We Are What We Eat

The Union of Concerned Scientists tells us there are three really important things that we consumers can do to reduce our negative impact on the environment: 1) reduce our energy use in the car and home, and 2) choose sustainable food choices. It shouldn't surprise anyone that both of these arguments boil down to reducing the use of fossil fuels, but I think it does. Everyone knows that we use non-renewable energy for transportation and for heating and cooling our homes, but fewer people understand the relationship between food and oil.


In the aptly labeled "industrial food system" we obviously use polluting non-renewable energy to run the vehicles that transport the food from far away, but the fertilizer and pesticides we use are also both largely made from petroleum and requires a great deal of energy to produce, not to mention the packaging. So, for every calorie of food that is produced in this system we have burned an awful lot of oil. Producing and transporting meat is even worse, especially when you consider the tremendous amount of plant food it takes to raise meat producing animals. In The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, the UCC concludes that two of the most beneficial changes in food consumption are to eat less meat and eat more organic foods.

I won't argue with that advice except to say that I would suggest emphasizing local food more than organic food. Author Michael Pollan determines in The Omnivore's Dilemma that buying organic food produced far away provides far less benefit than does buying conventional food grown locally. The main problem is that the industrial farm system has co-opted "organic" and seriously diluted the relative benefits it provides.

In contrast, conventional food grown on relatively small, local farms generally use significantly less fertilizers and pesticides than factory farms and the transportation factor is obviously greatly diminished.
As you consider what you might do to strive for a sustainable Frederick, consider buying food from people who love where you live as much as you do -- local farmers.

How about some Happy Fish?

We had sushi a few nights ago. I love sushi.

I know a little about the perils of over-fishing, but I have to admit I didn't think about it before, during or after the meal. Yesterday I read this article about a DC chef who is working to raise awareness about having yummy seafood and being sustainable, too. I love his attitude -- he agrees that sustainability isn't about denying ourselves, it's about making good choices. I'm not going to dub this guy a hero, but he's on the right track.

So, this morning I checked out this Seafood Guide published by the Blue Ocean Institute. They have analyzed seafood based on abundance and on the environmental impact of catching and/or farm-raising practices. Take a look. Think about it.

It turns out we did pretty well -- the one piece we had that has a status problem is Mackerel.


Fishthumb image courtesy of www.sputnikdesignworks.com

Footprints

When caretakers ask us to "Take only pictures, leave only footprints" they are taking care of human history, and to our way of looking at things footprints are not anything to concern us. We think we walk on top of the earth and we see ourselves as too small, too minuscule and ultimately too unimportant to matter. But look, long before humans even started releasing carbon into the air through campfires, some human walker left behind a footprint that matters. If a lone human can leave a 1.5 million year legacy, imagine what 6.77 billion of us are doing?

The idea of a ecological footprint is measuring the impact individuals have on the planet through day to day living, using energy and consuming products. If you take one of many quizzes and calculators, you'll probably find that we need something like four Earths to enable you to live sustainably the way you live now.


Given that we only have one, one hopes that this knowledge will motivate you to reduce your footprint. I'm afraid that many people, even greenies, read that we need a couple more planets to get by and the topic suddenly becomes just too damn big to contemplate. With what but terror can we conceive that there just isn't enough planet for us?

Check out this site to assess your ecological footprint if you dare, but if not just take a look at their recommendations for reducing it. It helps make our job a little more bite-sized by organizing our activities into transportation, food, housing and other consumer behavior.

Charity and Economy begin at home

The economy of an area -- in this case the Frederick area -- consists basically of what the community of the area produces and consumes plus money flowing in and minus money flowing out. There is miles of gray between these blacks and whites, but it works as a basic model.

Of course, we should first recognize that from most economists' perspective, we are really just kind of a slow moving side side show of the Baltimore Washington Area economy. The reason they see us that way is that our economy, like the whole area, is largely driven by U.S. Government money.

That's true and I see it differently -- I think Frederick has a distinct enough economic identity that we should seek to grow how we want to grow, as opposed to us becoming just another extension of DC and the East Coast sprawl. We have unique natural, economic and community resources that deserve local stewardship.

Still, let's be honest, we do depend economically on the Federal government -- at least as an employer of so many people, but also because of the spending the Feds do on construction and rent other locally provided services. So we are part of that larger economic area, and it is to our benefit as much as we might think or pretend otherwise.

So the Frederick economy has inflows of money from the Federal Government. We export -- in that the work is done here and someone not from here pays for it -- some biotech and some professional services, some agricultural products, some building and development services, and little bits of this and that.

Our money leaves our economy when we buy things brought here from somewhere else.

It's generally true that the more money we bring in from elsewhere, and the more we spend on goods and services produced right here, the healthier our economy will be. Don't get me wrong, I am happy we live in a global economy where I can get coffee, for example, from across the world. I believe the globalization of the economy is a good thing, by and large and if we don't screw it up.

Still, home is home. The closer our money stays to home, the better for all of us.



p.s. Look what great work the Frederick County Office of Economic Development is doing.

$0.13 from every dollar you spend on gas goes straight to Osama Bin Laden!

Think about that for a minute.

