Woohoo! This year's Blog Action Day, also known as #BAD11, focuses on the topic of Food, which I am actually interested in! I've enjoyed writing for previous years, but those have tended to be issues that I recognize as very important but don't think about that often. In contrast, I, and I'd presume to say almost everyone, thinks about food on a daily basis.
Over the years, I've come to treat BAD as an excuse for some rambling reflections on my personal connection with the topic, and then kind of try to tie in with some larger political themes. Shall we give that a shot again?
Food was an important part of my life growing up. My parents were great about making sure that we always ate meals together as a family - and, with six of us all at different stages of life and with a wide variety of interests, that can't have been easy! My mom was and remains a great cook, and I can still remember a lot of the dishes that she would make. We grew up in Minnesota, so there were a lot of classic casseroles like Tuna Noodle Casserole, and a chili with spaghetti in the broth, and seaburgers, and meat loaf... all kinds of stuff. She also tried to serve nutritious food, though I resisted mightily. I think that I would refuse to eat just about anything that was green - I didn't like broccoli, didn't like lettuce, didn't like celery, didn't like green beans, didn't like lima beans, etc. ad infinitum. I think that I liked canned corn, and tolerated canned carrots, and that was about it.
My strongest emotional connection was and remains with my mom's baking. She was a famously talented pie-maker, and could make an incredible variety of pies. Her most famous one was probably a rhubarb pie, made from our backyard patch of rhubarb. She also made a wonderful apple pie, a special-occasion strawberry pie, occasional blueberry pies, a sticky-sweet-but-delicious pecan pie, and more. The only pie I didn't care for was a sour cream apple pie, which I had decided at some point that I disliked. But, since she was known to make multiple pies, I almost always had an alternative anyways. Even today, when I'm feeling brave enough to attempt making a pie, I almost always steer away from the types my mom made, since I know they'll never meet those standards, and instead I usually end up making new kinds like sweet potato pie.
Beyond pies, she would also make birthday cakes for us. Early in life, I settled on a favorite birthday cake, which I continue to have every July: yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Some years we would put M&M candies along the edges.
And, of course, there were the cookies. Mom made cookies throughout the year, but a sort of Cookie Armageddon would strike just before Christmas, where our home would fill up with literally hundreds of cookies: chocolate bon-bons and Mexican wedding cakes and a variety of sugar cookies (in our family, we follow a strict hierarchy: Trees > Bells > Stars). It made an already special season even more special.
And, really, it's that "special"-ness of food that's so important and rewarding. Food isn't just fuel, it isn't just a source of calories, it isn't just a bundle of nutrients. Food is a very primal way of connecting with one another, of building shared experiences and common sense memory. When I sit down with my family for Thanksgiving, we're not just enjoying one another's company, but also tapping into a tradition that stretches back thirty years, and is all the more powerful because it's operating on the taste and scent planes, in addition to touch and sight.
I can't claim that I ate especially well as a high-schooler; like most of my peers, I enjoyed eating, but I kind of shudder now when I think about WHAT I ate. Lots of frozen pizzas, and frozen chicken pot pies, and Doritos, and cans of soda. It went even further downhill when I went off to college. My freshman year, I took advantage of the all-you-can-eat pricing at Center Court and loaded up on the (surprisingly tasty) choices, often dominated by pizza and pasta from the Italian kiosk (to this day, I get queasy when I see fetuccine alfredo on a menu, after one too many scoops from the congealing tray they always had on display there), or burgers from the grill, or ginormous sandwiches. In later years, I increasingly took advantage of the speed and convenience of Bear's Den, which led to a steady diet of fried chicken tenders and fried mozarella sticks.
As with family meals, food in college served an important social purpose beyond just feeding our bodies. I remember huddling under the stairs in Lopata II, enjoying Cheap Lunch with a circle of friends; or a weekend brunch in Center Court with the other floormates from Beaumont Hall; or a late-night session in front of the TV, laughing at The Daily Show while picking our way through trays of fried food.
I was probably at my least healthy when I graduated from school. I lived for a few years in Kansas City, and struggled a little with putting together a bachelor lifestyle that wouldn't kill me. I avoided eating out, and started "cooking," but my cookery wasn't anything at all notable. I would occasionally fry up burgers, but most of my meals tended to be Hamburger Helper-type affairs: the recipe would typically start with melting together a stick of butter and a cup of milk in a skillet, then adding raw meat and finishing with some dried pasta and flavoring packets. I doubt that this food was any healthier than what I was eating at college, but I do think that it was a healthier habit to get into: I was, very crudely, practicing making my own food at home, and developing a set of habits around preparing, serving, and saving food that would serve me well in future years.
My epicurean epiphany started when I moved to California. Off the bat, I started shopping at Food Maxx, still buying mostly the same stuff as I had in Kansas City, but starting to experiment with some Hispanic flavors. The big turning point came about a year later, when two unrelated events propelled me into becoming a more serious home cook. First of all, out of nowhere I received a sample issue of Cook's Illustrated magazine. I thought a couple of recipes looked good; made them; decided they tasted REALLY good; and ended up subscribing. For the next several years, every two months would give me a new magazine with enough recipes (with leftovers for one person) to keep me going with fresh, new, interesting dishes. Around the same time, Albertson's went bankrupt and closed a bunch of their stores, including one at Leigh and Southwest Expressway where I used to always shop. When coming up with a new routine, I started patronizing the Campbell farmer's market, and quickly fell in love with it. Every Sunday, I would wander into the market with a few empty bags and an open mind. I would walk up and down, check the prices on everything, try a few samples, look for anything that looked especially tasty or interesting. If I saw a fruit or vegetable that I didn't recognize, I would buy it, take it home, and then look it up in The Joy of Cooking, a massive cookbook that my aunt Fran had given me as a graduation gift years ago but was finally getting put to constant use. Between Cook's Illustrated for main dishes, and the farmer's market for produce and side dishes, I had a steady influx of new and stimulating challenges. I loved Christopher Kimball's methodical, precise approach to cooking, which gave me the confidence to try making complex dishes. Over time, I gradually got better at using my tools (it used to take me ten minutes to mince an onion, it now takes me about thirty seconds), gradually upgraded my tools (I can no longer imagine having a kitchen without a garlic press), and learned some fundamental but important principles for cookery, like the importance of a heavy skillet or the role acids play in baking. Even more gradually, I've slowly become comfortable with more of the ephemera of cooking: being able to "tell" when something is done cooking by the look and texture, or having a sixth sense kick in moments before something becomes overdone.
All this cooking stuff was pretty new for me. I think that I would make Macaroni & Cheese while growing up, and I've been making chocolate chip cookie bars since I was in junior high school, but otherwise I couldn't make anything that didn't come from the freezer. I think my parents were probably amused when I would gush at how much fun I was having with cooking - I'm sure I never gave a hint of interest back when I could have actually helped out in their kitchen!
Cooking has become a very important part of my life lately. It's an activity that both physically and mentally rejuvenates me; it requires a certain amount of focus, yet doesn't occupy all my attention, and so it can feel very relaxing and productive at the same time. I'll typically cook a fair amount over the weekend, and depending on what it is, I'll often save some in the fridge for the next few days, and some more in the freezer for a longer-term leftover. Even having a ton of leftovers, I'm able to get a lot of variety in my diet, and because I rarely repeat dishes, I don't have enough time to get bored of what I just made.
