A Bookseller Reads a Magazine

[Images unrelated to today's text]

Part I. A Dark Vision!

I’d slipped a slim, aged paperback into my bag before leaving the bookstore that day, but once home a magazine on the table caught my eye. Amazingly — because while I do read a magazine from time to time, it’s as likely to be two or three years old as the book in my bag is to have been published in some long-ago decade — this issue of The Atlantic was current, and the cover story, “What Jeff Bezos Wants,” dark matter with an insulting, impersonal gravity, pulled me into its force field.

Be it here recognized by all my half-dozen readers that when it comes to online shopping, RESIST! is my middle name. That the online behemoth cannot count my household among its far-flung dominion of eager, satisfied vassals. That unsolicited e-mails from the behemoth’s robots are not simply transferred to the very ordinary virtual wastebasket labeled TRASH in my mail program but summarily relegated to the JUNK! file. 

Such is my storm-battered position on a shrinking island which I hold and defend with my very life. Thank heaven the Artist is right there with me! We have chosen to live in the slow lane.

But now I read on. Does anything in the article surprise me? Statistics of the corporation’s market share, internal memos and “Leadership Principles,” punishment of sellers who do not bow to its will, the fact that it pays no federal tax? Infuriating but not either unknown or unsuspected. Thinking of the Pentagon storing all its files in the behemoth’s cloud is alarming in a surreal, nightmarish, downright dystopian way but hardly astonishing. 

For me, though, writer Franklin Foer hits pay dirt when he reveals the ultimate Bezos goal, which is nothing less than the colonization of outer space, made necessary by the ruin and despoliation of earth, that ruin hastened by the glorious, unbounded consumerism encouraged by none other than the behemoth itself. Because, as we all know, earth and its resources are not boundless. Bezos, no fool, recognizes the fact. And so world domination is for him only an intermediate challenge.

Oh, on and on it goes, but read it for yourself: The Atlantic, November 2019, Vol. 324, no. 5, the Tech Issue. Or here it is in paperless form. 

And if steam isn’t coming out of your ears yet, take a look at what this kind of retail does to communities. Yep, huge tax abatements — huge community investments in infrastructure — thousands of tractor trailers a day — roads the towns can’t afford to maintain — millions of dollars of community debt — temp jobs with no security or benefits — until robots replace even the human temp workers. Ask yourself: Do you want to invest in this kind of future? Because our choices will decide the planet's future.

Intermission

That long magazine article brought painful thoughts and memories to mind, but we were meeting friends in town for dinner, so retreating into gloom was not an option. And as we drove through the darkness, my mental clouds lifted. We’re alive. We’re together. We’re here now. Which served as a reminder that everything is temporary and all lives mortal. 

Part II. A Lighter Side

Back home again, later that same evening, I picked up the magazine again and turned to a different article, this time an interview/sketch with and about children’s book author Sandra Boynton, “The Bard of Bedtime.” I’d vaguely heard of Sandra Boynton before but had never focused on her work. Now, however, I learn that she was a student of Maurice Sendak, and I am intrigued. Says the writer of the article, “Boynton’s books oscillate between orders and disarray, wisdom and nonsense.” Boynton addresses her youngest pre-reader children with respect and is not afraid to use a word like “intone” in her minimalist text. She makes every syllable count. Her animals are really people, and not all people or even all kids are the same. 

I read on and on, carefully, skipping not a single word, and long before I reach the end of the article I have resolved to order Sandra Boynton board books the very next day, feeling much better and also feeling confident that I will have appreciative customers for these books in Northport. I can make small contributions in my little world, and this is where I need to put my mental energy.

Intermission

I don’t have anything special to say here but for consistency’s sake another break seemed indicated. Take a deep breath. Look around. What do you think so far? You don’t need to tell me. 

Part III. Everything Ends

The final piece I read in the magazine that night, three narrow columns in length and taking up less than a single page, was about endings, echoing my thoughts up in that first intermission. It was Ben Healy’s “Study of Studies” feature, this one titled “All Good Things …” Yes, all things will come to an end, but “even endings may be better than expected,” Healy finds, and that’s a good reminder, too. Maybe for some among us it’s even more than a reminder. More like a novel insight, one we need to reflect on for a while. 

In the old days, wars used to end, and that was a good thing -- wars ending. I am still curious and still learning but no longer have an obligation to spend my days in a classroom, and I feel good about that. All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Socrates died. The biggest ego, the loudest voice, the richest man on earth — all are mortal. As am I. As are you. 

My question (again) is, when our lives end, what kind of world do we want to leave behind?

I could say much more about endings as they relate to books and bookstores and all kinds of businesses, but right now I feel the end of this post approaching. Ah! Here it is! What a relief!

Back to -- the World?

