Kerrplunk

This is the long version of my response to today’s prompt on Advise the Advisor, which is about innovation:

Innovation doesn’t just happen in the world of the Internet. The biggest need for American innovation exists in some of the very oldest industries.

Food security is my biggest present concern. With industrial agriculture threatened by climate change, fossil fuel decline, and its own unsustainable practices, Americans are seeking sustainable, low-cost solutions they can be personally involved in. Innovative solutions include yard-sharing programs that connect apartment-dwellers with time to garden with homeowners who have the space to plant vegetables, urban farmers who use organic intensive cultivation techniques to grow thousands of pounds of food in a small lot, and peri-urban farms who offer their sustainably-grown produce direct to nearby city consumers through CSA subscriptions.

But the problem is still immense. America has too few farmers, and the farmers we have are on average past retirement age. Current regulations reinforce the unsustainable practices that are leading us to the edge of destruction. And government is making the problem worse, with regulations that favor big agribusiness and make it harder for local producers to reach consumers. We spend too much taxpayer money subsidizing the unsustainable practices of the past—funding cheap, inedible corn that makes livestock sick, gives our children diabetes, and rips nutrients out of the soil so they must be replaced with tons of fossil fuel-based fertilizer.

In their book A Nation of Farmers, Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton state we need fifty to a hundred million new small farmers by the end of this decade to pick up where our retiring generation of farmers is leaving off and ensure our food future. These new farmers will need to be using new practices rooted in low-input, diverse farm ecosystems that minimize the use of fossil fuels. They will need to raise not just one crop, but many, carefully chosen so that the waste products of one crop support the others. They will need to be farming in urban and suburban landscapes as much as rural ones. They’ll need support from the government, investing money into strengthening our food system and providing sustainable and rewarding livelihoods for more Americans. And they’ll need a change in our regulations to make it easier and more affordable for small producers to produce and distribute safe food to more Americans. For example, rather than tough restrictions on milk sales that assume everyone selling milk is operating an industrial-scale confinement dairy factory, we need flexible rules that address the actual risks of contamination at different scales of production. By making these changes in the way we support new, innovative models of farming, we’ll enable creative, hardworking Americans to build rewarding livelihoods solving America’s food security challenges.

GMO crops are not a good solution to our food crisis. GMO crops are generally engineered not to produce viable seed. In order to replant crops, farmers have to buy their seed again and again every year from the same biotech company. If there is a problem with that company—and their reliance on fossil fuel energy and unproven technology, as well as government subsidies, make it a certainty that there will be a problem at some point in the future—then all the farmers who rely on that company for seed will have nothing to plant, nothing to grow, and nothing to feed America. Just like in any investment, we need a diversified portfolio. So legislation that makes it impossible to protect organic agriculture from GMO contamination threatens the future of America’s food supply—regardless of whether eating GMO crops poses a threat to the health of Americans. We can’t afford to become reliant on this technology, not when the fundamental resource needed for its production—fossil fuels—is threatened. For this reason I believe the recent deregulation of GMO alfalfa is a terrible mistake—one that hinders the ability of American farmers to explore other innovative, diversified solutions to our agricultural sustainability problems.

I ask the White House to join me in supporting small farmers experimenting with innovative new models of food security. Support Americans engaged in such exciting new projects as the Dervaes family farm, a 1/10th acre plot in Pasadena that produces more than THREE TONS of food per year, with no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. Support trials of permaculture methods, farming systems that use the natural interactions of plant and animal species to return fertility to the soil without the addition of chemical fertilizers, that control pests with their natural predators rather than with chemical poisons, and that produce an abundance of food on less land by growing different crops together in ways that sustainably increase productivity. Support efforts like those of The Land Institute to breed perennial wheat, so that we can minimize tillage and protect the fertility of American soil.

What do you have to say to the White House today?

I plan to do this every week, for every new prompt. Let’s see how long I can keep it up—and how long it takes me to get through. Will you join me?

Because I have everything to live for.

Because I love nature—the feel of the warm sun and cool breeze, the miracle of green growing things, the softness of little sheep muzzles and ears, the taste of a strawberry seconds from the plant, the sacred intimacy of eating meat which had a name and a full life of joy and the pleasure of sweet pastures, the deep ocean, the dark forest, the sky at night full of stars the city never knows, the free-flying birds who have never tasted pesticides on their meal of bugs and worms, the owls at night in watchful care over the gardens full of tasty voles.

