil ... US domestic, North Sea, Alaska North Slope, Mexico's Cantarell fields, Saudi Arabia's Ghawar fields (ALL of which are in decline) .... and they've always been wrong.
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