Here's a conference paper I wrote back in 2008 before the bailout actually took place. It was supposed to be a speech, so it's a bit conversational and long, I'm afraid. I'm currently wondering if tactics like "The Compact" would be of any use in diluting the insane control Corporate America currently exerts on us. After all, the reason they HAVE the money is because we give it to them. So...comments? I'm starting to despair that anything short of attacking corporate profits at this point in history will go nowhere.
It IS very long, so I won't be sad if no one reads this. But do, if you get the chance. The statistics are interesting.
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Wouldn't you love to hear some good news right about now? It seems like all we get is bad. We have an economy that has crumpled like yesterday's paper airplane. We have manufacturing industries that are on the verge of bankruptcy and skyrocketing energy prices. CEOs are hat-in-hand five deep to ask for bailouts from a government that is deeper in debt itself than it's been in the past fifty years.
But within all of this bad news is a silver lining. "Change" is the watchword of the day, and as a nation we're finally beginning to take stock of our priorities. America can finally fix all of those broken systems that we've been putting off for so long. Surely, if we can spend billions to bail out poorly run financial and automotive companies and run a very expensive war for no net gain, we can afford to finally create a systemic plan to safeguard our future.
As we work to get through this current economic slump, we need to take care that the environment doesn't take a back burner to our short-term problems. We must....let me say this again...we MUST address the issue of global warming. Now. Every one of the worries, fears, and concerns I just mentioned a moment ago pale in comparison to a world that doesn't have enough fresh water, one that doesn't grow enough food, and one that can't support the diversity of life that makes our planet habitable.
Not to mention, fixing the environment impacts us economically. The damage from flooding, water pollution, unusual storms, and health impacts is costing us billions of dollars to address. We can't let this continue. If we don't do something now, not tomorrow when we think we can afford it, not tomorrow when we can agree on something to do about it...if we don't do something now it will no longer matter. What Al Gore brought to the forefront of the American consciousness in the last few years hasn't gone away because the economy is in chaos. It's just getting worse.
So, what to do? Where in the name of Gaia do we start?
In a way, we had to reach this low point to embrace the changes we are going to have to make-a point in our economic, financial, and environmental life as a country when we both can and must make systemic changes that include consideration for the environment. We can and must finally rework the system so that it DOES work. No more patch jobs; no more knee-jerk short-term solutions. And as we do so, we can finally apply solid solutions to the problems within our environment, not band-aids. So now, in this time of political and social change, we have both the desire and means. This could be the best thing to happen to the country in the last 100 years.
As we are considering our future, we need to think of one word. No, NOT plastics! That's where we went wrong the first time. What we NEED to think about is PERMACULTURE. You may be familiar with the term, you may not. It's been around for a number of decades, but it hasn't received the attention it deserves. The essence of permaculture is creating systems that work for the long term.
It was originally an agricultural term, but it is now considered a holistic theory focused on whole system design that works far beyond agriculture. It works by looking at the system as a whole and seeing how all the parts interrelate. True understanding of that relation is the key to the design. Everything follows from that understanding. Then comes planning to fix design problems and apply long-term sustainable working solutions.
Permaculture is based on three basic principles:
• Earthcare - recognizing that the Earth is the source of all life and we should consider that when making decisions and respect it, taking responsibility for our global future
• Peoplecare - supporting and helping each other change to ways of living that are not harming ourselves or the planet, and developing healthy societies
• Fairshare - limiting consumption to ensure that the Earth's limited resources are used wisely and fairly
I'd like to take a look at how these three principles relate to and will benefit our systems of manufacturing and agriculture, and how that will be beneficial to our energy and financial problems. Using the writings of Wendell Berry and Rachel Carson, and actions currently being taken by a grassroots organization called The Compact, I'd also like to discuss changes that I feel will help us create a successful permaculture that meets our human needs while meeting the needs of Earth as well.
As Wendell Berry in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America puts it, "It remains only to say what has often been said before-that the best human cultures also have unity." He goes on to say "In any of these systems, cultural or agricultural or natural, when a species or group exceeds the principle of usufruct (literally, the 'use of the fruit'), it puts itself in danger. Then, to use an economic metaphor, it is living off the principal rather than the interest. It has broken out of the system of nurture and has become exploitive; it is destroying what gave it life and what it depends upon to live....We can build one system only within another....At certain critical points these systems have to conform with one another or destroy one another."
