Jenna Orkin
When my son was twelve, he wanted to be a magician. As he underwent his sorcerer's apprenticeship, I picked up some tips. Rule number one was, when you're doing your sleight of hand, make sure the audience is looking somewhere else.
So it is with this morning's front page article in the New York Times about the pollution resulting from burning coal in China.
I'm not saying it's not a Godawful mess over there or that the mess won't spread around the globe. But when, as the article asserts about 9/10 of the way in, "the average American still consumes more energy and is responsible for the release of 10 times as much carbon dioxide as the average Chinese," isn't our focus on China a case of the pot calling the kettle black?
Not to sound like a fortune cookie, Chinese or otherwise, but in long articles, it pays to check out the last line:
"China is using subsidies to make its energy even cheaper, a strategy that is not unfamiliar to Americans, said Kenneth Lieberthal, a China specialist at the University of Michigan. 'They have done in many ways,' he said, 'what we have done.'"
Which brings to mind the last scene of Washington Square (or was it The Heiress?) in which the heiress sits unmoved upstairs while the suitor who once rejected her bangs on the door begging to be let in.
"How can you be so cruel?" her companion says.
She replies, "I have learned from masters."
China has learned from a master which is the United States. We showed the rest of the world the 'good life' and now we act affronted that they're going after it.
China's pollution is horrendous, as the many protests around the country attest. The point is, why are we focussing so much attention on that relative to what's in our own back yard?
Here's a little story which seems appropriate to follow Mr. Tennant's comment.
ReplyDeleteI started a garden this summer, partly because my son wanted to and partly as a tiny, active step towards sustainability and bio-regionalism. It's a community garden operated by the city, and it seems as good to support it in princilpe as it is to take advantage of it in practice.
Anyway, I was talking to one of my new garden neighbors about "Indian Corn" and she started telling me about her friend who is crossbreeding varieties from up here (in Montana? in the US? she didn't say) with native varieties from South/Central America to produce high-protein varieties which don't deplete the soil.
As if this wasn't cool enough in it's own right, I then learned that he was taking his varieties to North Korea and helping farmers there establish it, and that they had been very well received there.
That is so exactly the right sort of thing to be doing it made me proud just to be gardening next to somebody who knew him.
Next time I see my garden neighbor I'll remember to write down her friend's name.
I have also been met with totally inane reactions when I try to explain the immediacy of this. (I just recently finished reading Crossing the Rubicon. A couple of weeks ago I pleaded with my younger, minister sister to read CTR, she responded with, "well, no, maybe you can get it for me for Christmas, I'm going to be reading George Elliot this summer." -- Luckily she's come around). I've copied Mike's "most important talk of his life " Peak Oil speech and have handed it around, but the people I know just can't seem to wrap their brains around it -- it's outside of the framework of their "business as usual" reality -- outside of the direction they think they are going with their lives. I can see that it's going to be difficult to try to connect with/attempt to create a sense of solidarity here, in a community that is simply not on the same page.
ReplyDeleteFood availability is also one of my big concerns. I took a biodynamic/biointensive gardening class at Ohio University about 15 years ago, but I haven't had a garden of any size almost since that time... I moved from the Chicago suburbs to Michigan 13 years ago ... This summer I pulled out my Ecology Action books, How to Grow More Vegetables, One Circle (excellent information on growing a balanced diet on minimal land), and The Backyard Homestead, and have been studying them, practicing improving my backyard soil, and planting as if my life depended on it. If things deteriorate slowly, and the need becomes apparent, I may be able to share my rusty skills, and my more recent learnings, and participate in structuring a neighborhood food support network in my community. But you're right, Wayne, right now I am also just one person, in a sea of fiddling grasshoppers, and I may have stock on hand enough for me, and be able to grow enough this summer to share a little, but that's not going to work in anybody's favor if there is a sudden crash... with masses of unprepared people in dire straits clamoring for food. I'm particularly worried about winter... what would we in the north do in the winter with rolling blackouts; rolling heat-outs -- without food in reserve and/or a way to prepare it?
By the way, Brian, I am interested, in this light, in finding out a source for that corn...