From Happy Holidays to War and Back Again

We needed a little more Christmas at Dog Ears Books, where I have been quite frustrated over cheap strings of tree lights that last only one year. They don't cost much, it's true, but they are turning into mountains of electronic waste, and I can't justify contributing any more to the heap, although there are only a few bulbs that remain lighted near the top of my tree. But here, you see? Marjorie Farrell brought in two small artificial table trees, and we spent a pleasant part of the early morning decorating them with her handmade ornaments.


The little stockings and hearts and such are bits Marjorie rescued from an old holiday sweater found in a thrift store. She felted them and turned them into beautiful decorations.


She used to make these paper stars from marbled paper but to avoid the harmful chemicals used in marbling she switched to plain paper. Another friend stopped in and, admiring the stars, asked if Marjorie would be giving a star-making demonstration. She hadn't planned to. The plan was and still is that she will demonstrate furoshiki wrapping this coming Saturday, but now there's a possibility she can show how to do the stars, too. Time will tell if she can get together everything she needs this far from her craftmaking studio in Woodstock, New York. The ornaments on these trees are available for purchase, however, leaving you more time for baking cookies and writing cards.

If you're wondering how war comes into the picture, it comes obliquely. You see, while this blog feeds regularly on Sarah’s cuteness and on the many books that enrich my life (and, I hope, the lives of my customers), it also feeds at times on other blogs. Occasionally, also, I contribute to another blog, the Bookshop Blog, which you can find in the list in the right-hand column, and today I was rewarded with a surprise there. An author whose book I had mentioned left a comment on the post. You can read the post and the author’s comment here. The book is Truce, by Jim Murphy, about the Christmas Eve truce that took place during World War I.

But now, it's been a long day and I'm tired, so let's close with the ornamented trees. There, that looks like Christmas!

Guest Blog: Bruce Goes to Toronto for Henty Meeting

Here’s another contribution from Bruce Balas of Omena, Dog Ears Books volunteer for a solid decade:

Recently Judy and I flew to Toronto for a gathering of the G. A. Henty Society. George Alfred Henty, the object of the gathering, was a writer of historical novels in England from 1860 until 1902. His historical adventure stories, written mainly for young people and full of action, made him the most popular writer of his time. And since his books are historically accurate, they are still very popular today, especially with the home school families. In addition, in Victorian England where they were originally published, his books were beautifully bound and as a result are very collectible.

There is a “society,” headquartered in England, with a branch in North America, consisting of the people who collect his books. Our North American branch meets at least once each year to trade books around, share information we’ve learned about Mr. Henty and, of course, just socialize.

In addition to the conference itself, Judy and I got to spend several days exploring Toronto. The city has a lovely park along the north shore of Lake Ontario, a dynamic downtown and a wide variety of cafes, bookshops, and museums, with a very European feel. This area is small enough to be easily walked from the University in the north all the way down to the lakeshore. We enjoyed it very much and recommend a visit.

Socked In with Cozy Blizzard Reading +P.S.

It was the first bear trap that Joseph had ever set, but he was thoroughly satisfied. He leaned over towards the partridgeberry bush, and, picking off two more branches, careful to disturb the crusted snow on them as little as possible, dropped the branches carefully over the trap. Out of the great, snowy silence, a sudden, sharp “Ca-ca-ca!” at his heels startled him. He pivoted about, to catch the gray wing flash of the Canada jay as she swept mockingly to a pine overhead. His boots must have polished the snow to glass underfoot as he worked at the trap. He slipped as he started to turn, lost his balance, fell—and with a mighty snap of great steel teeth, the trap closed over his left leg.

...He was seven miles from camp, and his trail was already obliterated by the snow that had fallen during the earlier part of the afternoon. No one would be sent out to search for him for four or five days....

The big storm was forecast, so there was plenty of time to prepare, plenty of time to lay in tea and chocolate and oranges, as well as time to select just the right long novel to while away a long Sunday indoors before the storm arrived right on schedule. What a difference for Sarah between Saturday and Sunday!



What a difference for me, too. This morning I can stay home with the aroma of homemade cinnamon rolls, anticipating the moment they come out of the oven, and looking forward to a long, cozy day with my pack.

