Grassland

I've arrived in Walla Walla and have renewed my Semester in the West pre-departure reading list efforts. I just started a book called Grassland by Richard Manning, which discusses the destruction of prairies and grasslands in the US. He starts out with an interesting take on the environmental movement in the United States, which I think is largely accurate. He posits that the conservation movement began as a reaction against industrialization and separated man from nature by designating places like Yosemite and Yellowstone to remain wild. He goes on to say that conservation efforts have largely focused on "charismatic megafauna"--the polar bears and wolves who look so good on posters for environmental organizations--at the expense of less glamorous organisms and ecosystems. Everyone can appreciate that a clearcut isn't beautiful (no one would hang a poster of a clearcut in their room), but people celebrate the beauty in rolling hills of wheat, although they represent deforestation of the grassland ecosystem in the exact same way.

I hope I can get through Grassland before we leave. It touches on a lot of issues which have defined Western land management--the impacts of ranching and monocrop agriculture, the evolution of a conservation ethic, the meaning of environmentalism. And I'm guessing it's going to raise the same questions that have been bothering me since I started thinking about how we should go about fixing the world we live in.

Books like this invariably lead me to conclude that our civilization is not sustainable in any sense of the word. Certainly the way we feed ourselves, beyond just the sheer distance our food travels, isn't sustainable. Wheat, soy, anything grown as a monocrop, depletes irreplaceable topsoil and requires chemical fertilizers and pesticides to grow. The question then becomes--in a world of seven billion people, what is the right course of action. Last year on an environmental studies excursion, we visited a wheat farmer who challenged us to confront our bias towards organic, "sustainable" food production.

"If we only produced organic food, there'd be some really healthy people and a lot of dead people," he said.

And he's unfortunately, absolutely right. We're severely overpopulated to the point where speaking of sustainability without speaking of population reduction seems meaningless. But where does that leave me as an environmentalist? Urging everyone to eat local, organic food ignores the poverty that billions of people live in. Saying that continuing to deplete finite resources to feed ourselves makes sense seems to condemn future generations to an ever larger population crash.

Bottom line: I don't know, I'm excited to learn what I can, and I like this book.

Packing and unpacking

I'm off for Whitman tomorrow, where I will spend a week having training and preparing for the rock climbing trip I'm leading the following week. My bags are relatively packed, though the giant Semester in the West duffel isn't quite organized, due to the fact that many of its ingredients are needed for Scramble training and leading as well (sleeping bag, anyone?)

So, what did I end up bringing? Aside from the obvious basics (hopefully 22 pairs of underwear will be enough), there are a few things that I decided on which I hope will make the semester a bit more homey and interesting. Here's the list of Things I Packed Which I'm Really Excited About:

1. My new Carhartt overalls. For those of you who aren't acquainted with the Carhartt brand, they make fantastically durable clothing for people who do hard physical labor in the outdoors, like farming and ranching and stuff. So I got a pair of their quilt-lined double-knee-padded overalls for when it gets cold and miserable, and I'm hoping they're warm enough to make up for my lack of down pants.

2. A deck of American Environmental History cards. These were a Christmas present from my dad last year, and will allow me to annoy and/or amuse everyone in the van by informing them that the area we're driving through was once the site of a pristine wilderness preserve, before we put a dam downriver and flooded the whole thing.

3. A cowboy hat. This is not actually mine; I borrowed it from Clive on the grounds that he won't need it this semester, whereas I clearly will. I'm looking forward to wearing it with my dirty jeans and plaid flannel shirts. Extra points if we actually get to hang out with cows.

4. Planet Earth on DVD. I'm hoping we'll occasionally have enough free time to watch some of the BBC's spectacular footage of our planet, and where better to watch it than in the middle of the desert at night?

5. A copy of Mammal Tracks and Sign by Mark Elbroch. This book weighs about three pounds and is an absurdly comprehensive guide to mammal tracks, scat, dens, hair and just about everything else you could ever find. I doubt we'll have much time for tracking, and I've always been terrible at journaling tracks anyway, but I hope I'll at least be able to read about some of the animals we'll be leaving near.

