The Bicycle and the Olive Tree

Vernacular Space and the Crisis of Modernity

2010-11-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

Err...which is to say, MY crisis of modernity...

So, you know that theory that claims that any conversation about morality that goes on for long enough will inevitably turn to Hitler and/or Nazis? (This is apparently known as Godwin's Law. I had no idea it had an actual name.) And its offshoot rule that whoever eventually brings up Hitler and/or Nazis, whether drawing well-supported or baseless parallels in order to make a point, automatically loses? I've often remarked that the same sort of law applies to my own arguments in such conversations, only instead of Hitler/Nazis, it's pre-modern/hunter-gatherer societies. Questions like Is abortion morally acceptable? and Is war ever just? and What's the best way to get rid of this bunion on my foot? are invariably reduced to a matter of how such an issue would fit into a pre-modern context (I think I need a "WWPMSD?" bracelet), and what that says about modern culture, which is usually something bad.

I'll admit to having anarcho-primitivist leanings, which is something I generally won't discuss in polite company, though I will insist, if pressed, that I've come to such a place through a totally infallible train of logic: homo sapiens was a nomadic hunter-gatherer species for about 90% of its evolutionary history (prior to the advent of agriculture and sedentary communities about 12,000 years ago), and for countless millennia before that as a pre-human primate species; therefore, if our DNA disposes us towards certain biological, mental, emotional, and/or social conditions, they are almost certainly still largely based on prehistoric conditions and are only in sync with more recent (i.e. since about 10,000 BCE) ways of life insofar as agricultural lifestyles have managed to mimic particular conditions of homo sapiens' prehistoric space. (There are clear exceptions to this, such as the gene that enables humans to continue to digest milk into adulthood, which evolved as we began to domesticate dairy animals, but in general I think this is true, particularly when it comes to genes that don't confer an evolutionary benefit quite as straightforward as that of lactose tolerance.) In my way of theorizing, our lifestyle's incompatibility with our evolved needs—particularly our social, mental, and emotional ones—is increasingly a problem the more "modern" we become; the lifestyle of the average person alive in, say, 1800 CE was a far cry from the average person alive in 18,000 BCE, but the lifestyle of the average person alive today, at least in the industrialized world, is arguably much more different from that of someone alive 200 years ago than that person's lifestyle was from that of her hunter-gatherer predecessor of 20 millennia past.

Which makes me wonder: what about our lifestyles has changed in these last 12,000 years, and especially in these last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, that causes us to live in ways that are contrary to or physical and emotional well-being? Pollution? Poor nutrition? Stress? Exposure to toxic substances? What about our insistence on dividing the day into 24 hour-long segments, where we eat at certain times and go to bed at other times and wake up at still other times, all without any reference to our own biological needs? Or our insistence, in the industrialized world, upon living in nuclear family units, without the benefit of extended family members to help with the child-rearing and household work, not to mention teach essential skills and impart wisdom? I could go on (and on and on and on and on and on....). Which all begs the question of the extent to which we can attribute Today's Big Issues—widespread violence, systemic poverty, "diseases of affluence", etc.—to homo sapiens living in ways that are contrary to their evolved needs.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I will always, always, ALWAYS take conversations in this direction...but this doesn't mean that to do such is always logically sound, which is something I often lose sight of. For this reason, I've joked about applying the same sort of categorical ban on conversations deviating toward pre-modern/hunter-gatherer culture as Godwin's Law places on conversations that end up discussing Hitler and Nazis. And so my REAL point here is that I'm about to violate this ban. Because I read something interesting in a book, and I want to share it with you. But I will re-enact the ban as soon as I've done so, I promise.

So.

This is coming up now because I'm having somewhat of a motivational crisis in my life. I've settled on a research topic for my graduate degree that I actually quite like, which is a step in the right direction, but beyond that I'm having trouble getting motivated to do most tasks related to school, research, the things that pay my bills, and the things that will supposedly put me in good standing to have a prestigious, if demanding, career sometime down the road (which I'm beginning to suspect I don't actually want anyway). I find myself increasingly swayed by daydreams of finally buying that farm and building that yurt and engaging in my own survival in a way that will produce, if nothing else, an authentic interest in the work that consumes my days. I haven't spent too much time musing over why I'm feeling so darn undermotivated right now, because I've definitely been here before, a good number of times, and while I've come up with many answers over the years, none of them has helped me put a roof over my head or food on the table in a more mentally- and emotionally-engaging manner, so lately I've quit wondering why and begun focusing on how to escape the grind.

But today while flipping through a book on postdevelopment theory, I came across a piece on why traditional (or as the author called them, "vernacular") societies often resist development.¹ This piece contends that these vernacular societies necessarily see new ways of doing things as potentially dangerous because their own ways of doing things have evolved in close relation to one another, and are interrelated in ways and to an extent that those of us living in modern, industrialized contexts could never imagine, and that since historically there have often been consequences to stepping outside of these interrelated customs, technologies, etc. (e.g. death from starvation, getting mauled by lions...), communities have thus evolved protective norms in the form of resistance to outside influence. As the author puts it, "[Vernacular societies] have a certain organic consistency: in other words, their structures are living tissue of social and cultural relations defining the activities of their members and protecting them against possible dangers."²

I've often observed (to myself, and probably to anyone who'd listen) how in modern society, we tend to compartmentalize the different areas of our lives and treat them as separate pieces with no bearing on each other, and how this is probably bad and leads to alienation, depression, ennui, and other negative stuff like that, and how this is probably partially responsible for a lot of the bad stuff going on in the world today. But it never occurred to me to view synergy between a culture's beliefs and lifestyles as a natural feature of the pre-modern world, and thus, a natural psychological, emotional, and social condition of the world in which the vast majority of our evolution has taken place. And so I want to explore what this means for the modern world, which is why I had to postpone my categorical ban.

The implication of such a holistic way of life is that thinking and doing go hand in hand—one would never engage in an activity that didn't make sense within the context of one's beliefs, emotional and physical needs, etc., because these things are intimately tied to the culture, customs, and norms of the society. Someone in a vernacular society would never, for example, sport-kill the game animals upon which they depend for food, or build a house so large it consumes all the trees upon which they depend for fuel. This is clearly in strong contrast to modern life, in which most of us often find ourselves in positions where we are forced or otherwise compelled to act in ways that go against our beliefs, values, or needs, whether for reasons related to work, conspicuous consumption, or just the lack of available alternatives. So what does it mean for us, when we divorce thinking and doing to such a great extent?

The first thing that springs to mind is that if thinking and doing are traditionally such intimately-related activities, it should not come as a surprise that doing without thinking proves especially difficult; that is, when we're forced to engage in activities that don't jive with our inner conceptions of value, justice, morality, etc., we find ourselves unmotivated (and possibly alienated, depressed, etc. as well). I can no sooner find fulfillment by doing work I find meaningless than I can by becoming a devotee of a religion I don't actually believe is true. It's always a little alarming to me when I make connections like this, that should have been perfectly obvious all along. In the past, I've come up with all manner of explanations for why I've never actually had a job that I liked, from Marxist notions of labor as an exploitative process, to the realization that I just don't like stuff enough to make it worth all the work it takes to buy it, to depressing treatises on the sad realities of cubicle farms and the horrors of fluorescent lighting. And though all of these things do, of course, factor into my distaste for past jobs, I've suddenly discovered the link that seems to tie them all together, which is that I just don't believe in the processes driving them. I mean, presumably, if I actually wanted a house in the suburbs and an SUV and yearly vacations in Hawaii, I'd be less put-off by the cubicles and fluorescent lighting, because I'd have accepted them as part of the process of obtaining something I considered valuable. I assume that this is why most people tend to accept these things to some extent—they believe that there is value somewhere along the way, even if it's just in the end result of being able to provide a stable, comfortable life for themselves and their families. But I'm really not all that driven by these things, and I believe that stability and comfort can be achieved in much more fulfilling ways, and what's more, I'm deeply troubled by the world that's being created as a result of this way of living. And since basically every job I've ever had has forced me to engage, to a fairly large extent, in the processes creating this way of living, I've done a whole lot of doing without thinking, which, as we've established, is sad, difficult, uphill work. Oh, the trauma of being an anarcho-primitivist in the modern world.