The book I pulled off the shelf yesterday, started reading at the bookstore and brought home for the rest of the weekend is an old classic Michigan novel, Julie Antrocchi’s Wolves Against the Moon. You know how it is—somehow there are always books you haven’t gotten around to yet. Well, this one is perfect for a winter day at home: the action ranges from Quebec City to the Great Slave Lake, down through the Straits of Mackinac and all along the shoreline of Lake Michigan through Indiana to Chekagou. You do recognize that last place name, don't you?

You can read about the real man who is the main character in this novel here, where you will find that his life was a bit different from the fictional account. Would you mind? I don't--because Wolves Against the Moon was written and published as fiction. The author is very clear about this in her preface:

The narrator demands the freedom of action of the characters as they came to life and marched out, masters of themselves, upon the pages. The author hopes that the fictitious characters may seem fully as real as the authenticated ones. If some of the episodes seem overdramatic, this may also be ascribed to the “strangeness of truth.” The author has, if anything, underdrawn the amazing happenings in the old Northwest.

An added bonus is that I had a customer for this same book yesterday, and I insisted she take the copy with dust jacket and map endpapers. Map endpapers add so much to a story, I always think. But later I found in my much plainer copy a newspaper clipping from April 1947 about the Indiana Dunes state park, the area of dune country where much of the Bailly story takes place. The park had opened the summer of that year, and in subsequent years my family made many summer day trips to that Lake Michigan beach. Follow this link for a description and a photograph of the big bathhouse that I remember so well. Lake Michigan! The beach! The scary changing rooms with their clammy, wet cement floors and all those fleshy grown women!

The cinnamon rolls? They turned out great. And it feels great to be indoors today, too.



Postscript: The comments about Sarah’s pensive expression told me to show a more engaged aspect of her personality. Call her Snow Dog, or call her Princess of the Mountain—this girl loves the outdoors!

News from and of Michigan Writers

Word from Jerry Dennis, author of The Living Great Lakes; It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes, etc., is that his new work on the Great Lakes shoreline could be out in fall of 2011 or, possibly, not until sometime in 2012. An excerpt will appear before then, however, in Michigan Quarterly Review. And that reminds me to remind blog readers and bookstore customers that I still have copies of the MQJ issue with Benjamin Busch’s beautiful, moving and unforgettable essay, “Growth Rings.”

I contacted Jerry Dennis and got his news after a regular Dog Ears Books customer told me that he and his wife had enjoyed all the more a long road trip to Virginia because they passed the time reading aloud from The Living Great Lakes. Now these are people after my own heart! They read to each other!

Ellen Airgood is back in the U.P. after a trip to New York and meetings with her agent, editor, publisher and the marketing people who will be bringing her first published novel, South of Superior, to readers in the spring. Ellen is excited “to be doing what I’ve always wanted to do.” She also reports that “it was fascinating to watch the heart of the book business beating. It all happens at high speed, and constantly...,.” She asked if I could imagine it. No, I guess not, really. New York publishing is about as far from Northport as it is from Grand Marais--another world altogether.

Fans of Jim Harrison, former Leelanau resident, now of Montana and Arizona (the dust jacket information is incorrect), don’t have to wait until spring for a new book. The Etiquette of Freedom, conversations between Harrison and poet Gary Snyder, is available now, and even the poets’ dogs got into the act, as the photo section clearly shows. Because this book was first a documentary film, you get a DVD along with the hardcover, making it a pretty deal for $28.

Then there are the books you missed the first time around. One of my customers wanted Phil Caputo’s Indian Country, a novel set in the U.P., a request that brought to my attention the new paperback edition. Main character is a Vietnam veteran; the fictional landscape is geography I know and love, somewhat rearranged.

What’s it like here in the winter? Winter varies from year to year. This second week of December 2010 we have plenty of snow, with the wind to move it around. Need any snow where you are?

P.S. Sometimes, Mind on Topic // Dog on Bone (or Stick)


I can’t stop thinking about books, e-books, natural resources used and waste generated. Here is a whole list of sites looking at the question. A quick perusal revealed what I already suspected and wrote in my last post, i.e., that these comparisons are only between new hardcover books and new e-books. The most ecological option is still used print books, whenever available. Thinking of that, I can’t help wondering how many new hardcover books are bought and read by only one person. What do you think? If we compare readings to readings, rather than books to books, how does the LCA come out? The reading public needs this information!