I'd like to start with manufacturing, because the United States aligns much of what she views as "success" with the number of new products she produces. I contend that this is a damaging and unnecessary view, and one of those most hurtful to the environment. According to an IndustryWeek article by David Blanchard in June of 2007, the National Association of Manufacturers said that American manufacturing accounts for $1.5 trillion in gross domestic product. We are the largest manufacturer in the world in terms of total output. The article goes on to say that if U.S. manufacturing was a country, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world.
Think about that for a moment. The rate that Americans are using up resources and consuming energy to produce tangible goods is greater than most of the economies of all other nations of the world. Year after year after year, a flood of new goods enters the market.
So what happens to those goods produced last year, and the year before? Where is the car that you had seven years ago? Where are the clothes you wore five years ago? Did you wear them out, or just discard them for new ones? Were the energy and resources used to make those items and thousands like them really necessary? Far too often, the answer is no. We could have done without and saved that energy and those resources, but we didn't. We have the least sustainable culture in the world at the moment, and - let's be perfectly honest - we know it. But things are changing, because we also know they must for us to survive.
There are an ever-growing number of people coming together to take a stand against unnecessary consumerism. One of the most dedicated groups calls themselves "The Compact." The Compact's stated aims are:
First, to go beyond recycling in trying to counteract the negative global environmental and socioeconomic impacts of U.S. consumer culture, to resist global corporatism, and to support local businesses, farms, etc. They intend this stance to have the revolutionary impact of the Mayflower Compact.
Secondly, to reduce clutter and waste in homes.
And thirdly, to simplify their lives.
In order to achieve these aims, the members of this group make an agreement with each other to not buy new products of any kind for at least one year. If you need a product, you must buy it used or barter for it. The group offers resources for its members to help them find others that have whatever goods they may need.
Obviously, this is recycling-or freecycling, as many member give away items they don't need-but with much more of an impact than just putting your old soda cans in a recycling bin. In buying nothing new for an extended period of time, you remove yourself from thoughtless consumerism. It gives you an honest appraisal of what you need as opposed to what you want, and expands your creativity in problem solving.
Of course, the Compact allows exceptions to the rule for things that necessarily need to be new, which include things like food, drink, and necessary medicine, but does not include elective treatments like Viagra or Botox; necessary cleaning products, but not equipment such as vacuum cleaners; and personal clothing such as socks, underwear, and children's sleepwear.
They also make exceptions for services, such as various repair people and baby-sitters, emergency services of course, and other types of things, but they require that members use local people and small businesses for their needs. They encourage their members to look for cooperative farms in their area to buy as much food grown locally as possible. In focusing on local business and agriculture, not only are they creating a stronger community by supporting small businesses, they are saving energy by limiting the cost of the transport of goods.
But, really, what is saved by buying a used refrigerator instead of a new one? A surprising amount, actually. All of the material resources used to make the new product have been saved, of course, but there's much more. The energy produced to obtain the metal, rubber, and all of the other raw materials used to make components for a refrigerator. The energy used to transport all of those materials to where the components are made. The energy used to make and transport those components to the refrigerator manufacturing plant. The energy used to put those components together. The energy used to transport the finished refrigerator to the sales floor. Every item, every product produced goes through an entire supply stream that eats up vast amounts of valuable energy and resources.
Compact members very likely save more energy in a year by buying used goods than buying a hybrid car will save its owner throughout its life, especially if it's replaced when newer technology comes along. If we as a nation are serious about "breaking our addiction to oil", then reining in our greed for new goods is mandatory. Not only will we save energy, but we will help clean up our environment. Not only will we clean up our environment, but we will save ourselves money.
Used goods generally cost half of what new ones do, sometimes even less. In rejecting corporatism, there are no impulse buys, no buyer's regrets, and marketing lures have no impact. Members need to work less because they need less money to make ends meet. That means there is more free time to spend in leisure with family and friends.
