how to save the world

It’s hard to find foods that are free from this crap. Packaged, processed, and ‘fast’ foods are replete with them. Big Agribusiness makes its living by dumping all this junk in our food to make it cheaper to produce, better-looking or more addictive. So what can we do?

Ideally, we should buy all our food ingredients from local organic farmers (or grow our own). If that’s possible, and affordable for you, then you’ve got lots of choice, and you can stop reading this article.

For the rest of us, it’s a real challenge. I won’t get into the debate over whether it is natural or healthy to eat meat (humans have evolved, in different times and places, to be pure vegetarians, almost exclusively carnivores, and omnivores) — but most factory-farmed meats are a toxic soup of chemical additives designed to make the animal fatter faster, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, herbicides and other poisons. Fish from the sewers that we have turned our rivers, lakes and oceans into are often so dangerous children and pregnant women are forbidden to eat them. Most processed and packaged foods, and the garbage we get from fast-food restaurants, are full of chemicals, trans fats and other artificial and adulterated ingredients that have never been proved safe and are suspects in a host of diseases. 

These processed foods also contain massive amounts of sugars: North Americans consume an average of nearly 140 pounds of sugars per year, half of it in sugared drinks, and ten times what our ancestors consumed a century ago. We’re addicted to it. And the Monsanto sugar substitute monopoly is ratcheting up our consumption at a dizzying rate, deepening our addiction and poisoning us with dangerous manufactured chemicals. Our salt consumption is tracking a similar dizzying upward curve. In most countries not only are genetically manufactured ingredients present in almost everything we eat, they’re not even labeled as such. The ‘accidental’ ingredients left over from chemical treatment of foods and from processing are likewise not on the label.

Even our fruits and vegetables are washed in poisoned water, soaked in artificial pesticides, herbicides and preservatives, and grown in depleted, nutritionally dead soil on which we’ve dumped ever-increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers. Even many of our favourite teas, coffees and alcoholic beverages contain harmful and unhealthy ingredients. And other favourite foods are replete with cholesterol.

Despite this, there are still lots of good things to eat, if you use your imagination and can get past your addictions. The key ingredients are organic, whenever possible locally-grown (because a lot of food value is lost in long-distance transportation and related preservation processes): fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, beans and whole grains.

These ingredients can be combined, without much effort, into:

• salads
• raw side dishes (with or without sauces, seasonings, dips and dressings from these same ingredients)
• meat and dairy substitutes (e.g. soy protein)
• soups
• juices
• smoothies
• high-omega, unsaturated oils
• natural low-calorie sweeteners (e.g. stevia)
• spreads (e.g. peanut butter, sugarless jams)
• teas
• animal-fat cooking substitutes (e.g. applesauce)
• healthy breads (e.g. oat, flax, quinoa)

The keys to making eating only such foods delicious are

1. getting past our snobbery about simple raw foods (who says everything needs to be cooked, chilled or mixed with a dozen other ingredients?), 
2. getting a lot of variety in our diet and the ingredients we use, and 
3. as a result, achieving a good balance of macro- and micro-nutrients in our diet.

So even if we don’t have a variety of organic farms and gardens handy (or in our own yards), we can still eat healthy, and, by avoiding the processed foods and buying raw in bulk, save money as well. The pride of self-mastering another useful skill (healthy gourmet cooking), the satisfaction of reducing animal cruelty and the irresponsible Agri-golopy’s hold over our lives, and the pleasure of eating yummy meals, are just the (stevia-sweetened) icing on the (carrot, spice andwhole grain flour) cake.

Mmmm!

There are two things we can do in response to this. The first, which we are already doing, is to try to stretch the peak out to a plateau. The problem with this is that new production is increasingly expensive to bring on-line. This isn’t just a matter of throwing more money at the problem. It’s a matter of throwing more energy at it, as this chart shows:

 
The amount of energy needed to produce each barrel of oil has increased from the equivalent of 0.04 barrels at the start of the oil boom (when we were busy converting our economy to be oil-powered) to over half a barrel today. If this trend continues (and there is nothing to lead us to believe it won’t), by 2030 we will be using more than a barrel of oil equivalent energy to produce every barrel of oil. If that sounds crazy, it is, but consider this:

• The oil consortium building the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline has acknowledged that their passion for this project isn’t to deliver more natural gas to consumers, but to use the relatively clean natural gas (setting aside the potential ecological disasters the Mackenzie Valley project promises for Canada’s Arctic) plus nuclear power to power the extraction machinery for Canada’s eco-holocaust, the Alberta Tar Sands, which are now being counted on by oil analysts to produce ten times the volume of dirty oil (and environmental destruction) they are currently producing, and which are already consuming vast amounts of energy and water at current production levels.
• The Russian energy department is proposing to build underwater nuclear plants to power underwater deep-sea oil drilling platforms (reported on CBC radio news today, report not yet online).

