on sustainability

You may wonder what all the buzz is with sustainability and "green" practices and what it actually means. Most of our current manufacturing processes are linear, energy intense and they create waste, thus damaging the environment one way or the other. Just imagine how corn flakes are made (not that I'm an expert). The various ingredients - GMO corn (oh no), food coloring (just saying), high-fructose corn syrup (oh well), preservatives and additives (ahem) - have to be shipped to the corn flakes factory from various locations at the expense of a lot of energy (trucking, gas) and packaging material. The packaging waste of the corn flakes ingredients goes into the garbage or recycling (if we are lucky) stream. Then the cereal is being manufactured (don't like that word for food) by machines with high energy input and some waste products (waste water, steam and fumes, and who knows what else). After that it gets packaged into sealed inner plastic bags and outer cardboard boxes (another high energy/high supply input process) and shipped to distributors (trucking, gas - you get the picture), after that to the supermarkets, where they have to recycle or throw away the pallets/shrink wrap/outer cartons. Finally the cereal gets purchased, and the retail packaging goes into the waste (the inside plastic pouch) or gets recycled (the exterior cardboard box).   Overall it's a process that requires huge material and energy inputs all along and creates enormous waste and pollution.

A sustainable process should require no exterior input of energy or material. It is a cyclical and wasteless process that repeats itself indefinitely without damage or side effects to the environment. The easiest example of such a process is a vegetable garden. If we save the seeds from one year to the next, if we fertilize with compost created from organic home and garden waste, if we use manual labor to tend to it, it becomes a wasteless indefinitely renewable cycle that requires no outside energy or product purchase other than elbow grease. All natural cycles are thus sustainable. Permaculture is such a sustainable agricultural/cultural system (please refer to an earlier post on permaculture).

On the homefront the better our houses are insulated for example, the less outside energy we need to introduce to heat and cool them, and the more sustainable the home energy cycle becomes. The Passivhaus is a residential building concept with such stringent insulation specifications that the house retains a constant temperature and requires no heating system (heating the hot water is another story, and energy to run appliances and lighting is yet another). A Passivhaus also takes into account the heat output from lights, people, and appliances in its energy calculations. There is also a zero-energy house, which is sustainable and generates its own energy needs. A zero energy house may include a geothermal heating/cooling system, solar panels to offset the electrical needs, LED lighting (the lightbulbs are good for 50,000 hours!!! - something like 20 years, and consume minimal energy), triple-pane windows (see a previous post), and a few other new cutting edge mechanical systems, in addition to superior insulation.

Sustainable is the way to go, it is gentle on the planet!

we are nature

That we have come to think of ourselves as separate from nature shines through when we say "let me take a walk in nature," or when we refer to nature as "outside."  And of course it shines through in how we treat nature - we have not been kind to it lately.  As a society we have come to view ourselves as superior to nature, as separate from nature; we dominate and control nature, and "use" it for our enrichment.    I believe this behavior arose from disassociation and fear - what indigenous person would fear nature?  How absurd, they live with it, in it, as part of it, from it.  We Westerners of industrialized nations need to relearn to live with it, understand it, be kind to it, embrace it, and work with it. What is "nature" actually?   The 1970s gave rise to the idea of the Gaia principle, the idea of earth as one enormously complex organism that encompasses everything from rocks and rivers, to plants and minerals, animals and humans.  While the Gaia principle excludes elements outside of planet earth (the planets, the cosmos) it is a step in the right direction of a more encompassing understanding of our embeddedness in earth.  Native American Chief Seattle supposedly said something like "whatever you do to the web you do to yourself." We are part of nature, we are nature just as much as trees, mushrooms, mice, wales, clouds, the sun, or our consciousness.  And because We Are Nature we need to relearn to honor it, and we need to learn responsible stewardship of it and ourselves as part of this enormous and intricate web.

put your money where your values are

In the spring we switched our electric energy supplier to Viridian and chose 100% renewable energy (they also have a 20% renewable energy option).   Viridian is a socially responsible (another worthwhile value) power company that supplies clean energy from local wind power. I found that cheaper is not necessarily better, because this is no longer my only value and consideration when making a purchase.  Oh - I do admit that I buy things at Walmart - where else can I get sewing thread, school notebooks, cotton socks, a sink stopper, pens and envelopes, marshmallows for our camping trip all in one place?  And at Trader Joe's (lots of inexpensive organics).  But then they have certain values attached to them, which I buy into.  Walmart (the new Woolworth) offers lots of different utilitarian things in one place (important since I live in the country and have few specialty stores), and Trader Joe's means organics for the masses.

