Buying Green

Did you get the impression, on Feel-Good Friday, that I was lightening up on the "vote with your dollar" movement? Well, it's Monday morning now.

From the Climate and Capitalism blog's review of Kendra Pierre-Louis' Green Washed: Why We Can’t Buy Our Way to a Green Planet:

Her new book Green Washed is a powerful critique of “the comforting message that we can shop ourselves out of our current environmental mess.”

“Too many businesses and environmental groups have led us to believe that if we buy the correct collection of products, we can save the planet. While these assurances have done much to assuage our collective guilt, and even more to create a generation of smug eco-shoppers, it has done next to nothing to fundamentally change the environmental landscape, while in many cases actively contributing to environmental degradation and misinformation.”

So far so good? Pour yourself a warm beverage into your reusable mug and lean back. 

In refreshing contrast to most books on consumerism, Green Washed pins the blame for excess consumption on our economic system, not on individual psychology.

“If we were to make reducing our consumption to a level that was both materially satisfying and ecologically sustainable our central focus, our entire global economic system would collapse. This isn’t a hyperbole. Our economic system is based on the need for perpetual growth; we either grow our economy or it dies, taking us along with it.”

Hm. Food for thought. Take a bite of that muffin.

Unfortunately, Pierre-Louis’s analysis of causes stops with criticism of growth. She doesn’t ask why the global economic system is so irrational. Why is the only alternative to one polluting product so often another that pollutes as badly or worse? Many brilliant writers have criticized growth, and offered detailed proposals for steady-state economies – why have they been ignored by those in power? What about our existing social and economic order makes growth so essential and environmental destruction so universal?

Because it doesn’t pursue those questions, Green Washed proposes band aid solutions when major surgery is needed. Having firmly rejected individual green shopping, the alternative Pierre-Louis offers amounts to green shopping in groups.

And the bracing shock of cold water. 

Projects that improve the sustainability and resilience of local communities are important, but they are no substitute for political and social action against the global forces that are destroying our world. Unless we stop and reverse those forces, Pierre-Louis’s shadow economies will be small green islands in an ocean of environmental destruction – and water levels will continue rising.


Back to work.

Needed: Weather Recording System

This winter has been absolutely wacky so far in Saskatchewan. The first frost was on September 13th; the next day, night time temperatures dipped to -5C. It didn't get that cold again for another month. November 3rd had a daytime high of 11C, and the 19th a daytime high of -18C. The week of the 19th was the one cold week of winter that we have had, until today. I'm currently sitting at -15C, -30 with the windchill. These current temperatures are exactly what Environment Canada says are average for here this time of year. Environment Canada also says, however, that it is increasingly difficult to accurately predict the weather. (Yep, they forecast a cold winter.)

What does this mean? Well, a couple of things. First, I could have extended my growing season beyond my previous wildest dreams with very minimal equipment. My chard was actually sprightly well into November, but I'd mentally decided the gardening season was over and didn't pick it. I will plan better for next year (although I don't know if I'll start any earlier this year - the thought of having to plan what seeds to start right now fills me with panic.)

Second, I need a good system of weather recording. A system where I can record minimum and maximum temperatures, precipitation, and any other information of note, such as whether leaves are budding and if pollinators have appeared. And one that allows me to compare days or weeks with those of previous years. Ideally, it would have some graphing functions. I like seeing information pictorally.

Does anyone know of any software that can do some or most of this for me? What do you do to keep track of the weather?

Third, I am trying hard not to panic about climate change - what good does panic do? - and mitigate and adapt. Perhaps a future post on this?

Taking Control of the "Feed the World" Meme

One of the techniques I used a fair bit to prepare students for a lesson when I was teaching was brainstorming. There are more or less intricate ways of setting up a brainstorming exercise, but I'm not going to get all fancy here. I'm just going to pose a question to you, one that was posed to the general public on a website I stumbled across the other day. I think it was meant to be rhetorical, but I also think it shouldn't be.

"How can we feed a growing global population in an era of climate instability without genetically modified crops?"

Here's some answers I came up with, off the top of my head:

• curtail waste in the food system (40% of food is wasted at the household level in Canada; postharvest losses in developing nations range from 15-50% of production)
• stop producing food for inefficient biofuels (ie, almost all biofuels)
•  maintain and perpetuate biodiversity in order to respond contextually and locally to climate changes
• support and develop greenhouse gas-reducing farming methods
• put money back into public research in agriculture because even the USDA admits that Monsanto's 'drought-tolerant' corn has yields only equal to that of corn conventionally bred

I'm pretty sure the answer is not "giant plantations of monocultures from one seed source that require massive amounts of chemical and fossil fuel-based inputs to produce". That sounds like a textbook definition of a vulnerable food system to me.

What can you add to this list?

Farm Technology in 100 Years: A Photo Essay

These pictures are from the parade at my hometown's centennial this weekend.

Neighbour's team with covered wagon.

My great-uncle on a 6 HP Farmall tractor

His grandson on their 535 HP New Holland tractor.

His granddaughter on their John Deer 9870 STS combine.

• Increase in HP over 100 years: 267 times
• Decrease in town's population over 100 years: 96%
• $1 in 1911 = $23.82 today
• Price of one bushel of wheat in 1911: $1
• Price of one bushel of wheat today: $7.73

Dei ex machina and the social scientist

With all this talk about climate change, food insecurity, peak oil, and the growing dead zone in the gulf of Mexico caused by overuse of agrichemicals, it will cheer you to know that farming in Saskatchewan right now is sustainable. So I was told by the director of R&D from the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture. Extrapolating from the ministry's research focus, the director no doubt attributes this sustainability to the innovations of Science and Technology.

As a social scientist, I don't have the technical scientific background to understand how losing over 10% of our farmers per decade, and having only 10% of farmers under the age of 40 is sustaining farming, rural communities and economies. Likewise, I don't know how the suggestion of an MBA student at the last conference I attended, that we "find new sources of water", will work to ameliorate the problems with climate change effects on the South Saskatchewan River basin, but guess I'm meant to have confidence in anyone who can create a mean RSI graph.

 All snark aside, the problem is this:  These are all social problems that people are trying to solve using technology or theoretical economic models. Drought in Saskatchewan is not just a lack of moisture. It involves questions about values - green lawns? - about ecological appropriateness - thirsty monocultures? - about governance - will the market decide who gets water and who doesn't? - about imagination - what kind of future are we planning for and with how long of a view? 
 
But we have been conditioned to believe that technology can - or if it isn't now, will very soon - solve all of our problems, including the ones it has created. Heavens forfend that, for example, a social scientist working in the field, with real people and real data, should be asked what to do about potential long-term drought in Saskatchewan and come up with research that addresses vulnerabilities to climate change by looking at how an individual or community's adaptive capacity to drought is enhanced or constrained not only by their access to infrastructure, knowledge, resources and technology but by the institutional framework, their capacity to act as a collective, and their human capital.* In other words, why do some people and communities adapt, or not, and what gets in their way or helps them to do that? These are important questions that the theory of "rational economic actors" and industry, science, and technology do not address adequately.

*See, for example: Pittman, J., V. Wittrock, S. Kulshreshtha, and E. Wheaton. (2011). "Vulnerability to climate change in rural Saskatchewan: Case study of the Rural Municipality of Rudy No. 284." Journal of Rural Studies, 27(1), 83-94.