Constituent does not equal Consumer

Every morning I wake up to C-SPAN radio, before it even gets light outside. For some reason, it's easier for my brain to come to waking when political speakers are demanding my attention, asking for Change, insisting Yes We Can or trying to drum up some party unity.

This morning I noticed that, when addressing all manner of issues (from health care, investment and the economy, environment, education), decision-makers tend refer to their constituents primarily as consumers - as if the only factor that matters in any of these issues is money.

Excuse me for being picky, but I truly see myself as a citizen first and a consumer at least third or fourth, maybe even last. This way of thinking - the long shadow that "economics" casts - seems to be entrenched in the minds of those who should be thinking of their constituents' needs, not their wallets.

I don't want a politican to look at me and see dollar signs. But how to fix that unless the ubiquitous stakeholder companies are taken out of the legislative, judicial, and executive equation? I read a lot about that problem (and have a few posts on it), but I wonder what other major patterns in American society are contributing to the current myopic focus on money. We should be shaking our politicians out of their avarice and demanding they re-focus on what really sustains people -- health, shelter, family, and an occupation by which to contribute to society.

When do isolated outliers become a disturbing trend?

Regardless of whether or not you buy into the American high school ideal, it's a sad day when a bright, promising boy picks up a gun and kills his entire family. What stays with me the most is the message of the gun-control advocates: a gun is 22 times more likely to be used against a family member than to be used to protect the family against intruders.

Second is this idea that the system obviously isn't working for many young people. Those who are coming into power now, after the baby boomers take leave. When a school becomes less a fertile socioacademic playground and more a dry, confining standardized testing station -- or when the home becomes more of a repository for techno must-haves, in which there's 0.5 daily hours on average to spend together, since mom and dad work longer hours and dutiful daughters and sons shuttle from activity to activity, essential for the college application, you begin to detect you've developed a major problem. I'm not sure how to synthesize any kind of comprehensive review of what American cultural practices might be contributing to a growing detachment and disaffectation (see Affluenza for that), but this is how it appears in my fish-eye lens: we are judging quantity over quality. And paying qualitative consequences.

Or it could be a lingering consequence of World War II values. That's pretty plausible, observing how that value set has irrevocably altered almost every kind of consumption and industry there is in the US (not to mention the continuing dominance of economics over other values -- sustainability, for example). That reminds me a little of something I heard about that's been going on in Japan: the hikikomori.

Go Veg! This writer finally takes the plunge.

The Serious: Switching from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian diet does more for the environment than switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a hybrid car.
(University of Chicago geophysicists, from Veg For Life)

The Silly: The Meatrix: "It is all around you, Leo Hamderson. Take the red pill and I'll show you the truth."

Think about this the next time you're about to order a steak. Livestock farming is super inefficient, using up 8lbs of grains to produce each pound of meat that appears on the shelf -- but meat doesn't have any nutritional advantages, so there isn't any good reason we persist in doing it, other than meat's comfortable position in the status quo (and on take-out and fast-food menus nationwide). Not only that, over 70% of American grain and corn is fed to farm animals, instead of people! That same amount could feed 800 million hungry people.

Switching to a vegetarian diet has broad health benefits: statistics on a variety of issues, from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer to osteoporosis, meat-related proliferation of resistant "super-bug" microbes, and food-borne pathogens support cutting out meat entirely. More on nutrition here. The tragedy of livestock animals' short, pain-filled lives and the damage they innocently wreak on our soils and our waters is an epidemic. Personally, I have ignored it for convenience sake for too long, and it's time to make a conscious choice to stop. Recognizing the consequences of one's actions is a necessary step to being a conscientious citizen and to work toward changing for the better.

"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
- Dean Ornish, M.D.

There are even more potential benefits of vegetarianism related to the state of the environment. Factory farming, the majority source of milk and cheese in the U.S., produces such concentrated wastes as to pollute the land beyond the ability to rebound naturally. Animal meat provides a very concentrated source of accumulated human-created toxins, which get stored in their fatty tissue. Eating the plants they feed on instead makes people less likely to suffer from ailments that have arisen as a result of our landfill-happy culture and the subsequent leaching of endocrine disruptors, heavy metals and cancer-causing agents that permeate the water that Daisy the dairy cow or that your Christmas ham end up drinking.