Oh man, but it's so much worse than that too. I'm a pretty analytical person. I deconstruct the hell out of everything. It's like this compulsion, something my brain does when idle, like when I'm on the john and forgot to bring a book. And as a result, I can, and do, find dumb stuff in EVERYTHING, which makes it difficult to believe wholeheartedly in the processes generating or purposes served by pretty much anything. I've been hiding myself away in grad school for the past two plus years because it turns out that I believe in what goes on there more than I believe in what goes on in most other paycheck-giving sectors of society, but that doesn't mean it's not without its issues (more on this some other time). I'm really worried that I'll never be able to find a way to spend my working hours that doesn't leave me feeling numb and vaguely violated in some way. This is probably why I've always been so obsessed with the idea of having a farm and growing my own food—I theorize that if the thing at stake compelling me to work was my own actual survival, I'd at least be interested in that, if only because my biological self-preservation instinct made me be so. And once I got that down, I could experiment with adding other things back into my life and seeing how they fit, to try find a way I could live and work without feeling so numb about things, kind of like those diets they put people with severe allergies on, where they can only eat, like, oatmeal for a month, and then gradually add other foods back in to see how they jive. (Please spare me the lectures on how farming is hard and subsistence agriculture is a miserable way to get by and is practically impossible for someone raised in a cushy industrialized nation; I know these things deep down—this is just a thought experiment.) Right, so, the moral of the story is that soul-crushing ennui is lame, and is maybe due to inherent contradictions between the various parts of our lives and the fact that this is a quite odd and probably not totally healthy circumstance in the broader context of our evolutionary histories, and...yeah.

This somehow became very personal, which was not quite where I intended it to go.

I think it's time for me to re-enact that ban...

—

Endnotes:
1. Rahnema, Majid. "Development and the People's Immune System: the Story of Another Variety of AIDS." In The Post-Development Reader. Ed. Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree. Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1997. 111-131.
2. Ibid., p.113.

The Simplicity Paradox

2010-09-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

So I just got a car. It was a decision I didn't make lightly, and over which I'm still feeling extremely conflicted (so don't give me any grief, because I'm kinda touchy about it right now). My mom recently got a new car and offered me her old one, which was in good condition and, better yet, free. I've been carless for over four years, which has worked out fine, more or less, since I live in the urban core of Minneapolis where public transportation is actually pretty okay. But I would like to move to someplace rural at some unspecified time in the future, and if I do that, I'd really need a car. Even if I only drive it once a week to go into town. Even if gas is $15 a gallon at that point. Not to mention that it's hard to even start looking for such a place to live without a car. So I took this one.

But...okay, in the interest of full disclosure (and what are blogs for, if not full disclosure?), that was actually only half the reason I took the car. It was also, in part, because I am somewhat fed up with the hassle of not having access to a car, which is to say that I have grown lazy. It's not hassle enough that I'd actually spend money to purchase a car, but when a free car in good condition was dangled in front of my face, it was too enticing to pass up. So I took it, and was thus inducted into an elite secret club of folks who never, ever have to wait for the bus when it's below zero out or beg for a ride to some transit-inaccessible place. And—I won't lie—it's been a kind of amazing experience, to suddenly have that freedom after not having had it for four years.

I recently found something I wrote a couple years ago, musing over my non-car-ownership:

"I think a lot about cars. How I don't have one. How I'm not sure if I want one. How sometimes I feel like I was a different person when I had one. The degree of freedom and independence a car gives you is identity-altering, I have learned. I think about back when I had a car and a corporate job and lived in the suburbs, and could go anywhere I wanted, anytime I wanted to—to see friends in other suburbs, or to visit my college town. It blows my mind today, to contemplate that level of freedom, and the fact that I once had it. Who was I then?"

And I can only describe the personal renaissance I am now experiencing in light of having a car as kind of the reverse of this—a sudden blossoming of opportunity where before there were only limits. It's incredibly discouraging, actually, and more than a little scary—if I, an inner-city dweller on a budget with a penchant for doing things the hard way and a $97-a-semester-unlimited-student-bus-pass,-for-crying-out-loud, can't even be enticed into non-car-ownership, then what hope is there?

To be fair, I feel like the recent non-car-ownership fad, in which folks who can easily afford a personal vehicle are increasingly choosing not to have one, has glossed over some of the more inconvenient aspects of being carless. Take buying kitty litter, for example. No one wants to drag that home on the bus. I've generally managed to pick up that kind of stuff when I already happen to be out with someone who has a car. But then you always have to be thinking about it in the back of your mind. You've got to keep this mental list of the things you consume that are heavy/otherwise awkward to transport, and how much of each of them you have, whether you need more, and where to get them, and then randomly badger your car-owning friends into swinging you by the store that sells them while you're in the neighborhood, all the while worrying that they're rolling their eyes inwardly and wondering why you don't just get a car already, if you need kitty litter that badly. About a month ago, I found myself seriously contemplating skipping out on a friend's wedding reception because it happened to be held near IKEA, where there was something I'd been meaning to buy, and I didn't know when I might next be in the neighborhood. That kind of mentality can get exhausting.

And then there was my social life. I just moved out of a neighborhood populated mostly by (ragingly incompetent, naive, and perpetually drunk) undergrads, where a spate of violent crime incidents (shootings, stabbings, and gang rapes, wheee!), likely perpetrated by those attracted to the idea of a bunch of intoxicated easy targets wandering around with their parents' credit cards, were making me nervous to be walking to/from the bus stop late at night. I'd pretty much stopped going anywhere in the evenings unless it was with someone else who had a car, which made me feel like I was about twelve years old. And then there was all the stuff that I wanted to do outside of the city—camp, visit relatives, volunteer on farms, see green things in patches larger than one square block—that I couldn't do unless I conned someone else into taking me/lending me their car. It's one thing to satisfy most of your transportation needs via train/bus/bike, but another thing entirely not to even have the option to drive. I coped with these things for a while, but over time they got to be really, really old.

The problem is that I'm now spending I-don't-even-know-how-much per month for something I don't actually need. Insurance is setting me back $65 a month. I could go for the cheapo liability only insurance, but I was been burned by that one before, badly, when somebody hit my (tragically departed, may it rest in peace) old car when it was parked on the street in the middle of the night and left it for dead. $4000 asset, gone. So I'm wary of that route. (Because then how would I shop for a farm???) Then there's gas, which depends on how much I drive it, of course. If I don't drive it much, I'll basically be paying $65 a month for the privilege of knowing it's there to be driven...but if I drive it a lot, then I'm paying even more for something I don't even really need. And then there are repairs and such, which I don't even want to think about right now. If it needs some really expensive part, will I actually cough up the dough to fix it? If I truly relied on it, yes, but right now I'm thinking no...