Back on home ground

Although I took two books along on our four-day, post-Labor Day getaway, one kept me occupied during my few hours of vacation reading, and it was only back home again that I turned to the second, another book set in France, this one stories by the poet W. S. Merwin of the countryside in which he lived for many years. He called it The Lost Upland. I'm now over halfway through the three long stories in that book.

I first thought of titling this post “Back to Reality,” then argued with myself over the tentative choice. After all, even the one September we spent a couple of nights of Mackinac Island, a place the Artist maintained was “not the real world,” my take on it was that people live there, work and raise families there, and that makes it as much “the real world” as anywhere else, even if the island economy is based on tourism. And the Lake Huron shore towns and cities do not begin to match Mackinac Island for quaintness or isolation, so we were only away, briefly, from our own responsibilities and schedules.

Vacation from reality? I was the one, not the territory we visited, taking as much of a break from present-day American life as possible. By seeking out with him my husband’s departed forebears in cemeteries and museums and churches, plunging into the area history of shipping and lumbering and early farming, and pausing to linger over long-abandoned rural sites where only the mice and bees are busy these quiet fall days, I picked up books, postcards, ephemera — but never a newspaper. When the Artist turned on television news at night in a motel room, my earplugs let me roam ancient peasant roads with Alain-Fournier’s fictional characters. I had a little bookselling talk here and there when meeting colleagues in the field, and that was fine. I really did not want to hear a word about what was happening in Washington, D.C. Time enough for that when we resumed our normal lives.

Then the Artist picked up a newspaper, and the world intruded. But it was not the outside world! It was conflict and hostility within the very territory that had been absorbing our attention and screening out, for me, angry political voices elsewhere! And here’s that little story.

One of the small towns we had planned to seek out was Posen, where the Artist’s mother, at the age of 17, had once had a memorable and amusing date in Posen. It was a story she loved to tell. So we wanted to visit the town and also look up her brother’s Lutheran church, his first church when he finished seminary. Posen had had its annual Potato Festival the week before, and I was somewhat disappointed that we couldn’t have experienced that — until we read the newspaper account.

Apparently one political party had more or less hijacked the Potato Festival Parade and turned it into a partisan political rally, and the other political party naturally and vociferously objected, but what was done was done. Small towns don’t get too much smaller than Posen. Still, differences of opinion don’t need a large population, and a week after the festival sore feelings still rankled and would not easily be laid to rest. 

Oh, brother! Now I was glad we had missed the festival! The story even took away a little of my jones to venture away from the shore in search of the little town, but we went ahead and found it. The church turned out to be on the edge of Metz, three or four miles away, a town so much smaller than Posen that it seems to contain not a single going business concern, its claim to fame still the fire that destroyed it in 1908. We took a few photographs at the church and went on our way. It was a grey, overcast, drizzly day, and I imagined the few remaining residents of Posen and Metz, indoors in their houses, whether raucously celebrating victory or stewing resentfully over indignities, still consumed with their little country farm-festival-turned-political-conflict. In its small way, the story struck me as tragic. I saw my country torn apart in the Sixties, and it is painful to see battle lines drawn again between groups of Americans.

Change of scene: I keep in touch with my Arizona ghost town neighbors by text, e-mail, and Facebook, and the most recent thread of conversation among us was not about hummingbirds or rain but about giant agribusiness livestock confinement facilities in the Sulphur Springs Valley and consequent severe drops in the water table. The basic story wasn’t news to me. All of us have seen those confined cattle on the Kansas Settlement Road, and falling water table and failed wells have been in Cochise County news for years. The link one neighbor sent, however, moves the story from “same old” to brink of catastrophe. I watched that news story all the way through, and it's a heart-breaker.

I find it bitterly ironic that traditional ranchers who chafed at any kind of government regulation, who wanted no one telling them how many cows they could run or how much water they could use, may soon be put out of business by corporate giants who saw an opening and grabbed it. No limit to numbers of animals? Good, we can cram in thousands on a few acres! All the water we can pump? Great, we’ll put down wells as deep as two Empire State Buildings! Your little 200-foot well on your little forty acres has run dry, and you can’t afford a new well? Sorry! This is how free enterprise works!

Another change of scene: I’m not on vacation now and am looking reality in its sometimes smug, too often self-satisfied face again (politics, stripping of environmental protections, etc.), but when I wake up at three in the morning I still turn to something other than news, which brings me back to W. S. Merwin and The Lost Upland. As I was reading there in the quiet, peaceful dark, thoughts of my own emerged, sparked by the book. European countries, I was thinking, have never had what they could mistake as limitless frontiers. Farmers there have always had to take care of the land they had. The countries themselves are small. Their limits, I was thinking, have been their salvation.

