Hi All,
The recent discussions on this topic exemplify rather well how even a band of guys with their hearts in the right place are easily stymied when it comes to facing the larger picture. Proceeding from a question of the carbon output of different types of lawnmower, we have at last begun to glimpse the real heart of the matter: that radical question as to whether a lawn is in fact "necessary" in the first place. I suppose people who regard their lawns with fondness need to irrigate them, so we then look at devices that tell us when we've used a reasonable amount of [potable] water and can programme the system to shut off. Little human effort or initiative is called out, and nowhere is the deeper question asked, "Is it more important that I use water to beautify my garden or that it be left in the river for farmers downstream who need to irrigate the food that they struggle to grow?" (I know it's not usually such a straightforward situation, but ultimately we all draw water from the same basic sources). Anyone with the ability to add 2 + 2 and get the right answer must concede that using fossil fuels more quickly than they are laid down will result in exhaustion of the supply sooner or later. That important sense of urgency which Adam injected hasn't penetrated a lot of skulls yet, but some of us *are* growing concerned, and we're tuned into this listserve to learn, and to seek inspiration about ways in which the inevitable can be delayed just a little bit more. But if we can stay the crunch for (say) 51 years instead of the 50 that we may be heading for, that won't help us to *be prepared* for what our kids and their kids are going to have to face (thanks to us). Holly put her finger right on it: I, too, am in the process of ridding myself of as much lawn as possible and limiting the use of my gas powered push mower ... The paradigm shift required to readjust our thoughts about generally acceptable landscaping practices must run concurrently with [our] personal efforts to do so. Citizens seem divided into three camps. The first (Do-Nothing) supposes that it will happen one day but there are enough crises every day that need more urgent attention, so reacting to the Environmental issue is shelved until it happens (and perhaps it never will). The second (Do-Something) wishes that more would listen to the warning sounds, and believes that simple, costless, painless measures largely crafted on CBSM principles will be effective in converting the masses to toe the line voluntarily. The third camp (Doomers) sees the big picture as frighteningly close, and argues that only panic will activate us out of our present lethargy. Somewhere in between the Do-Something and the Doomers camp is an area for energetic activity. But even there, we are pretty ineffective without appropriate leadership. We may persuade our neighbours to turn off outside lights, but we can't reduce the light pollution and energy wastage from municipal lighting. We can recycle odd pieces of paper that have no further use, but cannot stop the flood of unsolicited advertising that comes in the mail nor the huge 'unreadable' sections of newspapers that are far too big for most of us to read in one day anyway. And so on. But if the municipal Council declares that all automatic irrigation systems on purely domestic properties are to be banned (but will offer a discount on rain barrels), those who still cherish the idea of a green lawn all summer will do their darndest to capture alternative supplies of irrigation water (though they will still have to administer it through a watering-can); or they may suddenly find other herbs to grow instead of grass. As Adam put it: "our challenge ... is how to develop the sense of urgency today." That sense of urgency can surely only come down from above, and is the kind of 'healthy' urgency which spurs us into considering our priorities carefully before finding alternative ways of carrying on much as before, or possibly of changing altogether. The (many excellent) projects and discussions on this listserve speak to me of that lack of leadership, of a glass ceiling that we can only penetrate collectively. At present we do not have that necessary nucleation. Our ideas are slowly growing and our interpretation is slowly maturing, but we are only preaching to the converted, and there is little sense of real progress. In order to become a Movement to be Reckoned With, the Do-Something camp has got to find a way of speaking to everyone, particularly those who don't want to listen, and that is practically impossible for individual citizens. But get the local Council on board and start imposing some mandatory bans (it may not take many to get the message home) and even the Do-Nothing camp will start asking "Why". My own style of living is what I term "Zero-living": being as self-sufficient as one can and reducing all acquisitions to what is actually necessary. For me, that means growing as much food as I can (or as the insects let me), using a bike for transportation (unless the going is dangerous), collecting and storing rainwater from all my roofs all year and the winter-time surplus from my well for fruit/veg irrigation, using lights only where needed for a purpose, and only heating the house with wood-stoves (including a wood cookstove). I write to senders of junk mail and request them to delete my name from their mailing lists (it is slowly having an effect!), I compost everything possible, and I simply don't generate any waste that cannot be recycled. I believe in all this fervently enough that I feel guilty at any infringement, however trivial, and consequently I get upset when I see others flagrantly wasting power, heat, lighting, paper, whatever - but I have no power to stop that waste except by preaching the occasional sermon about it. I'm sure many of you share these deep feelings of enthusiasm tempered with despair. If only .... if only we could harness our collective energy and become that Movement to be Reckoned With. And that doesn't really mean belonging to Green Peace or the WWF, whose members are converted anyway. It means finding a way of taking the message into every home, every workplace, every leisure area and every Govt department and insisting that it be read, discussed and acted upon.
