Deep Ecology by Bill McKibben - Excerpts

Deep Ecology: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.
Bill McKibben. 2007. Holt Paperbacks, New York. ISBN-13 978-0-8050-8722-2

EXCERPTS

… new research from many quarters has started to show that even when growth does make us wealthier, the great wealth no longer makes us happier.

The key questions will change from whether the economy produces an ever larger pile of stuff to whether it builds or undermines community – for community, it turns out, is the key to physical survival in our environmental predicament and also to human satisfaction.

In the face of energy shortage, of global warming, and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be, I think we’ve started to grope for what might come next.

Three fundamental challenges to the fixation on growth have emerged. One is political: growth, at least as we now create it, is producing more inequality than prosperity, more insecurity than progress … By contrast, the second argument draws on physics and chemistry as much as on economics: it is the basic objection that we do not have the energy needed to keep the magic going, and can we deal with the pollution it creates? The third argument is both less obvious and even more basic: growth is no longer making us happy.

Wars are fought over oil, not over milk, not over semiconductors, not over timber.

Most of all, perhaps the very act of acquiring so much stuff has turned us ever more into individuals and ever less into members of a community, isolating us in a way that runs contrary to our most basic instincts.

Cargill, Inc., controls 45 percent of the global grain trade, while its competitor Archer Daniels Midland controls another 30 percent.

Four multinational companies control over 70 percent of fluid milk sales in the United States … Four firms control 85 percent of global coffee roasting, and a small group of multinationals handles 80 percent of the world trade in cocoa, pineapples, tea, and bananas. The merger of Philip Morris and Nabisco in 2000 created a food conglomerate that collects nearly 10 cents of every dollar an American consumer spends on food. Meanwhile, five companies control 75 percent of the global vegetable seed market, and their grip on the market is tightening as the seed companies patent more and more genetically modified varieties and prevent seed saving.

Steven Blank of the University of California at Davis predicts that America may soon “get out of the food business” because it “will become unprofitable to tie up resources in farming and ranching” that could be better invested elsewhere … Blank is an extreme example, but standard economic thinking basically agrees: the country is better off because people have been freed from working in the fields to do something “more productive”.

Hogs produce a lot of waste, much more than people do. One farm in Utah, with 1.5 million porkers, has a sewage problem larger than that of the city of Los Angeles. In North Carolina, one of the centers of what boosters call Big Pig, hogs outnumber citizens, and they produce more fecal waste than California, New York, and Washington combined.

Seventy percent of the water used by human beings goes to irrigate crops.

In the 1890s, roughly one-quarter of the cropland in the United States was used to grow grain to feed horses, almost all of which worked on farms.

The number of farmers has fallen from half the American population to about 1 percent, and in essence those missing farmers have been replaced with oil. We might see fossil fuel as playing the same role that slaves played in early American agriculture – a “natural resource” that comes cheap.

In much of the world, 40 percent of the truck traffic comes from the shuttling of food over long distances.

If all you are worried about is the greatest yield per acre, then smaller farms produce more food.

… why don’t we have more small farms? Who the relentless consolidation? There are many reasons, including the way farm subsidies have been structured, the big guys’ easier access to bank loans, and the convenience for politically connected food processors of dealing with a few big operations. But the basic reason is this: we have substituted oil for people.

At the moment, subsidies essentially underwrite consolidation: almost a third of all federal farm payments go to the largest 2 percent of farms, and almost three-quarters of the payments go to farms that are among the top 10 percent in size.

Ever wonder why soybean products can be found in two-thirds of all processed food? It may have something to do with the fact that “about seventy percent of the value of the American soy bean comes straight from the U.S. government. [Elizabeth Becker]. Ditto for high-fructose corn syrup. Essentially, we are subsidizing Cheetos.

Our live may not be making us particularly happy, but the institutionalized anti-individualism that marked the Soviet and Maoist experiments was infinitely worse.

It’s important to realize that working together is not some freak Amish trait – it’s what all people did before they had machinery powerful enough to enable them to work alone.

We don’t need each other for anything anymore. If we have enough money, we’re insulated from depending on those around us – which is at least as much a loss as a gain.

