Some Thoughts About Localism
I’ve been reading about the potential for future environmental catastrophe for awhile now, branching out as I went into books that studied collapsed cultures of the past and on to other topics even farther afield. You could call it my second great education, because although I always knew there was the potential for danger in the phrase ‘global warming’, I only recently awoke to a fuller understanding of its implications. From environmental studies and a sort of anthro-ecological history if you like, I found myself taking a sidetrack that would lead me to staring at another perilous danger of our time: peak oil. Along the way, while studying both of these topics through books, documentaries, podcasts, blogs, and plain-old web research, I kept coming back to the idea of getting back to local communities of people you trust. Whether it’s escaping the addiction to a petroleum supply that’s running out, or finding the most effective way to curtail my contribution to climate change, it appears that at least the near-term solution - the solution that can take us a long way down the road of progress - is localism.
I’ve been thinking of writing about this convergence of ideas for a long time, and I’m sure it’s going to take me a few days to hammer it all out. So please bear with me.
For the first post on this topic, I want to take a look at the environment around us. Since I left school and started working, we’ve seen the disintegration of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, an event that happened in a staggeringly short amount of time. It was there, then it was gone. More recently, scientists have measured the thickness of the Arctic and Antarctic ice cover that remains; I can’t remember the statistics about Antarctica, but in the Arctic ice cover has gone from an average thickness of 6 feet down to 3 feet since something like the year 2000, and is expected to completely disappear in the summer within the next few years. It’s not just a problem for polar bears either, because ice is very reflective while open water is actually very dark. This means the sunlight that used to be reflected back out of the atmosphere by the Arctic (and Antarctic) ice is now being absorbed by the water to a high degree (something like 90% if I remember my stats), which warms the polar regions. When you consider that most of Europe is at the same latitude as Hudson Bay in northern Canada, and that Europe is warmed by the network of currents from the Equator that contains the Gulf Stream, it’s not hard to see what sort of effect warm water can have on its surroundings.
But let’s bring this home a little more. In my home state of Kansas, they’ve had five or six snowstorms resulting in 3 or more inches of snow each so far this year, when they normally have at most two. Normally, Kansas is more of an ice-storm state. Last year, Boston, Massachusetts had flowers blooming in late January. Boston is north of Kansas in terms of sheer latitude, and is not accustomed to such weather. At my home, I can tell you that we have pictures from when we closed on the house at the end of April, 2004. The azaleas are blooming like a blazing pink fire around the place. This year, our azaleas just started blooming (just like they did last year at this time), and the azaleas on campus have already been blooming for a month. Before we moved to Florida, I have it on good authority that the state had been battling drought conditions for something like five years. This past year, Lake Lanier at one point had less than 80 days’ worth of water left in it for Atlanta and its other customers to use; that situation was so dire, they had to choose between supplying humans near Atlanta with drinking water, or continuing to maintain a wetland here in Florida that gets its water supply from Lake Lanier…a wetland that hosts several federally-protected endangered species.
Make no mistake: this is the result of human activities over the past 200 years. The good news about this is it means we have the opportunity to do something about it, rather than just settle back as passengers on a climatic roller coaster. To make a difference, we have to cut back our greenhouse-gas emissions - by about 80% of 1990 levels before 2050, or so says the most current science. This definitely calls for technological solutions, but there is even better news: we can make a huge difference in our emissions even before these technological breakthroughs come, by simply making better use of what we have. Sure, there are hybrid cars you can buy. Sure, there is a company out there called Recycled Energy Development (RED) whose business is installing generators on existing industrial smokestacks to recover the 500-degree air and use it to generate electricity…who might even be able to supply up to 20% of our current electricity demand with their novel approach. However, as you will begin to see if you read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, our entire way of life is soaked in petroleum, and everything we do sends out ripples of carbon dioxide emissions. Our food travels on average 1500 miles to our plates. That same food is grown using huge, diesel tractors; it’s fed using fertilizer created from natural gas; and it’s sprayed with pesticides derived from petroleum. Then, it’s processed inside football-field-sized, refrigerated buildings (even for veggies), and trucked (using diesel trucks) to your supermarket…which itself uses an insane amount of electricity for each square foot of display it uses to sell the food to you, the consumer. Finally, we all drive to and from the supermarket, in many cases tied up in partial gridlock for much of the trip, idling along in engines with a fuel efficiency average that hasn’t improved in over 30 years…and yes, they all burn gasoline or diesel. Each gallon of gasoline creates about 20 pounds of carbon dioxide when burned, and we use something like ten calories of energy to produce every one calorie of food - without taking into account transportation or retail activities.
SIGH. Wouldn’t it be nice if we each knew a few friends who grew veggies and raised livestock, who we could pay to raise a little extra for us? Even better if these people practiced sustainable farming that had no need for all that petroleum-based fertilizer and pesticide. No extra packaging, no coast-to-coast transportation, no rummaging around produce bins for the one apple that hasn’t been dropped on the floor yet. And, best of all, this sort of localized farming produces only a miniscule fraction of the carbon emissions that normal food production and consumption patterns produce. Here, localism is probably the fastest way to impact the environment, since it works like compounded interest in a bank account, only in reverse. If you eliminate a dozen steps out of fifteen (4/5 of the steps), each of which emit greenhouse gases, then your emissions related to that activity drop by 80% (4/5; assuming all the steps have the same relative level of emissions).
Localism also places the problems we create squarely in our own back yards, so we can’t ignore them. This has a less quantitative effect, but should motivate a community to solve the problem that’s staring them square in the eyes. Shipping our problems away (wherever that is) allows us to ignore them, and creates monstrosities like the Fresh Kills landfill, which is now the highest point on the eastern seaboard…a true mountain of garbage. It also created the dead zone off the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana that’s currently the size of New Jersey…all from the run-off of excess fertilizer and similar pollutants from the midwest.
That’s probably all I can muster for one day without wearing both you and me out. In my next post, I’ll try to talk about why I think the problems caused by peak oil dovetail with the localism argument for the environment. I’ll try to finish the trio with a post about the economic problems that drive me toward a localist’s view that emphasizes real community.
For now, though, I’m finished. Enjoy your day, Dear Reader.