This is the view from the bar at the Happy Hour. See my other blog for a more detailed look at the snowy exterior.

I Am Not a Luddite

I have been invited to so many conferences on "The Death of the Book" that I suspect it is very much alive.
- Robert Darnton, Harvard librarian

How can I claim here at "Books in Northport" to provide news from the world of books if I say nothing of this week’s announcement from Google that their e-books are going to be available in (some) independent bookstores? It’s big news! It’s the Clash of the Titans! (Or, as one of my husband’s art students said, memorably, years ago in class, “the clash of the Titians.”) After all, this news could change the whole book world, from publishing to reading.

I am not a Luddite (she said, somewhat defensively), and I do not oppose all change simply because it is change. There are lots of changes I would like to see, e.g., drivers in Leelanau County suddenly deciding to use their turn signals at each and every appropriate opportunity. (Get a clue, folks! Signaling turns is not just a concept!) But I have serious questions about e-books and e-readers, beyond the accessibility of texts. Since environmental impact is a big question for me, I set out to look for some answers about how e-books and printed books compare in this regard and found a complex landscape to be surveyed.

This first site I looked at gives statistics for energy used in producing and transporting books vs. energy used reading an e-book, but I could not tell whether the energy to produce the e-reader was included, and I noted that this blog includes links to the online giant selling the e-reader the blogger uses. Conflict of interest? I also noted that the comparison was made strictly with new books--used books are not discussed--and that the blogger opens by talking about how bookstores have to over-order (hardly the case at Dog Ears!) and return books which may be pulped. Comparison of waste and recycling issues were not, however, gone into in depth.

The next online article I read might well be suspected to contain conflict of interest, since it appears under the aegis of the Independent Book Publishers Association, a group with a vested interest in continuing to sell books. To my surprise and delight, the beginning of the article promised a life cycle analysis (LCA) to make energy comparisons between the two kinds of reading packages. Unfortunately, the writer couldn’t come up with a lot of hard numbers because manufacturers of e-readers, with the exception of Apple, refused to provide information. I’m not going to try to summarize this article but would love to have other people read it and give me some feedback. What do you think?

Steven Levingston, in an article in the Washington Post, also writes of the difficulty of making the comparison but in the end relies on an analysis made by Daniel Goleman, who measured units like gallons of water used, kilowatts of energy required and adverse health effects. (This is not an all-inclusive list.)

Goleman’s rule of thumb: You must read 100 books on your e-reader for the environmental costs to break even. If an e-reader is upgraded before those 100 books are read, the environmental impacts will multiply.

You can read Daniel Goleman’s entire article here. His LCA includes materials used, energy required in manufacturing, transportation and reading, and disposal issues.

Finally, I skimmed quickly through an article claiming that printed books are faster to read than e-books. Comments left on the site by other readers criticized the original question, as well as sample size, and I realized I didn’t care much about which way of reading was faster. I’m a slow reader myself, and I appreciate slow books. How long did it take an author to write a book? Isn’t it worth more than four hours to read it?

Full disclosure: I am a bookseller as well as a reader, and while last year (2009) I read 102 books, the vast majority of them were used. We brought ten cartons of used books home from our winter in the South, books destined for resale at Dog Ears Books, but many others I read in Florida came from the library. I did buy one new book as a gift for a friend, and if I were in a higher income bracket, I would undoubtedly buy more new books, but it only makes sense to buy new selectively when there are so many used books available in readable or better condition. How does reading like mine affect the LCA of printed books?

David, when I was telling him what I was writing in this post, explicitly brought up the question of how many people will read any given printed book—not a book of the same title, but one physical book--in that book’s lifetime, and it occurs to me now that a more apt comparison would not hold books and e-books up side by side but would focus on readings. Each e-book reading will be singular, while the multiplying effect of printed books will reduce their energy requirements for each successive reading. Or—have all the costs been figured into the first reading, making subsequent readings zero impact? This question needs to be answered before any serious discussion of comparative environmental costs can get underway.