Because I love humans—art, late night talking, the hands skillful at building in straw and clay, the hands skillful in caressing, the lips trembling with tenderness, the prayers to broken stone and living earth and overpowering sky, imagination and play, the passion of the activists, the wild limbs outflung in the dance of Pan, the quiet words in the face of violence.

Because today I fed a yak from the palm of my hand.

Because the oil our whole society depends on is ending, and I don’t know what my life will be like, or the lives of my sister’s children, and I am afraid.

Because the planet is getting hotter, on average, and this means that in every place there will be stranger and stranger weather, and rising sea levels, and food shortages, and spreading disease; because all that I love is out of balance and edging further toward disaster, and I am afraid.

Because I like chocolate and bananas and the Internet and going out to eat and the ease of money, and I cling to these things even though I don’t love them as much as the cool moss and the flowing stream and the leaping salmon and watchful owl.

Because it is increasingly clear to me that I cannot have the fripperies of industrial civilization and global capitalism and also still have redwood trees, wolves, owls, bats, and the night sky untouched by electric light for miles in every direction.

Because I have everything I need right here.

Because a life some might call poverty is not so frightening as watching everything I depend on be ripped away from me, and so I will make a life in which everything I need is right here.

In the soil below me. In the sun above me. In the rain that falls.

Because the rewards and the risks all push me in the same direction. Because the love is a greater force than the inertia.

Because I love my family, my friends, the human people I know, and I want us all to be happy and free from suffering. Because I want all beings to be happy, to know peace, to be free from suffering.

And because it seems the only way to make that happen is to live a life where enough is enough. And because this is for me a far better way to live.

The good news is that more people describe themselves as caring about the environment than ever in US history.

The bad news is that this self-description is for most of us all but meaningless in practical terms.

It comes with a host of other attributes. You can expect someone who “cares about the environment” to choose paper or plastic or reusable or recycled shopping bags to bring home their unnecessarily packaged, industrially produced, organic labeled groceries because of some environmental justification or other. With regards to groceries, though, the thing to do to save the planet is to stop buying them. With few exceptions, anything you can get on a grocery store shelf depends on oil and casts a huge shadow of devastation across former wildlands turned over to industrial agriculture. Industrial organics differ primarily in what chemicals they are using to destroy biodiversity and the health of the soil. You can expect someone who “cares about the environment” to only drive when they really don’t feel like walking or biking, to have a bicycle—probably a nice new carbon fiber model that will break down in a few years and end up in a landfill—and perhaps a nice new hybrid car that uses less gas and more lithium in its production. But you can’t expect them to change their lifestyles and communities so that no one has to drive anywhere, in a new Prius or otherwise. You can expect them to have thought about energy efficiency when they purchased their 2,500 sq. ft. house or decided to furnish their rental apartment with flimsy IKEA furniture that, though made from FSC lumber, will be unusable in three years and need to be entirely replaced. You can’t expect them to defy building codes, although defiance of building codes is assuredly what it would take to make sure one’s home does not contribute to deforestation and climate change. You can expect them to care, in a distant way, about supporting “green” companies with their money, but you can’t expect them to refuse to support capitalism at all.

There are a plethora of lifestyle options these days for living green and feeling good. The problem is almost all of them are the wrong ones. The planet doesn’t care if your Earthbound Farms carrot was grown without chemical pesticides and fertilizers, because it was grown in a greenhouse in the middle of the high desert, with water trucked in from thousands of miles away. The planet doesn’t care if 30% of your three new shirts are made of recycled polyester, or if your bath towels are made from rayon that comes from bamboo. The planet doesn’t care if you use fluorescent lights. The planet doesn’t care about humanity’s “we’re trying” when it hears “we’re dying” from every other species of the life it supports.

Something that irritates me, that falls into the category of minor, unimportant irritations, is when people say things like “more unique.” “Unique” is not a comparable adjective. It describes a binary state. Everyone who knows me knows I’m not a big fan of binaries, but something is either unique—the only one of its kind—or it isn’t. If you’re saying something is “more unique” than another thing, what you’re actually saying is it’s “more special,” and frankly “more special” is meaningless.

Similarly, there is no such thing as “more sustainable.” A practice is either sustainable—meaning it can be continued indefinitely within the physical limits of life on this planet—or it cannot. If it cannot be continued indefinitely within those physical limits, it is a form of slow suicide. How fast or how slow is a matter of debate. How sustainable is not a meaningful topic for discussion. Sustainable or not sustainable; there is no how.

