Magic Spot Flowing

I haven’t generally been extremely hopeful about Obama as president as far as “Change” goes — my feelings tend more to the “intelligent, self-reflective, moderately liberal guy? okay, that sounds pretty good” sort — but I am fairly disappointed that he’s appointing a Secretary of Energy who thinks the problems are on the supply side and can be solved by technology, and a Secretary of Agriculture who thinks that…surprise…the problems can be solved by technology (bio, in this case). Technology is terrific, but we’re facing some pretty major problems, and I would like to see the new administration thinking about new, not old, ways to solve them.

It’s good that Chu is a scientist! Really! But…it’s not that good that he thinks that if only we can make more energy, it’s not important that we’re using so much.

And it’s really not good that Vilsack loves ethanol and Monsanto.

Edit: And.

Sigh.

I’ve been to or known of a lot of weddings of people I know this year, including two in June (both lovely, and very different). Thus I was charmed to find my interest in transit combined with this recent swell in weddings in Annie’s post about a couple traveling to their own wedding on the Tube.
Favorite line: “We didn’t feel that we needed a stretch limo to get to their register office when we have got an Oyster card and the Tube.”

What a great idea! Weddings are often resource-intensive, so I love their concept of trying to make lighter mark. Three weeks ago Barbara also wrote about doing a “local food” catering for a wedding (vegetarian, too), for another person who is committed to “green” living. The food, of course, sounded absolutely lovely, but that goes without saying since it is Barbara.

Post about my trip to Toronto coming soon, I promise.

…I think I’ve fallen for California, or at least for the Bay Area.

I fell for San Francisco a bit before I moved here, loving the little houses all packed up in the hills. It reminded me a little of Edinburgh (the city I love best). I also had an affection for BART — the speed, the frequency, the sounds it makes when it accelerates.

But moving to the Peninsula isn’t really like moving to San Francisco. It’s suburbia on crack, high-density, long-range suburbia, set into a landscape that would be much more beautiful if only it weren’t crowded with overpriced, undermaintained homes. It’s a frustrating place to live — I think whether you have a car or not (because if you do, you spend a lot of time in traffic), but more so if you don’t. Not dense enough for transit to be effective, too dense for transit not to make sense. I was angry with Caltrain for being crappy. I didn’t feel at home. I couldn’t get to places. I didn’t know people.

But I got seduced by the flowers in everyone’s yards, the beautiful weather, and the ever-tantalizing closeness of both city and wilderness. You can go to San Francisco and have your fill of urbanness (I don’t need that much, it turns out). And there’s that little strip of undeveloped area off to the coast edge as you start to come south from the city, progressing to a wide swath of ranches, estates, parks and near-wilderness as you go further south. Hiking and riding in that area isn’t too far from being a little strip of heaven.

Farmer’s markets overflow with produce from farms in the nearby area and the Central Valley. There are towns and cities with a multitude of different sizes and personalities, and interesting places to go that aren’t really that far away, even though they’re a lot further away than most people want to admit. Slowly, I started to get the measure of this place. I didn’t realize how at home I’d become until a fortuitous invitation to temporarily get away came my way, and I realized I didn’t want to miss anything.

I have the uniform, but I never really thought I’d become a California girl. I guess I underestimated California.

The single paragraph in Garbage Land: On the Trail of Trash that most annoyed me was this one:

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which made exhaustive studies of consumers’ environmental impacts, the things that make the biggest differenc to planetary health are transportation, housing, and meat eating. It isn’t worth it, they said, to get worked up over paper versus plastic at the grocery store.

Okay, if your choice is actually only between paper or plastic, whatever — although I have my doubts about the equivalency given the persistence of plastic in the environment. But the thing is, there’s a third, very obvious choice: reusable bags.

It’s true that most of the choices we make have a relatively small effect on our environmental impact, but even in the small choices, sometimes there’s an option that’s clearly much better than the rest. Paper or plastic? Yes, who cares — not because they’re the same, but because you should ditch both and get some reusable bags.

The more interesting thing that I started to think about as I got further through the book is the idea of local waste disposal, especially as a parallel to local eating. One of the common threads of all the waste that the author tracks is that much of it goes a long way away from where it was first deemed to be waste — very much like many things we acquire are first shipped a long way to get to us. Even as far as the other side of the world, in both cases, some of the time.

The author talks to a few people who are devoutly into reducing waste (and others interested in it for financial gain), and one of the common threads, though it’s not mentioned explicitly is that the stuff doesn’t go as far away. Instead of being trucked to a landfill or going to a sewage plant, it goes into compost toilets or to a nearby Freecycler (Freecycle is mentioned briefly, along with craigslist). If we couldn’t push our waste so far away, we’d be more likely to notice that it’s excessive and noxious. Keeping everything local makes you care where it comes from and where it goes to. Local waste may be as important to the environmental picture as local eating.

