Well, since I'm off for Whitman in a little less than two weeks and leaving on Semester in the West shortly after that, I thought a bit of reflection and panic would be appropriate.
The West has been a place of self-discovery for a while. People have written entire libraries about how its majestic landscapes mirror their personal struggles and searches for self. And right now, that seems very appropriate. Everything I've taken for granted in my life for the past year seems uncertain. My job might be waiting for me when I get back, but there's no guarantee that they'll have space for me or that I'll have time to work in the spring. My relationship, now at the sixteen month mark, is going on hold so both of us can step back and explore other possibilities. My environmental studies-politics major, which I was so sure about that I declared a year early, seems suspect after I spent half the summer reading books which convinced me that politics will never solve the environmental problems we face. Even my long-cherished vegetarianism is crumbling under a growing mountain of evidence that eating meat under certain conditions is far more sustainable than relying on monocrop agriculture to feed me.
It seems appropriate, then, to spend a semester thinking it all out with epic desert scenery in the background. I'm hoping that removing myself from most of the things I take for granted will help me focus on those things that are truly important in my life. I won't be able to drive myself crazy by triple-booking every waking second of my day, and while I've heard that Semester in the West is no picnic in terms of free time, I also know that no program could overschedule me to the degree I overschedule myself when left to my own devices.
Naturally, I'm also slightly terrified. This feels like going to college all over again. When I set out for Whitman at the end of last summer, I was saying goodbye to friends I'd had since 4th and 5th grade, a city I love, a school I knew I could excel at and a very large and supportive extended family. I was reassured by the constants in my life--Western civilization, access to the Internet and phone in case everyone at Whitman hated me and I needed to talk to friends from home and the knowledge that home was only a four hour drive away.
Semester in the West is a similar departure from the familiar. I'm leaving my new friends at Whitman to have a semester of adventures without me. I'm leaving both of my homes, my family, friends, boyfriend and Western civilization behind. My potential friend pool has shrunk to about twenty-five people, and god help me if I don't get along with one of them.
But in a way, the lack of constants is reassuring. With everything I usually hide behind stripped away, I'm forced to depend on myself for everything. If I don't get along with someone, I can't retreat to the safety of my room. If I feel stressed and need a break, I can't call a friend from home or zone out in front of the TV. And I'm hoping three months of living without the barriers I usually put up will make me a better person.
I'm hoping to update on a regular basis from the field, both with descriptions of what we're doing, as well as more personal reflections and such. For interested parties, here's our rough itinerary as of now:
August 25-27: Orientation, Johnston Wilderness Campus
August 28: Depart for Wallowa County, Oregon
August 29-September 3: Wallowa County, Oregon
September 4-9: Baker County, Oregon
September 10-11: Dufur, Oregon/Bend, Oregon Area
September 12-13: Mono Lake Area, near Lee Vining, California
September 14-18: Owens Lake Area, near Lone Pine, California
September 19-26: Escalante, Utah area
September 27-29: Wells, Nevada area
September 30-October 4: Hailey, Idaho area
October 5-8: Dinosaur, Colorado area
October 9-12: Paonia, Colorado
October 13-15: Aspen, Colorado area
October 16-19: Green River, Utah area
October 20-23: Bluff, Utah area
October 24-25: Four Corners area, TBA
October 26-30: Near El Valle, New Mexico
October 31-November 4: Bandelier, New Mexico
November 5-9 Southern New Mexico, TBA
November 10-11: TBA
November 12-13: Yucca Valley, California
November 14-16: Tejon Ranch, near Bakersfield, California
November 17-19 Travel, stops in SF Bay area, Bend, Oregon
November 19 or 20: Arrive, Johnston Wilderness Campus, begin work on final projects
November 25: Thanksgiving at JWC
November 30: Western Epiphany Presentations, 4pm
December 1: Western Epiphany Presentations, 4pm
If you're reading my entries on a regular basis, I'd love to hear comments and thoughts about the stuff I post or just thoughts about the issues I'm talking about in general. And of course, random emails and texts and phone calls are always welcome.
7.29.2010
Goodbye to vegetarianism
So I've decided that I'm done being a vegetarian.