But, what would this mean to the manufacturing industry? What would happen to everyone's jobs? The fact is, American manufacturing jobs are already on a radical downslide. Due to new computer-driven machinery and other factors, productivity and energy consumption is up while the number of jobs is sharply down. According to the same article by Blanchard, the number of U.S. workers employed in manufacturing has been on the decline over the past decade, with annual employment dropping from 17 million in 1997 to just over 14 million in 2006. The percentage of U.S. workers employed in manufacturing has dropped from 16.5% in 1987 to 10.8% today. So we have more products, more revenue for the large industrial companies. But, we also fewer jobs, and the numbers are dropping.
Not only are there fewer jobs in manufacturing, the wages aren't that impressive. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average salary of workers in the manufacturing industry is $17.76 an hour, with production workers making a median salary of only $10.75 an hour. That's a yearly wage of $22, 360, which is right at the poverty level for a family of 4 in 2008 according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The net effect is that we are producing many unnecessary goods when the labor and energy could be better spent elsewhere. Why are we creating tremendous amounts of pollution all along the supply chain that is wreaking havoc on our environment and contributing to global warming for such a small payback? We should not be. Why should we buy different cleaners for our ovens, floors, bathrooms, kitchens, white clothes, colored clothes, dogs, cats, cars, carpets, vegetables, and a myriad of other things-all with special packaging that also must be produced as well - when bleach, vinegar, baking soda, salt, and/or mild biodegradable soap will clean almost everything? We are wasting our money and our resources because we have been swayed by millions of dollars of advertising. Again, we should not be that foolish.
The threat of joblessness due to a shrinking manufacturing sector is a short-term prospect at most, and an illusion in the long-term anyway. There are many critical service fields that are in desperate need of increased labor and expansion. By redirecting resources into these fields, America would be much better served than by the production of unnecessary goods, and many of these fields have been understaffed for decades.
A good example is the telling one of the lack of manpower at the Food and Drug Administration. This administration, as you probably know, is the consumer watchdog to protect the public from harm from chemicals in their foods and medicine. Rachel Carson sounded the alarm in her book Silent Spring about the poisoning of the earth with chemicals in 1962. The book was so influential that it helped spawn the environmental movement and spurred changes in government policy. A quote from that 1962 book reads "A vigilant and aggressive Food and Drug Administration, with a greatly increased force of inspectors, is another urgent need."
It was a very popular, very well-known book. It stands to reason that if America values the health of its citizens that we would have addressed FDA understaffing. Did we? Fast forward to December 2007, and an article in USA Today entitled "FDA So Underfunded, Consumers Are Put At Risk." The article goes on to report, and I quote:
The Food and Drug Administration is so underfunded and understaffed that it's putting U.S. consumers at risk in terms of food and drug safety, an advisory panel to the FDA says in a report to be discussed Monday. Findings include:
• Inadequate inspections of manufacturers, noting that foodmakers, for example, are inspected about once every 10 years.
• A badly broken food-import system and food supply that grows riskier each year. In the past 35 years, FDA inspections of the food supply have dropped 78% due to soaring numbers of products and inadequate FDA funding.
• A depleted FDA staff, which is about the same size as it was 15 years ago despite huge growth in agency responsibilities. Instead of being proactive, the agency is often in "fire-fighting" mode.
• A workforce with a dearth of scientists who understand emerging technologies. Turnover rates in some scientific positions at the FDA run twice that of other government agencies.
• An obsolete information-technology system.
The report says that the FDA's IT systems are so lacking that reports of product dangers are not rapidly compared and analyzed, and that inspectors' reports are handwritten and slow to move through the system. The IT systems have resulted in lost FDA data and lack backup systems. Piles and piles of paper documents are in warehouses with no backup, including clinical trial data.
The question that I put to you is...would we, as Americans, rather drive three different kinds of American-made gas guzzling, global-warming-worsening SUVs, or would we rather invest in food safety inspections to keep melamine out of baby formula? It seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it? But, if it's really such a no brainer, why does the Ford Motor Company alone, who the US government as of December 2008 is considering giving a bailout of at least 4 BILLION dollars, produce NINE different options of gas guzzling SUVs for our overconsuming pleasure, while the FDA is still struggling with understaffing and underfunding?
Another quote from Carson's Silent Spring is this: "The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized." The devastation and economic ruin caused by our irresponsible actions that led to global warming and our current economic crisis will answer that question with a resounding NO if we do not make some serious long-term choices.