6. My pillow. I have this awesome square pillow with a tree pattern on it that my friend Anna made me for my birthday in 7th grade. It's probably the most useful present I've ever gotten. I've taken it on almost every outdoor trip I've been on since, because it's the perfect size, super-comfy and really cute. I'm sure by now it's impregnated with a bunch of hair grease, but I still love it dearly and am looking forward to sleeping on it.

The pros and cons of hair

As I prepare for Semester in the West, there are a lot of questions swirling through my head. Will two pairs of pants be enough? Should I get a second journal that I don't have to turn in so I can write about how annoying everyone is? Do I really want to spend most of my semester wearing a shirt that says Beer Mile on it in large yellow letters? But nothing has come close to the debate I'm having about hair.

There are two schools of thought on wilderness hairstyling. Option one: cut it all off. No hair, no worry. Just wake up and go. Option two: grow it long enough to put up and out of the way.

I really like the idea of running around barefoot in the desert right before sunset, when the sun's rays are at a low enough angle that they don't burn your eyes. It's that time of day when everything takes on a golden halo that makes you think you've left reality and wandered into a cowgirl themed fashion spread in Seventeen. And long hair is an absolute prerequisite for pulling this off. No advertisement in any medium has ever featured someone with short hair wearing a brown dress and staring suggestively off into the distance at a barren, rocky landscape. So for the aesthetic value of windswept desert beauty--advantage: long hair.

However, there's also reality. My hair is longer now than it's ever been, and while that's not saying much, I don't have a ton of experience managing this many dead cells at a time. My hair is quite like me, in that it thinks it's awesome and refuses to listen to anyone else's instructions unless it feels like it, which means that while I respect my hair immensely, sometimes I don't like it. So I'm worried that if I let this go on for another four months, I'm going to come home with accidental dreds and an entire nest of desert creatures lurking somewhere in its recesses. For hygienic pragmatism, then--advantage: short hair.

I think I'm going to leave it where it is, because I'll be able to french braid it most of the time, and anything short will grow out enough to be a pain by the end of the semester. Anyway, if I change my mind mid-semester, I can always go for the hacked-off-with-a-Swiss-Army-knife look.

Introducing...SEMESTER IN THE WEST!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Paralyzed by choice

I've been having a bit of an identity crisis lately. Not a Who am I and why am I here? sort of crisis, but a what the hell do I want to do with my life? kind of crisis. I know absolutely that I need to do something environmental, but beyond that, there are so many thing that sound appealing.

Here's a list of a few things I've realized in the last few weeks, which I feel are important. And I don't mean that these are all objective truths, they're just what I've realized I feel about systems and fields of study.


-I will always have the opportunity to pay attention to politics and study political theory, but I won't be able to teach myself biology or chemistry nearly as effectively, due to my lack of a high-tech lab in my basement, among other things.

-I no longer believe that change on the scale we need it is possible through our political system.

-Social sciences study human-created systems, and largely exist because we've screwed up those systems. Politics is a study of how to change the nation or world through our political system. Sociology is almost always a study of failed aspects of society--prisons, public schools, prejudices and systematically oppressive systems. Economics pretends to be objective and on par with real science, but is generally about justifying practices which further harm the earth and economically disadvantaged individuals. Even environmental economics is about fixing our economic system so that we value things other than profit and growth.

-Science is about research and creation. Even if we eliminate oppression and have a perfect government and dismantle industrial capitalism, we will always need scientists.

-When I think about science, it seems like promise and a bright future. In contrast, politics seems like fighting a series of battles, most of which you will lose. Furthermore, any victories you do achieve will be small in scale, temporary in nature and completely insufficient to address the larger problem that motivated you to get involved in the first place.

-I really, really like science. And I'm pretty good at it.

-I don't think you can really separate politics and biology when you're talking about the environmental side of both.

-I can't major in environmental studies-biology or environmental studies-chemistry without skipping study abroad or going crazy taking 3+ science classes with lab per semester.

-I wouldn't like being an environmental lawyer as much as some other things I could do, but I think as an activist, understanding how environmental law works is crucial. I don't know a better place to learn about environmental law than an environmental law school.

