|
|
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
Food, Water and Resilience - July/August 2008
|
By Ted Schettler
This month the American Academy of Pediatrics said that more children, as young as 8, should be given cholesterol-lowering drugs. Hundreds of thousands of children are taking medication to treat type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and acid reflux—all problems linked to obesity. Pharmaceutical companies are developing flavored varieties of adult pills for kids. They know a market when they see it.
Through the farm bill, the U.S. Department of Agriculture heavily subsidizes some of the very foods that are contributing to the obesity epidemic—among them, high-fructose corn syrup and soy-based products in many processed foods, rich in calories and poor in nutrients. These foods dominate the shelves of convenience stores and the center aisles of supermarkets, although many people in inner-city neighborhoods don’t have access to a supermarket with real food at all.
Cash-strapped school districts are cutting back on physical education programs, and the American College of Sports Medicine sees the sports and fitness industry as moving in to fill that gap. They know a market when they see it, but guess which kids will be left out.
Childhood poverty is increasing in the U.S. and so is childhood asthma. Now, put them together. Poor children with asthma living in high-traffic areas get more frequent and worse asthma attacks than more well-off children living in the same neighborhood. Why? It’s often a mixture of reasons, but it turns out that poor kids have chronically higher baseline levels of inflammatory markers circulating in their blood. Poverty has gotten under their skin—into their blood and lungs. They're constantly living closer to the threshold where they begin to struggle for air to breathe. They and their families lack the resilience that helps to keep better-off kids in school and out of emergency rooms.
And it's not just asthma. Poor people are at higher risk of most illnesses. As Harvard’s Nancy Krieger puts it, "The evidence is in. Health inequities are the embodiment of social inequality. The shorter, sicker lives of people burdened by economic deprivation, discrimination, noxious jobs, and environmental pollution result from injurious political priorities, not individual failure."
The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate and total documented prison population in the world. For the first time, at the beginning of 2008 more than 1 in 100 U.S. adults were in jail or prison. Prisons are big business. On average, states pay 6.8% of general funds dollars on jails and prisons. The growing prison-industrial complex joins the military-industrial, medical-industrial, and academic-industrial complexes in the market place.
What are the connections? Broken systems leave pieces lying around. Some people pick them up and study them without recognizing where they came from. Others pick them up to see if they can make a buck. Soon the short-term money economy is dependent on profits from pieces of broken systems. Special interests don’t want to give it up. Sick, poorly nourished children, broken schools, and full prisons may not be good for some people but they can be a source of income for others or just collateral damage.
Today's obese, diabetic children are tomorrow's adults with cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, kidney failure, dementia, and cancer. Today’s poor children face a lifetime of struggle. The pharmaceutical industry may see a growing market here, but this wave of chronic disease will swamp Medicare and make healthcare nearly unaffordable.
Would we let this happen if we were committed to healthy families and communities 150 years from now? Probably not. We could grasp common threads and be grateful for the opportunity to design interventions that solve multiple problems simultaneously. What happens when we talk about public health, medicine, agriculture, environmental health, economic disparities, and education in the same conversation? What new approaches become apparent and what are the budget priorities then? What new accounting methods do we employ? What is the influence of a 150-500 year timeframe? What are the qualities of the world that we want to leave to the seventh generation from now? Do we want the ideas and pieces that are lying around right now to decide?
In this issue Fred Kirschenmann proposes that resilience is a critical component of the concept of sustainability. Lena Brook reviews Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, a book that explains how America's wide gap between food access for rich and poor came to be, and what we might do about it. And Bryan Knapp reviews Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, a book that goes behind the curtain of selling a product that is still available for free. Even when it comes to water, it seems -- the ultimate freely available, public resource -- they know a market when they see it.
Enjoy this issue, enjoy your summer, and let us know what you think.
Ted Schettler is Science Director, Science & Environmental Health Network.
|
Frederick Kirschenmann
"Going green" seems to be the new sustainability watchword designed to save the planet. The question is: if we all go green, will that get us to sustainability?
A typical dictionary definition of sustainability is "to maintain," "to keep going," "to keep in existence." As a broad overview that is a useful definition, since it calls into question exactly what it is that we want to maintain.