The first day I had the thing, I ran some errands in two different parts of the city. This would have been a complex enough venture on public transit that I'd have probably split it up into two different trips on two different days, or else spend the better chunk of the day on the bus. But I was done in a slick two-and-a-half hours. I was like, "Holy sh*t, this is better than chocolate!!" But on the other hand...a whole city of previously inaccessible stores is now open to me, and my buying isn't restricted by what I can carry home on the bus. This was one of the things I really liked about not having a car—around here you can get to most things on the bus, but generally not without a transfer or two, and if it takes you five hours and four transfers round trip to get to the store that sells the thing you think you need, chances are you'll find a way to do without it. I'm pretty sure that this has saved me a lot of money over the years. But no more. Now I'm shelling out big bucks for the privilege of being able to get to stores more quickly and easily, where I can then shell out more big bucks for things I don't need, and all without worry about how I'm going to get everything home. It's great for the economy, maybe, but potentially not so great for my own personal economy. Or the environment. Sigh.

And then there are all the really nice things about taking the bus, which you (or at least I) will inevitably miss out on somewhat because driving is just so much easier. The first couple years I was carless, I was thrilled about it because, freedom notwithstanding, I really detest driving. And busing eliminates so many of the really loathsome things about getting from point A to point B. Traffic jams, for example, are no longer your problem. If you're stuck in traffic, you can kick back and read a book, or kick back and watch all the drivers of the cars around you grow increasingly frustrated while you put on your smug face because you're on a bus kicking back. Winter driving is a no-brainer—you don't even have to know how. You don't have to scrape ice off your windshield. You don't have to dig around in the backseat for the ice scraper and curse because your fingers are going numb. You don't have to freeze your ass off waiting for your car to warm up because the bus driver did that for you back at the station. And you're NEVER the designated driver. You NEVER have to pay for parking. In contrast, I've spent two afternoons in the past week stuck in absolute clusterfuck rush hour traffic after I decided to go places just because I could, and as it so happened about fifty thousand other people were trying to go to approximately the same place at the same time I was. (Hence the term "rush hour"; note to self—there's this thing called "rush hour".) AND THERE WAS NOTHING GOOD ON THE RADIO. Not cool. My non-car-owning self would have probably spent those tragically wasted hours kicking back on the porch with a beer and a book. So really, has my life just gotten better? Easier? More satisfying?

Not to mention all the negative environmental and economic impacts of having a car. Carbon dioxide emissions. Fossil fuel dependence. The implicit reinforcement of the idea that car ownership is superior to non-car-ownership, and that busing/biking just isn't a viable option. The fact that the majority of the money you spend on car-related expenses leaves your local economy.Wow, I'm starting to feel really bad about this decision. Thanks, blog.

It comes down to an issue that I've encountered often in other circumstances as well, which is that in the process of trying to "simplify" my life, I often make my life harder. And by "simplify" I mean get rid of stuff, clutter, gadgets, monthly expenses; in other words, make smart time/money tradeoffs by swapping the ability to buy or have lots of stuff (i.e. more income) for more time (which I gain by not having to work as much). (Source of above link: Dave Pollard's excellent blog.) Of course, this is somewhat moot at the moment since I'm a grad student and basically work ALL the time for very little money, but in general, this describes my values regarding time and money. The problem, however, is that in many cases, stuff does actually save you time—and on the flip side of that, getting rid of stuff often means that the time you gain by not having to work for that income is easily eaten up by having to do things in a different and often more time-consuming way. I call this the "simplicity paradox".

Cars are a good example of this. In the United States (and also Canada), the majority of cities are pretty dang difficult to navigate via public transportation. Oh, it can be done, but it isn't quick. When I stopped having a car back in 2006, I was incredibly pleased to be able to shed that monthly expense, not to mention the hassle of all the things that go along with car ownership—maintenance, finding parking, that constant fear in the back of your mind that your car is going to go kaput any day now and will need $3000 in repairs. But over time I realized that I'd just traded those hassles for a new set of hassles—buses that only run every 30 minutes on weekends, buses that are chronically late (or worse, buses that are chronically early and zoom by as you're rounding the corner to the bus stop, those jerks), transfers in dodgy neighborhoods, your suburban-dwelling friends always having to come visit you, and the fact that it consistently takes about three times as long to get pretty much anywhere. It's hard to say which set of hassles is preferable, because they're apples and oranges, and it totally depends on your situation, your priorities, and your income. For a while, I really liked non-car-ownership. Lately it's started to grate on me. But maybe once I've had this car for six months and seen it through oil changes, winter driving, insurance payments, and many, many tank refills, I'll be super keen on taking the bus again. And sometimes it is worthwhile to do things the hard way if your values so dictate, or you get pleasure from the mindfulness of it. (I feel this way about cooking and making things—nearly everything I eat—from scratch.) There isn't a definitive answer.

I'm definitely not trying to imply that more stuff is actually better than less stuff, or that stuff never complicates your life more than it simplifies it. I can think of plenty of things I've intentionally never had or ditched along the way that have truly simplified and improved my life immensely in their absence. A television, for example. And cable, for that matter. Nice clothes that require dry-cleaning. A nice haircut that requires styling. Zillions of knick-knacks and heirlooms that require storing (and moving, if you move). Etc. The epitome of this, in my mind, is the simple house (or maybe yurt) that I intend to build for myself someday, so that I can avoid a mortgage and the host of complicated issues and obligations that go along with that. Building a house is hardly a simple matter (building a yurt is somewhat more so, which is why it's on the table), but I suspect that in the long run, it will be far simpler than 30 years of indebtedness to some douchey bank, especially given recent (and current) trends in the housing market. Cutting down on your stuff, and your expenses, can and does simplify your life in meaningful ways. But not in every case.

I guess the point is that one has to go about it mindfully and consider the trade-offs carefully—and accept that in practice, it's probably unrealistic to cut out as many items and expenses as you know you could. I once met this retired man who'd become extremely environmentally conscious in his old age; not only did he ditch his car and keep his thermostat at about 50, but he refused to buy anything new, including socks and underwear. I'm sure most of America would consider this guy a nutter, but I found his stance, and his dedication to it, incredibly admirable...but I couldn't do that myself, if only because I don't have the time in my life to scour thrift stores for used socks and underwear in acceptable condition... As someone who does a lot of things the hard way in the name of simplicity, and recently caved and got a car because of it, I can confirm: there's a lot to be said for not burning yourself out on simplicity.

The Nature of the Problem

2010-07-04T14:40:00.000-07:00

I am incredibly fortunate to live in a city with a thriving food culture, where there's enough demand for "unconventional" food products that they're relatively easy to get your hands on. The items that I'm most grateful to be able to access are the grass-fed dairy products from Cedar Summit Farm in New Prague, MN, about 45 minutes southwest of the Twin Cities. Apart from all the health benefits I raved about in my last post, this milk and butter taste AMAZING, and the milk is available in returnable glass jars to boot. At about $6.50/lb. for butter and $8.00/gallon for milk, they're pretty pricey, but the farm has a devoted following of consumers who love the stuff and won't settle for anything less (including people like me, who don't make much money but are willing to forego other items to be able to afford it). Everyone I've talked to who consumes the stuff is kind of fanatical about it; in fact, encountering another CSF devotee can be kind of like encountering someone who happens to belong to the same underground religious cult as you (except, you know, without the negative connotations). You squeal in delight at having discovered the connection you share, and then proceed to swap stories about the things you love about CSF—the cream at the top of the milk bottle, the way you can tell the difference between the cows' summer and winter fodder in the taste, the glass bottles, which are just so gosh-darn nifty you can hardly stand it. Or maybe that's just me. Anyway, I adore the stuff. I even take the butter home to Denver with me when I go to visit my parents, and if I could find a way to get a couple gallons of milk home with me, you can be sure I'd do that as well.