And then I reached a series of episodes in the story Merwin called “Shepherds.” Yes, the relentless engine of change was already bulldozing its way into southwest rural France, in the form of multi-story confinement sheep facilities. Certain local factions considered the confinement “cruel,” but that was “a minor argument about the new ‘industrial’ barns,” one dismissed as “sentimental.” Inevitable pollution could not be so easily brushed aside. 

The statistics differed depending on who supplied them, but they agreed that many thousands of sheep, over a period of months until they attained the desired weight, would eat, evacuate, and eventually bleed, and that the results would have to be removed continuously. And for this, the developers maintained, they must have water. It must come in clean, which was not difficult along the valley with its small clear crayfish streams winding through woods. On the downstream side of the new barns the current would emerge full of the warm contents of bowels, bladders, and veins of lambs and sheep fattened on chemically souped-up feed.  

- W. S. Merwin, The Lost Upland

But there was no stopping the engine. Those pushing for “progress” wanted municipal slaughterhouses in nearby towns closed, as their businesses would be vertically integrated and process animals from conception to the market. Historic old roads and bridges would need to be destroyed to make way for wide, modern truck routes. A web of connections linked the “modern farmers,” as they saw themselves, to governmental officials and large chain grocery stores. Eventually even the conservative peasants were carried along by the tide of “progress.”

They moved reluctantly, helplessly, resentfully into debt and the use of unknown forces that they had been told were bettering them and that they knew were taking them over and would obliterate them.

Nevertheless, those who could afford to do so took to keeping two separate flocks of sheep, a commercial flock raised on chemicals and inside buildings, and a smaller flock raised the old way, pastured, for family consumption and for sale to discriminating restaurateurs. Merwin says nothing about fresh water for the flocks moved from pasture to pasture. In what sense was the upland “lost”? It still sounds quite charming in this lithub piece, though clearly no longer affordable to a college student putting himself through school by waiting tables and saving money by wearing secondhand clothes.

I tried this morning to work Esau into the American story of polluted and lost natural resources, but it felt like too far a stretch. It does seem to me, though, that Americans think of freedom not only as a birthright and an absolute but also in pragmatic terms, as a means to increased wealth. Thus in our greedy determination to have no limits whatsoever on our freedom and property rights, we too easily forget that natural resources are themselves limited, that the earth is finite. I suppose a southeastern Arizona homesteader could haul water for household use and maybe even to support a couple of feeder cattle for home consumption, but for how long? And where will future pottage come from when the resources bought by the birthright are gone? 

Pragmatism is not pragmatism when it doesn't work. And there is no "getting away." We are still here, and we still have to live together, one way or another. Or go extinct. For now I continue with the Merwin book, even as I can no longer consider it escape reading.

And So September Continues

Kitchen time!

Labor Day weekend was busy. Sun, rain, company at home, many holiday-makers in Northport, meals and sleep, lots of books going to new homes, with here and there some quiet time for a dog walk or, lower on Sarah’s priority list, a short grooming session. Reading, too, of course, even if it had to happen at 3 a.m. while the rest of the world slept.

American Stranger, a novel by David Plante, came to me as an ARC from Delphinium Books. While it was enjoyable reading, I have to say I expected more. Nancy’s parents fled the Nazis in Berlin but never speak of those days. She grows up believing that her parents’ furniture came with them from Germany and only learns as an adult that they bought it all in New York. But that is the extent of the revelations from their old life. There is a vague reference to “the president” asking people what they can do for their country but no more politics than that. I understand that the novel had to do with Nancy’s life, not the life of the greater United States. Still, it seems odd that the world around her wouldn’t seep into her thoughts now and then. I would have liked to get out of the bedroom more, I guess.

Pause en route

From fiction I turned to another book on economics and am finding that fascinating and very, very important. I’m trying to think back to my days as an office worker at Western Michigan University and topics covered in the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies course: Did those students perhaps read Herman Daly? The first edition of Steady-State Economics came out in 1977, so it’s entirely possible. I’ll have to ask my friend who was the program advisor, but if I knew the name back then I’d forgotten it.

My introduction or re-introduction, whichever it was, to Herman E. Daly in the 21^st century came, as does much of my environmental/scientific news, by way of Acres USA, a magazine that calls itself “The Voice of Eco-Agriculture.” With their Eco-Update and Industrial Ag Watch news sections, I keep abreast of developments that don’t necessarily make NPR or the top newspapers in the country, but another fantastic feature is the interview in every issue. (I’m trying to get the editorial people to pull a few years’ worth of interviews together into a book. I would be thrilled to have that for sale at Dog Ears!) September’s interviewee was Herman Daly himself, and I was so impressed by what he said in the magazine pages that I tracked down a few of his books.

Daly went from being a professor of economics to senior economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank. He co-founded and was associate editor of the journal Ecological Economics. As emeritus professor from the School of Economics, University of Maryland, he currently serves on the executive board of the Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economy. The essays in Steady-State Economics do not form a quick or easy read, but they are clearly written and understandable to any educated person willing to take the time.