Overall it’s an interesting book, although it’s a little inconsistent on information value since in many cases the author was denied access to the places that did her waste processing.

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
–Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

This beautiful expression reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad a while back about spending and saving money. We both enjoy watching money accumulate, and tend not to buy things, even though we can afford them. We were talking about what luxury means, and how it can be easy to become jaded by what once seemed a luxury, unless you make a conscious effort to avoid that.

When I was a kid, my stocking always had an orange in the toe, and although I understood it was tradition, I never really knew why. I just figured that it was supposed to balance out the candy.

The quotation comes after a description of Kingsolver’s daughter Lily eating one of the tangerines they bought for the winter holidays after an eight-month hiatus on citrus, which isn’t grown in their local area and wasn’t in the high season anywhere nearby until then. Eating locally, citrus returned to being the luxury it was in the time when it became a tradition to have it in the Christmas stocking. It once would have been as treasured as the candy, maybe more so. But with the trend in shipping everything everywhere, it became an everyday thing. I don’t think I knew where oranges came from until after I was an adult, much less that they have a season.

Since I’ve been buying most of my produce at the farmer’s market, I’ve been incidentally eliminating a number of things that aren’t in season now, or aren’t grown at all near here — like bananas, also once a daily or weekly part of my diet, also once fruits that I didn’t recognize as denizens of a faraway place, possessed of their own season.

Bananas that cost a rainforest, refrigerator-trucked soymilk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path, giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. –AVM p. 225

There’s something worthwhile about making sure that our ideas of everyday and luxury items, or everyday and luxury behaviors, don’t get too out of whack. The more we see as everyday, the less we have to get excited about on special occasions, the less excited we can get, and the more boring life seems. Or we keep seeking out greater and greater thrills, until our consumption and behavior become extreme. I’m happy to put limits on my everyday choices, both food and otherwise, if it means I gain more pleasure on the occasions that I allow myself to step outside those limits. And if it means the world will still have some resources available for all of us down the line.

This is a difficult line of reasoning, though, because where do we draw the line? Every day of my life is profligate luxury compared to some, yet very moderate compared to others. I don’t eat only beans and rice and live in a hut without running water; I don’t live in a multi-bedroom house, drive a Hummer, and wear diamonds.

What are we called on to do? This question is not academic in these early days of serious thinking about climate change and fossil fuel limits. McKibben raises the same question in Deep Economy: what are we all called on to do? We obviously have to give a great deal up, because right now our country of 5% of the world’s population is using 25% of its resources, but those in other countries want some of the benefits we’ve gotten from our cheap-fuel economy. Where in the middle do we meet? For now, I’m going to I hope it’s someplace where all of us choose some moderation, and we all also enjoy a few luxuries. And I’m going to keep looking for the place on the the scale where I feel like I’m doing the right thing by myself and the world.

Michael Pollan has an article in the New York Times magazine this week called “Why bother?” It’s essentially a long apology (in the old rhetorical sense) for personal action, personal virtue, in the cause of reducing our carbon emissions.

One of the last entries I wrote in my old journal before I switched over was about exactly this issue, partially a rebuttal of Thomas Friedman and partially of the assertion of a friend which was similar to the assertions Pollan mentions coming from even the august liberal media: how can my action make any difference?

Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

His approach is a little different from the one I took (and more academically phrased), but they’re quite compatible. I talked about moral consistency, which is in line with his mention of character. We have to call on ourselves to make the change, he says, and then we have moral standing to ask other people, and other countries, to change. I said, “To have any moral standing, I have to be acting out my own ethical standards to at least a high percentage. If I’m preaching and not practicing, what I say rightly has very little weight.”

I discussed in greater depth what I called “demonstrated opportunity”, which is essentially what he’s describing here: if we change our choices, then there’s a knock-on effect in the economy because the economy is made up of our choices, and it shows that there’s an opportunity and a need for new kinds of services.

His article also called to mind a book I recently finished, called Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben. I have more to say about the book, but the point here is that McKibben outlines different personal and governmental choices people have made to move toward locality, community, and sustainability, and creates a vision of how our whole world could change by moving in that direction. But while he, like me and like Pollan, supports some of that change coming from ‘above’ (laws and governtment), he also emphasizes the necessity of personal and community choice, the need for responsibility to oneself and one’s community.

It may be old-fashioned to believe in personal virtue. But how far might we get if we are the people pointing the way?