I suppose you could say that I'm going through a midlife crisis. That
term isn't entirely accurate, since it evokes images of guys buying red
sports cars or something. Besides, "crisis" is far too dramatic a word.
Perhaps a better phrase might be "midlife adjustment" or "reassessment"
or something. Whatever.
Three books have played important roles as catalysts in my thinking.
- Jared Diamond's book Collapse
got me thinking a bit more seriously about protecting the environment.
I've long contributed to various environmental causes and have done my
bit, such as recycling and replacing light bulbs with compact
fluorescents. However, his book highlighted for me the importance of
"sustainability" and of thinking more long-term. (Perhaps becoming a
father also had a role in that.)
- Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone (and, to a lesser extent, the followup book Better Together,
written with Lewis Feldstein) got me thinking about the importance of
personal relationships and of building strong communities, as well as
the need to address local issues rather than just "big picture" national and international issues.
- Lastly, Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon provided what I think is a small part of the solutions to the problems raised in Collapse and in Bowling Alone.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
In Collapse,
Jared Diamond examines several civilizations which rose, peaked, and
then collapsed. He explores the causes of those collapse, with obvious
parallels to today. The typical scenario is a civilization growing,
reaching the peak of its power, then running out of some essential
resource and collapsing, often quite suddenly.
Generally, a lack of "sustainability" is the key problem.
Suppose there are 10 million fish in a sea, and each year that number
grows by 10% (i.e. 1 million fish). If you harvest 1 million fish each
year (i.e. 10%), you'll never run out of fish. That's sustainability.
However, if you harvest 1.1 million fish each year, you'll eventually
run out of fish, even though the population isn't noticeably smaller
from year to year. It's an unsustainable rate. The population will
slowly shrink, and eventually you'll have kids listening to their
grandparents talk about how "there used to be so many more fish than
there are today".
What really got me thinking about our
situation is the explanation that, if the Third World were to achieve
the living standards of the First World, the environmental impact would
be the same as if the population of the world had increased by a factor
of 12. In other words, imagine all of the resources required, the
pollution produced, and the environmental damage caused by a population
of 72 billion people. Obviously that's not something that would be
feasible.
We are unlikely to convince the rest of the world to
just accept their place in life, so the best alternative is to make the
First World lifestyle sustainable.
Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community
In Bowling Alone,
Robert Putnam documents the sharp decline in recent decades of a wide
range of community participation. The decline includes involvement in
formal activities, such as attendance at club meetings, volunteering,
and voting, as well as informal activities, such as having friends over
for dinner, or playing cards.
The term used for the value of
social networks of friends and acquaintances is "social capital". Just
like "physical capital" (stuff) and "human capital" (knowledge and
skills), social capital is valuable.
Communities with high
social capital have higher education levels, fewer teen pregnancies,
less crime, more wealth, are healthier, live longer, and are happier
with life. Conversely, communities with low social capital have more
kids dropping out of school and skipping class, more teen pregnancies,
more crime, more poverty, more health problems, shorter lifespans, and
are less happy.
As a massive oversimplification, think of a
high social capital community as being like a small town, where
everyone knows their neighbors and helps them out, while a low social
capital community is like a big city, where people might live somewhere
for 20 years and not know anyone else on their block.
There are several causes of the steep decline in social capital in recent decades.
- One
cause is the two-income household. Once upon a time, women stayed at
home all day, which meant they had time to meet the neighbors, join
clubs, get involved in their child's school, prepare meals to entertain
friends, etc. Not anymore.
- Another cause is that we now tend to
live in one community, work in a different community, and shop in yet
another community. Before sprawl, we tended to live, work, and shop all
in the same community, so we had much more of an interest in what
happened there.
- A big cause is electronic entertainment -- TV,
video games, and the Internet. We spend many hours these days
interacting with one of those 3 screens. Add them up, then imagine what
you could do with those hours.
- Lastly, and perhaps most
surprisingly, is the passing from the scene of the so-called Greatest
Generation. (Yes, it's an annoying term, but you know who I mean.)
World War II had the effect of energizing lots of people to be involved
in their communities. After the war, many people felt inspired to seek
out some other Great Purpose to be a part of. As a result, large
numbers of people joined clubs, volunteered, etc. In the decades since,
there hasn't been a similar catalyst to propel large numbers of people
to become involved.