Last weekend my friend and fellow devotee Jenny and I made what felt like a religious pilgrimage to the farm for their "Milkapalooza" event. We got to take a tour of the farm and see the cows and all of their grazing land (and it takes a LOT of land to grass feed cows; no wonder the stuff is so expensive). The event also included a mini ecology lesson, where attendees were taught all about the way that traditional grazing benefits the land and the region as well. From an ecological standpoint, so-called "conventional" milk production is somewhat of a nightmare. I'm sure you've heard at least pieces of this story before. The corn and soy used as feed are typically grown in huge, chemically-intensive monocultures, and contribute to the whole collection of environmental issues that beset "conventional" agricultural practices, including erosion and loss of topsoil, nutrient runoff from fields and nutrient loading in waterways, habitat loss and fragmentation, the impact of pesticides on non-pest species, and more. Said corn and soy then become feed for cows confined in huge, crowded dairies, and are rapidly converted into vast quantities of excrement. Rich in nitrogen, manure has traditionally been used as a fertilizer, but the scale of modern dairy operations makes this difficult from a transportation perspective—who wants to cart hundreds of tons of cow crap all across the land to be spread on fields? (In some cases, when a there is a farm nearby that can take the excrement, this does happen, but it is often not an economical option.) Instead, it sits in huge piles, leeching nitrates into the groundwater (this is bad, and can cause blue baby syndrome), and emitting methane (a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide) as it decomposes anaerobically. Which is pretty much just bad for everyone, including the cows, who spend their lives up to their knees in their own excrement. The same is true of large scale "conventional" beef operations as well.

In contrast, grass-fed dairy (and beef) operations avoid nearly all of these problems by "closing the loop". Rather than importing environmentally-destructive feed and ending up with environmentally-destructive waste products, traditional grazing works as a system, where inputs and outputs are part of a nutrient cycle; the result is a healthy, functional ecosystem, above and below ground, which benefits other resident species and the surrounding land.

Fodder for the cows is not grown through large-scale intensive agriculture and trucked in; what the cows eat comes from right under their feet (the farm bales and stores hay for winter). At CSF, the pastures, many converted from "conventional" agriculture, were initially seeded with a mix of grasses and other nutritious plants (like clover), but have been self-propagating ever since. As polycultures, they are less susceptible to "weeds", or unwanted plants, and are more easily managed without chemicals. Cows excrete right in the field, where the manure is fertilizes the soil and is incorporated back into the plants with little to no nitrate leaching or methane emissions. Plant cover reduces soil erosion and nutrient runoff. Studies of streams in this watershed and others with significant organic farm representation have confirmed that stream health improves considerably when nutrient runoff is reduced. CSF's management practices have apparently also resulted in a number of native bird species moving in, which help out by catching and eating the flies that gather around the herd. And over time, well-managed pastures such as this one will accumulate organic matter in their soils, which (on a global scale) represents a significant carbon sink—a way to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in a form where it won't contribute to climate change.

The men who covered this territory with visitors to the farm that day—a retired DNR worker and a cattle farmer who's been crusading for this type of "alternative" approach to beef and dairy production for decades—were clearly just enthralled by the elegant simplicity of this approach. And if you think about it, it is pretty cool. We hear so much about the countless, extraordinarily complex environmental problems that beset modern culture that it's sometimes hard to believe that such elegant solutions exist—until you learn how all the pieces fit together, and realize that it's really not such an incredible, improbable thing that everything would work out so nicely, because it evolved that way. Pastures and the animals that graze on them evolved to compliment each other, each giving and taking nutrients in moderate quantities. Soil systems evolved under full plant cover, not in tilled and weeded monoculture rows. Etc. It really is quite elegant. So why are we not doing it more?

These two men asked the same question, and were seemingly unable to come up with what I think is the very obvious answer: money. Despite my fanatical devotion to this farm and its dairy products, I can definitely understand why paying $8/gallon for milk would put most people off. I'm not saying that the milk is overpriced—after seeing how much land goes into producing it, I can't imagine how it could possibly cost less. But it is a significantly more expensive way to produce milk than "conventional" methods, whether you measure in dollars or land and resources required, and that is not going to change.

Our two teacher/tour guides professed to have great faith in the ability of the market to address the issue. It's not that farmers want to farm the conventional way, they kept telling us. It's just that that's where the demand is. They insisted that once people realize all the benefits to this alternative way—health, environmental, and otherwise—demand for it can't help but go up.

And I'm sure this will prove to be true, to an extent. Interest in organics is growing. Awareness is growing. Notions of the negative impacts of "conventional" ag are entering the cultural lexicon. Farmers' markets, local foods, and small farms are all growing. But I'm willing to bet that at the end of the day, a very significant percentage of Americans will still balk at the idea of spending $8/gallon on milk when they can get it on sale at the grocery store for $2.50. Even if it's REALLY GOOD milk.

Which brings me (finally) to my point: the perverse incentives provided by this country's agricultural subsidies, which make it far cheaper to consume unhealthy food produced through environmentally-destructive practices than to consume the opposite. A land-intensive milk production method like the one described here is always going to be more expensive than a "conventional" method using fewer resources, but the scales are tipped even further in favor of the "conventional" method when the government subsidizes the cost of the corn and soybeans the "conventional" cows eat. I think it will be extremely difficult (read: nearly impossible) for agricultural and livestock production to shift significantly towards ecologically-friendly, organic, and closed-loop methods until the playing field is leveled somewhat. Ideally, the government would shift subsidies toward better practices, but even just eliminating agricultural subsidies altogether would at least fix the problem of perverse incentives, and allow food prices to more accurately reflect the cost of producing them. (Of course, eliminating food subsidies altogether has a host of other implications that I won't get into here, and not all of them are good; my point is only that it's one approach to addressing the issue of perverse incentives in food pricing.)

And when might we expect such a thing to happen? Pardon my cynicism, but I don't think it can. The various agricultural lobbies are just too powerful for me to really be hopeful that this type of change ins possible. Jenny and I discussed this in the car on the way home, asking ourselves what the tipping point is going to be. "Conventional" ag is literally unsustainable—it both relies on limited resources like natural gas-derived and phosphate rock fertilizers to operate, and it is currently blowing through other, theoretically renewable necessities like topsoil faster than they're being created. Eventually, something's got to change. So the question is, will we notice in time that things are looking a bit desperate, and take action? Will we finally see a shift in agricultural subsidies? Or are we just going to run our fields into the ground, work them dead, suck every last nutrient out of them? Is it going to take an agricultural collapse for things to change? And at what cost?

I want to say I'm hopeful that things won't turn out that way, but I'm not especially. It's not like we don't know what's going on today—we're just choosing not to do anything about it.

This is why I keep apocalypse food in my basement.

On Health

2010-05-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

After an embarrassingly long hiatus, I am attempting to resume posting here. It's kind of mind-boggling just how much time and energy grad school eats up. I mean, I knew it wouldn't be a walk in the park, but it somehow manages to creep into every spare minute of my day in a way I did not expect. But I am relatively free for the summer, with only a half-time research assistant position to keep me busy, so I am going to try harder to get my thoughts down in writing here.

So anyway, the bad news around here is that my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer last week. The good news is that it was caught very early, and it's not an aggressive kind and is highly treatable, possibly even without chemo. The past week has been a bit of a nightmare, but now that we know more about the prognosis and treatment recommendations, we are relaxing a bit.

The whole thing has gotten me thinking, though, about what the future holds for me health-wise—and what the future holds for our country and world health care-wise. I am apparently at higher risk for breast cancer now that my mom has it, though it's unlikely that I'd get it until I'm older, like my mom. But will treatment for things like breast cancer be available when I'm 62?