Elizabeth Griffin
(Victoria, BC)
Lawn Mowers, Cabbages and Kings
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Hello Elizabeth,
Thanks for the discussion. We all have seen the figures that we would need 3 to 5 earths to support the human population, using the consumption patterns and styles of North America. Obviously unsustainable. Some will say our saviour is in technology. Just be innovative enough, and we'll solve all the problems. Others think that doing without is the solution. Some believe that conservation (which isn't necessarily the same as going without) is necessary. Personally, I think it's a combination of things, but the one really big elephant in the room is the economic system. It currently rewards those who consume and pollute by comparison to those who conserve and deal with their own pollution. If we used the economic system properly, it would drive innovative technology, conservation and rethinking. For example, when oil prices were $15.00 per barrel, how much interest was there in public transit, or scooters? How much preaching would be needed to be equal to a 10 cent per litre rise in gasoline prices? Just one example of how the system is skewed. (The earliest reference I can see to this thought is Bobby Kennedy). If I encourage vandalism, or a tornado hits my town, it's 'good for the economy'. Some other examples. Lawbreakers add to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) because they encourage the building of prisons, which consume resources, and human energy (jobs). As Bill Clinton said "It's the economy, stupid". Until our economic laws come into line with our sustainability goals, we're going to constantly be pushing the environmental/sustainability stone up the hill. Our current 'system' (read 'economic system') works on the basis that petroleum is almost limitless and can be all used up by one or two generations (the future generations will have to invent their own energy source) and that pollution can be externalized to a third world country (out of sight, out of mind). And that what we all do to the environment is to be regulated, not made part of the economic system. Aldo Leopold said it best about conservation half a decade ago. "Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it". This is a 'downstream approach'. We need to move 'upstream' to the causes of the problem, rather than continuing to try to fix what the damage from an economic system that is out of synch with our sustainability goals. Here are some more extracts from his thinking. I agree with his thinking, but not with his conclusions in every case, because I think there is now enough understanding and fear of the future, that we can begin to more closely align the economy with the ecology. (Senator Gaylord Nelson, also of Wisconsin summed it up well with his phrase "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the ecology". So...in the words of Aldo Leopold. A 'life changing' professor from Wisconsin.
Conservation and Living from the Land
Why is it that conservation is so rarely practiced by those who must extract a living from the land? It is said to boil down, in the last analysis, to economic obstacles. Take forestry as an example: the lumberman says he will crop his timber when stumpage values rise high enough, and when wood substitutes quit underselling him. He said this decades ago. In the interim, stumpage values have gone down, not up; substitutes have increased, not decreased. Forest devastation goes on as before. I admit the reality of this predicament. I suspect that the forces inherent in unguided economic evolution are not all beneficent. Like the forces inside our own bodies, they may become malignant, pathogenic. I believe that many of the economic forces inside the modern body-politic are pathogenic in respect to harmony with land.
Leopold, Aldo: Round River, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, pg. 153.
Profit Motive
When one considers the prodigious achievements of the profit motive in wrecking land, one hesitates to reject it as a vehicle for restoring land. I incline to believe we have overestimated the scope of the profit motive. Is it profitable for the individual to build a beautiful home? To give his children a higher education? No, it is seldom profitable, yet we do both. These are, in fact, ethical and aesthetic premises which underlie the economic system. Once accepted, economic forces tend to align the smaller details of social organization into harmony with them. No such ethical and aesthetic premise yet exists for the condition of the land these children must live in. Our children are our signature to the roster of history; our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.
Leopold, Aldo: Round River, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 156-157.
Industry vs. Wilderness
For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master? Let no man expect that one lone government bureau is able-even tho it be willing-to thrash out this question alone. [....] Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.
Leopold, Aldo: A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds, Outdoor Life, November 1925. Reproduced in Aldo Leopold's Southwest, edited by David E. Brown & Neil B. Carmony, University of New Mexico Press, 1990, pg. 160-161.