Daly holds his opinions strongly and with good reason. In his preface to the second edition ((1991), he notes the omission of serious consideration for any works of “even remotely ‘Malthusian’” economics, including his own, by the majority of American economists who reject such theories and such works without examination. He quotes Daniel Raymond’s rejection of Malthus, Raymond who wrote simply that “the mind instinctively revolts at the conclusions....” Daly goes on:

It might be said in Mr. Raymond’s defense that one is not obliged to accept an unwanted or counterintuitive conclusion just because one cannot immediately find a logical or factual error in the argument leading to it. One might legitimately say, “I need to think about that.”

The thing is that they didn’t bother to think about it or examine it or consider it, and here Daly is stern:

[T]o refute an argument one must find either a factual error in the premises or a logical error in the reasoning. If after an extended time no such error can be found, then, contrary to Mr. Raymond’s view, one must bow to the conclusion of the argument. If the reader is annoyed with me at this point for unnecessarily reminding everyone about the elementary rules of argumentation, then I am glad. But experience has taught me that many people cannot distinguish an argument from a fulmination and are equally convinced (or unmoved) by either, depending only on whether or not the conclusion fits their established mind set.

(Is anyone else reminded here of the Heath and Heath book I brought forward recently? The well-supported contention in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard that logic is not enough, that people also need a motive to change their minds and behavior? Well, that is an important insight, but for now I only bookmark it and suggest to those who missed the earlier post to check it out.)

The one big, big, big idea underlying steady-state economics is that “the economy” (an abstraction with no clear real-world referent) is not a closed, man-made system but an open system depending on low-entropy inputs from the natural world. Human beings convert raw material matter-energy into more artifacts and more people -- we reproduce ourselves as well as adding to the world’s “stuff” -- and output waste of all kinds. Some of our waste is recyclable, but even recycling takes time, so that even recyclable waste builds up, while a lot of our waste is nothing nature is equipped to recycle at all. The goal of unending economic growth, therefore, nothing more than a recipe by which we will bury ourselves in waste and ecological disaster.

Why have most economists not seen this?

Because they are too enamored of abstract mathematical models to allow the intrusion of the biosphere into their schemes, too committed to what Daly calls (and I love his dark humor) “crackpot rigor,” “scientistic pretension,” and the “blind aping of the mechanistic methods of physics,” at the same time that they ignore the laws of thermodynamics that would alert them to natural limits.

And because no one wants the bad news. “Growth” is seen as positive for two reasons. First, it’s the basis of power for nations; second, it’s an alternative to sharing. Daly puts it pithily: “It offers the prospect of more for all with sacrifice by none....”

Take the question of American agriculture “feeding the world.”

The drive to increase agricultural productivity leads to the replacement of low-yield species by newly developed high-yield species, which results in greater homogeneity of crops, that is, in a reduction in the diversity of the genetic stock and consequently a greater vulnerability to future pest and disease mutants. The increased vulnerability of the monoculture calls for even more protection by pesticides. [GMO seeds modified to be resistant to pesticides have only accelerated this vicious upward spiral.] In addition, more inputs of fertilizer and fresh-water irrigation are required by “green revolutions,” with resulting problems of water pollution and shortage.
 

It isn’t only farmers whose livelihood depends on soil and sun and rain. Everyone on earth is in the lifeboat together. Look at today’s newspaper. Any day's news!

"National Minstrel"

One of the reason I am so proud to sell so many used books is that these ‘artifacts’ (in Daly’s language) are still fulfilling their purpose as human artifacts, still conveying the ideas of their authors, still useful, not waste. And because I know how long books can live, when properly cared for, I feel good about selling new books, too. Here are a few places where I’ve written about questions of and books about resource use, production, “stuff,” books, etc.:

All Stuff Is Not Equal, Part I

All Stuff Is Not Equal, Part II

I Am Not a Luddite

Copyright 1836

Where Do You Get Your News – and What News Do You Get?

Always informative, always relevant

Today's post isn’t about books, but it is about reading, and some of what you’ll read here, if you are persistent enough and read far enough, may surprise you, but if you’d rather just have pictures, see Wednesday’s world of glittering frost over on my photo blog.

“Where do I get my news?”

That’s the question on my mind this week, as I’ve been reflecting on sources I trust to tell me what’s going on in the world. What about you? Are you a newspaper reader, radio listener, TV watcher, Internet viewer, or some combination of different sources in different percentages?

My obvious #1 source in terms of exposure time is National Public Radio. We have it on every morning and every evening at home, and I’d listen at my bookstore if I got a good signal there. “What would we do without NPR?” is a rhetorical question often voiced in our house. Interlochen is our nearest station, with CMU in second place. “All Things Considered” is always interesting, and we value Diane Rehm and Terri Gross for range of topics and depth of coverage in politics, environment, and the arts. Aaron Stander’s local “Michigan Writers” program is also excellent. What would we do without any of these?