There are a couple of other issues having to do with how costs of printed books can be cut in future:

(1) Materials: Several comparisons between e-books and print books remarked on how using “fewer” trees from “sustainably managed forests” (i.e., industrial woodlots) will reduce the environmental impact of printed books. That’s true enough as far as it goes, but here’s a reminder from the Cradle to Cradle folks (see my Dec. 8 post): Books don’t have to be printed on chemically bleached paper! CtC was printed on a high-grade, recyclable kind of “plastic,” not the kind that can only be downcycled—once--into ugly and not very durable lawn furniture but a kind that can be used as “paper” over and over and over again.

(2) Publishing, distribution and sales: I am an advocate for the abolition of returns. If booksellers, either online or in a bricks-and-mortar store (as they’re called), could no longer return books, they would be much more careful and conservative in their ordering. A no-returns policy would result in more careful and conservative print runs, which in turn would be better for publishers and distributors, who would be able to count on books sold as books sold. It would also help small booksellers by leveling the playing field. As the business works now, giant retailers can order huge numbers of books for deeper discounts than small retailers get, but if those books don’t sell, they can be returned to the distributor, in turn sent back to the publisher, remaindered or pulped, generating a lot of unnecessary transportation, accounting headaches, business uncertainty and disposal worries.

Imagine what these two differences alone could mean for the future of printed books!

Here’s my bottom line: There’s no way to avoid using energy either to print books or manufacture e-readers, to transport books or to transport e-readers, and disposal issues crop up in both cases, as well, so why would I elect to read in a format that requires additional inputs of energy? Why not just take my book out under a tree or to the beach or read it on the front porch or under the lamp that’s turned on in the winter evening, anyway, so I won’t be tripping over my dog when I get up from my chair to go to bed?

It will be a while before all the dust from the new e-reader revolution settles, and the final settling may not come in my lifetime. Meanwhile, I’m watching the dust storm with interest and sticking with my old-fashioned books. As the Water Rat said of his old riverbank. “It’s my world, and I don’t want any other.”

About that Luddite business? I do have enough Luddite in me to prefer jobs to unemployment and recyclable materials over toxic waste.

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?

All “Stuff” Is Not Equal, Part I

Books discussed in this post and post to follow (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)

I’ll ask you to picture an old-fashioned construction site, the kind my friends and I used as playgrounds on summer evenings, a scene dominated by big, exciting piles of dirt to be run up and down, the “king of the mountain” remaining at the summit. See in your mind three such piles. All right, now instead of dirt see them composed of (1) natural resources, (2) “stuff” people have made, and (3) discarded waste.

The earth itself and everything on it and in it constitutes the first pile. Additionally, coming at us every day and adding to that pile, is energy from the sun. A star’s decay is our source of life.

Next the “stuff.” Everything in pile #2 was made from contents of the resource pile, but while the sun keeps coming at us every day, it can’t make oil fast enough to keep up with our use, and precious minerals aren’t formed quickly, either, so in general the resource pile gets smaller as the stuff pile gets bigger. But keep that “in general” in mind, because whether or not the resource pile shrinks depends on how and out of what we make our stuff. The best “stuff” we make and use can be returned to the resource pile for future use.

And before we go on to pile #3, we need to say something about the many ways we take away from the resource pile without adding anything to the stuff pile. Travel is a big category of resource use that doesn’t add to the stuff pile. Yes, trains and cars and planes are all manufactured and count as stuff, but more resources are used up in moving the vehicles and us from place to place. Frequent fliers don’t pile up miles in closets, but flying, like driving, makes heavy demands on the resource pile. By the end of the 20th century, Americans were consuming fuel for travel 40 times faster than they had done in 1900. Follow this link to read about changes in modes of travel through our history, where gains in efficiency were made and how different modes compare to one another. I’ll quote the bottom line here for those who don’t follow the link:

The increased travel (and increased population) in the 20th century not only canceled out the 5-fold gain in fuel efficiency but increased fuel consumption for travel 40 times. Thus, in addition to striving to increase fuel efficiency, it's even more important to strive to reduce the need for travel as well as to reduce population.

Moral of this part of the story: All use does not result in “stuff,” and all “stuff” is not equal.