Another example is our educational system. We are falling farther and farther behind other nations in education. Long-term human capital in America is being ignored to support short-term industrial and financial capital. With shortages of teachers, classrooms, materials, and college scholarships throughout America today, we are ignoring our long-term needs for the nation's future.
There is a very real link between the investment in education and the success of students-and through them, the nation-in the future. A study was conducted by Craig Olson and Deena Ackerman on the relationship between high school inputs measured at the time male respondents attended high school and the earnings of these same individuals when they were in their mid-thirties. The two published their findings with the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research on Poverty in 2000. Their results showed a significant relationship between the characteristics of teachers and the earnings of their students 17 years after graduation. Specifically, only a 1 percent increase in the average teacher salary in a district increased the earnings of students by 0.33 percent. Yet, America is continuing to produce and consume vast quantities of unnecessary goods while our educational system languishes. We need to develop jobs that are closer to our needs and less based on our wants if we wish to create a viable permaculture that will sustain our environment and our economy, and that absolutely includes education.
So, to sum up let's look at the permaculture principles and see how we can apply them to manufacturing:
Earthcare: We need to stop pouring energy and resources into unnecessary goods. To take things that are valuable to the environment and then give them back as nothing but waste is absurdly short sighted. Let the manufacturing segment shrink and divert those materials, that labor, and the energy it takes to something more useful long-term.
Peoplecare: We need retool our economy to reflect our priorities. Do we truly value shampoo that comes in 8 different flavors over educational materials, or nine different SUVs from one company over food safety? Of course not. Let's transfer some of that labor, energy and those resources to the long-term solutions and social needs that we value, such as education and healthcare. The elderly need skilled care. Children need smaller classes. We know this, yet we still have an economy that is focused on buying stuff alone. Let's change that. Let's buy more non-polluting services from educated professionals instead.
Fairshare: Buying unnecessary items and discarding them is irresponsible. We know this, yet marketing is allowed to goad us into buying more bad products for less good reasons. We should take what we need, but try and leave what are short-term wants so that the resources can benefit others.
Again, we are at a critical time in our nation's history. If we envision our perfect life, what does it look like? Do we want more labor and materials devoted to educating our children and developing our human resources, or do we want more labor and materials devoted to producing 22 kinds of soap, wasting global resources and energy? One will support our nation's future; the other will damage it beyond recall. This is the essence of what Berry termed a "crisis of culture." It is altogether a moral, ethical, and practical decision. If we show our children how to do this by example, just as racial discrimination has lost traction in a matter of a few generations, so will wasteful consumption.
Agriculture, too, is one of the systems that will need to be rehabilitated for the future success of America. In The Unsettling of America published in 1977, Wendell Berry describes a past where smaller farms raised a variety of produce for local consumption. That diversity preserved the quality of the land, tremendously expensive petroleum-based machinery was not necessary, and more fuel energy was not needed to transport crops thousands of mile across country. Animals and plants lived on the same farm, so that waste from one was a boon to the other in a natural cycle, and so neither reached pollution levels.
Again, as with manufacturing, if we wish to break that addiction to oil we need to consider these two statistics that reflect our current agricultural methods: First, produce in the average American dinner is trucked 1,500 miles to get to the plate, up 22% in the past two decades according to a 2001 study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, and secondly according to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1999 the food system was estimated to account for 16 percent of total U.S. energy consumption.
Berry warns of the logical outcomes of gigantic industrial agriculture. He wrote, "the damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal, to use living things as if they were machines.
If animals are regarded as machines, they are confined in pens remote from the source of their food, where their excrement becomes, instead of a fertilizer, first a waste and then a pollutant. Furthermore, because confinement feeding depends so largely on grains, grass is removed from the rotation of crops and more land is exposed to erosion.
If plants are regarded as machines, we wind up with huge monocultures, productive of elaborate ecological mischiefs, mischiefs which are in turn productive of agricultural mischief: monocultures are much more susceptible to pests and diseases than mixed cultures and therefore more dependent on chemicals."