We haven’t had television in our home for years now, and the only newspaper I read on a regular basis is our county weekly, but every now and then I splurge on a New York Times or Detroit Free Press or, more often, a Traverse City Record-Eagle.

(I’m hardly what anyone would call a news junkie, but I was shocked to hear that one local man admitted he was unfamiliar with a name that’s been in our local newspaper, week after week, for quite a few years. Do we live in the same planet?)

*  *  *

I come back a day later to make amends for an omission in my original post by inserting this important paragraph. When it comes to news of publishing and bookselling, my trusted daily source is Shelf Awareness, delivering national and international stories from the book world, as well as regional bookstore news that would not reach me otherwise. I cannot say enough good things about Shelf Awareness and recommend it to all who care about the future of independent writers, publishers, and bookstores.

*  *  *

As I reflected further on “where I get my news,” however, I realized that the issues most important to me – and those I feel are most urgent to the future of the world – are only rarely addressed by dailies or weeklies, and seldom are they examined in much detail or depth. I’d love to hear more about them on the radio, but the usual silence there, other than occasional, topic-limited “stories,” is deafening, too. I want more than an occasional “story” about global finance, international trade agreements, genetically modified organisms, farm and food regulation, food and farm safety, farmland ownership and subsidies, hydraulic fracturing, and natural resources in general. What I want is ongoing, nonstop coverage. 

Where do I get it? Mainly from two sources: “Nation of Change” and a magazine called AcresUSA, “The Voice of Eco-Agriculture.” 

The Acres folks have been around since 1970, and the history of the magazine is worth reading about. (How did I miss it back in the 1970s when gardening and rural life informed all my dreams?) These days there are plenty of new rural periodicals, but far too many of them are superficial and “cute,” their content -- intended mostly for hobbyists --  driven by (as is common on the newsstand) by corporate advertising of the worst kind. Acres is different. Every month’s “Eco-Update” and “Industrial Ag Watch” cover the latest, most important studies and legislation affecting not only organic growers but every single American. The magazine’s editorial and opinion pieces are knowledgeable and hard-hitting, their features long on specifics and experience, and the interviews are with experts whose voices deserve a national hearing.

We all eat. We all need to know where our food comes from. Agriculture news shouldn’t be just for farmers.

A 2012 Stanford University meta-study (study of results of other studies) that got a lot of attention in the national media purported to show no nutritional difference between organic and nonorganic food. Imagine two apples analyzed in a laboratory and found to be “nutritionally” equivalent. How much did the study really show?

It did not ask these questions:

Ø  What toxins are present in various nonorganic products that are not present in organic products?

Ø  Which toxins from nonorganic products may remain and accumulate in the human body?

Ø  Of nutrients found in organic and nonorganic products, what are the differences in the body’s ability to access and utilize these nutrients?

Ø  What long-term dangers to health result from toxin accumulation?

Ø  What long-term effects on food prices result from escalating immunity to agricultural chemicals?

Ø  What long-term effects on health care costs will result from continued and escalating reliance on agricultural chemicals?

Ø  What is the truth of studies purporting to show safety of GMO crops? (Find someone who's studied the question seriously here. I learned about her work through an Acres interview.)

Etc.

Sigh! Journalists sometimes make me think of lemmings. One particular story of the day or week, one temporary world “hot spot,” and there they run, en masse; meanwhile, ongoing economic, environmental, and political events continue to unroll, unreported, throughout the world. During the Clinton presidency, for example, reporters and news junkies did a lot of jumping up and down and worrying and shouting and rib-jabbing about President Clinton’s marital indiscretions. I couldn’t care less, then or now. It was NAFTA that took away any enchantment I had with Clinton. And here’s what the current Acres Opinion of Judith McGeary has to say this month about NAFTA:

...Instead of the hundreds of thousands of new American jobs that were promised, a recent report estimates that the United States lost over 1 million jobs. Our trade partners have suffered just as badly. Mexican farmers, in particular, have been some of the greatest losers under NAFTA as subsidized corn from the United States undercut local production and drove Mexican farmers off their land. The “free trade” approach has not simply shifted wealth from American workers to foreign workers – it has shifted wealth from workers of all the countries involved to the large corporations.

Is that news to you? And what about the latest “free trade” agreement, now being negotiated, is the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama Administration initiative begun under George W. Bush? While NAFTA was ramrodded through Congress under Clinton’s guidance, the substance of TPP is being kept ultra-confidential. Over 600 corporate “trade advisors” are in the know, but the few members of Congress who have seen the text have been sworn to secrecy. Why, if this agreement would be beneficial to our country, are American taxpayers and voters being kept in the dark? That’s what Elizabeth Warren asked, and her question deserves an answer. McGeary warns that a bill to “fast track” TPP and other trade agreements “would empower the Administration to negotiate ... without input from Congress,” which she calls “an abdication of Congress’ constitutional duty to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”

AcresUSA is where I get my most important news.