-I really really want to do the Wilderness Awareness School Anake Outdoor School program after I graduate from Whitman. It's a 9 month naturalist field course that teaches you tracking and primitive skills and things like that.

-I think green chemistry (designing materials to be environmentally benign and reuseable/recycleable/biodegradeable and nontoxic and not pervasive) is one of the coolest things I've ever heard of.

-If I didn't think our environment was in the middle of imminent catastrophe and I didn't need to make a lot of money at work, my dream job would be running and leading trips for an outdoor program that focuses on late elementary and middle school-aged girls. Self-esteem and social skills via rock climbing and plant identification, bitches!

-I want to travel a lot, especially in developing countries, and I'd like a job where I get to do that.

-I'm really interested in food supply issues, and sustainable agriculture.

-I'm increasingly realizing that it's not just our lifestyle and consumption patterns that are unsustainable. It's our entire civilization and culture.

So there you have it. I'm flirting with a double major in biology-environmental studies and politics-environmental studies, but I don't think even I can pull that off. I'd like to at least minor in biology, since it's only 16 credits. I'd like to take another semester of chemistry, and I'm hoping I can pull some strings to get into advanced intro chemistry, even though my placement test scores weren't quite there. Mostly, I just want to do something lasting, whether I'm remembered for it specifically or not. Maybe it'll be an investigative report about pollution. Maybe I'll synthesize a compound to replace plastic. Maybe I'll do a groundbreaking study of biological relationships in the American West. Maybe I'll get some land set aside as a nature preserve. I just really, really hope I can learn enough in the three years I have left to go out and do something.

Oil and responsibility

The Deepwater Horizon spill has many people looking for blood.Obama has BP agreeing to set aside $20 billion to compensate people whose jobs are effected by the spill, independent of any money they might have to pay for violating environmental laws. Even Facebook asked me, via paid advertisement, to join a group demanding that BP's CEO resign.

And while holding them accountable is definitely a good thing, it's missing the point.

Oil drilling has a long list of associated environmental disasters. Few, besides the Exxon-Valdez spill, have garnered this much public attention, and none have been this big and this visible for such a long time. But the history of oil drilling shows that such problems are not anomalies, nor are they preventable in the broadest sense of the word. And while companies have always cut corners and ignored environmental and safety regulation to turn a profit, eliminating these abuses would not stop all spills. Accidents can and will happen, especially in the dirty business of oil.

The irony of demonizing BP has been shown by consumers wondering if they should boycott BP in favor of other oil companies. Step away from them, and what are your options? Exxon-Mobil funded fake science reports denying climate change was occurring, then, when they couldn't pretend it wasn't, saying it wasn't human caused. They're responsible for what was the largest oil spill in US history until last month, and the actual cause of the spill had much less to do with a drunk skipper and much more to do with them turning off safety radar that was too expensive to operate than they'd like you to believe. Exxon and Shell both operate in the Niger Delta, where spills have been happening consistently for fifty years, completely removing people's ability to live off the land and politically destabilizing the region to the point where even peaceful activists have been executed. Chevron is there too, and they've left toxic oil byproducts and waste all over Ecuador, making it nearly impossible for locals to find clean drinking water. So, that ethical oil company you were talking about...?

The uncomfortable truth of the Deepwater Horizon is that the problem lies in our use of oil. We can fine BP billions (and we should), call for their CEO to be fired (and he should) and even pressure the British government to revoke their corporate charter (which we also probably should, but obviously won't). But ultimately, responsibility for the spill lies with us, the people of the developed world, and our governments, who have encouraged our total dependency on fossil fuels for the better part of a century. And obviously, business and government are intertwined to the point of being virtually indistinguishable, and individuals can only do so much to change the system. But what we can do, we should. Energy that doesn't use fossil fuels makes economic sense, and business sense when done right. It doesn't have to be a partisan issue, and we've got enough politicians paying lip service to it that if we push hard enough, they might have to actually do something.