I am conscientious about what I buy and where I buy it:  meat from local farmers (or venison from our own fall harvest), produce from food coop, local farm stands, or the farmers' market, organic grocery staples in bulk from the coop, eggs from a friend or a local farmer, clothes for myself and my daughter mostly from local second hand stores, pet supplies from the local pet store for the corn based cat litter (and I make my own cat food), 100% recycled copy paper for the office: from Staples (only place that has it), 100% recycled toilet paper and paper towels from Trader Joe's (lots less than the local supermarket), to name just a few choices that indicate clear values.

Imagine what would happen if 80% of Americans stopped buying GMO corn and soy products? And remember, if you don't buy organic they'll keep spraying the pesticides that are killing the bees, which are our main produce pollinators (!!!). So be aware of what values you fund, or don't fund with your purchases.  Cheap is not the only value.

Also see a similar post on voting with your dollars.

be patient!

We have become used to instant gratification.  Information is now available at the touch of a finger.   We no longer write letters, barely even send e-mails or make telephone calls, we text and twitter.  Our attention spans have become shorter, as teachers have noticed, and the movie and TV industries exploit and promote it, which then self-perpetuates.  On the material side the credit system has enabled us to buy now and pay later, since we choose no longer to be patient until we have saved up enough money.  Besides houses and cars we can also get everything else instantly without paying for it upfront (just pay Amazon an annual fee and you'll get 2-day shipping on all your orders).  We have lost our patience, we live on credit, and we are banking on a better future to acquire today’s perceived needs now.

The belief that this system will work long-term is also coloring our relationship with nature.  Many don’t want to believe - yet, as it seems - that oil and natural gas reserves are finite.  Many don’t want to believe - yet, - that we have a huge garbage problem.  Many don’t want to believe that we have any number of grave environmental challenges to deal with.  We’ll fix them in the future – or so many still like to believe.  Environmentally speaking, we live thus on credit instead of investing now into our environmental future.  From indigenous cultures we need to relearn patience and a long-term outlook on issues.  

Native Americans look seven generations ahead into the future!   We must invest in a viable future for our children, grandchildren, and five more generations out, instead of leaving them to mop up our messes. The Lorax is a good book by Dr. Seuss on what happens otherwise.

shark fin soup and hope

If the Chinese are back peddling on shark fin soup, so ubiquitous at all festive banquets of the past, there is hope for changes in our attitude about a lot of other things as well.  I am thinking of idling stances on such pressing issues as climate change, pollution, animal welfare, GMOs, child prostitution, and many other ugly realities.  It seems to me that ultimately our collective indecisiveness on these issues boils down to the hesitance of wrestling ourselves away from the profit-first model.  If we only realized that the wellbeing-first model benefits us all around. Bonnie Tsui wrote this week-end in the NY Times about the changing attitude of the Chinese on serving shark fin soup at important banquets, previously a sign of "honoring (and impressing) your guest."  I was served shark fin soup at several banquets in my company's honor in the late 1980s when we lived in Hong Kong, and was oblivious of the gruesome practice (which I can't bear to describe here, but you can look it up).    Because it has been such an inherent component of Chinese food culture I was really quite amazed to read that "last summer, the Chinese government announced that it would stop serving the dish at official state banquets."

Here's to change for the better, change towards wellbeing, change towards respect of nature and all living beings. 

food forests

Permaculture, although around since the 1970s in Australia, is still a fairly new idea over here.  The word is a contraction of the words permanent, agriculture, and culture (interesting that agriculture, which means cultivation of the land, is so tightly tied to culture - without agriculture there is no culture!).  The idea of permaculture is a completely sustainable agriculture, and more so culture.  Sustainable means that there is no "garbage," that everything we need to live on comes and goes in a permanent, circular, mutually beneficial and dependent, and therefore WASTELESS cycle.  The principle of agricultural permaculture is planting crops together that complement one another in a wildly complex and diverse composition that emulates nature, although it is man-made.  These food forests work at every stratum of the vegetation, from low down mushrooms, herbs and flowers, to the next level of berry and hazelnut bushes, to higher up fruit and nut trees.

This is not a new concept, though.  But then - sometimes we need to revisit old ideas from a fresh perspective and a higher perch.  Thanks to the suggestion of a friend, I recently read the book 1491 by Charles Mann and learned about milpas.  Milpas are South American planting compositions that comprise up to a dozen crops (maize, avocados, squashes and beans, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potatoes, jicama, amaranth, and mucuna), which all "complement one another nutritionally and environmentally."  Some milpas, I learned, have been in existence for four thousand years without depleting the soil!!!

One of the problems of our conventional farming methods, which is exacerbated in monocultures, is the lack of diversity in crops, because a lack of diversity in the insect/grub/bird population follows it.  This disconnect between agriculture and nature then depletes the soil on top of it all.