Along with articles on poultry-raising and bee-friendly farming, the March 2014 issue of Acres features a lengthy, in-depth interview with Margaret Mellon, senior scientist with the Food and Agriculture Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an authority on biotechnology and on environmental law. Mellon was interviewed on the subject of herbicide-resistant weeds. “Roundup Ready” corn and soybeans and cotton, she said, were embraced by farmers who were promised they could lower inputs (costs) by applying only a low dose of a single herbicide, but here’s what happened:

At the beginning the company claimed this was lowering herbicide use while increasing farmer incomes, and they were right. As time goes on, though, the weeds started developing resistance, as they will. ... [Now Roundup Ready seeds are] driving big increases in herbicide use and some people think that in four or five years we’re going to have double the herbicide use that we have right now, and it will be because the glyphosate isn’t working....

Farmers become dependent, and weeds become immune. After an initial drop, costs – and therefore prices – rise. One might draw a parallel in human health and disease, with the enormous increase of antiobiotic prescribing and antibacterial cleaning products and the subsequent increase in deadly resistant bacteria.

But there is more than a parallel between problems confronting farms and hospitals, and there is important news to be found in what at first glance look like mere foodie-health-and-cosmetic sources. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, has made antibiotics resistance a top agency priority for 2014, says an article in this month’s Prevention magazine, where I read the story told in numbers.

Every year 2 million people in the United States get infections that are resistant to antibiotics, and at least 23,000 people die as a result. Dozens of new, virulent bacteria have emerged over the years, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which causes more than 11,000 deaths in the United States each year, and resistant strains of E. coli that can turn a run-of-the-mill urinary tract infection into a trip to the emergency room.

Antibiotics, remember, are given to livestock (in heavy doses) as well as to humans, and on-farm use does as much to encourage resistant strains as overprescription by family doctors. According to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council,

The FDA buried research revealing that 18 types of antibiotics currently in use on farms are considered high risk for increasing antibiotic-resistant bacteria outbreaks in humans. In total, 30 drugs did not meet the FDA’s own safety standards. (Prevention, March 2014, “Special Food Report: Cleaning Up the Farm”)

Health magazines can be important sources for all kinds of important global news stories. I would not have thought to look up the CDC home page if not for the story in Prevention magazine. When one news source leads us to others, our available information is multiplied.

Then the other day David brought home a couple copies of Rolling Stone, where we were both astonished to find important, in-depth features on the banking industry (February 27, 2014, “The Vampire Squid Strikes Again,” by Matt Taibbi) and, in another issue, American energy capture and use, as distinguished from official green “talk” (January 2, 2014, “Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story,” by Bill McKibben). Did you have any idea that investment banks are now buying up entire industries, as well as the natural mineral resources needed to sustain them? Do you believe our country is moving away from dependence on oil and gas? Rolling Stone is a lot more than a rock-n-roll rag.

If I had my way, major U.S. newspapers would carry daily features like “Eco-Update” and “Industrial Ag Watch,” and radio news would cover every day whatever could be uncovered relative to the shenanigans of politicians in bed with corporations and the ramifications of that nonstop fornication for the immediate and long-term future of American farms, food supply, fuel prices, land ownership, workers’ wages, and the health of soil and air and water. But doing so necessitates news sources going up against the biggest money in the corporate world.

Many issues affect the lives of residents of Planet Earth, but agricultural and economic issues affect us all, and if we’re not informed about what’s going on relative to those issues, we have no chance to determine our own future.

What news sources do you trust to tell you what you really need to know?

It's still very cold, but the sun is shining, and we're here now, we're here now, we're here now....

Could a "Boom" Knock Us Right Out of the Ring?

The London Review of Books had a page-and-a-half “Diary” feature in the 7 February 2013 issue. Rebecca Solnit was the author, and her topic was the Silicon Valley economic boom and how it has affected housing availability and prices in San Francisco and the surrounding area. Where high-paid, high-tech workers (“routinely make six-figure salaries, not necessarily beginning with a 1”) commute 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 hours to work, the corporations they work for provide buses with wifi, so employees can start work before arriving at their offices (and unfortunately undermining community support for improved public transportation).

“Where orchards grew Apple stands.” 

Why does that one sentence make me, an Apple user, so sad? Because I live in orchard country? Because I could live more easily without the Internet than without fruit?  Once wild and creative San Francisco, now a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, is the scene of regular evictions, and prospective home buyers bid up property minute by minute.

It’s a boom.