Now, finally, on to the third pile—and here this whole mental exercise suddenly strikes me as a tour of Dante’s Divine Comedy in reverse, with the resource pile (wonderful gift!) as heaven, the stuff pile (glittering temptations!) purgatory, and the waste pile as pure hell, a horror growing even as we gaze. The waste pile is built up of stuff that was used and discarded, along with (perhaps an even greater portion of the pile) unwanted byproducts of the making of stuff. Some waste could be recycled and returned to the resource pile but hasn’t been. Other parts, tragically, are not recyclable at all and can never again in our lifetimes become resources.

Now, the Big Question (BQ): Is there any way to halt the ongoing depletion of the resource pile and to stop the waste pile from growing and still enjoy stuff? Put another way: Is the only way to achieve these goals to stop making and buying stuff? And does that mean that people already lucky enough to have plenty of stuff just kick away the ladder and tell the rest of the world to do without for the sake of the planet? This is the question of two books I want to highlight in today’s post and the one to follow. These books answer, basically, as follows: The problem with how we have been making things since the Industrial Revolution is a design problem. We need new designs. We need to design products for the life of their component materials, recognizing that (as my friend on Throwaway Blog says) “nothing ever really goes away, does it?”

McDonough and Braungart are in agreement with Hawken on many important points, and I’ll focus on those in this post, discussing mostly Hawken’s book. In Part II, spending more time on McDonough and Braungart, I’ll also highlight their differences from the Hawken view.

We Americans pay a smaller percentage of our income for food than people in other countries. We pay less for gasoline than any Western European country. As a nation we flock to big box stores to buy television sets produced overseas. But we get all this stuff “cheap” because—like maxing out credit cards or taking Incompletes rather than getting term papers written on time—we’re postponing true accounting, and future generations (not far down the line) will be handed the bill.

Markets are the place at which production becomes consumption, but at present they do not recognize the destruction and waste caused by that production. Because markets are a price-based system, they naturally favor traders who come to market with the lowest price, which often means the highest unrecognized costs.

Hawken gives cigarette smoking as an example, with lost wages and high health care costs not included in the price of the pack (though how anyone can still be smoking cigarettes when a single pack costs between $5 and $8 is completely beyond me) and goes on to say that

...this is true for almost all production/consumption systems, whether they involve the steel in your car, the wood in your house, or the food on your table. The problem is that these costs are shared unevenly, just as the profits from selling them are garnered disproportionately.

As a species, we human beings (unlike any other life form on earth) are spending the earth’s capital, eating our own and other species’ seed corn—use whatever metaphor makes it most vivid to you. Between the resource pile and the stuff pile, as we all know, comes transformation and reorganization of materials, but unfortunately most of what we transform ends up in the waste pile. Designing for the life of materials rather than for product life would create cycles of recovery and reuse in place of a dead end mountain.

Toxic waste is the worst, but disposal of toxic waste, as Hawken sees it, is not the root problem. Rather, it is the root symptom. “The critical issue is the creation of toxic wastes.” And that’s what we need to stop.

In the natural world, all processes, directly or indirectly, result in food for other species. Rot, rust, ants, worms, skunks, toads, pikas, voles, bats, moles, mites, alder, gentian, lichens and several thousand other plants, invertebraves, birds, reptiles and mammals make up a forest. ... In the forest, there is a competitive yet yielding relation....

The most sustainable agricultural practices mimic nature, returning “waste” (there is no true waste in nature) to the soil, whereas the least sustainable methods require heavy financial debt, reduce biodiversity and speed soil erosion. Other writers I’ve written on recently pointed to the industrial ideal of “efficiency” as a distraction from what really goes on in farming, and Hawken is in complete agreement:

What we call “efficient” in agriculture is usually a process that substitutes fossil fuel in its myriad forms for human labor, displacing workers and families while causing widespread and lasting ecological damage to soil, water and wildlife. ...The most truly efficient farm is the one that most effectively internalizes all of its costs. This is a farm that builds up topsoil, that uses water sparingly and thriftily, that uses pesticides rarely if at all, that understands that the secret to healthy plants is healthy soil, not deadly chemicals.

If price were reflective of all costs, Hawken says, you would not pay more for locally grown, organic produce than you pay now for chemically grown fruits and vegetables transported hundreds or thousands of miles. Set that “If” to one side for a minute. We will come back to it shortly.