In recent years, I've grown increasingly fascinated by the economic and political aspects of our food system. The first example of this for me was Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation". Now, I'm actually less tied to fast food than a lot of people I know. When I was growing up, I ate fast food maybe a total of a dozen times, mostly on family vacations; since then, I'll occasionally stop by a restaurant, but have never regularly patronized the major fast food chains. Still, FFN greatly disturbed me. It goes beyond the problems with fast food itself, and taps into what has been wrong with our country's food supply in general: the deplorable conditions in the meat-packing factories, the totally backwards approach to food safety (where the USDA doesn't even have the authority to order a recall, and has to rely on manufacturers to do so), the way we cannibalize animals and have them eat one another's flesh, which in turn has led to the rise of scary new diseases like BSE.
For a few years, I pretty strictly confined myself to only eating organic meat, and almost always eating organic produce. I've since softened that stance a bit; I still prefer organic when I buy stuff for myself, but since the food I buy and prepare myself forms by far the largest part of my diet, I don't worry about the few times when I'm eating out or at a friend's house. More importantly than that, though, is probably the way that Fast Food Nation helped un-jar my meat-centric approach towards meals. For a long time, I just took it for granted that any meal I ate would have to include meat, in some form: either chicken tacos, or beef chili, or Swiss steak, whatever. Increasingly, I have many more vegetarian meals, and when I do have meat, it tends to be a smaller component in a larger meal, like a stir-fry or pasta with chicken and vegetables. It also helps that I now live on the West Coast and have much better access to a huge variety of fresh and delicious fish. For me, fish used to mean either fish sticks or canned tuna. Now, it means a yellow grouper curry, or a salmon burger, or toro sushi, or simply broiled snapper. Ever since I found the Monterey Bay Aquarium's phenomenal Seafood Watch guide, I've been able to happily and confidently buy and eat all the delicious seafood I want.
My reading continues, and over time I've become more passionate and less militant about food, if that makes sense... I'm learning more about the problems with the way we produce and eat food, but also recognize that there are multiple ways to make things better. The single best food-related book I've read may still be Marion Nestle's "What to Eat" - it came at a great time in my life, and helped stave off the confusion that I would have otherwise come up against if I tried to keep track of what's good and bad for you. Nestle has a wonderful approach which allows you to throw out all of the news-cycle-driven "health" stories that are constantly produced, with a bewildering set of recommendations and reversals, and replaces it with just a few simple, basic principles: "Eat less. Move more. Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. Don't eat too much junk food." Cool! There's lots more that you can learn, but if you just follow that sound (and simple!) advice, it's really hard to mess up your diet.
Michael Pollan takes a similar kind of tack, although he is perhaps a bit more interested in the production of food, where Marion Nestle focuses more on the distribution and consumption. Pollan's alternate mantra is "Eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Just eight words - a winner!
The food-related book I've most recently read, though it's actually a bit older, is Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." This is much less overtly political than Nestle or Pollan, but is quite emotional and heartwarming, while still tapping into some of the same national themes that those other authors work with. Kingsolver has the most up-close view at actual farming of the bunch, and unlike the others, who point to the problems with the current system, Kingsolver shows (and lives) an alternative approach to how we can feed ourselves.
These days, the food information I'm most interested in comes from Nutrition Action Healthletter, a small monthly from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Along with the EFF, I think that the CSPI are some of the good guys in American civic life. They lobby strongly, based on the most solid, proven science, for effective legislation to improve Americans' physical quality of life. They were responsible for putting nutrition labels on food products in the supermarket; they helped push for the US standard for organic food; they led the successful drive to remove trans fats from our food supply; and they continue to be at the forefront of every important food-related issue. Beyond their lobbying, though, I just generally dig them for their common-sense approach to everything. Whenever someone publishes a new nutrition study, every newspaper and magazine in the country will simply reprint whatever the researchers say. Nutrition Action, though, will actually break down the study, help explain whether it was well-done or not; whether it confirms or conflicts with previous studies on the topic; explains how reliable the results are and who they apply to; and gives bottom-line recommendations for how to integrate this new information. More often than not, that ends up meaning ignoring it, and I'm glad that they can cut through the noise and help people stay focused on what's really important. Like Nestle and Pollan, they help drive a consistent message. There's a nearly infinite variety of healthy diets out there, and you shouldn't stress out about whether you're eating the right "miracle foods" or have the hot supplement of the month; instead, just make sure that your plate is mostly full of fruits and vegetables. That's it! You can pick the fruits and vegetables that taste best to you, and you can prepare them in a variety of ways, and you can enjoy sweets and meats as long as you don't go overboard.
I'm so very fortunate to live in California, where it's probably a lot easier to find fresh and tasty fruits and vegetables year-round. I've gradually come to realize that this is one of the big intersections of cooking and food. Cooking is kind of a great equalizer: if you cook well, you can elevate humble ingredients to a strong finish. However, if you're starting out with great ingredients, little or no cooking is required to bring it out. I still do cook a lot of my vegetables - one of the things I've realized as an adult is that, unlike my parents, I dislike the texture of hard vegetables, and a lot of the same foods that I despised as a child, I now enjoy if I cook them until they're soft. (I don't like eating raw celery, even with dips, but will gladly eat celery once it's braised. I don't care for raw carrots, but think that roasted carrots are some of the most delicious sides imaginable, and steamed carrots tossed with a little pepper and thyme aren't far behind.)
I think that there are improvements we can make in our approach to food, both on a micro, personal level and at a macro, societal level. The two levels are linked but distinct, sharing the same ultimate goal of improving quality of life, but the personal level focuses on actions that we can take today, while the political level seeks to improve the playing field. On a personal level, the most important thing we can do is to cook more and to eat socially. Cooking brings us into a relationship with our food, and is a powerful foundation for all the other improvements we can make in our culinary lives. It's impossible to eat healthily if we eat out all the time, and it's nearly impossible to even tell just how unhealthily we're eating, thanks to the gargantuan portions and the difficulty of obtaining good information about the food. When we cook, though, we have control over every aspect of the meal. We can shape it to our own tastes, and we know exactly what we're putting into our bodies.
Cooking at all is great. Even better is to cook primarily with produce. Nothing against a juicy steak, but bringing more plants into the diet makes you feel better, and gives you a better variety of food. For extra credit, cook with food that's in season (it's cheaper and tastes better), grown close to where you live (tastes better and is better for the environment), and organic (healthier for you and better for the environment).
And, just as importantly, enjoy food. It should be shared, it should be savored. Pay attention to what you eat. Pay attention to what you like. Try to develop a vocabulary for the flavors you encounter. Whenever you share a meal with someone else, ask them what they think of it, and see if they can raise anything that you might have missed.