Reach out and pick up the nearest material object to your hand. For me, it’s this laptop. Do a quick embodied energy assessment. Embodied energy is the amount of energy that it took to get the materials, process them, produce them, assemble them, package and transport the finished product, sell the product, transport it to the user, operate the product throughout its lifetime, and dispose of the product when its useful life is over. This MacBook is a reassembled one. My mother, who is extremely gifted at this sort of thing, buys broken Apple computers and reassembles the parts until they work. She taught herself to do this. I think she’s really cool. It means I’ve got a Mac with a slightly less egregiously bad energy footprint than many another computer out there. It doesn’t make it sustainable. My mother can only do this because there’s an industry based on sucking irreplaceable minerals out of the earth, processing them into identical parts, assembling them into machines that work for just a few years, and selling them for gobs of money to enrich CEOs and stockholders. She can only do this because there is not yet a similar profit margin in slightly less irresponsible disposal of the broken machines. Clearly this can not go on. Silicon is pretty plentiful, but much of this computer is made from oil and rare metals. The massive energy expenditure required to make each of these parts makes sense only in an economy that benefits from extremely concentrated energy sources. To make computers without fossil fuel inputs would first require a massive input of fossil fuels to create a huge solar array, enormous wind farm, rebuild the electric grid, make an entirely new kind of factory, grow GMO plants on fossil fertilizers just to process into plastic, and so forth. We know that we are reaching the end of plentiful concentrated fossil energy. Take a look at the object you’ve picked up. Is it something you would have without cheap oil? Everything around me that I can see got to be how it is and where it is because of cheap oil. Even, for example, my bamboo cutting board, and the raisins wrapped in a plastic bag on my dresser. I can also see a bag of handspun yarn—but it’s been washed with chemical soaps and dyed with chemical dyes, all of which chemicals involved fossil fuels in their production. There is not one thing in this room that is not in some way dependent on resources that will not be replenished for millions of years. My computer has lasted me about three years so far. I hope it’ll last another two. It took millions of years to make the oil that went into this object that will be useless within five years. We are never getting that energy back.

So out of all of the things you can see that are dependent on fossil fuels, what do you think you will still be able to have when fossil fuels are scarce and expensive?

The only way we can be comfortable living a lifestyle that cannot last out our own lifetimes, let alone that of the next generation or the next, is because we’ve been acculturated not to think about the future. From fear of dying and taboos about talking about death, to suppressing information about dwindling global reserves of fossil energy, our culture cannot bear to face change. Rather than think about how our lifestyles must drastically change in the years and decades to come, we would prefer to think of ways to continue what we are doing now, only with a “more sustainable” gloss. We can keep shopping if we shop green. We can keep ourselves distanced from the production of our food so long as we at least make sure to eat organic. We can use and waste a new computer every two years, so long as we send the batteries off to be recycled. These practices are comforting—but comforting the way when you were five it might have made you feel better to think that Woofles had gone to a special Dog Summer Camp where he could play all day instead of learning that people die and we have to live our lives without them after they’re gone. That is to say they are comforting lies.

The “green” movement depends on the theory that our basic way of life can be tweaked until it’s “more sustainable” and then it will somehow be “sustainable enough.” But what’s actually happening is that what we are calling sustainability is slightly slower suicide.

If we’re really to practice a way of life that can continue, we have to build a society that is founded on the most basic physical constraints. The laws of physics apply: You cannot have an economy based on perpetual growth. Human ingenuity may be unlimited, but that doesn’t translate into real wealth being unlimited. Capitalism is based on perpetual growth—when the capitalist economy can no longer grow, it collapses. We’ve been looking at the beginnings of one such collapse since 2007. There are no examples of sustainable steady-state capitalist societies. So a real sustainable way of living is incompatible with capitalism.

There’s worse news yet for the green movement. If all we do is become sustainable—somehow make it so that human activities do no further harm to the ecology, but don’t help it, either—we’re still screwed. We’ve damaged our ecology enough at this point that it won’t simply return gracefully to a state of balance. More than simply not doing any more harm, we have to make sure our ways of life revolve around restoring the nutrients we’ve drained from the earth, cleaning up the pollution we’ve already spewed, sequestering carbon we’ve already released. If we are to sustain life on this planet for the coming generations, these are our first economic priorities—not how to make our existing products green and sell new green products to the new green consumers.

There is some good news—some really great news, actually—for all of us who care about the environment, though. More on that next post.