Breast cancer treatment has apparently made HUGE progress even in just the past five years, since my aunt had it. Seriously—if you're going to treat the symptoms (cancer) and not the cause (pollution, crap food, toxicity in the places where we live, etc.) this is the way to do it. But do I want to rely on this type of treatment to be around in 35 years? Wouldn't it just be better to try to prevent the cancer in the first place? In one worst-case scenario à la Jim Kunstler, fossil fuel depletion (and our complete lack of planning for it) combined with climate change, financial collapse, government corruption/ineptitude, and other social failings would drastically change the industrialized way of life, limiting access to things like highly-technological (and therefore expensive) health care. It's not that such things would not exist at all—they would just not be available to the average person anymore. Even less doomy views on the future—at least those held by people mindful of the very real constraints on the continued existence of our modern way of life—predict a future characterized by far less prosperity than we enjoy today. Between our borrowed wealth (individual and national), our rate of natural resource extraction/use (which is well beyond replacement rates for renewable things like forests and soils), and the fact that fossil fuels provide the average American with the equivalent of 147 "energy slaves" and are neither renewable nor easily replaced by the less energy-dense alternatives available, it is not hard to see why today may be a period of unusual prosperity, ease, and access to things like advanced health care technology.

Such a gloomy future may never come to pass, but I feel better planning as if it will, and this includes the health front. If you are young and healthy, NOW is the time to work to preserve that, rather than waiting for the symptoms to appear. Mainstream science and media make modern cancer rates out to be somewhat of a mystery, but the truth is that a lot more is known—or at least suspected—about what causes cancer than we are generally told. The complicated part is that there are so many factors that come into play—everything from what you put into and onto your body, to the materials used to build your home and place of work, to where you live in relation to power lines and such. But the good news is that you can control some of these things, and doing so isn't that hard, once you know what to look out for—and where to get your information. The easiest place to start is probably with what you eat—it's the factor over which you have the most control.

Modern nutritional science will have you believe that modern ways of eating are perfectly good for you, so long as you heed the advice to eat your fruits and veggies, use fats sparingly, and all that stuff. But there is a fair amount of information out there that suggests that no matter how careful you are, the modern diet is nutritionally-inferior to the traditional diets consumed by humans for most of our evolutionary history. It goes beyond all the things you already know you aren't supposed to eat—white flour, trans-fats, foods high in sugar, and all those unpronounceable ingredients in pretty much any packaged food you buy. Modern fats (and I'm not talking trans-fats), modern meats, modern fruits and veggies, and modern grains are nearly all nutritionally inferior to those of hundreds of years ago because of the way they are grown or produced, as are the modern meals we make out of these foods, not only because the foods themselves are inferior, but because we've stopped preparing these foods in ways that take maximum advantage of the nutritional benefits they have to offer.

The benefits of traditional diets over the modern, industrialized diet was first brought to light in the 1930s by a dentist named Weston Price, who researched many then-extant traditional cultures all over the world and noted that a really astounding array of ailments common in industrialized cultures—including not only poor dental health but also allergies, asthma, and cancer—just weren't present, or were extremely uncommon, in these traditional cultures; however, when these cultures adopted an industrialized diet, these ailments all appeared. The same phenomenon has been observed by others all over the world, as traditional groups eating traditional foods have made the switch to processed, packaged, industrially-produced, and/or otherwise modern foods. As Michael Pollen notes in In Defense of Food, Dr. Price and others have investigated what facets of traditional diets are so beneficial, and what they found was surprising: according to the logic of modern nutrition, which looks at things like calories, fat content, and cholesterol, there were no clear patterns among traditional diets. Some groups ate high-fat diets and some ate low-fat diets; some ate high-cholesterol foods and some did not. None of these things seemed to matter.

Michael Pollen discusses the implications of these findings for the modern diet, but he barely scratches the surface. A more thorough treatment of the wisdom of traditional diets can be found in the quasi-cookbook Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon (thanks to Sharon Astyk for recommending this book in her blog). This book combines research by Dr. Price and others regarding traditional diets with the results of food studies that did not receive their funding from the food industry (and which, unsurprisingly, report significantly different findings than studies that DO receive food industry funds). The book begins with an 80+ page introduction to the health benefits of traditional foods over modern ones, and then provides recipes for everything from condiments to desserts. While I don't find these recipes overly inspiring, the techniques used are easy to incorporate into my favorite dishes. Sometime's it's merely a matter of ingredient choices, and sometimes it's a more complicated question of preparation, but the majority (though certainly not all) of what she recommends is relatively easy to incorporate into home cooking, provided you can get your hands on the right stuff.

It would be impossible to go into great detail about the foods and techniques this book recommends, but here are a few basics:

1. Fat is good for you—but only the right kinds.
And I don't mean trans-fat versus non, or any of that modern nonsense. (Trans-fats were created in a lab; obviously they're bad for you, but it goes beyond that.) Fats from animals raised in confined feeding operations, doped up on antibiotics and being fed foods that their stomachs were not designed to digest, are generally not that good for you (this should be perfectly intuitive, yet somehow we don't often stop to think about what our food eats). On the other hand, fats from animals raised without antibiotics or other drugs, eating exactly what they've evolved to eat, are actually quite good for you, even in quantities exceeding the fat intake generally recommended by modern nutritionists. Meats and meat byproducts like soup stocks and lard, as well as milk, butter, and eggs from free-range animals eating their traditional foods contain a better balance of fatty acid types and more; you may not notice these differences, but your body definitely does. Free-range meats and eggs are increasingly available at stores like Whole Foods, but milk and butter from grass-fed animals is still pretty hard to find in most places. (Ask at a natural foods store to see if they are available in your area.) These foods are more expensive than their factory-farmed alternatives, but most people find them far tastier, and they can be thought of as an investment in long-term health.

In terms of vegetable-derived fats, Fallon recommends only two for cooking: olive oil, and, when you need an oil with a high smoke point and a neutral flavor, coconut oil (the flavor of which is noticeable when concentrated but not when diluted in a dish). Canola (rapeseed) is actually quite unhealthy for you (see her book for a molecular explanation of why). Fallon also notes that the fats found in avacados are extremely healthy as well.

Another fat to watch out for is rancid fat, which is carcinogenic and has been demonstrated to contribute to stomach and intestinal cancers. Many of us can't taste rancid fats in our foods, but you should definitely be able to smell them—they smell old and musty and generally not like something you'd want to stick in your body. (Find an old bottle of oil or an old bag of whole-wheat flour and stick your nose in it to find out what it smells like.) Rancid fats are common in processed foods, and are present in any oil or oil-containing food that's outlived its shelf life (which varies, so it's always best to smell first).

2. Soaked grains are healthier than unsoaked ones.
When grains are soaked for several hours or overnight, something or other breaks down that, when not broken down, inhibits the absorption of other nutrients in the grain. In fact, Quaker Oatmeal boxes used to include overnight soaking in their preparation instructions, but this got shed somewhere along the way, in our fast-food culture. Grains like oats, rice, and barley which get cooked rolled or whole will be more nutritious if soaked prior to cooking (and they'll cook faster to boot). Foods made of flours, like bread, will be more nutritious if the production process allows for more soaking time—such as leavened breads that require a long rise time. Assuming you cook/bake things from scratch, working this into your food preparation is easy once you make it a habit.

3. Sprouted seeds are healthier than unsprouted ones.
Okay, so back in the day, wheat/oats/rye/etc. used to be harvested with a scythe and then stood up in shocks in the fields to finish drying for a couple weeks. They would inevitably be exposed to rain/dew and sun, and would sprout in the process before being put away into storage. Little did we know when modern farm equipment eliminated this standing-out-to-dry process that these once-sprouted grains produced by old-fashioned farm techniques provided several times the nutritional value of their non-sprouted counterparts.

Fortunately, we can get the same nutritional benefits from eating sprouts—which, by the way, are easy to make at home; you don't have to spend like four bucks on a little box of them at the store. Here is a tutorial that shows you how.