I'm in the middle of reading The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, which offers a lot of compelling reasons for eating meat, plus a lot of evidence that agriculture is one of the most environmentally destructive practices humans have ever come up with. She addresses moral vegetarians, political vegetarians and nutritional vegetarians separately and offers reasons for each of those groups to stop eating meat. I've only read the moral chapter so far, but it resonated with me and lined up well with a lot of the thinking I've been doing over the past year or so.
I became a vegetarian in third grade because I thought the idea of killing animals for food was terrible. Over the years, my thinking shifted to more political reasons for being vegetarian. I said I would eat meat I caught or killed myself, but I didn't want anything to do with industrial meat production and factory farming. By the end of high school, I had decided I didn't think there was anything wrong with killing animals for food--that's a natural part of life. But, it is wrong to not treat those animals like animals when they're alive.
Meanwhile, I had been reading about sustainable farming in books like The Omnivore's Dilemma and visiting Thundering Hooves, a farm near Whitman that raises grass finished cows. These books convinced me that eating meat from producers who let their animals live the way nature intended was fine, but I still had no particular impetus to change my life. I figured it was easier to keep eating the way I had for the last decade than to do a bunch of research finding sustainable meat producers and bother the dining hall staff with questions about sourcing.
Except then I started thinking about the alternative. Tofu is the classic vegetarian protein, and while I don't eat a ton of it, I eat enough that I worry about how sustainable it really is. Tofu is always processed and packaged. It's shipped hundreds of miles to the stores I buy it in. The soy it comes from is grown as a large monocrop, often genetically engineered. Monocrops destroy topsoil. They destroy genetic diversity. Clearing land to grow them kills countless ecosystems and is a large contributor to deforestation in many developing countries.
Most veggie products are manufactured, packaged and owned by large food conglomerates. Kraft owns Boca burgers. ConAgra has a ton of "natural" food subsidiaries. Where do I want the money for my food to go? To them?
To be considered sustainable, something needs to be able to be sustained indefinitely. Eating outside my landbase is not sustainable. Eating food the landbase cannot support is not sustainable. Eating anything which gives Cargill, Kraft, Monsanto or ConAgra more money is not sustainable.
So last night, I had meat for dinner. Clive and I decided to make dinner, and we made it out of 100% organic ingredients derived from inside our state. We had squash, onion, garlic and pepper stir-fried with flank steak, plus a salad mix. All the veggies came from the farmer's market. The meat was from a butcher down the street who has grass finished natural meats and a book showing the farming practices of their various suppliers.
And here's the thing. It tasted like food. It tasted absolutely amazing. It tasted like hard work and love had gone into it, and it felt like a truly sustainable meal. And I decided--this is how I want to eat from now on.
So I'm not a vegetarian anymore. And I'm a little bit sad, mostly because I like that word. I like the idea of conscientiousness is conveys. I like having a label that means, "I think about what I eat."
I still won't touch factory farmed meat. I'm not going to eat meat all the time, and when I do, it's going to be the good stuff. But I want this to be a step towards making more of an effort to think about my food, instead of just assuming everything organic is sustainable or everything vegetarian is sustainable. But we need death to sustain our life. I'd rather that death was a cow that lived in a functioning pasture ecosystem instead of a few hundred acres of Brazilian rainforest.
I'm in the middle of reading The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, which offers a lot of compelling reasons for eating meat, plus a lot of evidence that agriculture is one of the most environmentally destructive practices humans have ever come up with. She addresses moral vegetarians, political vegetarians and nutritional vegetarians separately and offers reasons for each of those groups to stop eating meat. I've only read the moral chapter so far, but it resonated with me and lined up well with a lot of the thinking I've been doing over the past year or so.
I became a vegetarian in third grade because I thought the idea of killing animals for food was terrible. Over the years, my thinking shifted to more political reasons for being vegetarian. I said I would eat meat I caught or killed myself, but I didn't want anything to do with industrial meat production and factory farming. By the end of high school, I had decided I didn't think there was anything wrong with killing animals for food--that's a natural part of life. But, it is wrong to not treat those animals like animals when they're alive.