Localism … offers a physically plausible economy for the future, and a psychologically plausible one as well: an economy that might better provide goods like time and security that we’re short of.

Almost all of us now take our cues about how to live less from the people around us than from the people we see on television; we live not in our own cities and towns but in the generic Southern California nowhere that streams in through the coaxial cable.

There are communitarians and social conservatives and progressives for whom “community” has become a magic word, a mystic goal. But it is our economic lives, even more than our moral choices, that play the crucial role in wrecking or rebuilding our communities. We need to once again depend on those around us for something real. If we do, then the bonds that make for human satisfaction, as opposed to endless growth, will begin to reemerge.

Clear Channel brags a good deal about its “public service”, which mostly involves running those free ads from the Ad Council. That’s different from the idea that the radio station is there to actually serve a community.

The modern radio industry is utterly focused on you. It’s entirely set up around the idea that you are a part of a predictable demographic whose tastes can be reliably commodified as alternative country or classic rock; the whole premise of talk radio is that you can go all day without hearing an opinion you disagree with – Rush Limbaugh’s fans, after all, call themselves dittoheads.

Television, of course, is so expensive to produce that it has to chase the largest possible audience, and the Internet, though useful in many ways, by virtue of its design splits people off into narrow avenues of interest. Radio is the ideal broad community vehicle.

A generation ago, in his book Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale noted that indigenous societies from Australian aborigines to Great Plains Indians seemed to cluster in collections of about five hundred individuals – a small enough number for everyone to know everyone else, large enough to provide a sound gene pool.

Besides food, the most important commodity in our lives is energy, and at first blush it seems almost impossible to localize.

Americans are the energy-use champions of all time, requiring twice as much fossil fuel to power each of our lives as even the citizens of the affluent countries of western Europe.

We’re used to thinking of solar power as a set of panels up on the roof and a set of batteries down in the basement, supporting a grinning, graying hippie happy in his off-the-grid paradise. But there’s something too individualistic about this model: it’s the hippie’s power, for him.

When they burn coal, an enormous amount of the energy is wasted as heat that simply goes up into the air; one recent British study indicated that 61 percent of the energy value of coal just disappears.

A car is the ultimate expression of individualism; a cross walk is about community.

The hyper-individualistic idea that I need to go exactly where I want to go exactly at this instant, and with the radio station I want playing on the car stereo, is relatively new, but very powerful.

The knowledge that you matter to others is a kind of security that no money can purchase.

Most progress toward local economies will probably arise not so much from grand visions as from slow modifications.

“The fussy, trendy, anachronistic rooflines, cupolas and turrets in contemporary subdivisions,” wrote one architect, “are palliative attempts at endowing these spiritless developments with aesthetic substance.”

… in 1900, in the state of Iowa alone, which was then crowded with small farmers, there were also thirteen hundred local opera houses, all of them hosting concerts. “Thousands of tenors,” writes Robert Frank, “earned adequate, if modest, livings performing before live audiences.”

Once it gets rolling, the building of connections can accelerate quickly. We learn once again what skills and gifts our neighbors possess, and they become valuable to us again, literally valuable, people we can start to depend on for some of our food, our fuel, our capital, our entertainment.

China has more than a hundred cities with populations topping a million; by some estimates, it needs to add an urban infrastructure equivalent to Houston’s every four weeks just to keep pace.

Ninety-five percent of the population growth this century will occur in the cities of the developing world, “overwhelmingly in poor cities, and the majority of it in slums” [Mike Davis].

Most people in the developing world still have so little that more money means more satisfaction and the sacrifices of community for stuff are worth making. But those who have begun to “make it” have also begun to resemble Westerners in less-than-happy ways.

A connectedness to place is no kind of desirable life if it brings only a single meal a day, or children are unable to attend school for lack of food and books, or options for wage earning are degrading and soul-destroying.

In India, 60 percent of the population works on the land. If you “modernized” their agriculture to the Western ideal, 600 million people would need to find new jobs, not to mention new places to live, new cultures, new identities.