On the social level, we have already made huge strides in the past decade. Books like Fast Food Nation and groups like the CSPI have helped significantly decrease the cannibalism in our cattle; they have led to greater transparency in nutrition information at chain restaurants; they led an absolutely crucial and revolutionary charge in Congress that resulted in the successful passage of the most significant overhaul in our food safety system in the past 80 years, finally giving the FDA the authority and resources to proactively prevent poison in our food supply. Sadly, the Republican party is trying to gut the law, so we'll be playing on the defensive for a while yet, but even if they manage to strip funding from the FDA, the country as a whole will have a far safer food system than we did at the turn of the millennium.
That doesn't mean that the job is over, though. The highest priority should be maintaining the Food Safety Modernization Act. Next to that, in my opinion, is the importance of increasing the availability of healthy, real food. People like me who are lucky to make good incomes and live in fairly upscale neighborhoods have an embarrassment of fresh food supplies available (within roughly a three-block radius of my condo is a Trader Joe's, a Safeway, a butcher shop, a greengrocer, and a small upscale independent grocery). However, many Americans live in "food deserts", which have plenty of McDonalds restaurants but no grocery stores with fresh produce. Kids grow up in these places with horrible nutrition, and as a result we're seeing children growing up into both first-world obesity and third-world malnutrition. Solving this problem will require the cooperation of government, business, and grass-roots social groups. The federal government can help by subsidizing the production of produce (currently most subsidies are directed towards grain crops like corn); state and local government can help by using zoning to encourage development within food deserts, streamlining approval for businesses moving into such areas, and providing tax incentives to the first companies moving in; and local community groups can help clean up the blight that tends to scare away new investment.
Besides this, we can help align our country's actual government policy with our stated aims. For decades now, Congress has acted very schizophrenically, on the one hand deploring the decreasing health of our country, and on the other hand massively supporting the system that has led to that poor health. The prime culprit here is the Farm Bill, which overwhelmingly subsidizes the production of grain crops using unsustainable levels of pesticides and other gunk. That has led to a highly inefficient series of outcomes: we sweeten our drinks with corn, and we turn corn into fuel for our cars (arguably better than burning gasoline, but corn is one of the least efficient alternative fuel sources, and is only chosen because the government has made it cheap). This has also led to the monoculture of our agriculture; Iowa used to grow a huge variety of fruits, vegetables, starches, and animals, but now produces almost nothing but corn, soybeans, and pork. We should put our money where our mouth is: support small-scale mom-and-pop farmers instead of subsidizing ADM and other corporate behemoths; cut down on subsidies for commodity crops and increase subsidies for fruits and vegetables, which will help drive down their price, make them easier to buy and more available, and increase consumption; and reward farmers for farming sustainably and preserving their topsoil, instead of relying on ever-increasing chemical support.
The Farm Bill will probably be coming up for reauthorization in 2012, and in the middle of a huge election, I can see it being very political. We should take that opportunity to align our tax dollars with our goals, instead of putting them at odds with one another.
Until then, though, there's plenty that we can do in our own lives to improve our diet, and vote with our dollars for better food. The market for organic foods and farmer's markets have exploded in the past decade, as a direct result of the increasing demand from regular consumers. Food quality has been one area where the government has followed public opinion, not driven it, and the choices we make today will not only benefit us, but the rest of the country as well.
Showing posts with label blog action day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog action day. Show all posts
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Watering Can
Another year, another Blog Action Day! And hey, this time it isn't about climate change. Yay variety! Instead, it is a slightly related topic: Water.
I never used to think about water much before I moved to California. It was just something that came out of a tap. We would sometimes talk about Lake Michigan water, as opposed to other kinds of water, but that was simply a matter of taste.
I'm now living in a part of the country where it simply doesn't rain for about six months out of the year, and most of our rain occurs during a stretch from December-February. This is a land that has rationed water use in the past, and may need to do so in the future. It's a place where all the grass turns brown during the summer. Water is a major political topic, and an incredibly complex one at that, pitching farmers, environmentalists, suburban homeowners, fishermen, power companies, and residents in the Central Valley all against one another.
The root problem is scarcity. We don't get much rain, we don't have large sources of freshwater, and so we need to manage what we have. During the rainy season, this isn't as big of a problem: local communities can collect rainwater in reservoirs and use that. To keep hydrated throughout the year, though, we rely on the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range on the eastern edge of the state. When spring comes, the snow melts, and flows in giant rivers into the Central Valley. From there... well, that's just the question. Local farmers want to use it to water their crops. Residents in Southern California want to use it to water their lawns. Fishermen want to make sure enough water remains in the river so salmon can swim back upstream to respawn. Environmentalists want to make sure that, while diverting water to other uses, the dams don't kill off endangered species like the delta smelt. San Francisco wants to make sure they get enough water to drink. And on and on.
It's pretty amazing that we can even have this argument. For almost all of human history, water was local. People would move around to follow water: nomads would move on to another oasis when their present one dried up; tribes would move their camps during the wet and dry seasons. With the invention of irrigation (thanks, Civilization!), we could move around water to suit our own needs. Now, a city could be built away from rivers with dangerous flooding, and long rows of ditches would carry water where it needed to go to water crops.
The industrialization of our society made this change even more dramatic. We can use millions of tons of concrete to build gigantic dams, with the ability to completely reverse the flow of a river. We can use locks and canals to bring ships far inland. Gigantic public works projects can create impossible cities, like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, which could not exist without carrying in hundreds of billions of gallons of water each year.
It's tempting to say that we need to stop what we're doing. California is straining at the limits of what it can achieve by shuffling around the limited water it has. Population has boomed, we've already squeezed out almost all the efficiency we can through technology changes like low-flow toilets and showers, and with the specter of climate change looming, it seems likely that we'll have less and less water to work with. People talk about California needing to downsize, to stop messing with nature, to clear out of the places that require engineering to be livable.
I understand the impulse, but I have to disagree. Probably the best example is the Central Valley itself. Without the elaborate system of canals and irrigation created by the Army Corp of Engineers, this would just be a desert. With that infrastructure, though, it's arguably the best agricultural region in the entire world, and provides the lion's share of our nations's vegetables, fruits, and nuts. It's a calculation we have to make: is the investment of water worth the result we get? I think the answer is "Yes".
We need to start getting better at asking that question, and better at picking our answers. We no longer have enough water to meet all of our needs, so we need to prioritize those needs. Is a green lawn nice? Yes. Are salmon nice? Yes. Well, suppose we can't have both. Which should we choose?
There are no easy answers. We can keep working towards future technological solutions like desalination plants and wastewater recycling, but those are incredibly expensive and may not provide a panacea. We need to have honest political discussions about what to do with the water we have. Inevitably, those discussions will become arguments, and politicians will make enemies no matter what they decide. We, as citizens, should hold our leaders accountable: they should act like adults, be truthful about the situation we face, and clearly present the tradeoffs we can make.
I never used to think about water much before I moved to California. It was just something that came out of a tap. We would sometimes talk about Lake Michigan water, as opposed to other kinds of water, but that was simply a matter of taste.
I'm now living in a part of the country where it simply doesn't rain for about six months out of the year, and most of our rain occurs during a stretch from December-February. This is a land that has rationed water use in the past, and may need to do so in the future. It's a place where all the grass turns brown during the summer. Water is a major political topic, and an incredibly complex one at that, pitching farmers, environmentalists, suburban homeowners, fishermen, power companies, and residents in the Central Valley all against one another.