Substitutes for a Land Ethic
When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread. I now describe some of the stones which serve in lieu of a land ethic. One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbird are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity they are entitled to continuance. When one of these non-economic categories is threatened and if we happen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the beginning of the century song birds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them. The evidence had to be economic in order to b valid. It is painful to read these circumlocutions today. We have no land ethic yet, but we have at least drawn nearer the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter o biotic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us. A parallel situation exists in respect of predatory mammals, raptorial birds, and fish-eating birds. Time was when biologists somewhat overworked the evidence that these creatures preserve the health of game by killing weaklings or that they control rodents for the farmer, or that they prey only on 'worthless' species. Here again, the evidence had to be economic in order to be valid. It is only in recent years that we hear the more honest argument that predators are members of the community, and that no special interest has the right to exterminate them for the sake of a benefit, real or fancied, to itself. Unfortunately this enlightened view still in the talk stage. In the field the extermination o predators goes merrily on: witness the impending erasure of the timber wolf by fiat of Congress, the Conservation Bureaus, and many state legislatures. Some species of trees have been 'read out of the party' by economics-minded foresters because they grow too slowly, or have too low a sale value to pay as timber crops: white cedar, tamarack, cypress, beech, and hemlock are examples. In Europe, where forestry is ecologically more advanced, the non-commercial tree species are recognized as members of the native forest community, to be preserved as such, within reason. Moreover some (like beech) have seen found to have a valuable function in building up soil fertility. The interdependence of the forest and its constituent tree species, ground flora, and fauna is taken for granted. Lack of economic value is sometimes a character not only of species or groups, but of entire biotic communities: marshes, bogs, dunes, and 'deserts' are examples. Our formula in such cases is to relegate their conservation to government as refuges, monuments, or parks. The difficulty is that these communities are usually interspersed with more valuable private lands; the government cannot possibly own or control such scattered parcels. The net effect is that we have relegated some of them to ultimate extinction over large areas. If the private owner were ecologically minded, he would be proud to be the custodian of a reasonable proportion of such areas, which add diversity and beauty to his farm and to his community. In some instances, the assumed lack of profit in these 'waste' areas has proved to be wrong, but only after most of them had been done away with. The present scramble to reflood muskrat marshes is a case in point. Where is a clear tendency in American conservation to relegate to government all necessary jobs that private land owners fail to perform. Government ownership, operation subsidy, or regulation is now widely prevalent in forestry range management, soil and watershed management, park and wilderness conservation, fisheries management, and migratory bird management, with more to come. Most of this growth in governmental conservation is proper and logical, some of it is inevitable. That I imply no disapproval of it is implicit in the fact that I have spent most of my life working for it. Nevertheless the question arises: What is the ultimate magnitude of the enterprise? Will the tax base carry its eventual ramifications? At what point will governmental conservation, like the mastodon, become handicapped by its own dimensions? The answer, if there is any, seems to be in a land ethic, or some other force which assigns more obligation to the private landowner. Industrial landowners and users, especially lumbermen and stockmen, are inclined to wail long and loudly about the extension of government ownership and regulation to land, but (with notable exceptions) they show little disposition to develop the only visible alternative: the voluntary practice of conservation on their own lands. When the private landowner is asked to perform some unprofitable act for the good of the community, he today assents only with outstretched palm. If the act costs him cash this is fair and proper, but when it costs only forethought, open-mindedness, or time, the issue is at least debatable. The overwhelming growth of land-use subsidies in recent years must be ascribed, in large part, to the government's own agencies for conservation education: the land bureaus, the agricultural colleges, and the extension services. As far as I can detect, no ethical obligation toward land is taught in these institutions. To sum up: a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts. It tends to relegate to government many functions eventually too large, too complex, or too widely dispersed to be performed by government. An ethical obligation on the part of the private owner is the only visible remedy for these situations.
I would suggest that we need to give songbirds and wildflowers an economic value. Otherwise, the economic system (the one we have) will continue to chew them up, and spit them out.
Norm Ruttan
iWasteNot Systems
1-800-630-7864
I guess my question would be: What do you make mandatory? How do you evaluate what needs to be mandatory? The politician who has to make that decision faces the same problem you outlined when you said that: In order to become a Movement to be Reckoned With, the Do-Something camp has got to find a way of speaking to everyone, particularly those who don't want to listen, and that is practically impossible for individual citizens. Citizens who won't listen to you are even less likely to listen to a politician who they likely trust even less. The decision-maker can certainly decide to enforce bans but, whether we like it or not, he/she will need to balance that decision with the imperative to be re-elected. I have difficulty believing that forcing a significant lifestyle-cramping ban on people who don't truly understand the need for it would be seen as a winner from a political POV. Not defending that way of thinking; just pointing it out.
Francois