Again, a BQ: Must an economy involve limitless growth, or can it be healthy without expansion? Classical economists answer the question one way, Hawken differently, by means of a distinction borrowed from Herman Daly, who puts it like this: “A growing economy is getting bigger; a developing economy is getting better.” Hawken describes the developing, or restorative, economy in this way:

Growing implies size for the sake of size, while the idea of development implies that the product or service supplied will actually help people use fewer resources in the long run, and at the same time will serve or improve their lives. In the restorative economy, a company is based on the idea that its products or services will improve people’s lives qualitatively, not quantitatively. It should provide a product or service that helps people develop their lives, and not merely increase the amount of their possessions. The smaller the business, the easier it is to internalize this distinction.

Two huge issues lurk here. One is jobs, the other motivation. Internalization of all costs in the production process, Hawken argues, would recreate jobs and put people back to work. Sounds good. Sounds great! But—and here we come back to that earlier “If”--what would bring about such a revolutionary change in our economy? What would motivate manufacturers to internalize all costs, to hire more workers, to redesign commerce so drastically that it would be paying its way in the world?

Hawken’s answer begins by noting that design is not limited to products. Systems and ways of doing things can also be designed. So prior to redesigning products we would design systems that would encourage new and better products to emerge. Motivation would come in the form of green taxes or green fees. More resources might be managed as public utilities. The whole idea is to design a marketplace that makes destruction of resources and creation of waste very expensive and that rewards ecologically restorative acts. From this would come “environmental restoration, economic prosperity, job creation, and social stability.”

End of Part I

Guest Blog: Bruce Reads Salman Rushdie

Today's guest blogger--surprise, Bruce!--is Bruce Balas of Omena, the bookstore angel (disguised as volunteer) for lo, these many years. When Bruce decided to stay home on Monday and continue his reading of Midnight’s Children, I asked him how it was going, and since he gave me permission to quote him, I decided his detailed reply would be my new blog post.

Part of the problem is that Rushdie is erratic in his story telling and wanders all over before he gets to the main thread of the story. For instance, he will say that in this chapter he is going to tell about so and so, but before he does this, he has to tell about how his mother got the flu and as a result had to move in with her uncle-in-law for three months and found romance but was caught in the act and chased out of the house by her angry husband, and so the main character was without a mother for three months, and the resulting loss of his mother’s love has affected his personality in such a way as to alter his reaction to the sequence of events highlighted in this chapter substantially enough to require a full explanation and so on and so on--blah, blah, blah.

I have figured out how to skip over those bits without it affecting the main thread of the story. To look at the book at first and see 500 pages of his ramblings is rather daunting. On the other hand, his has an interesting writing style, and the parts about the history of India are good, so I have chugged on and now, having read over 300 pages, am getting into it. Tell whoever is also reading Rushdie [I told him someone I talked to recently is struggling with The Satanic Verses] that it took me over 200 pages to figure him out, but it becomes worth it. Besides, think what an attention-getter it will be at your next cocktail party when you drop into the conversation that you’re reading Rushdie!

What do we think? Should Bruce be assigned to read Proust over the winter?

Lights, Colors, Festivity! Really, Really, Really!

“The blog’s been kind of heavy lately,” a reader observed recently. She wasn’t exactly complaining, just taking note, but she was right. The blog has been book-heavy, issue-heavy and opinion-heavy—and don’t we all need a break? I know I do, so here's a light and happy holiday theme.


The cold air, slippery roads and brooding skies of Saturday morning didn’t seem terribly promising, but I was headed indoors, to the Willowbrook, to be part of a bake sale and holiday bazaar to benefit the Leelanau Children’s Center, and indeed the scene there was light and bright and cheery and colorful, even before the doors officially opened to let in the crowds.




The aromas were tantalizing, too, but you’ll just have to imagine the maddeningly delicious smells of all the cookies and other baked treats, along with irresistible hot Tuscan bean soup to be sampled at the Share Care table, where bags of the soup mix were among items offered for sale. Dog Ears Books had a table in the corner, with Share Care for one neighbor and Ammons Maple Syrup for another, so you can just guess some of the shopping I did for myself on Saturday.


Other craftspeople and vendors contributed variety to the bazaar—knits, pottery and objects incorporating Lake Michigan stones.




A couple of Northport’s own photographers were on hand with stunning work. Sharon Kalchik had some of her drawings, as well. Karen Casebeer quickly sold out of her calendars.