In today’s discourse we generally view sustainability from a quantitative perspective. How can we maintain or improve crop yields? How can we maintain the growth of the economy? How can we improve the energy efficiency of our vehicles so we can continue transporting goods from one part of the world to another in the face of rising energy costs? How can we increase the cod population to maintain our seafood industry?
Both environmental and commercial sectors have been captured by this approach to sustainability.
More recently we have added the "greening" component to this quantitative perspective. Recognizing that we are reaching certain thresholds that could fundamentally change the functioning of the planet, we are beginning to focus on improving efficiencies, reducing our green house gas emissions, switching from fossil energy to renewable alternatives and recycling more of our wastes. On the surface these seem like laudable activities, but will they lead us to sustainability?
Inspired by the insights of ecologists like C.S. Holling, a new professional society has emerged during the last 15 years called the Resilience Alliance. Following Holling’s description of natural systems and how they function,[1] the Resilience Alliance has concluded that this quantitative approach to sustainability is "based on false assumptions. In a world characterized by dynamic change in ecological and social systems, it is at least as important to manage systems to enhance their resilience as it is to manage the supply of specific products." Using the quantitative approach, the Alliance claims, "We have assumed that we could manage individual components of an ecological system independently, find an optimal balance between supply and demand for each component, and that other attributes of the system would stay largely constant through time."[2] Given how both social and ecological systems function, that is a fundamentally flawed assumption. All social and biophysical systems are constantly changing.
The basic message from the resilience thinkers is that doing more of the same -- new technologies, greater efficiency, more control and command, more intensification, more single tactic strategies -- without addressing the resilience of systems will not lead to sustainability. A central problem is that the kind of efficiency that leads to optimization tends to eliminate redundancies -- the key ingredient of resilience. Additionally, the achievement of such efficiencies tends to cause rebound effects. More fuel-efficient cars inevitably lead to more driving.
So the kind of greening that pushes the pedal to the metal a little harder -- more efficient technologies, better command and control, input substitution -- ends up creating the problem we intended to solve. We delude ourselves into believing that working smarter will solve the problem but more often it simply reinforces the problem, since we have not approached it from a dynamic social/ecological perspective.
The central issue here is that we can never control whole systems, nor can we totally control any part of a system in isolation. Consequently, while greening may bring about desirable short term results, it will never lead to sustainability. Our world is a complex adaptive system which is interconnected, interdependent and constantly changing. Accordingly all systems are unpredictable and proceed in a nonlinear fashion. In the end we can never hold a system in an optimal sustainable state. We can only design systems to enhance their capacity for self-renewal.
Sustainability from a resilience perspective operates at two levels. All systems (biophysical and social) proceed within a certain structure and function. Given a certain degree of shock or disturbance, any system will cross a threshold that pushes it into a new structure and function. A recent Associated Press article by Deanna Martin, for example, described the kind of "disturbance" that recent flooding in Indiana caused for Jim Lankford, a farmer who raises corn and soybeans 30 miles southwest of Indianapolis. The current "stable" form of agriculture that most farmers in the corn belt have evolved to is monoculture corn and soybeans, leaving large swaths of soil vulnerable to soil erosion. The unusual amount of rain that fell in a short period of time caused the river that flows by Mr. Lankford's farm to erode "a new route for itself during June’s flooding" leaving ditches with "12-foot banks at the edge of some of Lankford’s corn fields" and large swaths of crop and soil washed out of his fields. If such flooding continues in coming years (which is likely as a result of climate change) these fields will clearly "cross a threshold" that will of necessity push these fields to a different kind of structure and functioning.[3]
From the perspective of resilience, therefore, sustainability comes into play in two ways: 1) designing a system so that it is not as likely to cross into a new threshold -- that is, from one state of equilibrium to different configuration, and 2) designing systems so that if they do cross into a new threshold (which, over time, all systems will) they are sufficiently robust so that they reorganize themselves quickly into a new structure and function that continues to provide the services required. It is this second resilience role that makes maintaining diversity and redundancy so critical. Only sufficient diversity and redundancy will enable systems to retain their capacity for self-renewal.