The root problem is scarcity. We don't get much rain, we don't have large sources of freshwater, and so we need to manage what we have. During the rainy season, this isn't as big of a problem: local communities can collect rainwater in reservoirs and use that. To keep hydrated throughout the year, though, we rely on the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range on the eastern edge of the state. When spring comes, the snow melts, and flows in giant rivers into the Central Valley. From there... well, that's just the question. Local farmers want to use it to water their crops. Residents in Southern California want to use it to water their lawns. Fishermen want to make sure enough water remains in the river so salmon can swim back upstream to respawn. Environmentalists want to make sure that, while diverting water to other uses, the dams don't kill off endangered species like the delta smelt. San Francisco wants to make sure they get enough water to drink. And on and on.
It's pretty amazing that we can even have this argument. For almost all of human history, water was local. People would move around to follow water: nomads would move on to another oasis when their present one dried up; tribes would move their camps during the wet and dry seasons. With the invention of irrigation (thanks, Civilization!), we could move around water to suit our own needs. Now, a city could be built away from rivers with dangerous flooding, and long rows of ditches would carry water where it needed to go to water crops.
The industrialization of our society made this change even more dramatic. We can use millions of tons of concrete to build gigantic dams, with the ability to completely reverse the flow of a river. We can use locks and canals to bring ships far inland. Gigantic public works projects can create impossible cities, like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, which could not exist without carrying in hundreds of billions of gallons of water each year.
It's tempting to say that we need to stop what we're doing. California is straining at the limits of what it can achieve by shuffling around the limited water it has. Population has boomed, we've already squeezed out almost all the efficiency we can through technology changes like low-flow toilets and showers, and with the specter of climate change looming, it seems likely that we'll have less and less water to work with. People talk about California needing to downsize, to stop messing with nature, to clear out of the places that require engineering to be livable.
I understand the impulse, but I have to disagree. Probably the best example is the Central Valley itself. Without the elaborate system of canals and irrigation created by the Army Corp of Engineers, this would just be a desert. With that infrastructure, though, it's arguably the best agricultural region in the entire world, and provides the lion's share of our nations's vegetables, fruits, and nuts. It's a calculation we have to make: is the investment of water worth the result we get? I think the answer is "Yes".
We need to start getting better at asking that question, and better at picking our answers. We no longer have enough water to meet all of our needs, so we need to prioritize those needs. Is a green lawn nice? Yes. Are salmon nice? Yes. Well, suppose we can't have both. Which should we choose?
There are no easy answers. We can keep working towards future technological solutions like desalination plants and wastewater recycling, but those are incredibly expensive and may not provide a panacea. We need to have honest political discussions about what to do with the water we have. Inevitably, those discussions will become arguments, and politicians will make enemies no matter what they decide. We, as citizens, should hold our leaders accountable: they should act like adults, be truthful about the situation we face, and clearly present the tradeoffs we can make.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
We are here to save the Erf! E-R-F!
Another year, another Blog Action Day, another topic that I feel unqualified to write about that I will nonetheless spend a post discussing!
This year there was a new wrinkle: the folks behind BAD offered a vote to choose the topic. Previous participants could cast their ballot and guide the conversation. There was some seriously organized lobbying behind it, including a passionate push for the topic of human rights. In the end, climate change won, so that's why if you poke around the blogosphere today you'll see so many posts on the topic.
I believe that climate change poses the largest existential risk to humanity outside of rogue nuclear weapons. I also find the topic incredibly boring. I'm not sure how I can reconcile those two attitudes.
Like most people, I rely on the research performed by scientists to make sense of the issue. Based on what I've read, it seems obvious that our actions are modifying our atmosphere. This is nothing new, of course... residents of Dickensian London went striding through pea-soup fog brought about by nascent industrialization. In my own lifetime rock formations around the world were decimated by acid rain caused by sulfuric compounds pumped into the air by factories, and Antarctica's ice began melting due to the damage fluorocarbons from consumer products were doing to our ozone layer.
When people talk about "climate change" these days, they're referring to a much vaster phenomenon: the amazing mass of volume that we're transferring from our soil into the air. The term "climate change" has replaced the earlier buzzphrase "global warming" to reflect the fact that the effects will be varied, leaving no part of the planet unaffected but affecting each in different ways. Africa, already parched, will be desiccated. Meanwhile, the melting of the Greenland ice shelf will likely freeze the Atlantic gulf stream, sending Europe back to the Ice Age. Siberian tundra will be replaced with Siberian swamp. North America actually will come out better than most, but that isn't saying much... many of our animal species will die out, and far more of our plants, which can't migrate nearly as quickly. Locally, at least 2 of the 3 airports will be under water, as well as all of Foster City, much of Milpitas, Alameda, and large chunks of San Francisco, Oakland, and many more.
And yet - again, I just can't get too worked up about it. I'm way more passionate about far more limited issues, like government surveillance of law-abiding citizens, copyright reform, patent reform, our transportation infrastructure, and so on. I can't rationally argue that these things are more important than addressing the carbon problem, but I never tire of talking about them, while I rarely have the patience to even finish newspaper articles on climate change.
My theory? My priorities are wrong. Or, more charitably, I don't feel like I have much useful to contribute to the climate change debate. (As opposed to climate change itself - more on that later.) It seems like all the information is out there, people are getting the message, and politicians are slowly coming around to the need to act. If I join the debate, I'm joining a chorus - all well and good, but I find it more rewarding to dig into issues that may not be as widely appreciated or understood outside the nerdy circles I frequent.
Of course, everything is connected. Ever since moving to California I have become mildly obsessed with the water problems that this region (and, generally, America west of the Rockies) faces. There's a lot that we can and should do to address these problems, but you know what? In the long run, none of that will matter if we can't slow the course of surface warming. Similarly, while I've long been a passionate believer in the need to move from an auto-based economy to a more sustainable one. I've had many reasons for this - greater national independence from foreign dictators with oil reserves, a need to preserve the scarce resources available on this planet, the healthier lifestyle that comes with more walking and biking, more attractive urban layout, etc. The climate change issue adds some really powerful arrows to this particular quiver.
While I hardly ever talk about climate change, I try to be a good liberal and do what I can. To be fair, I probably would do most of these things even if it wasn't for the threat of drowning San Francisco or killing penguins. Most of these are great ideas anyways as they save money, improve lifestyles, or more.
Sooooo, uh, that's what I think about climate change. It's bad, but we know what needs to be done to fix it. Just as we eliminated fluorocarbons and sulfurs to fix earlier environmental crises brought on by our industrial age, so we need to severely limit the amount of carbon to solve this crisis. I'm hopeful that Richard Branson or microbiologists can come up with a technological solution to this problem, but I'm not willing to bet the planet on that. We should hope for the best while preparing for the worst, and start taking action now to make sure this planet is in good shape for our descendants.
This year there was a new wrinkle: the folks behind BAD offered a vote to choose the topic. Previous participants could cast their ballot and guide the conversation. There was some seriously organized lobbying behind it, including a passionate push for the topic of human rights. In the end, climate change won, so that's why if you poke around the blogosphere today you'll see so many posts on the topic.