Meanwhile, I had been reading about sustainable farming in books like The Omnivore's Dilemma and visiting Thundering Hooves, a farm near Whitman that raises grass finished cows. These books convinced me that eating meat from producers who let their animals live the way nature intended was fine, but I still had no particular impetus to change my life. I figured it was easier to keep eating the way I had for the last decade than to do a bunch of research finding sustainable meat producers and bother the dining hall staff with questions about sourcing.
Except then I started thinking about the alternative. Tofu is the classic vegetarian protein, and while I don't eat a ton of it, I eat enough that I worry about how sustainable it really is. Tofu is always processed and packaged. It's shipped hundreds of miles to the stores I buy it in. The soy it comes from is grown as a large monocrop, often genetically engineered. Monocrops destroy topsoil. They destroy genetic diversity. Clearing land to grow them kills countless ecosystems and is a large contributor to deforestation in many developing countries.
Most veggie products are manufactured, packaged and owned by large food conglomerates. Kraft owns Boca burgers. ConAgra has a ton of "natural" food subsidiaries. Where do I want the money for my food to go? To them?
To be considered sustainable, something needs to be able to be sustained indefinitely. Eating outside my landbase is not sustainable. Eating food the landbase cannot support is not sustainable. Eating anything which gives Cargill, Kraft, Monsanto or ConAgra more money is not sustainable.
So last night, I had meat for dinner. Clive and I decided to make dinner, and we made it out of 100% organic ingredients derived from inside our state. We had squash, onion, garlic and pepper stir-fried with flank steak, plus a salad mix. All the veggies came from the farmer's market. The meat was from a butcher down the street who has grass finished natural meats and a book showing the farming practices of their various suppliers.
And here's the thing. It tasted like food. It tasted absolutely amazing. It tasted like hard work and love had gone into it, and it felt like a truly sustainable meal. And I decided--this is how I want to eat from now on.
So I'm not a vegetarian anymore. And I'm a little bit sad, mostly because I like that word. I like the idea of conscientiousness is conveys. I like having a label that means, "I think about what I eat."
I still won't touch factory farmed meat. I'm not going to eat meat all the time, and when I do, it's going to be the good stuff. But I want this to be a step towards making more of an effort to think about my food, instead of just assuming everything organic is sustainable or everything vegetarian is sustainable. But we need death to sustain our life. I'd rather that death was a cow that lived in a functioning pasture ecosystem instead of a few hundred acres of Brazilian rainforest.
7.21.2010
Birth control: the ultimate preventative medication
I think birth control is a pretty cool, straightforward concept. People have sex. Women have sex. Birth control prevents a whole lot of other health care from being necessary. At best, not using birth control will necessitate emergency contraception. At worst, it will mean an abortion at minimum and nine months of prenatal care, plus a whole new person on your insurance policy if you don't go that route.
So, given that EC costs about $50, an OB-GYN visit about $100, an abortion anywhere from $200-600 and a hospital stay for giving birth can run into the thousands, why the hell doesn't my insurance cover any portion of a diaphragm? Diaphragms cost $60 and last for years. I know women who've used them for several decades happily. They're probably the most cost-effective method of birth control. They're a great health investment from the standpoint of an insurance company.
Just thought I'd put that out there. I'm going to try to find out whether my insurance covers the Pill, EC, Viagra, or abortions. Because if they cover any of those at all, it's ridiculous of them not to cover this.
So, given that EC costs about $50, an OB-GYN visit about $100, an abortion anywhere from $200-600 and a hospital stay for giving birth can run into the thousands, why the hell doesn't my insurance cover any portion of a diaphragm? Diaphragms cost $60 and last for years. I know women who've used them for several decades happily. They're probably the most cost-effective method of birth control. They're a great health investment from the standpoint of an insurance company.
Just thought I'd put that out there. I'm going to try to find out whether my insurance covers the Pill, EC, Viagra, or abortions. Because if they cover any of those at all, it's ridiculous of them not to cover this.
7.07.2010
Valuing life
Our society is not sustainable. Our culture is not sustainable. Our civilization is not sustainable. And technology is not going to save us.