Of course, maintaining redundancy and diversity incurs a cost. And it is one of the reasons we seldom consider this approach to sustainability. It sacrifices a certain degree of efficiency and therefore incurs costs that we, in our industrial economy, are reluctant to accept. Furthermore, it is difficult to assess all of the costs and benefits of dynamic systems. We can never accumulate sufficient precise knowledge to predict them. How does one assess the costs and benefits of preparing for a "500 year flood" as opposed to the cost of ignoring it in the interest of greater efficiency? And in our industrial culture if you can’t prove that costs outweigh benefits you don’t dare interfere with the market.
This may be one of the more compelling reasons for adopting the precautionary principle.
It seems to me that this is where some of the prescient wisdom of Aldo Leopold is instructive. Leopold reminded us of two important realities with respect to resilience that we have largely ignored, but that seem essential if we truly are interested in sustainability.
First, he wrote that it is futile to calculate the value of conservation "wholly on economic motives" because "most members of the land community have no economic value" yet they are vital to the stability and integrity of the whole.[4] For example, Niles Eldredge writes in Dominion: Can Nature and Culture Co-Exist? that most of us might be in favor of exterminating termites from the face of the planet, yet termites, because of their symbiotic relationship with spirochete bacteria, are one of the few creatures that can digest cellulose. Consequently, we humans are absolutely dependent on termites for a huge portion of the recycling of the world's biotic material. "No recycling, no ongoing life." (1995:163)
We now also know that each biotic community is so complex and dynamic that it is impossible to determine which species are essential to its sustainability. Consequently, using a cost/benefit analysis as a basis for judging the value of sustainable practices is a fool’s errand. A good example is the Canadian government’s decision in the late 1990’s to organize hunting expeditions to slaughter half a million harp seals to replenish Atlantic cod populations. They had concluded that because harp seals are cod predators, killing harp seals would reduce the predator pressure on cod allowing the cod to thrive. What they failed to recognize was that harp seals were also directly connected to at least another 150 species, many of which also eat cod, and that the seals also hunt and eat many of those 150 species. Owing to the complexity of this situation there was no way to predict the effect. It may be that killing the harp seals actually ended up further reducing the cod population.
Second, Leopold recognized that we could not "preserve" the biotic community in any given state of equilibrium. Since biotic communities are dynamic and interdependent they are constantly in a state of change. Consequently, conservation perceived as an activity to preserve things in their "natural" state is also an exercise in futility.
What we can do, however, is to understand and preserve the biotic community’s capacity for self-renewal, and that, according to Leopold, requires the nurturing of an "ecological conscience."
A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.[5]
Nurturing that concept of conservation is essential to any quest for sustainability.
[1] Holling, C.S., 1973. "Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4:1-23.
[2] Walker, Brian and David Salt. 2006. Resilience Thinking. Washington DC: Island Press. xi, x.
[3] http://wire.jacksonville.com/pstories/us/20080727/310351196.html
[4] Aldo Leopold, 1949. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press. 210.
[5] Leopold. Op. Cit. 221
Frederick Kirschenmann is Distinguished Fellow, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and President, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.
|
Bryan Knapp
After "water" the word that most often appears in Elizabeth Royte’s Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, is "Nestle." Royte begins by unraveling the story behind the water battles in Fryeburg, Maine, which have pitted neighbor against neighbor, corporations against activists, attorneys battling attorneys. Much of Nestle's current activity centers on acquiring water rights to groundwater around the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, Nestle was targeted by activists for marketing infant formula to Third World mothers who were capable of breastfeeding. Today, Nestle craves fresh water. Activists claim that Nestle is again attempting to privatize a sacred resource. Bottled water is everywhere, and Nestle has a hand in much of it: Poland Spring, Arrowhead, Calistoga, Ozarka, Ice Mountain, Deer Park and Zephyrhills are all owned by Nestle.
According to Royte, bottled water sales account for $10.8 billion dollars a year in the United States alone; globally sales reach $60 billion. Americans drink more bottled water than beer and milk, and soon will eclipse even America’s consumption of soda. Indeed, "more than seven hundred domestic and seventy-five imported brands are sold in the United States." Nestle "pumps 114 billion gallons a year from groundwater" that is integral to Lake Michigan. Royte argues that water is not simply a pure liquid that keeps us alive, it is also "a signature product of the world’s largest food corporation, a flash point for activists environmental, religious, and legal," and importantly it is "either the biggest scam in marketing history or a harbinger of far worse things to come."