Glass blocks with holiday lights inside caught everyone’s eye.


Oh, and I can’t forget the elves! There were lots of elves, and they kept busy all day long, bustling and facilitating and the all-important making-sure-everyone-had-shopping-bags.




The theme of this year’s sale was “Children Matter,” and toward the end of the day we had a sweet musical surprise in the form of two young violinists. For me there was nostalgia in their sweet music, as I played violin myself from fourth grade through high school.



All in all, it was a lively, cheerful and festive day. Everyone commented on how wonderful it was to see so many cars in downtown Northport, and I wrote down (now where did I put that note?) the fervent words of one shopper who expressed the hope and determination of many in the community to keep our K-12 school along with the preschool. Elves, bakers, vendors and shoppers—everyone involved in Saturday’s event—gave witness to this hope and determination. Being part of it felt great. Funds from the bake sale and bazaar (100% of sale of baked goods, 15% of vendors' sales) were directed to the Leelanau Children’s Center through the Leelanau Township Community Foundation.

There are 146 nonprofit organizations in Leelanau County, and too often, it has sometimes seemed to me, county businesses and nonprofit organizations are competing with each other for increasingly scarce Michigan dollars. Is this too heavy for a festive holiday blog? Don’t worry, I’m not going to dive for the emotional cellar today. Quite the contrary. Being immersed in Saturday’s holiday atmosphere at the Willowbrook reignited my hope and enthusiasm for Northport--which, let’s face it, has its problems like any other place on earth--and I’m working on a new idea for how businesses, nonprofits and local residents can come together, as a community, for the mutual good of all. I believe the fates of businesses and families are intertwined, not at odds with each other. What's best for kids is a vital, vibrant community.

Of Mice and Men

What’s with me lately? Why are so many of the books I pick up not even from the most recent turn of the century but the one before my parents were born? John Burroughs, born in 1837, began keeping a journal at the age of 17 and continued until his death in 1921 (age 84). In addition, he wrote and 23 books of essays, three of them published posthumously. He lived on a farm in the Hudson River Valley and raised grapes but lived primarily by writing. Burroughs, along with Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman (he admired all three), preached a gospel of closeness to nature:

Let me work all day in my garden, the next day ramble in the fields and woods, with a little reading, and the third day I can give myself to literary pursuits with a new freshness and vigor.

- Journals, April 5, 1867

When he is telling of what gives him joy, or when he tells of some small event in a quiet day--such as bringing home in his pocket a cold, motionless mouse, making for it a nest in a bucket and bringing it back to life before releasing it again to the wild—he is at his most charming, but there is another side to Burroughs, the rush to form a hasty opinion and then state it as if it fell from God’s own mouth and he just happened to make the catch.

Religion, he says “is a sentiment, like poetry or art; ...not a universal gift.” I sense a kernel of truth there, but the pontificating expression grates on me. What does it mean to call poetry or art a “sentiment,” anyway? Religion, poetry and art nothing but feelings? Yes, one must have a feeling for poetry to appreciate it, but the feeling alone, though it may be one sort of “gift,” hardly makes a poet. And can Burroughs stop there? No, he must go on to say that what he calls this “sentiment” of religion “belongs to women more than to men, though the finest specimens of it are men, as in every other field... [my emphasis added, as if you couldn’t guess]. Meaningless, maddening, unsupported generalization! Yet one hardly knows where to aim an objection, since B. never made it clear what he was talking about in the first place.

In general, what annoys me most about these journals is a lack of wonder, an overabundance of certainty and the way he fell, time after time, to the temptation of sweeping, general statements, as if pronouncing Truth with a capital T. But there were other things, too. Little, niggling, jarring notes. For example, many writers I know live alone, and some of them live in the country, so when I reached the following passage I began to mark it mentally for an old friend:

I wonder [he wondered! Read on—did he really?] if there is another so-called literary man who spends his time as I do—in the solitude of the country, amid the common people. Here I sit, night after night, year after year, alone in my little Study perched upon a broad slope of the Hudson, my light visible from afar, reading for an hour or two each evening, and then to bed at nine. No callers, no society, no proper family or home life. Not in years has a person dropped in to spend the evening with me.