OK, for the record, I don't know how exactly much of our money gets to bin Laden. I made up the 13 cents because I can't find that specific analysis. Its a useful placeholder though, because there is no doubt whatsoever that a huge amount of the money we pay for oil ends up in the control of terrorists and also undemocratic dictators like Hugo Chavez and Putin's Cabal.

Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat & Crowded breaks this down for us. A few highlights:

• Saudi Arabia is set to earn around $200 billion dollars in oil money in 2008, and Saudi interests have tens of millions of those dollars building thousands of mosques and hiring teachers to spread the most extreme form of anti-western Islam in Pakistand and Afghanistan.
• Iran, which is OPEC's 2nd largest oil producer aggressively finances terrorist groups including the Lebanese group Hezbollah. When Hezbollah launched war against Israel in 2006, Iran gave Hezbollah $3 billion-plus for payouts to Lebanese citizens during and after the conflict.
  
• Almost 50% of foreign insurgents in Iraq have been recruited by extremist Saudis and sent to join the battle carrying thousands of dollars to help finance operations.

There is more and I hope you remember that your pennies and dollars that go in your gas tank don't stop there. They go into the accounts of faceless corporations who have no qualms at handing them over to dictators who are exploiting the land and people who could benefit from an economy that does more than produce oil. Those dictators do many bad things with what is now their money, including paying people to kill themselves to take a few or a lot of Americans with them. Women around the world are being stoned to death and worse because dictators with lots of money tend to stay in power and tend to become increasingly intolerant. Children are denied education in anything but extreme Islam, which ensures they will never be able to progress economically and will therefore always be vulnerable to militant recruiters.

So, every time we fill our gas tanks, we should acknowledge to ourselves that in that act we are in fact sending some of our money to our enemies. Maybe if we remember that every time, we'll start deciding fuel efficiency really does matter even when the price of gas is relatively low.



p.s. Let me note from the "People are Stupid" file that in December '08 as gas prices dropped, Americans bought more trucks and SUVs than cars for the first time since February. Do these people really think prices won't go up again?

Where the buck stops.

Change is coming. A good bit of it is going to be uncomfortable -- painful, even. Take a look at the NY Times columns by Friedman and Krugman to get a pretty clear idea of the big picture we are facing.

We did this to ourselves. Sure, the big and powerful in DC and Wall Street and Detroit, etc. have larger impact than we do -- but that doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to be responsible. Consider this: over the last few decades in the U.S. consumption has soared and household debt has skyrocketed, while the savings rate has dwindled to nothing and wages stayed pretty much constant.

Where did the money come from? Where did it go?

None of this was a secret, but people acted like it was. Every story is different, and the big picture is that the ever increasing "value" of our real estate had us believing that as one of my friend's put it, "it's like free money!"

Well, it wasn't free. A lot of it was imaginary. A lot of it is essentially in China and various other treasuries and funds around the world.

The change that is coming is essentially less money in our pockets. Even after this recession is over, in every way money grows, it will grow relatively slowly for quite a while. In America we'll still be able to earn a living, and most of us will be able to have our cable TV and cell phones. But we'll have a lot less of most everything else.

This is the cold edge of sustainability. If we aren't living sustainably, the party will end.

Live sustainably -- some suggestions:

Start with your health -- including your body and mind, and the health of your relationships.

Maintain a healthy family economy. Use credit to make transactions easier, not to buy what you can't afford or don't need. Save for the future -- both rainy and sunny days. Don't assume that your investments, including your house, will always increase in value. Teach your children what healthy economic behavior looks like, including how to develop the skills you need to earn a living and get along in this world.

Take responsibility for your impact on the environment. Understand how your behavior -- especially your consumer behavior -- wears down our local environment and the Earth, and start doing something about it. Learn about your carbon footprint and start reducing it. Learn where the products you buy are made and who makes them, and what are the costs to their livelihood, economy and environment.

Be a good member of your local, national and global economies. When you can, buy from local producers and sellers -- the closer your dollars stay to home, the better off we'll all be. When buying products or services from far away, try to be sure you are investing in a seller or producer you would want to live near.

Be a good citizen. Pay attention to local and national politics and don't be afraid to speak about it reasonably with anyone. Vote. Get involved. Learn about other cultures and countries and global affairs. Understand that what your government does anywhere is your responsibility, too.

Love the Earth and every single thing on it. Then, live that love.

Stewardship: It's our responsibility.

I think that people resist taking responsibility for our environment because they have no hope for a good outcome. The trends of the last few hundred years indicate that we will fill up the landscape with buildings and roads and parking lots and landfills, we will use up all the clean water and we will dump our trash and our pollution pretty much anywhere rich people don’t have to see it.

If we take just a minute to think about reversing these trends, we are immediately faced with what seems to be an insolvable dilemma. Consider the Chesapeake Bay, which is choking to death in our waste, for example. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want the Bay to be clean and beautiful with lots of fish and crabs and birds around. But start talking about turning things around and the conversation tapers off as we start to realize that’s it is our houses and roads and toilets and farms that are filling it with nitrogen and sediment and death.

It seems like we can’t have a good place to live without destroying it.

But we have to figure out how, don’t you think? To do that, we have to start with the rock hard principle that we need a healthy environment and a healthy economy. Anyone who wants one without the other isn’t in the real world.