I believe that climate change poses the largest existential risk to humanity outside of rogue nuclear weapons. I also find the topic incredibly boring. I'm not sure how I can reconcile those two attitudes.
Like most people, I rely on the research performed by scientists to make sense of the issue. Based on what I've read, it seems obvious that our actions are modifying our atmosphere. This is nothing new, of course... residents of Dickensian London went striding through pea-soup fog brought about by nascent industrialization. In my own lifetime rock formations around the world were decimated by acid rain caused by sulfuric compounds pumped into the air by factories, and Antarctica's ice began melting due to the damage fluorocarbons from consumer products were doing to our ozone layer.
When people talk about "climate change" these days, they're referring to a much vaster phenomenon: the amazing mass of volume that we're transferring from our soil into the air. The term "climate change" has replaced the earlier buzzphrase "global warming" to reflect the fact that the effects will be varied, leaving no part of the planet unaffected but affecting each in different ways. Africa, already parched, will be desiccated. Meanwhile, the melting of the Greenland ice shelf will likely freeze the Atlantic gulf stream, sending Europe back to the Ice Age. Siberian tundra will be replaced with Siberian swamp. North America actually will come out better than most, but that isn't saying much... many of our animal species will die out, and far more of our plants, which can't migrate nearly as quickly. Locally, at least 2 of the 3 airports will be under water, as well as all of Foster City, much of Milpitas, Alameda, and large chunks of San Francisco, Oakland, and many more.
And yet - again, I just can't get too worked up about it. I'm way more passionate about far more limited issues, like government surveillance of law-abiding citizens, copyright reform, patent reform, our transportation infrastructure, and so on. I can't rationally argue that these things are more important than addressing the carbon problem, but I never tire of talking about them, while I rarely have the patience to even finish newspaper articles on climate change.
My theory? My priorities are wrong. Or, more charitably, I don't feel like I have much useful to contribute to the climate change debate. (As opposed to climate change itself - more on that later.) It seems like all the information is out there, people are getting the message, and politicians are slowly coming around to the need to act. If I join the debate, I'm joining a chorus - all well and good, but I find it more rewarding to dig into issues that may not be as widely appreciated or understood outside the nerdy circles I frequent.
Of course, everything is connected. Ever since moving to California I have become mildly obsessed with the water problems that this region (and, generally, America west of the Rockies) faces. There's a lot that we can and should do to address these problems, but you know what? In the long run, none of that will matter if we can't slow the course of surface warming. Similarly, while I've long been a passionate believer in the need to move from an auto-based economy to a more sustainable one. I've had many reasons for this - greater national independence from foreign dictators with oil reserves, a need to preserve the scarce resources available on this planet, the healthier lifestyle that comes with more walking and biking, more attractive urban layout, etc. The climate change issue adds some really powerful arrows to this particular quiver.
While I hardly ever talk about climate change, I try to be a good liberal and do what I can. To be fair, I probably would do most of these things even if it wasn't for the threat of drowning San Francisco or killing penguins. Most of these are great ideas anyways as they save money, improve lifestyles, or more.
- Transit. I'm fortunate to live in a part of the country with good mass transit and fairly bike-friendly cities. I used to put about 12,000 miles a year on my car; now, I put on about 3,000 per year. This saves me a ton of money - I can cut way back on car maintenance, mainly just doing an oil change twice a year; I barely felt the enormous gas price spikes in late 2008 because I fill up less than once a month; and I even got State Farm to reduce my insurance price because of how little I drive. I also feel better physically than I ever have before, thanks in part to the walking and biking that are built into my lifestyle now. AND I'm happier and more productive; instead of the stresses of traffic, I can read novels and write blog posts while the nice train engineer drives for me. (In all fairness: according to what I've read, any carbon savings I make in cutting back on car use are totally blown out of the water by the two airplane vacations I make each year to Chicago for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sigh. Well, maybe one day we'll have a bullet train that will get me there in a reasonable amount of time. Or maybe teleportation devices! That would rule.)
- Energy use. I learned good habits growing up from my parents. I turn off the lights when I leave the room, I close the refrigerator door when I'm not using it, I strategically open and close the blinds and windows depending on the temperature inside and what the sun's doing. These add up to a manageable electric bill. Again, I'm lucky to live in a part of the country with temperate climate, but still, I'm usually able to keep my bill to around $20 a month in the summer and around $30 in the winter. Lately I've gotten better about unplugging appliances when I'm not using them, and I'm already seeing those benefits as well.
- Food. Rather than driving in an air-conditioned SUV to purchase a paper-wrapped meal made from processed beef raised on gigantic feedlots and flavored with chemicals manufactured in New Jersey, I make virtually every breakfast and dinner in my own kitchen, generally from food purchased from small local farmers. (Midgets!) I had some false starts early on, but it's always been fun, and now it doesn't take any longer than it would to go out for food. As a bonus, it tastes great, I know exactly what I'm eating, and I'm in control of servings so I can eat exactly what I want and not waste any leftovers or feel compelled to keep eating. (Disclaimer: I haven't done the math on this one yet; I know the raw ingredients are more carbon-friendly, but it's entirely possible that the energy I spend by operating a burner or the oven is greater than my proportional share of the energy required to create 10000 fast food hamburgers. If you were to walk to your fast food place, you MIGHT be more planet-friendly than cooking for yourself. But you'd be missing out... there are plenty of good reasons to cook, and unlike most other items, this is something that humanity has been doing for thousands of years.)
- Politics. While individuals can make an impact, this is a global issue and it will require global solutions. The talk about carbon credits is good; I think a carbon tax would be far better. I doubt we'll get one, but I'll support a politician who's willing to try. Ultimately, though, even a carbon tax won't be enough unless we can convince China, India, and all other countries to limit their emissions as well. This will be the big challenge of our generation, and we'll need to elect strong, diplomatic, intelligent leaders who can pursue those negotiations with aggression and tact. I'm nowhere near being a single-issue voter on this topic, but it's something I try to keep in mind when I'm considering candidates at the national or (because I live in this crazy wonderful messed-up wreck of an experiment) state level.
Sooooo, uh, that's what I think about climate change. It's bad, but we know what needs to be done to fix it. Just as we eliminated fluorocarbons and sulfurs to fix earlier environmental crises brought on by our industrial age, so we need to severely limit the amount of carbon to solve this crisis. I'm hopeful that Richard Branson or microbiologists can come up with a technological solution to this problem, but I'm not willing to bet the planet on that. We should hope for the best while preparing for the worst, and start taking action now to make sure this planet is in good shape for our descendants.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
BAD Poverty
Wow - for the second year in a row, I'm writing a Blog Action Day topic that I feel tremendously unqualified to discuss: poverty.
BAD (oooh, I love the acronym!) encourages people to incorporate the topic into their blog's normal focus - so a political blog would focus on candidates' positions on poverty, a tech blog might look at engineering that can help alleviate suffering, etc. This is a case where my extreme lack of blog focus really hurts. My posts seem to be both to scattered and both too specific to really adapt well to a topic. I mean, what am I going to do - blog about digitized poverty in classic Sierra games, the Civilization franchise, and post-modern fiction?
I think I'll fall back on a rambling autobiographical musing. Please stop reading this post now and save yourself.