The book is a first-person guided tour of the principle issues in the global water wars. Royte asserts that the story of bottled water is about "the struggle over the global water commons." She asks how we came to be a nation that consumes much of our water in plastic bottles and which tosses "thirty to forty billion of these containers a year." She follows the process from the borehole to the gas station convenience store, from the world’s great springs in Maine and Vergeze, France to a water connoisseur’s tasting table. Bottlemania is about money and flooding profits. It also covers sustainability, accountability and environmental impact. And it is a narrative of exploitation, callous degradation, overconsumption and expropriation. This is a nonpolemical text about the ownership of life itself.
Royte describes problems with the plastic bottles themselves, from leaching chemicals to lack of recycling. She reveals arsenic in bottled waters like Fiji, which is proud that "It’s Not Bottled in Cleveland," and cancer-causing benzene in Perrier. She debunks the myth that Americans should drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day, calling it a marketing ploy backed by spurious science. She writes of a woman in California who died from drinking too much water. Additionally, Royte details where Coke and Pepsi get their water -- from municipal water supplies in Detroit, Wichita, Fresno, New York City, and Jacksonville -- and that they "filter the bejesus out of it." And bottled water at gas stations? Well, "it’s more profitable than gasoline."
Nestle in 2008 still resembles the Nestle of the 1970s. Like its '70's-era practice of sending company employees into the field dressed as nurses to convince mothers to use infant formula, Royte uncovers a Nestle-produced CD that instructs waiters how to expand bottled water sales. Avoiding the use of tap water, it promised, will increase tips. "Converting just twenty guests per shift from tap water to bottled," claims Nestle, "would bring in an extra hundred bucks" a month.
Royte blames Americans' insane increase of bottled water consumption on celebrity worship, mobile eating habits, "hyperindividualism," health concerns, and the fact that the water bottle is "a security blanket" for neurotic, busy Americans. Marketing inundation by multinationals like Nestle is partially responsible for the above. Fittingly, one of the primary activist groups that once agitated against Nestlé’s infant formula marketing campaigns and instigator of the worldwide boycott, the Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT), is now known as Corporate Accountability International, which fights the privatization of water.
Royte accomplishes her work with skill, digging up facts, outlining the intricacies of municipal water treatment processes, learning about microbes, pharmaceuticals, benzene, and methyl tertiary butyl ether in tap water, while also tramping through the Maine woods to mossy springs or high-tech boreholes with corporate hydrogeologists -- professionals one activist has colorfully called "hydrostitutes." But the water is "free"! shouts a hydrogeologist cum water entrepreneur in self-defense against the charges of critics. "It’s your right to take it from your property in Maine," and, indeed, for some people that’s the end of the discussion.
Royte also explores the origin of our tap water. "There is an infrastructure disconnect," she informs us. We don’t know how the water gets to our faucet and we don’t know what’s in it. Our tap water includes the nation’s current bogey E. coli and "microscopic crustaceans called copepods." But still, American tap water is among the safest in the world.
Royte is at her best when she writes about Kansas City civil engineers turning Missouri River water that "resembles chocolate Yoo-Hoo" into clear award-winning potability. She also traces the current backlash against bottled water, from Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse to a tax in Chicago on bottled water which is hoped to bring millions of dollars to the city. The International Bottled Water Association is fighting the tax. Royte's chapter on New England town meetings and democracy in action -- as small towns either fight large corporations or welcome them in -- was perhaps the most compelling of the book.
If there is a problem with the book, it is that to like the book you have to like its author. It is driven both by concise reporting and fine writing, but also by the occasional officious personality of its narrator. Her underlying politics, though she coaxes information out of Industry in a friendly manner, are evident. She asks the reader, "If we believe water is a basic human right -- such as freedom from persecution or equality before the law -- then why would we let anyone slap a bar code on it?"
Nestle and other corporations have consistently defended their rights to bottle and sell "their" water against the claims of environmentalists and concerned citizens. Industry claims that "there’s no evidence of environmental harm," as it is difficult to prove that pumping groundwater has emptied lakes or killed brook trout. This is a classic defense, and will remain so as long as the precautionary principle is not primary in the United States. There are those who argue that the onus should be on corporations to show that their products don’t cause cancer or their activities don’t threaten our health or environment. Royte notes that this is problematic "when it comes to unregulated contaminants," because "industry pumps out new ones faster than regulating agencies can test them." Until there is a paradigmatic shift in our society, corporations will continue pumping and bottling as much water as they possibly can.