We need a national calling, a scientific re-purposing. We need Kennedy all over again calling for the US to put a man on the moon. Only this time, we need to save our climate, we needed to do it yesterday and there's no USSR to bring out our competitive masculine streak. There's just us, and the rest of the world and a ticking clock. And I know science alone won't solve our problems and government probably won't solve any of our problems. But I want to see us try. I want us to take a tiny fraction of our defense budget and put it towards encouraging science and engineering students. I want FDR-scale public works projects to bring this country better mass transit and more wind power. I know all the reasons that won't be enough. I know we need to use less energy and reconnect with the land and live more locally and stop driving altogether and look at materials and waste and stop polluting our groundwater. But I think we also need to redesign our entire grid, and that's something we're up to if we get the entire nation behind it.

So call Obama and tell him. Tell him what your version of a better future looks like, tell him we seriously need to stop offshore drilling. His number is 202 456 1111. Call your senators. Cantwell is 202 224 3441 and Murray is 202 224 2621. And while you're at it, stop driving so much.

In defense of capitalism, I think

This year, I've read a lot and tried to pay attention to the news. And everywhere I look, capitalism appears to be responsible for a seemingly endless list of atrocities. It's the economic system that brought us Bhopal, the military industrial complex, Superfund sites, sweatshops, the financial crisis, climate change and the Gulf oil spill.

Right now, we're witnessing what seems like the Last Days of capitalism. Every passing day brings new evidence that this system is unsustainable, exploitative and killing the planet. As our economy crumbles around us, people are taking it as evidence that the entire philosophy of capitalism is wrong. And though it might make me unpopular in some circles, I want to defend the core tenets of capitalism. Not because I don't agree with every single criticism people have made of the way our system operates, and not because I don't think we need radical change. Not because I'm harboring some illusion that our political system is capable of fixing the world's problems, and not because I'm defeatist and think we have to accept the current system and be "realistic". There's nothing realistic about pretending that changing our lightbulbs and waiting for Congress to pass an even more flawed version of Waxman-Markey will stop climate change.

Here's the thing: I think the core idea of capitalism--individuals coordinating their desires and abilities through a market--is actually a really good idea. On its most basic level, capitalism is about matching up someone doing or making something with someone willing to pay them for it. Capitalism encourages research and innovation--for drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, for alternative energy sources, for better water infrastructure in developing countries. Capitalism provides rewards for people who provide goods or services that meet needs. And I don't think there's another economic system that does that.

Where capitalism becomes problematic is when it gets large, global, industrialized and values maximizing profit at the expense of everything else, including human life or ecological health. Some people would argue these problems are inherent in the system, but I disagree. A woman in Ghana running a sewing business which makes traditional West African clothing for customers is still a capitalist enterprise, and one which, I would argue is fundamentally different from the likes of Dow Chemical or Monsanto. We need a system which will preserve those enterprises--the independent bookstores, clothing makers, hippie juice bars, creative dance teachers and farmers--without allowing corporate behemoths to commit state-sanctioned murder.

How do we get there? I'm not sure. I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of our political system to create change, especially on the scale we need in the time we have. I think overturning both Citizens United and its underlying precedent--corporate personhood--would be a good start. Holding corporations legally accountable for their actions would be better. That's a change that won't come from our legislative or executive branches, but a few rogue judges could get us somewhere. And if courts in the US won't hear it, we need to drag Coca-Cola, Nestle, Dow and anyone else we can think of in front of the International Criminal Court.

More than anything, I think we need to break the cycle of materialism and consumption. As Adbusters loves to say--"When you cut off the flow of oxygen to a person's brain, their brain dies. When you cut off the flow of nature to a person's soul, their soul dies. It's as simple as that." We need to get everyone in the developed world outside, starting at a young age. We need to resist media intrusion into our lives. We need to take down billboards, and any other ads that we're forced to look at. We need to remember how to value nature, and how to see ourselves as connected to it. We need to learn to be happy with what we have. We need to remember how to be people.

All of that's going to take a while. And it's not everything we should be doing, by any means. We need people sitting in front of bulldozers. We need people who won't come down from trees. We need anger and outrage and giant posters of people killed by methyl isocyante paraded in front of every single politician in this country. We need to find a way to take our government back, and I'm not talking "helpful tips" like calling your elected officials to tell them what you think. But when we get there, if we get there, and we get to re-write our world, I think capitalism should stick around. I don't mind paying someone to grow my food, as long as I know who they are and how they're growing it.