So to slake our insatiable thirst for the liquid stuff, we’re prepared to construct colossally expensive and dangerous nukes and vulnerable gas pipelines through fragile permafrost, to produce less energy than the projects that power them consume. Just so we can get it in a form we can dump in our gas tanks.

The same folly lies behind the use of corn as a bio-fuel ñ it costs more energy to grow, fertilize, harvest and convert corn into fuel than the fuel that it produces gives us, but we’re willing to do it because we’re utterly dependent on liquid hydrocarbons. How is this economically viable? Because we the taxpayers are subsidizing it (through agricultural and other subsidies, financing of wars to keep the Middle East destabilized and oil prices artificially low, tax gifts to rich corporations, and indemnifying the corporate plunderers producing the oil from the costs and damages they are causing to our environment). We are paying Big Oil and Big Agribusiness for the privilege of letting them keep us addicted to liquid fuels and an unsustainable way of life ñ for a little longer.

Eventually the stress of this system will pass the breaking point, and the combination of global warming disasters, skyrocketing prices, global oil wars, ecological devastation and massive vulnerability to sabotage, natural disasters and system breakdowns will catch up to us. Then the plateau will end quickly, and it will be worse than just a normal curve downslope ñ it will be like falling off a cliff.

The other thing we can do, of course, is to wean ourselves off our addiction to oil. A recent study suggests that corporations can, on average, reduce their energy costs by four times the cost of the reduction programs. And most citizens seem prepared to change if it can be done relatively painlessly, or if it becomes too painful to continue to squander oil (as the inverse correlations between SUV demand and oil prices demonstrate). As Amory Lovins recently showed, government utilities can actual save money by giving away compact fluorescent bulbs, and replacing hot water tanks with European style instant hot water dispensers could pay for itself in less than a year. George Monbiot’s Heat has a hundred other viable ways to conserve.

But the lack of political will to be a true leader, the first to make hard decisions that neither corporatist campaign funders nor financially struggling citizens will be too fond of, is evident everywhere, especially in the most extravagant users of oil (North America), and in the struggling nations of the world (notably Asia).

So we have a choice: Stretch the End of Oil out a little longer, at tremendous financial and ecological cost, and face an even worse and protracted withdrawal crisis after that, or begin now to seriously change our lifestyles, everything we do, our very way of thinking. Since it is human nature to do only what we must when we must, this is not really a choice at all. We will continue our short-sighted attempts to put off the fall of the oil economy until we are poised on the edge of the cliff with no way back. Only then will we embrace conservation seriously.

It’s going to be ugly for our grandchildren. We’re lucky we probably won’t bearound to have to face up to them for what we’ve done.

So for most of us, the workday involves deciding (constantly) what to do next and how to do it. This is true even for people in ‘responsive’ jobs like customer service.

A number of factors come into play in deciding what to do and how to do it. There may be standard procedures, policies or regulations that constrain our freedom to decide. There may be situations where we know what the boss would want our decision to be. We may not have the authorization or capability to do what we think would be the best decision. There may be obstacles to doing what we think is right.

So what do we do? We weigh the consequences of doing what we think is best, versus what is easiest. When there’s no conflict between them, the decision is simple. When there is, such as when a customer wants us to x (the best action) but we know the boss would want us to do y (the easiest action), we will have to make a number of judgements. If the boss is unlikely to find out, or if it’s easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, we’re likely to do x, especially if the customer is aggressive and is making it harder to do y. If we don’t care that much about taking the best action (e.g. if we’re disgruntled or bored in our job, or if the customer is an asshole or a complete idiot who won’t appreciate what we do anyway), or if x is illegal, then we’ll probably do y.