I don't want to believe this. I really want to listen to Al Gore and the Sierra Club and Obama telling me that if we redesign our grid and recycle and get hybrid cars and eat organic food, we'll fix the planet.
Here's the thing. I believe we might be able to fix climate change with technology. Obviously, the easiest way to stop climate change would be to simply and unconditionally stop burning oil and coal and natural gas and watch out civilization crumble. But I do believe that within a few decades, we could get our emissions under control enough to stop us from killing ourselves, via increased awareness, more energy efficiency and non-carbon emitting power sources. There will be enormous human costs along the way--we're already seeing some of them in the South Pacific and Africa--but we'll get there with our society largely intact if we put enough minds and manpower behind it.
Here's what a lot of environmentalists aren't telling you: climate change is not the only environmental problem we face. The computers that are going to save the world by preventing us from having to commute to work and providing us with helpful green living tips require all kinds of resources to manufacture, many of which are toxic. Silicon Valley is home to 29 EPA Superfund sites, the highest concentration anywhere in the country. Dams have turned rivers like the Columbia from natural habitats into a series of lakes that salmon have a harder and harder time surviving in. Even those nice quiet Priuses need nickel for their batteries, and mining it uses land and toxic chemicals.
If all we want to do is make sure most (richer, more privileged humans) survive, then we can worry about stopping climate change and breathe a big sigh of relief when we get it under control. But if we care about life, if we believe all humans and non-humans have a right to exist, we can't stop there. Mining will always involve exploitation of human labor, will always involve toxic chemicals which shouldn't exist, and will always leave behind waste capable of killing living beings long after we're gone. Manufacturing anything, even solar panels or wind turbines, depends on finite resources, and no amount of "green technology" will be able to make their manufacture sustainable for a population of seven billion (and counting).
This is where you see a big rift in the environmental movement. All kinds of people who probably wouldn't have called themselves environmentalists five or ten years ago suddenly care about our climate. And that's great. But I hope for every hundred people we get to care about the earth, a few will realize that this problem goes much deeper than carbon emissions. I hope a few of them will start to think about the earth in terms of all living things, not just humans.
I was talking with my parents about dams, and about how they've decimated salmon populations. I said I understood that they're a marginally better power source than coal burning plants or nuclear plants, but I want people to understand that they're a stepping stone to something better, not a sustainable solution to anything. And my dad said he understood that we've built too many dams in the West, but he thought at some point, it didn't make sense to set aside everything in nature as untouchable. We could build some dams and flood a few canyons, ruin a few salmon runs, but we'd still have the rest, so it would be ok.
I told him this all comes down to a simple question--do you believe the natural world and other living beings are here for us to use as we best see fit, or do they have a right to exist independent of our desires? If salmon and rivers and every other living thing in the world had an equal voice and an equal vote in our political systems, I don't think a single dam would have been built in the first place.
I've seen this before, when the federal government was deciding whether or not to remove the grey wolf from the Endangered Species List. The debate was between animal rights and conservation groups and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The conservationists argued that the wolf population wasn't large enough yet to be self-sustaining. FWS said it was, therefore it would be fine to delist the wolves and open hunting on them. Nowhere did anyone suggest that an individual wolf had a right to exist. If wolf population numbers are sustainable, if the killing of an individual wolf won't impact the species as a whole, that wolf has no right to live no matter which side of the debate you're on.
Our society, our culture, and our civilization are killing the planet. I don't want to admit this. It scares me to admit this. But I can't sit by and pretend it's possible to be neutral while we kill the landbase we depend on for survival, any more than it's possible to be neutral by standing silently as someone commits murder in front of you. You have to see this as personal, because it is personal. If my child was dying of cancer from a toxic waste dump that used to be a manufacturing plant, I wouldn't rest until I was sure no one else would get sick from the same chemicals that killed my child. If the park that I spend my childhood exploring, the park where I first tasted stinging nettle and saw deer tracks, was going to be bulldozed (sorry, "developed") to built houses or a coal plant or anything else, I would sit in front of those bulldozers for as long as I had to until they went away. I don't know the best way to fight for our planet, for the other living beings that don't have a voice in our destructive systems. But I know I have to.