4. Fermented foods are all sorts of nutritious.
Fermentation has been used for ages to preserve foods that would otherwise go bad. And as it turns out, these foods, like sprouted foods, have a host of nutritional benefits that their unfermented counterparts do not. This one is a little trickier to work into your daily diet, as fermenting your own beer or saurkraut is a lot trickier than soaking your oatmeal the night before (and storebought options often don't provide the same benefits due to the production process). However, fermented foods taste AMAZING, so I've been gradually learning how to make more of them and figuring out how to incorporate them into my life.

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So, armed with information like this, can I preserve my good health for longer and stave off diseases like cancer? I'd say it's my best bet. I'm grateful for the medical technology that will treat my mom's condition, but I'd prefer to nip these things in the bud, rather than rely on said medical technology to always be there and available to me. It's unfortunate that an unhealthy diet has become so integral to the modern lifestyle that most of us have no idea what even constitutes a truly balanced one. Fortunately, however, this modern failing is one from which you can easily opt out.

My Big Fat Midwestern Train Journey, Part II

2009-01-24T08:30:00.000-08:00

12 January 2009
Somewhere in Middle America

I just spent the past three days in Omaha. As it turns out, Omaha is a very good place to think about trains. I arrived at the tiny Amtrak station—the sad remains of what was once a booming passenger rail system—thinking, This is IT?? I was expecting a station similar to Denver's, which has been in use for 105 years. It has obviously seen busier times, but has recently started servicing one of the light rail lines, and is once again becoming an important part of the city fabric.

In Omaha, the station was tucked away, in the shadow of the former passenger train station—this enormous, ornate, art deco thing that was built in 1929, which now houses a history museum. The friend I was visiting took me there, and it was a magnificent space. We wandered through the exhibit detailing the history of the station and rail service through Omaha, and I imagined what it would have been like to be alive when the station was built—it would have been such an exciting time in history, with the whole country suddenly opening up to be explored and experienced. The museum gives you a sense of that residual novelty on the train in the old train cars they have on display, where you can poke around in a coach car from the 30s, a sleeping car full of bunks with tiny toilets hidden under the fold-up beds, a lounge car decked out in red velvet. "It was a great place for socializing!" the volunteer museum guide told me in the lounge car. Surely this was better than the utter pain in the ass that air travel has become...slower, sure, but time much better spent.

As cities go, Omaha kind of sucks—a tiny downtown, surrounded by a huge, sprawling wasteland of strip malls and subdivisions, with crap public transit and virtually no walking access to anything of use. My friends live on the edge of downtown, and even they can't really walk to much—a coffee shop and an artsy movie theatre, and that's about it. Most of the city has the seedy look of a place that hasn't seen any development at all since about 1952, save the constant addition of cookie-cutter housing developments and big box stores. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect the city's economy started to dry up around the same time as passenger rail was superseded by widespread car useage and interstate highways. I learned at the history museum that Omaha's role in the regional livestock trade was once so significant that it warranted the building of one of the city's grandest architectural features to serve as an exchange building (today it's a general office building), but much of the city's importance as a regional economic hub seems to have disappeared around the time that other modes of transportation—modes that did not depend upon transit access to and from a single, centralized location—became cheaper and more feasible. Driving around, you can tell that the city was once very prosperous—buildings from the turn of the (last) century through about the 30s or 40s are elaborate and ornate and still dominate the skyline—but there doesn't seem to have been much of anything with any sort of aesthetic or functional quality built since. (On a side note, Omaha is also home to the corporate headquarters of ConAgra. Fun, no?)

And this is unfortunate, because as it turns out, Nebraska is kind of an okay place. I'm writing this on the train in Iowa which, as it turns out, is also an okay place. Did you know that Nebraska and Iowa are actually incredibly beautiful? I did not. I have driven through Nebraska and Iowa no less than 42 times (no joke), but I have only once ventured off the interstate. Now that I've seen other parts of Nebraska again, I can safely say that the U.S. government, for some reason, built the interstate highways through the most hideous, barren parts of the landscape—or else the ugliness of the interstate highways has gradually seeped into the surrounding land and turned it all blah. Once, while driving through Nebraska on I-80, we were detoured onto back roads going through the Sandhills, and I almost flipped my lid over how unbelievably beautiful it was. This is Nebraska?? I thought. No wonder everyone thinks Nebraska is such a pit—they've only ever seen the flat, drab, uninspiring rows of corn monocultures that surround the ENTIRE rural length of I-80, but there is definitely more to the state than that (who knew?). My train from Denver to Omaha traveled through the same Sandhills area I saw on my detour from I-80. The moon was full, and I could just make out the outline of the undulating hills against the night sky, and it was incredibly gorgeous and peaceful. This is what we're missing when we rush from point A to point B with no interest in what lies between.

Lately, I've found that I've become a student of the minute: one city block, one old house, one columned porch, one tomato plant. Each contains enough detail to keep a person occupied for far longer than we typically spend on it. What do we miss when we breeze right by them?

15 January 2009
I Think the Honeymoon is Over

Well, the bloom may be off the rose. Some of the glamor of train travel has started to wear off. Shortly after I typed out the above musings, things took a turn for the slightly inconvenient. A major train derailment in Illinois between Galesburg and Chicago prevented my train and a bunch of others from making it into Chicago via that route. After an hour of sitting and waiting, those with connections in Chicago got put on a charter bus and the rest of us took a detour into the city. In the end, my train was about four hours late, and for much of this time the train staff were either unable or unwilling to tell us where we were or when, approximately, we might arrive in Chicago. Kind of annoying.

However, two facts made this experience far less irritating than it might have otherwise been—for me, anyhow. First, we found out when we arrived in Chicago that the charter buses had gotten hung up in traffic—it was basically blizzarding the entire day—and still had not arrived in Chicago when we got there. On a nice day, bus travel is probably significantly faster than train travel (though only because we've got crap train infrastructure in this country), but when the weather's bad, taking the train is totally the way to go, derailments notwithstanding. In fact, once we got going on our detoured route, we were traveling much faster than at any previous point in our journey.

And second, I was surprised but very pleased that they were able to put together a detour route so quickly that, when you subtract time we spent sitting and waiting for instructions, really only took us a few hours longer than it otherwise would have. When asked, one Amtrak employee told us that he couldn't guess when we might get into Chicago because the route we were taking was akin to taking the back roads in your car—none of the employees was at all familiar with it or where it went. Evidently there must be serviceable rail routes out there that don't currently see passenger traffic...I wonder how feasible it would be to get these operating again in a lower-energy economy?

Today I am heading from Chicago back to Minneapolis. My train's departure was delayed for nearly four hours due to some mechanical difficulties; however, it's a good -10°F here, and the mechanical issue and the long repair time were both reportedly a factor of the weather. I don't doubt that if I'd been flying from Omaha to Chicago on Monday when it snowed like mad the entire day, my plane would have been delayed as well, so I looked at it as a fair trade-off with the universe. Others in the waiting area were not inclined to be quite so chill about it, though, and one woman proclaimed, loudly and repeatedly, to the entire waiting area, that she was absolutely livid about having spent $175 on this ticket, and wanted a refund and would never take the train again. Train travel is not for everyone.

But this is unfortunate, because it certainly could be, if we got our act together over here and actually put some money into our train network and infrastructure. In terms of the conveniences we've all come to expect from our modes of transport—on-time departure and arrival, speed, staff knowledgeability, etc.—Amtrak gets a big ol' F (through little fault of its own, honestly), but despite all of this, I've actually really enjoyed my train experience. The delays have upped the stress level a bit, but it certainly hasn't been any more stressful than flying. (Yeah, so how about that plane that crashed into the Hudson River this afternoon?) It's been warm and cozy, relatively comfortable, laid-back, and scenic. Monday, on my way from Omaha to Chicago, a woman from Fairfield, Iowa sat next to me, and we had a wonderful chat for three hours, until she got off the train. We both got out our knitting and worked on that for a while, and swapped tips and stories. Of course this kind of thing can and does happen on airplanes, but it's not the kind of thing that I ever do; usually I'm too nervous about flying, and stressed from all the rushing around (mine and everyone else's), and completely focused on getting from point A to B as quickly as possible.