And then there are the situations when we want to do x, but we’re blocked from doing it because it violates policy or because we don’t have (and can’t easily get) the authorization or capability (skill or resources) to do it. In these cases we improvise, using workarounds. If possible, we will find a way to do x, the right thing. We’ll find a way to get around the policy by justifying it as inapplicable or a special situation. We’ll find ‘hostages’ who will agree with us that x is clearly the right thing to do despite the policy, or who we can quote to get authorization we otherwise would not get easily. We’ll ‘borrow’ the skills or resources from someone who does have them, and chalk up a tacit IOU to be repaid later. We’ll find a way. After all, we know our job best, and so what is right is what we will do whenever possible, even if it isn’t easy, and often even if it’s forbidden. That’s how stuff gets done.

Just thinking about all my years of work in a dozen different positions, I would hazard a guess that the normal checks and constraints and tensions in any business are such that more than 50% of the time we need to make a decision between what is right and what is easiest. And I would hazard a guess that in 90% of those cases we resolve the conflict in favour of what is right. Even if you’re a CEO, your situation is the same ñ your ‘boss’ is the board of directors or the bank or the corporate lawyer or the insurance company telling you not to do what’s best for the customer or the employees ñ and like the rest of us CEOs will go to the wall (but not over it) to do what’s right. I believe it’s human nature.

That means that we spend much of our work lives (and a stressful part at that) making difficult decisions and finding workarounds to do what’s best. That’s why organizations that devolve a huge amount of authority and responsibility to the front line usually find productivity, performance and work satisfaction go up. They’re reducing the number of conflicts and the need for workarounds. And in all but at most 5% of cases (50% x (100%-90%)) the outcome will be the same whether they’re hands-off or micro-managing. One could even argue that that 5% is a modest investment in ‘wrong’ decisions that produces a huge return in learning from those mistakes.

When Bush wanted to reward the megapolluters for their generous campaign donations, he didn’t confront Congress to abolish environmental laws (OK he did a bit, but most of the laws remains on the books) ñ he simply told the EPA and the other government agencies to stop enforcing the law. He found a way to make it relatively easy to do what to him was ‘right’, by using a convenient workaround.

Watch how traffic manages itself when stoplights go out ñ people work around it much more effectively themselves than when an officer shows up and tries to regulate the chaos.

Workarounds are probably the most prevalent and effective form of innovation in most organizations, and perhaps in our world.

So what if we added ‘finding effective workarounds’ to our Save the World toolkit? As a means of making a better world easier, it is hard to imagine a more natural solution than workarounds. Just as squirrels find a way to defeat the baffles we set up to keep them out of bird feeders, shouldn’t we be able to find a way to defeat the organizations, people, processes and technologies that are ruining our planet, and creating the social and environmental problems that bedevil us?

Or do we have a problem with scale here? Workarounds are fine when they’re within our sphere of control, but what happens when the problems we’re trying to work around are bigger than all of us?

Pick an example: Global warming. In our part of the word, coal-fired power plants are the worst polluters. What’s easy is to shrug off the fact that the government that owns many of them has tried to switch to renewable energy but concluded they still need these plants. What’s right (for our health, and that of our world) is to get them shut down.What’s the workaround that will enable that to happen?

I also believe that, like in past civilizations, the collapse of ours will not be due to one single cause but rather to a cascading series of crises. These could include:

• A ghastly and global economic depression
• The complex effects of global warming
• Use of increasingly available, devastating biological, genetic, chemical and nuclear weaponry by extremist groups and individuals
• Traditional nuclear war between (already) horrifically overpopulated and ecologically devastated states
• The End of Oil
• The End of Water
• New pandemic diseases
• A host of other threats

The occurrence of any of these, in our overextended and fragile economy and political society, increases the probability of triggering the others.

My brain, my heart, my senses and my instincts all tell me we are near the end, and that by the latter part of this century this will start to become very apparent. But I cannot convince you if you are not ready to be convinced.

Those who are convinced are asking what to do. They tend to fall into two camps: Those who believe that concerted human action might avert the collapse of civilization, and those who don’t. The latter group is looking for means to a softer landing, and a head start for a possible next civilization. There is a third group, who I have dubbed neo-survivalists, who are actually welcoming and looking to accelerate our civilization’s collapse. I have no time for this third group: If they could conceive of the horror that will accompany collapse, they would change their tune.

I understand the first group, as I used to be part of it. It is, after all, human nature to be hopeful, to believe we live in good times and that good times can last forever, to expect and depend on the promise of new technologies without recognizing that every new technology has created as many problems as it has solved. It took a lot to educate me that we are far past the point of no return, and that the second, softer-landing group is most likely correct. For the last couple of years, this blog has reflected that belief.

James Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency is one of a growing list of books that also reflect this belief. He recently reiterated the steps he prescribes for a softer landing, in a synopsis he calls his Agenda. “We will have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life”, he says. Specifically:

• Producing and consuming food differently: 
• coping with sterile soil exhausted by overuse of chemicals no longer available
• producing and distributing foods locally
• recovering all the lost knowledge of natural, diverse, organic ways of farming
• shifting to a vegetarian/vegan agriculture
• eating healthier
• Inhabiting the land differently: 
• moving people out of big cities and suburbs no longer sustainable to small towns and self-sufficient cities with healthy rural hinterlands
• relearning to use natural construction and repair materials
• replacing land use and zoning codes with ‘vernacular wisdom’
• Moving things and people differently: 
• living without private automobiles
• using more rail, water and public transport that does not depend on fossil fuels
• finding ways to scrub CO₂ out of the transportation system
• giving up on fruitless grandiose ‘alternative fuels’ for automobiles that merely create scarcity elsewhere and more pollution
• Keeping warm and cool differently: 
• using clothes to do so rather than space heaters and air conditioners
• insulating our homes and offices better
• using renewable energy delivered through personal and neighbourhood mechanisms instead of massive grids
• Making things locally again and transforming retail trade: 
• returning to local markets to make, move and sell stuff within the community
• living with fewer choices of things to buy
• relearning to make products domestically
• relearning to make our own unique personal stuff
• Entertaining ourselves again: 
• when the Internet and the electrical grid fail, we’ll need to relearn to make our own music and theatre and to play sports instead of watching them on a screen
• Reorganizing our education system: 
• community and home-schooling
• internship
• self-learning: less rote and more practice
• Reorganizing our health system: 
• more local and community-based
• much more emphasis on prevention, self-diagnosis, self-treatment
• taking responsibility for your own health

In short, relearning to make everything more local and smaller-scale. And not relying on government or big institutions for services, financial support, or bail-outs of last resort, since the government will have no money. And becoming resilient ñ so if our income stream suddenly disappears, or all our stuff breaks down, or the people who do things for us (from teaching our kids to cutting our hair to supplying us with bottled water) all go out of business, we will know what to do, and how to look after ourselves and each other. A shocking majority of us are spending so much, borrowing so much, saving so little, and so narrow in our self-reliance skills, that any sudden economic shock would be ruinous.

A lot of people ask Kunstler (and me) for timelines ñ when will we have to start working on this? The answer is: no one knows, and now. We cannot wait for systems to collapse to start learning the skills we will need when they do, and to start creating local networks for the production and distribution of what we need to live, and to start planning for precisely what we will do, assuming we can depend on no one else. Katrina taught us that, if we didn’t already know.

Kunstler concludes: “If you’re depressed, change your focus. Stop wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances”.

So, time to get learning new capacities: how to grow your own food, make your own clothes, make your own furniture, and repair everything you own. How to set up a business you can run from home that serves local needs. How to manage your own health, and that of those in your community who cannot care for themselves.

And time to create new local networks: community renewable energy co-ops, local farm markets and delivery services, neighbourhood craft and skill networks that make and fix beautiful, durable, essential things from local materials.

Will we relearn these essential capacities, establish these critical local networks, and recreate communities that work, before cascading crises are upon us and it’s too late to do so? It will probably depend on how soon they occur, how many hit us at once, and how severe they are. Most of all, it will depend on how many of us see the value in acquiring these capacities and creating these networks and rebuilding self-sufficient communities that work, for their own sake, now. And doing so together, not just as neo-survivalists trying foolishly and selfishly to create resiliency just for themselves and their family.

We’ll do what we must, when we must. Maybe in time for a softer landing, and in so doing perhaps create a model for the next, gentler, lower-footprint society.

And maybe not.

I remember those years well, and fondly, but in retrospect I’m not sure if I understood them well enough to answer the questions above. I am inclined answer ‘yes’ to the first question, and to attribute the loss of momentum to two paradoxes that George Monbiot calls The Rebound Effect and the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate. Taken together, these paradoxes describe human behaviour that abhors change and seeks equilibrium. If a lot of people buy fuel-efficient vehicles, pretty soon demand for gas goes down, price drops and gas-gulpers become economical again. And with the savings from their fuel-efficient vehicles, people can afford to drive further and more often, and make other changes that negate the benefits their change in thinking might have brought about.