The “tragedy of the commons” really reflected what happened when hyper-individualism came into contact with older, more community-oriented ideas about the land. In fact, all around the world, as long as communities remained intact so did the commons; there exist forests, pastures, and fisheries that have been collectively managed for millennia.

It takes a village to raise a child, indeed, and to raise a crop.

… as the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has pointed out, for instance, hundreds of millions of squatters and black-market business owners could get an immediate boost of capital if their governments simply deeded them the land they already occupy and granted them licenses to operate without making them navigate labyrinths of corrupt bureaucracy.

Somewhere there’s a sweet spot, that produces enough without tipping over into the hyper-individualism that drives our careening, unsatisfying economy. The mix of regulation and values that might make such self-restraint more common is, of course, as hard to create in China as in the United States; far simpler just to bless an every-man-for-himself economy and step aside. But creating those values, and the laws and customs that will slowly evolve from them, may be the key task of our time, here and around the world.

The standard conservation-development approach … would be to construct a “biosphere reserve,” with some core areas where nothing could go on, and some buffer zones within hunting or agriculture or whatever. But the Shimong tribesmen were not keen on giving up control of their land (indeed, the literature is full of accounts of what can happen on such reserves once the government takes control: “conservation refugees” forced from their homes, and angry locals busy poaching).

Just like us, people in the developing world need dignity, security, identity. Some of these can be achieved through economic growth, and some of them can be undermined by it. Negotiating modernity requires creativity.

Europeans now provide more than 50 percent of all the civilian development assistance in the world, and 47 percent of all the humanitarian assistance. Our government provides about a third as much assistance, gives much of that aid to corrupt regimes, and ties nearly 80 percent of it to agreements to purchase U.S. goods and services.

European unemployment rates are higher than ours (though some economists have pointed out that we simply don’t bother counting “discouraged workers” and that having 2 percent of the potential male adult workforce behind bars further reduces our total).

Does “quality of life” mean anything? Here’s perhaps the most important statistic: in recent years, while, as we have seen, Americans grew steadily less satisfied with their lives, the percentage of Europeans predominantly satisfied with their lives “increased … from 79 to 83 percent.” As the economist Richard Layard concludes, “The decline in happiness is largely an American phenomenon.”

QUOTATIONS

Thomas Dorr [U.S. Undersecretary of Agriculture for Rural Development]
… the right scale for farms in the future will be about 200,000 acres of cropland under a single manager.

Benjamin Friedman
[Carbon dioxide] is the one major environmental contaminant for which no study has ever found any indication of improvement as living standards rise.

Brian Halweil
In terms of converting inputs into outputs, society would be better off with small-scale farmers. As population continues to grow in many nations, and the amount of farmland and water available to each person continues to shrink, a small farm structure may become central to feeding the planet.

Daniel Kahneman
[Hedonics:] the study of what makes experience and life pleasant and unpleasant. It is concerned with feelings of pleasure and pain, of interest and boredom, of joy and sorrow, and of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It is also concerned with the whole range of circumstances, from the biological to the societal, that occasion suffering and enjoyment.

Michael Pollan
Mexico’s scarce water resources are leaching north, one tomato at a time. It’s absurd for a country like Mexico – whose people are often hungry – to use its best land to grow produce for a country where food is so abundant that its people are obese – but under free trade, it makes economic sense.

Jules Pretty
For as long as people have managed natural resources, we have engaged in forms of collective action. Farming households have collaborated on water management, labor sharing, and marketing; pastoralists have co-managed grasslands; fishing families and their communities have jointly managed aquatic resources. Such collaboration has been institutionalized in many local associations, through clan or kin groups, water users’ groups, grazing management societies, women’s self-help groups.

Charles Schultze
Harnessing the ‘base’ motive of material self-interest to promote the common good is perhaps the most important social invention mankind has achieved.

Daniel Taylor
Development is typically viewed as a snapshot, but you have to understand it’s a process. It began at the beginning of time, and it’s going to go to the end of the future. Your job is to go with the flow.

James Twitchell
Much of our shared knowledge about ourselves comes to us through a commercial process of storytelling called branding … ten percent of a two-year-old’s nouns are brand names.