And then there's stuff like this: Earlier, on this leg of my journey, I went to the lounge car to have a beer, and witnessed the following spectacle: a group of 20-somethings with spiky pink hair and the like, congregated on one end of the car, singing folk songs to the accompaniment of a banjo; and a group of 40-somethings at the other end, completely trashed, having what I would consider a very lewd conversation, and punctuating their points by (I shit you not) pulling down their pants and mooning each other. WHAT. Umm, so like I said...train travel isn't for everyone, but it is definitely more eventful and, um, social (if you can call seeing someone's butt social) than other modes of transport. This trip has been as much about the experience as it was about the destinations, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone with the time to spare, inconveniences and all. That is, if you think you can tolerate the occasional glimpse of some stranger's butt.

My Big Fat Midwestern Train Journey

2009-01-07T21:55:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to cut my airplane travel. This is hard, because I make the journey from my current home in Minneapolis to my parents' place in Denver four times a year or so, and these trips are probably the last thing I am willing to eliminate in my attempt to cut my carbon footprint. In the past, I've been working full-time, and thus I've had extremely limited vacation time, so plane travel was almost a necessity to make the trip worth the effort and expense... Now that I'm in grad school, though, I've got a LOT more time (this is the absolute BEST thing about being in school), so I figured I could afford to start taking more time-consuming forms of travel.

As Jim Kunstler has pointed out, America is really, REALLY big; WHY on earth aren't we paying more attention to the imminent demise of the airline industry, and re-investing in our rail system??? My parents and I took the train from Denver to New York City in 1999, not because it was cheaper than air travel (it wasn't, and we didn't even get a sleeper), but because we'd always wanted to take the train somewhere. And it was pleasant enough, but fraught with the kind of inconveniences that would deter 90% of everyone, especially people on a tight schedule. For example, our train was approximately eight hours late into NYC; apparently, this was because Amtrak was having disputes with freight rail companies over right-of-way, and our train kept getting diverted to the side tracks where it sat completely stationary for hours at a time while coal trains rambled past. This was during the World Series between the Yankees and the Mets. The Amtrak employee running the snack bar had tickets to the game the evening we were supposed to arrive, and he missed it entirely, by a good number of hours...he was so mad that he gave away all the snack bar's food for free. So, given that it took the better part of three days to get there, and the timing was completely unreliable, I can't imagine that the majority of people would ever willingly choose such a mode of travel over planes.

But I've had exceedingly pleasant train experiences as well—though not in this country. In 2005, a friend and I spent three weeks in China. We took the train all over the country, from Hong Kong to Beijing, hitting eight other cities in between. Looking back on this trip, I think the train journeys were my favorite part. They were LONG—some of them over 24 hours (China is a BIG country), which ate up some of our travel time, but also provided a much-needed respite from the otherwise constant action of our adventure. We booked beds in the open sleeper bunks—second class, essentially—where we shared an entire car with bunk-fulls of other travelers. Most fortunately, my friend spoke fluent Mandarin and Cantonese, so she was able to converse with all of our fellow travelers and learn all about their lives, and we had a great time swaping stories and passing around the scarf I was knitting for my dad, which the Chinese women, it seemed, couldn't wait to take a crack at. It was just pleasant all around—clean, friendly, affordable, and best of all, on-time. I honestly can't imagine NOT choosing the Chinese train over airplane travel, given the difference in price, not to mention the opportunity to watch the (fascinating and beautiful) countryside go by. If only American trains could be like that...

So, upon learning that my winter break would be an incredible FIVE WEEKS LONG, I went onto the Amtrak website to find out how one might get to Denver from Minneapolis on the train and discovered that it was actually quite difficult: I could either take a THREE DAY journey west from Minneapolis, through the Dakotas and Montana to Seattle, then down the west coast to San Fransisco, and east to Denver (which would undoubtedly be a beautiful journey, but a bit long for my tastes); or, I could take the train to Chicago and then southwest to Denver, but I'd have an overnight layover in Chicago. Neither of these really struck my fancy...but I realized that I have friends I can visit along the way and in Chicago, and a rambling, slow-paced cross-country train journey might be just what I needed to top off my fabulous, month-long winter vacation.

So I flew home, but booked a one-way train ticket back (thanks to Amtrak's multi-city fare finder), and tomorrow I will be leaving Denver on the train and heading to Omaha to visit my college roommate and her husband. I'll stay there for a few days, then move on to Chicago for a few days to visit some other friends, and then head back to Minneapolis from there. It will be slow-paced and, I hope, relaxing. I suspect it will be much less-stressful than airplane travel (knock on wood). I haven't exactly been pressed for relaxation over the past few weeks of my break, but even so, having the opportunity to kick back for 8+ hours between cities with nothing to distract me from my reading or knitting sounds fabulous. And it will be nice to have some sort of connection to place—a sense of what lies between me and my destination (besides corn), an alternative concept of space to that of the near-instantaneous movement from A to B that I've been experiencing for the past...well, forever. I don't want to overly romanticize a world characterized by slow movement—air travel has had its distinct benefits (like its ability to open up far-flung places to people of average Western means, like me), but as long as we're headed in the direction of limited air travel (and I truly believe that we are), we might as well focus on what we've lost by making it possible to rush across thousands of miles of landscape without a second thought as to what we're missing in between.

Though it does seem to me that with the enormous expanses that we must cover out here, west of Ohio or so, train travel will never be an appealing option to anyone on a tight schedule. This is yet another unfortunate aspect of the measly two-to-three weeks vacation that most Americans get—it makes any sort of slow-paced vacation or travel totally unappealing. I wouldn't have considered a multi-day trip back to Minneapolis if I didn't have the time to spare. So, while I hate to wish underemployment upon anyone, I suspect that a lot of us are going to have a bit more time on our hands in the future than we do now...and I can't help but think that a little bit more travel of the old-fashioned, laid-back, slow-paced variety will do us some good.

How I Got Here

2008-12-23T15:21:00.000-08:00

I've had the sense, since a very young age, that there was something terribly amiss in the world.

Maybe this was partially a function of growing up towards the end of the 20th century, when a combination of factors—the back-to-earth reality check brought on by hard economic times in the 70s and early 80s, the increasingly sensationalized television coverage of the world's many crises, maybe the alienation and ennui caused by an increasingly complex and stratified social and economic structure, etc.—combined to create a much more demoralized narrative than the one with which my parents were raised in the 50s and 60s. We might have beat the commies at creating a prosperous and functional society, but there was a hole in the ozone layer, and black babies with distended bellies cried on late-night TV, and American teenagers were depressed and doing hard drugs and shooting each other at school.

As a result of all of this, many people in my generation, it seems, have a less optimistic outlook on the world than our hippie-turned-stockbroker parents. But I have been plagued, more than most of my peers, by perpetual unease over all the things that are wrong with modern society. I have never found comfort in the fact that there are also many things right with modern society, like the (ostensible) recognition of universal human rights, and humanitarian aid that transcends cultures and borders. We are a society that put people on the moon, for Pete's sake. It has always seemed to me that if we really wanted to fix the world's problems, we could do it easily.