I feel extremely fortunate to have grown up in a middle-class family. We weren't rich, but there wasn't a day in my life that I felt hungry, or needed to worry about where I would be sleeping that night, or whether I would have enough clothing to wear. The older I've grown and the more I learn about suffering in the US and the world, the more amazed I grow at the blessed life I lead.
I'm not sure at what time I first learned that there were truly poor people in this world. It may have been in Sunday school when we learned about Jesus's ministry. I do remember the first time that the idea of poverty made me feel bad, though. There was a song called "One Meatball" that is about someone - perhaps a hobo? my memory is vague - walks into a restaurant. He doesn't have a lot of money, so he tries to buy a single meatball. The waitress laughs at him. That just made me feel awful. The combination of things, really - the idea of someone not being able to have both spaghetti AND meatballs is kind of sad, but this song also revealed the world of mockery and cruelty that accompanies dire economic straits. When someone is truly poor, people who have means seem far more likely to treat them as a target of ridicule, or pity, or anger - although they wouldn't consciously think so, the homeless man or bag lady becomes almost sub-human in their eyes, and they no longer treat them with the same respect that they would show to their neighbors.
My first up-close look at poverty came in seventh grade, when I took a trip with the Berean Junior High Youth Group to Chicago. I'll be honest: some of my strongest memories from this outing are primarily social, like when we sang songs on the El or ate at an Egyptian restaurant. But I also remember walking through Cabrini-Green and painting apartments; driving down city streets and staring out the van windows at people shambling by; hearing from former gang members about what their lives had been like. I think that one of the best things that our leaders did was take us to the Water Tower Place immediately after one of our clean-up projects. For those of you who aren't familiar with Chicago, this is a very swanky, upscale shopping center. And here we were, wandering around in our dirty clothes. Frankly, we teenaged boys weren't that put out by it, but the underlying message was clear: even though this country doesn't have laws controlling where people can live and shop, our social mores and economic structures enforce a de facto segregation of rich from poor. Most poor people would not be at all comfortable walking through that snobby place, any more than a wealthy stock trader would want to walk through the Tenderloin. And while the Chicago trips were real eye-openers for me, I was always aware of their limitations. I still had not really FELT what poverty was like. Even though I had finally seen it up close, it was still somehow unreal, part of another world. I knew that in another two days I would ride back to the Twin Cities and resume my comfortable suburban existence. I was painfully aware that the trips were much more about trying to shake me out of my isolated mindset more than they were about me "saving" the poor of Chicago by giving them a horrible paint job.
I think I did two Chicago trips with Berean, and then another one or two with College Church after we moved. Weirdly enough, I think these trips did a lot to cement my love of and desire for urban life. Despite my sense of separation from the people I saw, Chicago seemed more "real" to me than my suburban existence. It had the true extremes of human life: extreme beauty and extreme ugliness, wealth and poverty, faith and scorn. The African-American churches we attended also seemed incredibly vibrant and immediate... I was never seriously tempted to go Pentecostal, but could certainly see the attraction. After having seen the extremes in Chicago, it seemed somehow improper to retreat to my comfortable life, ignoring the reality of poverty.
Now, I can pretty much guarantee that if and when my parents read this post, they will already be thinking about a notorious statement I made as a youngster. My comfortable upbringing did not mean a lot of disposable income, and when I reached the age that I wanted to buy things, I grew frustrated at my limited means. When I had my eye on, say, a computer game, I would save and save for months - but, because I bought presents out of my allowance, I was regularly tapping it for five birthdays for April through August, then again for November and Christmas presents for everyone in December. I was probably paying more attention to my income and outflow than most kids my age, and didn't like what I saw. In a fit of pique, I tried to describe my frustration to my parents, explaining that I felt like I was "trapped in a cycle of poverty."
Needless to say, I STILL hear about this twenty years later.
This is one of those cases where I really wish I had clearer memories about what was going on. Was I asking for a raise in my allowance? My guess would be yes, though I might have just been venting. What specifically was I hoping to buy? Did I ever threaten to cut down on gift-giving?
Still, I think that exchange captures a lot about my personal attitude towards money. Because I've never lived on the edge, I don't have the appropriate degree of fear towards losing everything; at worst, I feel an annoyance at not having everything I want. Early on I told myself that I didn't want to be rich, didn't want to become a millionaire. All I wanted was to feel comfortable: to not need to keep an eagle eye on every little purchase I made, to provide for myself and any family I might have. I decided that worrying about the big things would be okay - cars and a house - but that if I could ever reach the point where "little" stuff didn't cause me stress, then that would be enough.
And you know what? I've made it. Through very little virtue of my own - I owe so much of my present good position to my parents, my teachers in school, my friends and university, and of course all the companies I've worked for over the years. But there was a certain point a few years after graduation when I sort of stopped, looked around at my life, and thought, "This is good. I am content. From here on out, everything is pleasantly superfluous."
Now, of course, I have a new worry to contend with: keeping an eye on the little green monster. Mammon is a powerful force, and however little or much you have, the temptation is always there to get more. I would love to see a survey asking people how much money they think they would need to be happy, plotted against their current income. I don't think there's any point along that scale where most people would say that they have enough.
I think this point is perfectly illustrated in this recent Dinosaur Comic. I'm not sure how exactly to put it - if our relationship with money gets more "complicated" as we get older, or if it's just greed, or what, but it does feel like there is increasing pressure to equate material wealth with personal worth. Even if we won't always directly say it, most people assume that it is better to have more. I do love the phrase "LifePoints". It reminds me of an incident involving the character Silk from David Eddings "Belgariad" (part of a long line of books I loved as a child that proved, upon later examination, to be embarrassingly bad). Silk was a thief in the D&D mold, who loved stealing stuff when he wasn't using his dexterity to help out the party; his larcenous attitude concealed a fundamental decency and adventurous virtue. (Lawful Good!) Anyways, throughout the series he steals more and more gold, gems, etc. At one point the party needs to dump everything and flee. With a sigh, Silk tosses his ill-gotten gains aside. Garion commiserates with him. Silk replies with something like, "Oh, the money isn't important. It's the game that I love. Money is just a way of keeping score." I'm not sure that I'd like to adopt that as my own life philosophy - it's a bit depressing to think that our primary purpose should be the accumulation of goods - but I do admire the idea of someone being able to discard all (or most) of their gains when the time is right.
For me, the key is keeping perspective and counting my blessings. The more I look at the wealthy millionaires in Silicon Valley who joined Google in 2001, the more dissatisfied I become. The more I look at how most of the world lives, and the suffering of people close to home, the more satisfied I become. With that personal satisfaction comes, or should come, a sense of obligation. Like I said before, I can't give myself all or even the most credit for how things have turned out for me. It seems only fair that other people should have the same sort of chances and support that helped me reach the place where I am today.
BAD (oooh, I love the acronym!) encourages people to incorporate the topic into their blog's normal focus - so a political blog would focus on candidates' positions on poverty, a tech blog might look at engineering that can help alleviate suffering, etc. This is a case where my extreme lack of blog focus really hurts. My posts seem to be both to scattered and both too specific to really adapt well to a topic. I mean, what am I going to do - blog about digitized poverty in classic Sierra games, the Civilization franchise, and post-modern fiction?