The story was fascinating enough (to me, it was fascinating in the manner of a disaster story), but then Solnit changed the subject somewhat: “San Francisco’s tech boom has often been compared to the Gold Rush....” In the mining boom, there was a population explosion, runaway inflation, and, while the boom lasted, high wages for the workers flooding in. Booms are like that.

The oil and gas boomtowns of the present, in Wyoming, North Dakota and Alberta, among other places, follow this model. Lots of money sloshes around boomtowns, but everyday life is shaped by scarcity, not abundance. The boom workers are newcomers. They work long hours, earn high wages, drive up the cost of housing for the locals, drive out some locals.... Like a virus, mining destroys its host and then moves on. There are ghost towns across the west full of dying businesses with the landscape around them ground into heaps leaching toxic residue.

Silicon Valley, she writes, returning to her main subject, is different from mining towns in many ways—“clean, quiet work, and here to stay in one form or another.” It’s the similarities that interest her, though—the “mass displacements and the casual erasure of what was here before.” Mining or high-tech, she is saying, there are similar losses for those not in on the boom.

I couldn’t help thinking that there is another connection between the two kinds of booms that Solnit did not explore. This is not criticism: she had a certain focus, certain points she wanted to make, and the piece does that very well. But the truth is that there could be no Silicon Valley industry, no high-tech boom, without nonrenewable mineral resources. Mining is part of San Francisco's boom today.

Okay, I’m not a hermit, and I write this blog on a laptop. I even have a cheap, pay-as-you-go cell phone for emergencies. It’s almost impossible to be an American these days and not be connected. As I've said before, I’m not a Luddite. But neither do I want the electronic devices in my life to proliferate like those animated brooms poor Mickey Mouse, would-be sorcerer, had to deal with in “Fantasia.”

Soil, water, food grown in soil, minerals under the earth—these must be protected and conserved. It doesn’t make sense to pollute water and soil by mining and processing finite, nonrenewable materials. It isn't in California's backyard, but the high-tech industry is not as "clean" as it appears from that one geographical area. We can do better. We can insist that the industry do better.

Does all this seem a long, long way from your backyard? No, it's right at your fingertips!

All “Stuff” Is Not Equal, Part II

(1) The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, by Paul Hawken (NY: HarperBusiness, 1993)

(2) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart (NY: North Point Press, 2002)

If you only want to read one of these books and want an exciting, fun approach and don’t have the patience for a lot of depressing detail supporting the argument for necessity (and who would pick up these books if not already convinced of the necessity for change?), I recommend McDonough & Braungart’s 2002 contribution. Cradle to Cradle is only 186 pages, its tone is very upbeat, and the physical book itself is an example of what the authors are talking about. In their “tale of three books,” they first compare a traditionally printed and bound book with one using soy ink on recycled paper. The first is handsome, a pleasure to hold and easy to read, while the second is flimsy and hard on the eyes. But why should these be our only choices? Let’s rethink the design, say the authors, and here is a description of book that breaks out of the false dilemma:

The pages are white and have a sensuous smoothness, and unlike recycled paper, they do not yellow with age. The ink won’t rub off on the reader’s fingers. Although its next life has already been imagined [the materials are fully recyclable], this book is durable enough to last for many generations. It’s even waterproof, so you can read it at the beach, even in the hot tub. It celebrates its materials rather than apologizing for them. Books become books become books over and over again, each incarnation a sparkling new vehicle for fresh images and ideas. Form follows not just function but the evolution of the medium itself, in the endlessly propagating spirit of the printed word.

Holding an example of good design in your hands while reading about good design makes the idea come alive.

Cradle to Cradle came out eight years ago, before the popularity of e-readers, and for some the new technology may seem a better solution. I wonder. I wonder not just because I sell books but because I love them (which is why I sell them). I also wonder about e-books because a future that doesn’t allow me permanent ownership of what I’ve “bought” (rented, really) seems like a future without books, and that scares me. What if the book I want becomes unavailable? There’s no way I can insure being able to read it again! Another reason? The real, physical book I choose now, to keep and love for the rest of my life, requires no batteries and (unlike the laptop I'm composing this post on) will generate no e-waste, so even with traditionally printed and bound books, I feel pretty good about what it is I sell, and I don’t see how I could possibly have the same good feelings about having my own business if I were selling electronic gadgets or cheap, imported, battery-operated plastic toys.

I said that Cradle to Cradle has an upbeat tone. I would love to see this book as required reading for high school seniors across the country, because it doesn’t send a message to young people that the “good old days” are over and that their future, because they were born too late, will have to be lived in dark caves. The inspiring, exciting, uplifting and spirit-freeing feeling this book imparts comes precisely from the fact that its authors have taken the big environmental questions and problems out of the field of ethics and framed them as design problems.