As I grew older and began to express my views, this became problematic. I was billed by friends as a downer, or worse, a pessimist (the gravest of all personality traits in this feel-good culture). I alienated people with my constant focus on injustice and dysfunction in the world. I had a brief respite from these troubles during college, where I met other similarly-minded folks who cared about similar things, but I found, upon graduation, that most people's enthusiasm for getting to the bottom of What's Wrong With the World was pretty thoroughly extinguished once they had jobs and car payments and such—as it turns out, most people just want to be happy...they don't want to be constantly contemplating how their consumer choices are creating misery for sweatshop workers in Indonesia.

I began to suspect that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was too pessimistic. Possibly even chemically unbalanced. I was probably just a natural misfit, doomed to an ill-fitting existence in a culture I couldn't escape—it wasn't society that was all wrong, it was me. Sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind.

And then, gradually, I began to discover voices that made sense.

It began with Kunstler's criticisms of suburbia, which I read during the six months I spent stranded at my parents' place in suburban hell, where I regrouped after doing some extended travel. From there, I started to read about peak oil, and and I found it absolutely FASCINATING—enthralling, almost, in a morbid sort of way. I had never before considered the impact energy flow has had on our society. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of understanding the world (and the world's problems). I was somewhat tempted to interpret peak oil as some sort of cosmic limit or override that confirmed what I'd been claiming all along—a message from above, if you will, that we'd completely botched everything up and The Powers That Be would be revoking our most critical resource shortly, thank you very much—and despite recognizing this train of thought as rubbish, I began to feel slightly more validated, and slightly less insane.

Eventually this led me to the the internet and in particular, the blogsphere, where I discovered voices that had been there all along, sounding off about the raging dysfunction that has gotten us in this predicament of peak oil, climate change, resource depletion, and, more recently, the financial crisis. I devoured these people's thoughts like my life depended on it. And as I did, I felt secure in my worldview for the first time ever. As Rod Dreher of the Dallas News said in his column on austerity, "[T]he U.S. government is trying to restart an economy blown to bits by debt by encouraging Americans drowning in debt to resume spending money that they don't have for things they don't need. You tell me: Who's crazy here?"

Precisely.

As I've thought and read and synthesized, I've begun to take certain ideas for granted that are fairly controversial, or even totally unheard of, within the mainstream. I will treat these things as given in all of my writings from here on out, so I figure I might as well get them out there on the table.

In no particular order:

1. This is not progress.
And by "this" I mean modern society. Most people seem to believe that in spite of hard times, the world is progressing towards a better and more just arrangement, à la Thomas Friedman. This is the story that we're fed in order to get us to accept the particularly ugly aspects of the modern world trajectory like poverty, exploitation, apathy, depression, obesity, cancer, divorce, senseless violence...the list goes on. It should be pretty clear to anyone paying attention—really paying attention, that is, not merely reading the New York Times with the so-called critical eye of the educated liberal class (who happen to be quite vested in the status quo)—that things are absolutely NOT getting better in the long-run. There are ups and downs, depending on the world economy and general political atmosphere, but in the long run, corporations have become more powerful at the expense of individuals, both in developed and "developing" or "underdeveloped" nations. Income disparity in the U.S. is growing, the environment is increasingly degraded and unable to support the full range of human activities it used to, and modern economic arrangements in many third world countries are breaking up families and providing a lifestyle that's hardly, if any, more sufficient than subsistence farming at providing basic needs. I could go on, but I won't for the time being—my point is that the evidence does not indicate an increasingly just world, even if that's what the rhetoric says.

And on that same note...

2. Modern capitalism is not "good". It does not "work".
Any economic system that does not have inbuilt checks on greed is an economic system that will likely benefit the few at the expense of the many—and thus, is NOT an economic system that most of us should support! Until recently, many have tried to claim that capitalism does keep greed in check, by giving consumers the option of moving their business elsewhere, if a certain company is getting a little greedy—but this argument takes for granted that consumers are informed, and I have trouble with this one...if we're so informed, how did so many of us end up with retirement money in repackaged sub-prime mortgage securities? We're too busy getting lulled into a semi-coma by cable television to know a sound investment from a con, let alone where our bank banks or who sold seeds to the farmer who grows the tomatoes we buy at Big Box Mart, and a lack of transparency, coupled with the ridiculous tangled web of corporate ownership that recent takeovers have produced, are making it increasingly difficult even for those of us who want to be informed consumers.

Capitalist principles actually make quite a bit of sense in certain contexts—particularly, the context in which they were originally observed—but today's enormous, complex, technologically-intensive global economy has about as much in common with that original context as George Foreman has in common with my grandmother. Therefore, in order to benefit the greater good (which is what most of us little people should be rallying for, considering where unchecked greed has gotten us), those capitalist principles require some serious tweaking—otherwise, we just end up with the kind of morbid economic train wreck we've got currently. I'm not saying we need to switch to a USSR-style planned economy, where you've got to wait in line for three hours just to be able to wipe your butt with something other than a leaf; people jump to the grossly-uninformed conclusion that anything other than pure market capitalism (which, by the way, we don't even have in this country) is automatically socialism, and nobody seems terribly interested in setting them straight. But some regulations, made with the well-being of the individual consumer rather than the corporation in mind, would be fabulous, and we'd be so much better off for it, even if these regulations contradicted everything we hold dear about the free market. I have a feeling that Adam Smith would be horrified by the society that we've created through our blind adherence to capitalism. Poor man's bones are probably spinning in his grave even as we speak.

3. Perpetual economic growth is not only not good, it's not possible.
And all those people working in factories in third world countries are never going to see a first world lifestyle as their country moves through the phases of industrialization, the way we tell them they will. There's not enough stuff to provide it for them, unless we discover fresh water and trees and fossil fuels on the moon sometime very soon. (And besides, then who would manufacture our Nikes and false eyelashes?) Anyone who believes that perpetual economic growth is a possibility needs a refresher in basic common sense; we may have made amazing technological advancements in creating synthetic materials, but all of these technologies depend on real, tangible, scarce, and increasingly depleted resources. Again, you tell me: who's crazy here? You can not run a growth economy in perpetuity in a closed system. End of story.

Of course, this has some pretty major implications for the way our economy is set up, not to mention the priorities we've set as a society. But more on that some other time.

4. The people with the greatest investment in the status quo happen to be the same people who control idea flows in our society.
I mean this very generally, because the internet has really changed how we get our ideas; nowadays, people can go online and find communities based around the ideas they support and wish to exchange, just like I did. But in general, among those without access to the internet or knowledge of the countless ways to connect with others online, and most definitely among those who spend any significant amount of time watching TV, the ideas, values, and norms to which they are exposed are at least somewhat—probably largely—influenced by the media, and by powerful interests speaking through the media.

And not only is media ownership increasingly concentrated in fewer and more powerful hands, it is with few exceptions a profit-driven business that owes its revenues to whatever company is making this month's must-have consumer shiny, and thus, has a limited capacity to question the processes that make this dysfunctional society run: consumption, capitalism, maybe exploitation, and a little bit of existential desperation brought on by the mind-numbing rat race. They don't want you to wonder whether you really need that new shiny toy, so they're not going to encourage you to think for yourself. And thus, the band plays on...

5. We fail to solve most of the problems we tackle because we treat the symptoms instead of addressing the causes.
Whether this focus on symptoms is an accidental feature of our culture, or engineered/encouraged by elements of the power establishment, I don't care to speculate right now—though it's probably some of both. There are certainly powerful interests that have a stake in this approach, such as pharmaceutical companies, which profit from the long-term treatment of chronic conditions far more than they do from preventative medicine. But it's unfortunate that this approach permeates nearly everything we do to make this world a better, happier place, from our approach to poverty to our response to terrorism.

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This blog will be a place for myself and one of my college friends to vent our frustrations with business as usual in the world, hash out thoughts or ideas that need refining, and generally join the dialogue about what went wrong, what it means, and how we can work to make it better. We welcome your thoughts, ideas, and feedback.