In Canada recently we’ve had two seismic changes in thinking that are about as paradoxical as they come: Global warming soared to the top of the polls as the most important issue facing us today (and the black market is getting $150 a ticket for tonight’s speech in Toronto by Al Gore), yet, at the same time, right-wing conservative, Kyoto reneger and global warming denier Stephen Harper has soared in popularity and put his party back ahead in the opinion polls.

How does one account for this? Well, as I explained in an earlier post, the media have been hyping the subject of global warming to the point it’s now top-of-mind to most of us. But Canadians don’t like the new Liberal leader, StÈphane Dion, who, despite being an environmentalist, is a long-time party stalwart (of a party still stinging from recent scandal) and a Francophone who’s rather clumsy in English. There is clearly resentment that the Liberals missed the chance to pick a ‘new blood’ leader, and instead picked another leader from QuÈbec. So the surge in popularity for Harper is really more a drop in popularity for Dion. Nevertheless, this should give environmentalists pause — the battle to get Canada to live up to its Kyoto commitments is clearly far from over.

The situation in the US is not all that different. Despite Americans having the worst, and most ideologically extreme conservative, president in decades, the 2008 presidential race is shaping up to be one among four moderate conservatives (Clinton or Edwards versus Giuliani or McCain), none of whom has a environmental or peace agenda. Canada has Elizabeth May (Green) and the US has Dennis Kucinich, both of whom have both environmental and peace credentials, but neither is given any chance of becoming their country’s leader. And even when Al Gore was VP and environmental laws were actually being enforced, megapolluters like ExxonMobil and Koch Industries flaunted the law more than they did under previous anti-environment regimes.

What’s going on is illustrated in the graphic above:

• Case 1a: Remember ‘acid rain’? Public pressure over this scourge led to Clean Air laws that improved things for awhile, but this very success led to public and political apathy, and more recently a backsliding, with an upsurge in new coal plants and failure to act on set objectives. The situation is rapidly worsening and we’re still a long way from even starting to address it seriously again.
• Case 1b: Through much of the 1970s and 1980s, there was a big push to use environmentally friendly products. Detergents with phosphates were justifiably demonized, and the chemical industry lobbied furiously, succeeding in getting Nixon to obfuscate labeling requirements, deny the dangers of phosphates to aquatic life, and to refuse to enact a phosphate ban, instead devolving regulatory authority to state and local governments. With the chemical industry and government in collusion, environmental shoppers finally concluded that our paltry efforts to make a difference by buying no-name brands were futile, and we gave up. In most of the world, your box of Tide still contains 10% phosphates.
• Case 2: The issue of global warming is the best example of most people thinking that something should be done, but not considering the issue urgent enough to actually do anything about it. Sales of hybrids vs. SUVs vary with gasoline price, not level of concern about global warming.
• Case 3: A few decades ago it became clear that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) posed a severe and immediate threat to the atmosphere. There were alternatives available at the same cost, governments took the necessary action to get these alternatives in the market and withdraw CFC-containing appliances, and quickly the amount of CFCs was dramatically and sustainably reduced.

The lesson is clear. Shall I say it again? We do what we must (what’s urgent), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. Even when there is a sense of urgency, the rebound effect, or ignorance over what to do, or lack of political or social will, will usually preclude any sustainable change in results. And if there’s a sense of importance but not urgency, we’ll be content to talk about it but not act. If we really want to bring about sustainable change, we need to make it (i) easy and (ii) either inexpensive or perceived to be important.

If hybrids and other energy-efficient vehicles were heavily subsidized and available in every size and shape, they would quickly take over the market. To prevent drivers from driving them more with their savings, this subsidy would need to be financed by a large tax on gasoline. Similarly, European-style bicycle-only lanes and other facilities to make it easier to use zero-emission transportation could lead to permanent environmentally friendly behaviour changes, even among those who don’t care about the environment. The same easy + (inexpensive or important) approach applies to achieving enduring social and environmental change in every area where it is needed.

Can we bring about necessary seismic shifts in human thinking, and commensurate changes in behaviour? My answer?: It doesn’t matter. Those shifts won’t be enough to make a sustainable difference. Making it easier (and cheaper) to do the right thing will. Innovators, this isthe challenge we need you to take up: Help make a better world easier.