And let's not forget the fish. Overfishing has resulted in a complete imbalance of the oceanic food chains, and with the nitrogenous and phosphoric farm waste flows contributing to the problem, dead zones dominate once-vibrant waterways. Oxygen-depleting organisms have made waters even more uninhabitable for complex, higher organisms that work to keep smaller ones in check. Algal blooms (also known as a "red tide") are more common now than ever, and the drought will surely have an amplifying effect for the eastern United States (see notes from new hampshire for more on that). Farmed fish aren't any better; they consume 3 pounds wild fish, from already-barren oceans, to every pound produced.

My conclusion is that my meat consumptions stops, now. I will try to eliminate dairy products as well, but my primary priority is to start treating the flesh of animals like the sentient beings they are, and let them be. I'll leave you with a quote:

"Kindness and compassion toward all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves."
-Cesar Chavez

Affluenza: Treatment

Here are some poignant quotes I wanted to share from the book that started from a PBS series called Affluenza. This particular quote is from a chapter entitled, "Political Prescriptions."

"What if Americans started buying smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, driving them less and keeping them longer? What if we took fewer long-distance vacations? What if we simplified our lives, spent less money, bought less stuff, worked less, and enjoyed more leisure time? What if government began to reward thrift and punish waste, legislated shorter work hours, and taxed advertisers? What if we made consumers and corporations pay the real costs of their products? What would happen to our economy? Would it collapse, as some economists suggest?

"Truthfully, we don't know exactly, since no major industrial nation has yet embarked on such a journey.

"...But as economist Juliet Schor points out, there are many European countries (incl. Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway) whose economies have grown far more slowly than our own, yet whose quality of life-- measured by many of the indicators we say we want, including free time, citizen participation, lower crime, greater job security, income-equality, health, and overall life contentment-- is higher than our own. Such economies show no sign of collapse. And their emphasis on balancing growth with sustainability is widely accepted across the political spectrum. As former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, a conservative, put it:

'It is true that the Dutch are not aiming to maximize gross national product per capita. Rather, we are seeking to attain a high quality of life, a just, participatory and sustainable society. While the Dutch economy is very efficient per working hour, the number of working hours per citizen are rather limited. We like it that way. Needless to say, there is more room for all those important aspects of our lives that are not part of our jobs, for which we are not paid and for which there is never enough time.'"

Small Design is Beautiful

Recently, I traveled to New York to visit some friends and to see an exhibit about the fruits of a movement to direct engineering, design, and architecture toward socially responsible, sustainable, humanitarian design. Design for the Other 90%, at the Cooper-Hewitt museum until September 23, 2007, is a small but important temporary exhibit at this branch of the Smithsonian museums. I enjoyed seeing the objects on display, but much more valuable are the ideologies spelled out and the stories behind the exhibits.

Again and again, the project leaders credit the concepts laid out in E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful; by designing on the more human scale of the intended customers (poor people included!), you eliminate waste and make the design enterprise more fail-proof. The kicker for me is that you can "design like you give a damn" and since you're operating on the level of the customer, which necessarily includes lots of feedback and hands-on, creative development, projects are almost guaranteed to have an observable beneficial impact.

Here are a few quotes from the second chapter, on peace and permanence (paraphrased from the writings of Prof. Leopold Kohr). They're rather long but they make some important points:

"Small-scale operations ... are always less likely to be harmful to the natural environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperative forces of nature. There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experiment far more than on understanding. The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge such as we are currently witnessing in the application of nuclear energy, of the new chemistry in agriculture, of transportation technology, and countless other things."

"It is obvious that men organised in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomanic governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry."

Some particularly demonstrative examples from Design for the Other 90% are the Fuel from the Fields project and IDE's Drip Irrigation system. Fuel from the Fields uses a variety of farming waste products specific to the intended customers to make cooking fuel that decreases damaging air pollutants and the demands on the females who usually have to go far afield to find wood, dung, or other burnable materials. The Drip irrigation system incorporates a way to store waters from monsoon season with a simple distribution system that is perfectly fitted to the quarter-acre size of the plots maintained by small farmers, allowing them to dramatically increase their output of high-priced produce in the dry season. Both of these projects incorporate equipment and technology that is low-priced and low-tech enough so it can be produced by entrepreneurs in the region. This means that such entrepreneurs can make a profit by enabling their fellow villagers a more healthy lifestyle and decreasing the harmful impact of deforestation in the case of the fuel, and by enabling an increase in profit and food supply for the case of drip irrigation.