Well, but then he says that “Julian comes in” from time to time, and instantly I wonder, Who is Julian? He writes that in the morning he, the writer, may “lend a hand in getting breakfast,” and I recall (looking back, to make sure, to the list of important dates in his life that the editor has thoughtfully provided in the front of the book) that Burroughs married in 1857 and that his wife survived until 1917. No society? John Locke would have seen it differently! The shadowy Mrs. Burroughs turns up only on rare occasions, in a sentence or an enigmatic phrase such as when the writer mentions he might “lend a hand in getting breakfast,” but where there’s a wife.... I wonder! And yes, a short search turns up the fact that Julian was, in fact, his son.

“No proper family life” could mean any number of things. The marriage might have been unhappy. Perhaps the writer felt that his wife was not his intellectual equal. If you follow this link and read of the disposition of Burroughs’s estate, you’ll find another surprising revelation about this "solitary" life in the country, a revelation that answers, for me, another question I’d had when, after noting the almost complete absence of the author’s wife and son from his journal, I turned back and saw that his editor had been a woman. I’d wondered what she thought of the author’s pronouncements on women and the invisibility of the wife in the journals. Turns out his female editor was also his “longtime secretary and mistress,” who upon his death received as long as she lived all the income from his writings. The wife, I should note, had predeceased Burroughs, and Julian, the son, inherited all of his father’s not inconsiderable real estate. (The farm remains--at least, as of 2004--in the family.) Perhaps in the unedited journals the wife appears more fully--then again, perhaps not. My point is only that a life with wife, son and secretary-mistress is hardly solitary.

We all know by now that Thoreau’s little cabin was not far from town and that he didn’t live in it very long—two years and two months, by his own account. Still, he did live there alone, and no one has ever questioned that he built the cabin and planted his beans himself.

What put me on the trail of David Grayson? Probably nothing more than that I had Adventures in Contentment on the shelf between Burroughs and Thoreau. Long before the hippies of the Sixties, Grayson wrote (using these very words) of “dropping out” of the race for success:

One morning I wakened with a strange, new joy in my soul. It came to me at that moment with indescribable poignancy, the thought of walking barefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows as I had once done when a boy. So vividly the memory came to me—the high, airy world as it was at that moment, and the boy I was walking free in the furrows—that the weak tears filled my eyes, the first I had shed in many years. Then I thought of sitting in quiet thickets in old fence corners, the wood behind me rising still, cool, mysterious....

I remembered that Grayson was a pseudonym but nothing more than that. Beware research and the shattering of illusions! David Grayson was none other than muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker, and the retirement of “David” to the country with sister “Harriet” (as housekeeper, naturally) was a complete fabrication. Like Burroughs, Baker had a wife; unlike Burroughs, he didn't even live in the country. Baker stayed in the rat race, and he and his wife lived first in a Chicago apartment, later in a suburb of Westchester County. In fact, Baker liked the suburbs, admitting to his bride that he had had to revise his opinion of them when they settled in their home. Follow this link to read more about this writer’s relationship to women, how he wrote about women, and how women responded to his writing and speechifying.

Heaven only knows I am not opposed to marriage, and the suburbs are fine for many people who find that way of life congenial. Marriage and suburbs aren’t the problem for me. It’s that the idea of these men building myths of themselves so at odds with the reality of their lives makes me suspect almost every other sentence they wrote. Give me Thoreau! Give me Anne LaBastille! Give me Harlan and Anna Hubbard! Give me Wendell and Tanya Berry! I don’t need rugged, solitary individualism in a man before I can respect his views on nature. I do need honesty.

Here in our old farmhouse, with the winter's first snow lying all around, David comments, "It may be too soon to say anything, but I haven't seen any mouse activity yet." I tell him it is indeed too soon. The temperature is barely below the freezing mark. When the thermometer plummets, those mice will be running for shelter and all the peanut butter and crumbs left on the counter! "Here, mice! Your banquet table has been spread!" David thinks I'm kidding. Here's how our attitudes break down: We both think mice are cute. We don't want them in the house. He is the eternal optimist, thinking that this year they won't come in, while I am on perpetual sentry duty, scolding and banishing crumbs. We live in the country, in company with one another and Sarah. That's enough. The mouse chorus can get cozy under the snow.