I am never advocating a return to the past!  However, new for the sake of new is often short sighted.  In this case we have two inspirational and sustainable agricultural models whose principles are worthwhile knowing about.  (please also visit a previous post on "spiritual farming.")

don't frack our future

Instead of digging into our earth, chopping it up, fracking it and injecting chemically laced water into it, carving some out of it, plundering it, hollowing it out, throwing our trash onto it and burying trash into it,

making a mess of it, plundering and raping it,

let's respect our earth, appreciate it for what it gives us, honor it, cooperate with it, and understand it.

happy earth day

It does look like “…the economy provides us with all of our products…,” as environmentalist David Suzuki writes.  However, that is simply a belief, and an erroneous one at that. Suzuki clarifies that “This is nonsense, of course.  Everything we depend on….comes from the earth and will eventually end up going back to it.”   Whether it is paper, glass, steel, fiber, or even plastic, it helps to remember that those are all made from natural materials.  But we have lost the connection to where those things really come from because our lives have become so abstract, so removed from nature. Because of the separation in our mind between man and nature, we separate ourselves literally from nature altogether, we eliminate it downright from our lives (and we tend to forget that our garbage ends up there as well - see my recent post on that subject). So here is my Earth Day thought-of-the-day:

spiritual farming

Huh, you might ask?  Yes, there is such a thing, and it is called biodynamic farming.  The Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association’s website defines it as a “spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture, food production and nutrition.”  Fred Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, explained in his 2010 keynote address at the conference of the association, that the present big-ag paradigm of maximum efficiency is geared towards short-term gain, and is only possible through specialization and simplification (the small picture, immediate gratification).  However, he says, farms need to be run more like organisms (the Gaia principle), in sync with nature.

We need a new agricultural paradigm, what with the bees dying, crop varieties diminishing (Tom Standage reports that “of the 7,100 types of apple (!!!) that were being grown in America in the 19th century…6,800 are now extinct.”  WOW!), monocultures that discourage insect and bird variety and promote disease, and GMOs and pesticides as misguided solutions to increasing production with short-minded profit in mind.  While there is so much more to say about the deficiencies of the present paradigm, I’d rather look towards the future and better solutions.

Organic agriculture, sustainable agriculture,permaculture, and biodynamics are all promising alternatives, of which the first is the most profit and least nature oriented (yep).  The term permaculture comes from the contraction of permanent and culture and agriculture (there is indeed no culture without agriculture).  Permaculture is a completely sustainable agri/culture practiced in symbiosis with local nature and without waste.  Biodynamics incorporates more lofty principles.  Just like permaculture it works with the farm in a symbiotic wasteless cyclical organism-like relationship.  In addition, though, it takes into account our embeddedness in the larger cosmic picture, and considers the planetary influences on seeds, crops and soil, and works with “homeopathic” soil enhancements since the health of the soil is first and foremost in growing minerally rich produce, the ultimate aim of agriculture.

healthy soil = healthy food = healthy body

poor bees

Whether Einstein really said that mankind would perish within four years if all the bees died is less important than the realization that bees are crucially important to our food chain and they are indeed dying at an alarming rate.  It is, however, true that Rudolf Steiner predicted 100 years ago that the bee population would be damaged or might die out if we kept raising and treating the bees in an industrial way – and this is exactly what is happening right now.  It is also a fact that our crops will decline by about 40% if the bees died out because there are not enough other pollinators out there. While big agri farmers and big agri beekeepers still talk about the “mysterious” colony collapse syndrome, and some scientists still remain vague about the cause (“it’s the mites” – no, the bees’ genetic make-up is weak and they can’t stand up to the mites any longer!), the cause is eminently clear to holistic beekeepers and all who are in tune with nature.  The bees’ genetic material and immune system have been weakened by the industrial approach to both beekeeping and farming.  Monocultures deprive the bees of variety in their food, the poor things feed on a diet of poisons (all the –icides we spray on crops and gardens), industrial beekeepers take their honey away and feed them diluted sugar water instead, and they wake them up in February from their winter slumber, pack the hives by the hundreds onto trucks, and shuttle them up the coast to a different orchard every six weeks.  This treatment is worse than what peasant endured in the Middle Ages.  No wonder they die of mistreatment and weakness.

What to do?  It is so encouraging that backyard and rooftop beekeeping are becoming so popular.  It is also very encouraging that more women, who are naturally more nurturing, are becoming beekeepers.  But you don’t have to become a beekeeper to help the situation.  Just stop spraying your lawn (what’s wrong with dandelions and clover?  the bees love them), stop spraying your roses (find more natural and gentle ways to interact with your garden), buy more organic produce, and simply become more informed.