I don't want to believe this. I really want to listen to Al Gore and the Sierra Club and Obama telling me that if we redesign our grid and recycle and get hybrid cars and eat organic food, we'll fix the planet.
Here's the thing. I believe we might be able to fix climate change with technology. Obviously, the easiest way to stop climate change would be to simply and unconditionally stop burning oil and coal and natural gas and watch out civilization crumble. But I do believe that within a few decades, we could get our emissions under control enough to stop us from killing ourselves, via increased awareness, more energy efficiency and non-carbon emitting power sources. There will be enormous human costs along the way--we're already seeing some of them in the South Pacific and Africa--but we'll get there with our society largely intact if we put enough minds and manpower behind it.
Here's what a lot of environmentalists aren't telling you: climate change is not the only environmental problem we face. The computers that are going to save the world by preventing us from having to commute to work and providing us with helpful green living tips require all kinds of resources to manufacture, many of which are toxic. Silicon Valley is home to 29 EPA Superfund sites, the highest concentration anywhere in the country. Dams have turned rivers like the Columbia from natural habitats into a series of lakes that salmon have a harder and harder time surviving in. Even those nice quiet Priuses need nickel for their batteries, and mining it uses land and toxic chemicals.
If all we want to do is make sure most (richer, more privileged humans) survive, then we can worry about stopping climate change and breathe a big sigh of relief when we get it under control. But if we care about life, if we believe all humans and non-humans have a right to exist, we can't stop there. Mining will always involve exploitation of human labor, will always involve toxic chemicals which shouldn't exist, and will always leave behind waste capable of killing living beings long after we're gone. Manufacturing anything, even solar panels or wind turbines, depends on finite resources, and no amount of "green technology" will be able to make their manufacture sustainable for a population of seven billion (and counting).
This is where you see a big rift in the environmental movement. All kinds of people who probably wouldn't have called themselves environmentalists five or ten years ago suddenly care about our climate. And that's great. But I hope for every hundred people we get to care about the earth, a few will realize that this problem goes much deeper than carbon emissions. I hope a few of them will start to think about the earth in terms of all living things, not just humans.
I was talking with my parents about dams, and about how they've decimated salmon populations. I said I understood that they're a marginally better power source than coal burning plants or nuclear plants, but I want people to understand that they're a stepping stone to something better, not a sustainable solution to anything. And my dad said he understood that we've built too many dams in the West, but he thought at some point, it didn't make sense to set aside everything in nature as untouchable. We could build some dams and flood a few canyons, ruin a few salmon runs, but we'd still have the rest, so it would be ok.
I told him this all comes down to a simple question--do you believe the natural world and other living beings are here for us to use as we best see fit, or do they have a right to exist independent of our desires? If salmon and rivers and every other living thing in the world had an equal voice and an equal vote in our political systems, I don't think a single dam would have been built in the first place.
I've seen this before, when the federal government was deciding whether or not to remove the grey wolf from the Endangered Species List. The debate was between animal rights and conservation groups and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The conservationists argued that the wolf population wasn't large enough yet to be self-sustaining. FWS said it was, therefore it would be fine to delist the wolves and open hunting on them. Nowhere did anyone suggest that an individual wolf had a right to exist. If wolf population numbers are sustainable, if the killing of an individual wolf won't impact the species as a whole, that wolf has no right to live no matter which side of the debate you're on.
Our society, our culture, and our civilization are killing the planet. I don't want to admit this. It scares me to admit this. But I can't sit by and pretend it's possible to be neutral while we kill the landbase we depend on for survival, any more than it's possible to be neutral by standing silently as someone commits murder in front of you. You have to see this as personal, because it is personal. If my child was dying of cancer from a toxic waste dump that used to be a manufacturing plant, I wouldn't rest until I was sure no one else would get sick from the same chemicals that killed my child. If the park that I spend my childhood exploring, the park where I first tasted stinging nettle and saw deer tracks, was going to be bulldozed (sorry, "developed") to built houses or a coal plant or anything else, I would sit in front of those bulldozers for as long as I had to until they went away. I don't know the best way to fight for our planet, for the other living beings that don't have a voice in our destructive systems. But I know I have to.
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