Save an Iceberg, Plant a Vegetable

Yesterday, the New York Times published a new Michal Pollan piece. It's no secret that we're big fans of Pollan's stuff and this new article, "Why Bother?" is just as good as the rest. In it, he writes about the kind of hopeless feeling of doing too little in the way of being environmentally responsible. What's the point of changing a lightbulb or walking to work if some dude in China is chowing down on Big Macs while he drives his unregulated emissions car to his job at a coal mine?

Pollan's argument, essentially, is that you should feel good about making environmentally friendly choices, however small, because small changes are what catch on in society. After all, it was only a hundred and fifty years ago or so that some doctors bought into a crackpot theory about germs and started to regularly wash their hands, and we all know how that turned out. If we each turn off lights, plant a garden, or save gas, the outcomes will be positive even if they're initially tiny.

Basically, if you drink Al Gore's Kool-Aid, you're not going to hurt anything and you just might be the beginning of something big.

Here is something I've always thought about: What if everyone grew just one thing? A bed of lettuce, a tomato plant, some peas. Think about how much we'd save in resources if we put a small dent in the amount of produce that gets shipped around the country. What would happen if every single person with a porch or a plot of dirt planted cucumbers this year? So what if your cucumbers get demolished by squash bugs or eaten by nasty groundhogs? As long as one of your neighbors has a live plant they're going to have about a million and half more cucumbers than they can eat, so you can have some of theirs. American cucumber consumption in the 1990s was at about 10.3 pounds per person annually. What's that, like 20 or 30 cucumbers? You can grow that in one week in July.

Granted, a lot of the cucumbers in that figure are imported from South America or wherever in the middle of the winter, when most of the country can't produce their own fresh ones. Leaving aside for a moment the argument that no one needs fresh cucumbers in January, say each person is still responsible for coming up with half the cucumbers they eat each year—that's 1.75 billion pounds of cucumbers that aren't being trucked around. FedEx would charge $427 million to ship that from Florida to Pennsylvania, and that's with crappy 3-day ground service.

I'm not trying to bring down the cucumber industry or anything, but just think how much fertilizer, gasoline, emissions, road ware, traffic congestion, little "Cucumber 4062" stickers, and plastic produce bags we'd save if we all grew half our cucumbers. Hmm.

And that's why we don't eat at McDonalds

Mark Bittman, a food writer for The New York Times, has written a wonderful, unappetizing article about the miserable implications of industrial meat production. If you've got an extra fifteen minutes, check it out: Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler

Essentially, Bittman writes about the ways we disproportionately allocate resources to meat production, and he speculates on how it's all gonna catch up with us, and soon. The problem is worldwide but as with almost everything else I can think of, Westerners can take most of the blame since we insist on doing everything--including meat eating, apparently--to excess. Americans eat about four pounds of meat a week, though fifty years ago that average was three pounds. Furthermore, Bittman learned that

"...if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius."

So really, we're eating so much of the stuff that even cutting out a small amount--twenty percent isn't that much--would have a huge impact. And after charging through Michael Pollan's latest two books recently, it's pretty clear to me that the effects of a twenty percent reduction would be positive for the environment as well as for people's health. If everyone in America did that, we'd be eating twelve billion pounds less meat each year. Holy crap.

We could probably eat all the meat we wanted with minimal environmental impact if we made sure all of it was sustainably raised--though the problem there, of course, is that sustainable farms can't give us all we want if what we want is billions and billions of hamburgers and chicken wings. However, supporting small farmers will help them produce as much as they're able. If you haven't already done so, before oil prices drive the cost of industrial meat through the roof you might want to make friends with one of these farmers so you have a source of local, responsibly raised, and probably organic meat.

What Gets Ya Goin?

I heard on the radio that Barneys is going "green" for the holidays. It makes me mad to see how principled and proactive inspirations are made fashionable and commodified. The reason for my anger isn't because I feel that these ideas are best left exclusive, but I know that fashion has a shelf life too short for any true impact to be made. Pretty soon being green will become trendy and ultimately die in the public's interest.

I'm easily drawn into this "leave it alone" mood. When I see models wearing dresses made of recycled plastic bags, I feel like what Meg and I (and tons of others) are trying to do is somehow becoming closeted into this twisted vaudeville performance. Just get rid of the damn bags.

But, we are always being redefined. (Prepare for my digression.) I heard the bit on Barneys yesterday and had been simmering until this afternoon. I was flipping through some past photos for a blog idea when I ran across these shots of an abandoned greenhouse we spotted on a hike a few weeks back. We hiked for two or three hours and I laughed when I realized that all but one of the photos I took from the whole trip were of this greenhouse.

The hike was beautiful, but I remember that this greenhouse really sparked our interest. We started talking about Future House Farm and all of the things we need to do to make it a reality. There's something very private and personal, not secluded, about trying to live in an environmentally conscious way. It seems that the more self sufficient we are, the larger our community becomes. I realize now that fashion happens when you allow it to happen and sustainable living means there is no shelf life.