A syllogism: If water equals life, and if corporations attempt to privatize water, then corporations in concrete terms are trying to own and control life itself. It is clear that Royte believes life is on the line.
Bryan Knapp is a doctoral candidate in American History, Washington University in St. Louis.
|
Lena Brook
Mark Winne’s Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty is an elegant, inspiring addition to the growing body of literature on the food revolution unfolding in the United States today. The author spent over thirty years at the helm of Hartford Food Systems, supporting underserved neighborhoods in various efforts to increase their food security. He has done it all -- community gardening, food coops, policy advocacy, farming, food banking -- and it shows. And his personal passion for gardening and farming reminds us that we may have to revisit our agrarian roots in order to move forward.
Winne’s book is illuminating for many reasons. His synthesis of seminal works and movement histories from the 1970’s serves as a reminder for today's activists that many current efforts have been in play for 30 years. Positive changes are certainly on the horizon, but one can’t help lament that we still have little in the way of concrete answers.
This primer on sustainable food systems places food security -- and the linkages between poverty and hunger -- at its core. I was impressed by Winne’s ability to weave volumes of information with decades of personal experience that would equally engage a policy wonk or a layperson. Closing the Food Gap reinforces the essential place food holds in the human experience. It uses a critical social justice lens to cover a range of topics as broad as hunger, poverty, health, and agricultural production. Winne writes with the assurance, authority and humility of an esteemed leader in his movement and he is willing to break down assumptions, hold the right parties accountable, and offer innovative strategies for moving forward.
No one issue is put on a pedestal at the expense of others. For example, he asserts that our track record of supporting the livelihoods of farmers typically comes at the expense of low-income communities. Reconciling the seemingly conflicting needs of food producers and those who struggle to afford healthy food is a significant challenge. But I wonder if they are pitted as opposing forces because we default too often to free-market mechanisms as solutions? Winne posits that with increased and better-allocated public policy support, the gap stands a chance of substantially narrowing. Political willpower is essential to catalyzing new solutions and rebuilding broken patterns of the past. The advent of food policy councils on the local and state levels provide an excellent platform for change, as does the recent impressive mobilization of sustainable food activists around the 2008 Farm Bill. A leadership transition at the apex of government come November is certain to provide new opportunities to ameliorate the mistakes of the past.
The collection of books on sustainable food systems has grown exponentially in recent years, only to be matched by an explosion of public interest. Yet those most negatively impacted by the vagaries of our industrial food system and underfunded public support programs continue to be left even further behind. Food insecurity is probably difficult to imagine for many living in our "land of plenty," yet a full 10% of Americans rely on the National Food Stamp Program, which just brushes the surface of filling in the gaps of their food needs. Winne questions why "we were wasting time teaching people to eat healthfully if they couldn’t find affordable food stores, and they are not getting the full value of the food assistance vouchers that taxpayers were supporting."
Nowhere is this dichotomy more starkly apparent than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. Food deserts in low-income communities of color abut the heart of this country’s local food movement, which has shepherded some of the most highly regarded restaurants, growers, and food purveyors in the world. Yet like in many of the examples presented by Winne, too many low-income residents continue to survive on the meager offerings of liquor stores and corner markets. Major supermarkets are too often out of reasonable reach and are thus a prime focus point of activism. From the point of direct access, large food markets do have a lot to offer. Though I can’t help but wonder if these entities, whose corporate bottom lines have failed these communities in the past and who profit tremendously by offering vast quantities of unhealthy, expensive processed foods, are the right solution?
Toward the conclusion of his book, Winne asks, "How do we begin to make this dream of a healthy and sustainable lifestyle available to everyone?" He proposes a selection of creative solutions, which include continuing to forge strong relationships between farmers and consumers, a redistribution of public funding to reduce food insecurity, and including food systems into urban planning decisions.
The first-hand experience the author brings to Closing the Food Gap is invaluable. Rarely does one find a book that is as comprehensive and at the same time thoroughly enjoyable as this one. Use it as a source of inspiration -- and pass it on!
Lena Brook is Senior Program Associate, Physicians for Social Responsibility, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter.
|
Print Friendly Page
| |  | |  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
about sehn 