I think I'll fall back on a rambling autobiographical musing. Please stop reading this post now and save yourself.
I feel extremely fortunate to have grown up in a middle-class family. We weren't rich, but there wasn't a day in my life that I felt hungry, or needed to worry about where I would be sleeping that night, or whether I would have enough clothing to wear. The older I've grown and the more I learn about suffering in the US and the world, the more amazed I grow at the blessed life I lead.
I'm not sure at what time I first learned that there were truly poor people in this world. It may have been in Sunday school when we learned about Jesus's ministry. I do remember the first time that the idea of poverty made me feel bad, though. There was a song called "One Meatball" that is about someone - perhaps a hobo? my memory is vague - walks into a restaurant. He doesn't have a lot of money, so he tries to buy a single meatball. The waitress laughs at him. That just made me feel awful. The combination of things, really - the idea of someone not being able to have both spaghetti AND meatballs is kind of sad, but this song also revealed the world of mockery and cruelty that accompanies dire economic straits. When someone is truly poor, people who have means seem far more likely to treat them as a target of ridicule, or pity, or anger - although they wouldn't consciously think so, the homeless man or bag lady becomes almost sub-human in their eyes, and they no longer treat them with the same respect that they would show to their neighbors.
My first up-close look at poverty came in seventh grade, when I took a trip with the Berean Junior High Youth Group to Chicago. I'll be honest: some of my strongest memories from this outing are primarily social, like when we sang songs on the El or ate at an Egyptian restaurant. But I also remember walking through Cabrini-Green and painting apartments; driving down city streets and staring out the van windows at people shambling by; hearing from former gang members about what their lives had been like. I think that one of the best things that our leaders did was take us to the Water Tower Place immediately after one of our clean-up projects. For those of you who aren't familiar with Chicago, this is a very swanky, upscale shopping center. And here we were, wandering around in our dirty clothes. Frankly, we teenaged boys weren't that put out by it, but the underlying message was clear: even though this country doesn't have laws controlling where people can live and shop, our social mores and economic structures enforce a de facto segregation of rich from poor. Most poor people would not be at all comfortable walking through that snobby place, any more than a wealthy stock trader would want to walk through the Tenderloin. And while the Chicago trips were real eye-openers for me, I was always aware of their limitations. I still had not really FELT what poverty was like. Even though I had finally seen it up close, it was still somehow unreal, part of another world. I knew that in another two days I would ride back to the Twin Cities and resume my comfortable suburban existence. I was painfully aware that the trips were much more about trying to shake me out of my isolated mindset more than they were about me "saving" the poor of Chicago by giving them a horrible paint job.
I think I did two Chicago trips with Berean, and then another one or two with College Church after we moved. Weirdly enough, I think these trips did a lot to cement my love of and desire for urban life. Despite my sense of separation from the people I saw, Chicago seemed more "real" to me than my suburban existence. It had the true extremes of human life: extreme beauty and extreme ugliness, wealth and poverty, faith and scorn. The African-American churches we attended also seemed incredibly vibrant and immediate... I was never seriously tempted to go Pentecostal, but could certainly see the attraction. After having seen the extremes in Chicago, it seemed somehow improper to retreat to my comfortable life, ignoring the reality of poverty.
Now, I can pretty much guarantee that if and when my parents read this post, they will already be thinking about a notorious statement I made as a youngster. My comfortable upbringing did not mean a lot of disposable income, and when I reached the age that I wanted to buy things, I grew frustrated at my limited means. When I had my eye on, say, a computer game, I would save and save for months - but, because I bought presents out of my allowance, I was regularly tapping it for five birthdays for April through August, then again for November and Christmas presents for everyone in December. I was probably paying more attention to my income and outflow than most kids my age, and didn't like what I saw. In a fit of pique, I tried to describe my frustration to my parents, explaining that I felt like I was "trapped in a cycle of poverty."
Needless to say, I STILL hear about this twenty years later.
This is one of those cases where I really wish I had clearer memories about what was going on. Was I asking for a raise in my allowance? My guess would be yes, though I might have just been venting. What specifically was I hoping to buy? Did I ever threaten to cut down on gift-giving?
Still, I think that exchange captures a lot about my personal attitude towards money. Because I've never lived on the edge, I don't have the appropriate degree of fear towards losing everything; at worst, I feel an annoyance at not having everything I want. Early on I told myself that I didn't want to be rich, didn't want to become a millionaire. All I wanted was to feel comfortable: to not need to keep an eagle eye on every little purchase I made, to provide for myself and any family I might have. I decided that worrying about the big things would be okay - cars and a house - but that if I could ever reach the point where "little" stuff didn't cause me stress, then that would be enough.
And you know what? I've made it. Through very little virtue of my own - I owe so much of my present good position to my parents, my teachers in school, my friends and university, and of course all the companies I've worked for over the years. But there was a certain point a few years after graduation when I sort of stopped, looked around at my life, and thought, "This is good. I am content. From here on out, everything is pleasantly superfluous."
Now, of course, I have a new worry to contend with: keeping an eye on the little green monster. Mammon is a powerful force, and however little or much you have, the temptation is always there to get more. I would love to see a survey asking people how much money they think they would need to be happy, plotted against their current income. I don't think there's any point along that scale where most people would say that they have enough.
I think this point is perfectly illustrated in this recent Dinosaur Comic. I'm not sure how exactly to put it - if our relationship with money gets more "complicated" as we get older, or if it's just greed, or what, but it does feel like there is increasing pressure to equate material wealth with personal worth. Even if we won't always directly say it, most people assume that it is better to have more. I do love the phrase "LifePoints". It reminds me of an incident involving the character Silk from David Eddings "Belgariad" (part of a long line of books I loved as a child that proved, upon later examination, to be embarrassingly bad). Silk was a thief in the D&D mold, who loved stealing stuff when he wasn't using his dexterity to help out the party; his larcenous attitude concealed a fundamental decency and adventurous virtue. (Lawful Good!) Anyways, throughout the series he steals more and more gold, gems, etc. At one point the party needs to dump everything and flee. With a sigh, Silk tosses his ill-gotten gains aside. Garion commiserates with him. Silk replies with something like, "Oh, the money isn't important. It's the game that I love. Money is just a way of keeping score." I'm not sure that I'd like to adopt that as my own life philosophy - it's a bit depressing to think that our primary purpose should be the accumulation of goods - but I do admire the idea of someone being able to discard all (or most) of their gains when the time is right.
For me, the key is keeping perspective and counting my blessings. The more I look at the wealthy millionaires in Silicon Valley who joined Google in 2001, the more dissatisfied I become. The more I look at how most of the world lives, and the suffering of people close to home, the more satisfied I become. With that personal satisfaction comes, or should come, a sense of obligation. Like I said before, I can't give myself all or even the most credit for how things have turned out for me. It seems only fair that other people should have the same sort of chances and support that helped me reach the place where I am today.
