[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Why Bother?

[Bill Totten]

The Way We Live Now

by Michael Pollan

The New York Times (April 20 2008)


Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals
hoping to do something about climate change, and it's not an easy one to
answer. I don't know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) came long after Al Gore scared the hell out
of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of
life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the
really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to
... change our light bulbs. That's when it got really depressing. The
immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had
described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was
enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind
the "why bother" question. Let's say I do bother, big time. I turn my
life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down
the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan,
forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in
the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I
could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know
full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some
carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just
bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in
1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's
positively itching to replace every last pound of carbon dioxide I'm
struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for
all my trouble?

A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest, somewhat sheepishly. But
what good is that when virtue itself is quickly becoming a term of
derision? And not just on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal
or on the lips of the vice president, who famously dismissed energy
conservation as a "sign of personal virtue". No, even in the pages of
The New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet "virtuous",
when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be
used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a
quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a
virtue - became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that
doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating
like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr treatment.

And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother,
there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating
local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint?
According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite
and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually
emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently
suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from
places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than
comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was
co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!)
New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the
carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to
consider not only "food miles" but also whether the food came by ship or
truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on
second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least
until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing
nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage
to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it
has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists' projections that seemed
dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming
and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now
truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change
exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic
absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more
biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon
into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist
recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this
suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge.
It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on
carbon footprints, when he says: "Personal choices, no matter how
virtuous [NB!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money." So
it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and
money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes
in the way we live. Why? 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 seventy
percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name
of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how
we're living our lives suggests we're not really serious about changing
- something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move
until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money
and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely
the sort of thinking - passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on
specialists - that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It's
hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put
forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the
environmental crisis of the 1970s - an era innocent of climate change;
what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! - was at its
heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that
level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote
checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering
fossil fuel in their everyday lives - the 1970s equivalent of people
buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing
was likely to change until we healed the "split between what we think
and what we do". For Berry, the "why bother" question came down to a
moral imperative: "Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes
clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our
dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the
effort to change the way we think and live".

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of
industrial civilization is "specialization", which he regards as the
"disease of the modern character". Our society assigns us a tiny number
of roles: we're producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great
many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we
vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to
specialists of one kind or another - our meals to agribusiness, health
to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media,
care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to
the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor
has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is
what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet
this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection - and
responsibility - linking our everyday acts to their real-world
consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power
plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that
had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams
running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first
place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant
others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve
our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to
accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you
suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out - up to and
including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure
causes your neighbors - your community - to suddenly loom so much larger
in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it
possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon
into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here's the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters
precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our
own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no
longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or
law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs
because he probably can't imagine us doing anything much more
challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can't
imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers
and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power - new liquids
and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The "cheap-energy mind", as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that
asks, "Why bother?" because it is helpless to imagine - much less
attempt - a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant.
Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy,
it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions - carbon taxes and
pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it
believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and
nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope
for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has
no use for.

But while some such grand scheme may well be necessary, it's doubtful
that it will be sufficient or that it will be politically sustainable
before we've demonstrated to ourselves that change is possible. Merely
to give, to spend, even to vote, is not to do, and there is so much that
needs to be done - without further delay. In the judgment of James
Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who began sounding the alarm on
global warming twenty years ago, we have only ten years left to start
cutting - not just slowing - the amount of carbon we're emitting or face
a "different planet". Hansen said this more than two years ago, however;
two years have gone by, and nothing of consequence has been done. So:
eight years left to go and a great deal left to do.

Which brings us back to the "why bother" question and how we might
better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at
least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly
tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough
other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain
reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products
and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the
market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even
changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the
culture. Driving an SUV or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your
McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as
outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than
having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire
the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others - from
other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I'm describing (imagining
would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change,
and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone
can plan or predict or count on. Who knows, maybe the virus will reach
all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe
going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few
years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy
Carter's solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it's one
we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren't
great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference,
even when you can't prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely
what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of
individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would
simply conduct their lives "as if" they lived in a free society. That
improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded
to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the
case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that
people begin to "conduct themselves as if they were to live on this
earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day". Fair enough,
but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea
is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn't involve spending or
voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and
particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its
own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce
your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this:
determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely
from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some - even just a little -
of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don't -
if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade - look into
getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We
Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it's
one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your
carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of
dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of
them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related
nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar
technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the
cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less
effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and
pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in
your diet now requires about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy to
produce. It's estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow
ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas
for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still
works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden
(one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and
involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the
proverbial free lunch - carbon-dioxide-free and dollar-free. This is the
most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest,
tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that
even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while
we're counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the
heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your
vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will
probably notice that you're getting a pretty good workout there in your
garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to
the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor
that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to
burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.)
Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time
(and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as
Wendell Berry pointed out thirty years ago, one of those solutions that,
instead of begetting a new set of problems - the way "solutions" like
ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do - actually beget other solutions,
and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the
habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You
quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide
for yourself - that your body is still good for something and may
actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if
both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind
we're all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could
gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied
as much as forty percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least
in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal
the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your
identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your
garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce
to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced
the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most
debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can't do
much of anything that doesn't involve division or subtraction. The
garden's season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit - will you get a
load of that zucchini?! - suggests that the operations of addition and
multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not
exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our
relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the
sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we
can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without
diminishing the world.
_____

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author,
most recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Penguin, 2008).

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&em&ex=1208836800&en=d1c754441761d09a&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin

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