There's much, much more to
this book than I can summarize here. It's a book that I want to give to
everyone I meet and say, "Read this! It will change your life!" (Maybe
I'll go door to door like the Mormons or something, or start leaving
copies in hotel rooms.)
Anyway, I feel pretty sure that the decline in social capital is a very big reason for the dissatisfaction that many people feel with "the world today".
After reading Bowling Alone,
I was motivated to become more active in the local community.
Previously, I had always focused more on national and international
issues (in part because those are the ones you see on TV and read about
in news magazines).
One bit that caught my interest was his
description of "checkbook membership" -- in other words, "joining" some
organization where your entire degree of involvement consists of
writing a membership check every year. That definitely described my
membership in numerous organizations. Activism has become
professionalized. We no longer tell our politicians what we want; we
pay professional activists to do that for us.
My interest in the environment led me to decide to join the local Sierra Club and to start attending meetings, rather than just sending money to the national organization as I had in the past.
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
Lastly, I read Plenty and found another way to combine my renewed interest in protecting the environment with my new interest in social capital.
The short version is this: Eat more locally grown food.
How does that help the environment? Well, the ingredients in the
average American meal have traveled anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 miles
or more, on average, by the time they get to your plate. We're buying
hybrid cars, recycling, and replacing light bulbs with compact
fluorescents, but then we're eating apples shipped from New Zealand!
I remember seeing an article on the Internet several months ago that
pointed out that, if you walk 3 miles to the grocery store, the energy
used to produce the food needed to replace the calories you burned in
walking to the store is greater than the energy that would be used to
drive your SUV to the store instead.
This was immediately
misinterpreted by the Digg crowd as a defense of SUVs rather than as a
way to highlight how much energy is used to grow, process, package, and
ship our food.
In addition to obvious (and probably
defensible) things like importing citrus from South America in the
winter, there are truly weird examples of waste. For instance,
the peak season for importing strawberries to California is the same
time period as the peak season for harvesting strawberries in
California. Rather than selling berries grown right next door, stores
are selling berries that were grown thousands of miles away!
Even more bizarre, many foods are harvested locally, shipped hundreds
or thousands of miles away for processing, then shipped back for final
sale to the public. For example, crabs caught off the west coast are
shipped 4,000 miles to China, where the meat is removed from the
shells, then the crab meat is shipped 4,000 miles back to the west
coast, for a total journey of 8,000 miles for a locally caught food.
The authors of Plenty decided to go an entire year eating only food that was grown within 100 miles of their home. They called it the 100-mile diet
and they found that, contrary to expectations, they ate a much wider
variety of foods than they had before. Out of the 30,000 species of
edible plants, just 20 species supply 90% of the world's food. It's a very
good book, and I highly recommend it to everyone. (This is another book
that I'll be leaving in hotel rooms all over the country.)
I
can't find the quote now to confirm my memory, but I seem to recall
reading that a regional food system could be 17 times as efficient as
the global food system we have now (but don't quote me on that).
So that's how eating local is better for the environment, but how is it
good for social capital? Well, if you buy locally grown food, you're
more likely to talk directly to the farmer who grew the crop, raised
the chickens, or tended the bees. Even if you buy at a specialty
grocery store that sells locally grown food, chances are it's a small,
non-chain store, where you're more likely to establish a relationship
with the employees of the store.
I'm not ready to commit to
the 100-mile diet yet, but I am interested in trying to eat more
locally grown food. The dead of winter is not the best time to start,
because what you tend to eat during the winter are things that you
harvested and canned earlier in the year. Plus, since we're renting
this house, planting a garden this spring is pretty much out of the
question. However, we can buy locally grown food at the farmer's market
when it opens in May, as well as buying directly from local farmers
once spring arrives. And we can look into growing some things in
containers (tomatoes, herbs, etc).
The biggest challenge for me will be learning how to actually cook,
as opposed to "cooking" aka "reheating precooked prepared foods".
Before I can really do that, we'll need to work on clearing out the
kitchen and getting it a bit more organized, so that cooking doesn't
involve more time searching for utensils and counter space than it does
actually preparing the food!
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