Monday, October 15, 2007
BLAD
So I just found out (courtesy the Google Blog) that today is Blog Action Day. I immediately flashed back to 1996, the day that the Internet went dark, and reasoned that this must be some sort of similar, social activism thing. Sort of... unlike the previous mass movement, this is using technology in one medium (the Internet) to draw attention to an issue in another area (the environment). There really aren't any rules - anyone can post about anything - so I figured, why not? I'll warn you ahead of time that I'm not coming into this post with any real thesis, so be prepared for a fuzzy and very possibly pointless post.
I'll be honest with you: the environment tends to land really low on my personal list of political priorities, below issues such as censorship, civil liberties and social justice. In my personal life, it's something that I try to be sensitive to when it's convenient... I'm really good about recycling (fortunately, San Jose goes out of its way to make this easy for me), I use very little energy and gasoline (these are arguably byproducts of my tendency to be cheap), and I buy local, organic food. Still, I just don't spend much time thinking about it. I don't get teary about the rainforests, I can't get worked up about China's coal industry, and I'm more interested in the science of fuel cells than their impact on emissions.
That said, I recognize that my life today is far better than it would have been if we hadn't had an environmental movement. As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I benefit greatly from the foresight and hard work of my predecessors. A while ago I saw a side-by-side photo contrasting the view from downtown San Jose in 1976 with that of 2006. Those thirty years made an incredible difference: in the 1970's, you couldn't even see the mountains, and the landscape faded away into a sickly haze. These days, though, you can see for miles and miles around, and I can attest that from the mountains in the South Bay you can see all the way up to San Francisco, or even east to the Sierra Nevadas on a clear day.
So why was there a change? It was the result of political will, individual sacrifice, hard work, and much enforcement and expense. At a national level, we removed leaded fuels from our cars and started installing catalytic converters. California, which is hurt by smog more than most areas due to its large populations in confined valleys, went even further. They demanded even higher standards of fuel efficiency from autos, required a special blend of clean-burning gasoline be sold during the smog-intense summer months, and most radically of all, require every vehicle in the state to receive a smog certification every two years before a license will be issued or renewed. Why go to all this expense and effort? Everything is done for the specific purpose of eliminating smog from our air, and that means tracking down the so-called "Gross Polluters" - the 10% of vehicles that produce over 50% of the smog in our state.
As you can imagine, there has been plenty of grumbling about all this. Some are upset at the expense, others at the inconvenience, still others at the idea of living in a nanny state. It has produced a specific and valuable benefit, though. I can see the mountains, I can deeply breathe the fresh air, I can spend hours cycling or hiking without getting short of breath, and I don't cringe when it rains. This past year, the Bay Area had only a single day when it exceeded the federal clean air guidelines. That value goes up and down from year to year, but the past decade has been quite good compared to the pre-environmental-activism era.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that these problems aren't intractable. Global warming is a huge issue, and one that could potentially have catastrophic long-term effects on our way of life, but that does not mean it is hopeless. We've seen in the past that by carefully passing laws, examining the science and sociology of human behavior, incenting different behaviors, and enforcing standards, we can deal with changes in our environment, and even roll back the clock and undo some of the damage we've done.
I'm not saying that this will be an easy thing to do. We've been dumping carbon into the air since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and we won't be able to change our societies overnight, nor turn some magic spigot and drain all the offending gases from our atmosphere. But I think this is a solvable problem, and we won't know how hard it will be until we start trying to do something about it.
For myself, I'll continue doing the little things in my own life to act as a better global citizen, and will listen with interest to any big ideas about how we can best deal with this situation. It may be a technologically-driven change; I'm intrigued by Richard Branson's challenge, and encouraged by some work being done here in Silicon Valley to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. It may be a politically-driven change; greater regulation of industry and better support of mass transit could have a big, positive impact on the environment and our nation. My feeling is that it will be some combination, with technology pointing us towards a less painful solution and laws encouraging people to take advantage of it. We'll see what happens. There will probably be bumps ahead, but a century from now, we'll be glad we started when we did.
I'll be honest with you: the environment tends to land really low on my personal list of political priorities, below issues such as censorship, civil liberties and social justice. In my personal life, it's something that I try to be sensitive to when it's convenient... I'm really good about recycling (fortunately, San Jose goes out of its way to make this easy for me), I use very little energy and gasoline (these are arguably byproducts of my tendency to be cheap), and I buy local, organic food. Still, I just don't spend much time thinking about it. I don't get teary about the rainforests, I can't get worked up about China's coal industry, and I'm more interested in the science of fuel cells than their impact on emissions.
That said, I recognize that my life today is far better than it would have been if we hadn't had an environmental movement. As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I benefit greatly from the foresight and hard work of my predecessors. A while ago I saw a side-by-side photo contrasting the view from downtown San Jose in 1976 with that of 2006. Those thirty years made an incredible difference: in the 1970's, you couldn't even see the mountains, and the landscape faded away into a sickly haze. These days, though, you can see for miles and miles around, and I can attest that from the mountains in the South Bay you can see all the way up to San Francisco, or even east to the Sierra Nevadas on a clear day.
So why was there a change? It was the result of political will, individual sacrifice, hard work, and much enforcement and expense. At a national level, we removed leaded fuels from our cars and started installing catalytic converters. California, which is hurt by smog more than most areas due to its large populations in confined valleys, went even further. They demanded even higher standards of fuel efficiency from autos, required a special blend of clean-burning gasoline be sold during the smog-intense summer months, and most radically of all, require every vehicle in the state to receive a smog certification every two years before a license will be issued or renewed. Why go to all this expense and effort? Everything is done for the specific purpose of eliminating smog from our air, and that means tracking down the so-called "Gross Polluters" - the 10% of vehicles that produce over 50% of the smog in our state.
As you can imagine, there has been plenty of grumbling about all this. Some are upset at the expense, others at the inconvenience, still others at the idea of living in a nanny state. It has produced a specific and valuable benefit, though. I can see the mountains, I can deeply breathe the fresh air, I can spend hours cycling or hiking without getting short of breath, and I don't cringe when it rains. This past year, the Bay Area had only a single day when it exceeded the federal clean air guidelines. That value goes up and down from year to year, but the past decade has been quite good compared to the pre-environmental-activism era.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that these problems aren't intractable. Global warming is a huge issue, and one that could potentially have catastrophic long-term effects on our way of life, but that does not mean it is hopeless. We've seen in the past that by carefully passing laws, examining the science and sociology of human behavior, incenting different behaviors, and enforcing standards, we can deal with changes in our environment, and even roll back the clock and undo some of the damage we've done.
I'm not saying that this will be an easy thing to do. We've been dumping carbon into the air since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and we won't be able to change our societies overnight, nor turn some magic spigot and drain all the offending gases from our atmosphere. But I think this is a solvable problem, and we won't know how hard it will be until we start trying to do something about it.
For myself, I'll continue doing the little things in my own life to act as a better global citizen, and will listen with interest to any big ideas about how we can best deal with this situation. It may be a technologically-driven change; I'm intrigued by Richard Branson's challenge, and encouraged by some work being done here in Silicon Valley to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. It may be a politically-driven change; greater regulation of industry and better support of mass transit could have a big, positive impact on the environment and our nation. My feeling is that it will be some combination, with technology pointing us towards a less painful solution and laws encouraging people to take advantage of it. We'll see what happens. There will probably be bumps ahead, but a century from now, we'll be glad we started when we did.
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