The old Industrial Revolution designed products with assumptions we now know to be false: that natural resources are in “endless” supply, that Nature can always restore itself, etc. Products were designed to last from “cradle” (the resource pile) to “grave” (the waste pile). Now that we see so clearly that our natural resource capital pile is shrinking and the waste pile growing, we cannot afford to continue designing on false assumptions. Designing for the life of the materials, assuring that everything used can be returned to the resource pile for future use, is designing from cradle to cradle, and the authors offer a challenge to creativity rather than a scolding.

Environmental ethics all too often boils down to using less and recycling. (Hawken put the recycling argument bluntly: “If the items used in households in America were all recycled, this would reduce our solid waste by only 1 or 2%.”) But recycling, buying less, using less—none of that alone changes the overall, linear, cradle-to-grave paradigm. (You might think of it like vowing not to tell lies seven days a week but cutting back to three or four.) And for every virtuous ecological decision I hold up over my neighbor, my neighbor can show some other way I am at fault and he isn’t, so the finger-pointing becomes tedious, and people end up sticking their fingers in their ears.

McDonough and Braungart are clear early in their book about the way they don’t want to approach the problem:

The environmental message ... can be strident and depressing: Stop being so bad, so materialistic, so greedy. Do whatever you can, no matter how inconvenient, to limit your “consumption.” Buy less, spend less, drive less, have fewer children—or none.

Bill McDonough writes of his own early work in design: “I was tired of working hard to be less bad.” What he wanted was to do good work.

Don’t we all? And don’t we want our children and grandchildren to have opportunities to do good work? The examples given in this book, from books to carpets to the renting and recycling (rather than purchase and disposal) of solvents, paint a vision of what the future could be, given intelligent design.

“Nature doesn’t have a design problem,” McDonough and Braungart write. “People do.”

Here are some of the important issues on which McDonough & Braungart agree with Hawken:

• Our supply of natural resources is finite but can be replenished given more intelligent production processes.
• Most bad consequences are not intended, and no one wants them. They are a problem for all of us. “In planetary terms, we are all downstream” (M&B).
• “Less bad” is not good and not nearly good enough.
• It is the nature of business and commerce to be creative.
• Production must shift from a linear process to a cyclical process.
• There is no universal, one-size-fits-all solution to any design problem. Good designs depend on specific location and use local materials wherever possible.
• Human beings have the ability to design processes that mimic nature, producing “stuff” that will not end up as waste.
• This is an exciting challenge!

They differ on at least two major points:

• Hawken sees overpopulation as a problem and takes the idea of “carrying capacity” seriously. McDonough & Braungart consider this gloomy and negative thinking, and they don’t buy it. They seem to think that good design will overcome natural limits. An indication of the distance between the two books on this point is B&M’s dismissal of sustainability as an unexciting goal. B&M want a lot more fun out of life than that.
• Where Hawken would have society, wortld-wide, design systems of fees and taxes to motivate internalization of all costs, McDonough & Braungart see any regulation at all as a signal of design failure, the issuing of a “license to harm.” Hawken agrees that existing attempts at fining polluters has amounted to “licensing to harm” but believes that is because the fines did not fully reflect costs. If all costs were accounted for, companies would be financially motivated to work toward better and better designs. B&M are confident that because we can build self-regulating systems, we will do it--without stick or carrot. Or rather, the carrot will be our own pride in accomplishment.

Both of these books contain bad news and good news. All three authors express more optimism than is usually heard from environmentalists. All three authors (of the two books) are very optimistic and excited about design challenges, and all believe in the creativity of business and commerce. Hawken is not as optimistic about a “limitless” world as McDonough & Braungart, nor does he see the “re-evolution” taking place without financial motivation coming at corporate concerns from the outside.

What do you think? The changes are imaginable, but do we have the will to make the changes?

One problem is that each individual human life is lived only in the short term, and there will always be people content to rob and pillage and destroy to enrich themselves for the short span of their own lives, little caring what happens when they’re gone. A more subtle motivation problem appears in an article in this week’s New York Review of Books, in a review of two books on happiness research. The reviewer is philosopher Thomas Nagel, the subtle problem that people don’t just want stuff, and they aren’t necessarily happy when they have as much stuff as other people. For some people, having more than other people is the whole point. Might there even be people (this would be the “dog in the manger” syndrome) who crave the luxury of wasting what no one else can use?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but they are things I wonder about. Readers determined to be pessimistic will resist even Hawken’s program, while the radically, radiantly sunshiny will go along with McDonough & Braungart all the way. (I tend to think more like Hawken, sustainability is plenty exciting for me, and yet I appreciate B&M's insistence on fun, too.) Whatever your personal inclinations, these are important books. These are important ideas. And both offer a positive vision for the future, challenges to be undertaken in a spirit of exploration and discovery. Isn’t that worth quite a lot?