The results described in Berry's warnings are unfortunately coming to pass all to often. The Washington Post ran an article in June of 2008 regarding the major flooding of the Midwest at that time - Iowa in particular. What originally seemed like a fluke disaster caused by too much rain actually could have its source in America's agricultural methods just as Berry describes. The article entitled "Iowa Flooding Could Be An Act of Man, Experts Say" has this to tell us:
The director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa suspects that this natural disaster wasn't really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed. "We've done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions," he said. "Agriculture must respect the limits of nature." Iowans who study the environment suspect that changes in the land, both recently and over the past century or so, have made Iowa's terrain not only highly profitable but also highly vulnerable to flooding.
Crop rotation may also play a subtle role in the flooding. Farmers who may have once grown a number of crops are now likely to stick to just corn and soybeans-annual plants that don't put down deep roots that hold water. Corn alone will cover more than a third of the state's land surface this year. The ethanol boom that began two years ago encouraged still more cultivation.
Another potential factor: sediment. "We're actually seeing rivers filling up with sediment, so the capacity of the rivers has changed," Asell said. He said that in the 1980s and 1990s, Iowa led the nation in flood damage year after year.
Consider for a moment the economic impact of such flooding. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, $2.7 billion in federal flood relief has been approved to aid 2008 flood victims. The American Farm Bureau estimates crop losses at $8 billion for the Midwest in this one flood alone, with $4 billion of the total in Iowa, which will impact food prices and energy costs. If we think we are making major gains by large-scale, single crop agriculture and changing the hydrology of the land to suit us, we are wrong. We are damaging environmental systems that have taken thousands of years to perfect, and we are seeing systemic breakdowns that are costing us billions of dollars.
Berry's observation was that "this attempt at total control is an invitation to disorder. And the rule seems to be that the more rigid and exclusive is the specialist's boundary, and the stricter the control within it, the more disorder rages around it....the patterns of cooperation are safer than the mechanisms of exclusion, even though they lack the illusory safety of 'control.'"
Using modern methods of trying to exert enough force and control on the land to yield a vast amount of a single crop, Iowa has created the perfect conditions for flooding disasters and has experienced two devastating and expensive ones within a decade. Nothing exists in a vacuum-if there are variables, then control is an illusion. And...there are ALWAYS variables. Rainfall, for instance.
The Washington Post article continued with:
The basic hydrology of Iowa has been changed since the coming of the plow. By the early 20th century, farmers had installed drainage pipes under the surface to lower the water table and keep water from pooling in what otherwise could be valuable farmland. More of this drainage "tiling" has been added in recent years. The direct effect is that water moves quickly from the farmland to the streams and rivers.
So, what happens when "water moves quickly from the farmland to the streams and rivers?" Pollution from pesticides and fertilizer move quickly as well. As Rachel Carson underscored in her "Surface Water And Underground Seas" chapter of Silent Spring, "To an ever-increasing degree, chemicals used for the control of insects contribute to organic pollutants." She goes on to say "Probably the bulk of such contaminants are the waterborne residues of the millions of pounds of agricultural chemicals that have been applied to farmland and have been leached out from the ground by rains." And so, these floods could have future health consequences that we are not yet even aware of.
Once again, just as in manufacturing we have a system that is in the short term desirable, but in the long term is utterly unsustainable. The ecological and health consequences of monolithic farming are destined to be disastrous, and to continue to grow as Berry suggests.
So, let's take a look at the permaculture principles and see how we can apply them to agriculture:
Earthcare: Gigantic monoculture crops damage the soil and require ever more chemicals to keep them productive. In essence, we are creating a non-renewable resource out of a renewable one. We are also creating waste and pollution out of what should be organic fertilizer from animal wastes. We need to reintegrate the system so that it functions naturally.
Peoplecare: Monoculture crops also increase the likelihood of flooding, erosion, and the leaching of poisons into groundwater. It is not to our long-term advantage to allow this to continue.
Fairshare: Wasting energy on the tremendous transportation costs of a one-crop system is irresponsible and contributes to global warming, which hurts everyone. It also raises food prices and continues our dependence on foreign oil.
In conclusion, we must begin incorporating these ideas of permaculture into the way we address our resources. We have an enormous opportunity to finally start fixing the elements of American as a system instead of as an unconnected group of separate mismatched elements. And as we do so, we can finally incorporate solutions to the problems within our environment that are resulting in global warming. Let me leave you with a last quote from Wendell Berry. "It is impossible to divorce the question of what we do from the question of who we are." It is time we align our actions to our priorities, and work toward sustainable permanent culture.
