You are what you eat

In "Eating Animals" (2009), the author asks the reader to exercise her moral imagination.

For example, look at the pig's face. It seems sociable, curious, and intelligent. In fact, pigs are very intelligent. So what are we to make of the fact that man forces tens of millions of them into an overcrowded, hellish existence? We genetically engineer them, render them incapable of living in nature, stuff them with antibiotics, herd them into pens where they live on top of each other, sometimes beat them senseless with pipes or stick lit cigarettes into them, and generally make them suffer an abbreviated life until death at the slaughterhouse. The end must come as a release.

So why, asks Jonathan Safran Foer, when we buy a package of breakfast links, do we support such a system?

Of course, the ends justify the means, right? After all, we eat these animals--they are our food. And factory farming, a mode of corporate production spreading across China now, just as it has in the U.S., brings it to our table cheap. The bottom line is the only thing that matters.

Foer wants us to think about such things, because we currently don't think about them at all. We are in deep, collective denial.

For a moment, though, put aside the moral as well as the obvious dietary reasons not to eat factory farmed animals. The environmental reasons against it are compelling. Foer says millions of individual decisions to boycott farmed animals "will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history (p.257)."

Foer pines for the localized animal husbandry evident in the picture I took of the pig. That was in a small village in Yunnan province, China, where families raise pigs intimately and care for them as if a pet. Don't be confused, though, about the ultimate outcome. That pig will be slaughtered, probably at the hands of the village butcher, some of his parts eaten by the family, and the rest put to market.

The question is not one of animal rights, but animal welfare. Can we treat animals more humanely on their way to our table, or is factory farming here to stay?

Don't like this unit?: I have 10 million more

While rising prosperity in China has spurred demand for U.S.-style suburban tract housing, with gated entrances, man-made ponds, and roomy square footage that would make an Atlanta or Dallas hausfrau envious, there is also a very contrarian development taking place.

High-rise condos and apartment buildings are shooting up like a bamboo forest, many half filled with tenants while construction crews busily finish the other half. It seems they can't be built fast enough for the millions of migrants moving to China's mega-cities.

Construction in China goes on all day and night until completion, a manic energy that contrasts sharply with the seemingly glacial pace of U.S. construction. I remember it took two years to build one New Jersey high school. Time is money, and the difference can only be explained by the politics of union organization. Chinese labor is unorganized and cheap. But I digress.

The consequences of the dense urban living model are salubrious (to the environment), compared to the sprawling, commute-until-you-drop model of, say, a Weston, FL. The collapse of the U.S. residential real estate market, rising energy costs, and the rediscovery of more human scale "communal" urban living may force many Americans to re-examine their preference for the 'burbs.

Take a look at the NYT photoessay on China's "instant cities." The scale and pace of urban development is breathtaking:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/chinas-instant-cities

The 99-cent challenge to liberal orthodoxy

Transiting recently across the Florida-Georgia border, I came across a wholesale bookstore which advertised "no book over $3." Of course I couldn't resist. Imagine my dismay when I discovered it was a Christian bookstore with aisles overflowing almost entirely with bibles, notebooks and calendars, as well as such inspirational bestsellers as "The Christian's Guide to Eating Healthy" and the "The Divine Spirit's Home Repair Kit."

The clerk, however, did point out a small section, basically one table, for "secular" books. And it was there I discovered the "Nordhaus thesis" (a solemn hush comes over the room). Unless you are an environmental policy wonk, you might have missed out on this guy's essay a few years ago called "The Death of Environmentalism." I did.

The book I picked out of the pile, "Breakthrough," or, "From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possbility" is a worthwhile read. The hardcover copy, jettisoned from the Harford County library (Maryland?) cost all of ninety-nine cents. The authors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, give you bang for the buck, bringing an erudite, and no doubt controversial, analysis to the whole global warming and climate crisis debate.

The book is ostensibly about global warming and the need for a vigorous global energy economy capable of handling it. But where it differs from other books on the subject is in its aim squarely at liberal interest-group environmentalism: its "small-bore" or techo-fix approach born of the sixties that fails today to summon ordinary people's energies and stimulate their imagination for thinking BIG.

Written at the time of the Democratic takeover of Congress, the book is not optimistic that the party of Franklin Roosevelt can transcend liberal, interest-group politics and promote a postindustrial, postmaterial agenda equipped to both grow the economy and slow climate change. Filing lawsuits against corporations is just so late twentieth century.

They bring many contemporary heavy-hitters to bear, including Thomas Kuhn ("The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"), Daniel Bell, and Francis Fukuyama. They invoke memories of old school favorites Nietzsche and Hegel.

Several passages are delicious, particularly the treatment of Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s obvious hypocrisy over the Cape Wind project, an elite case of NIMBY if ever there was one.

And the chapter devoted to Brazil should shame anybody who supports doing something about development in the Amazon forest without mentioning in the same breath the need for action reducing poverty in Rio's favelas. That the two problems are opposite sides of the same coin now seems too obvious.

One of their enduring ideas with me is that environmentalism will have to re-invent itself along the lines of Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. Don't laugh. They make a convincing case that a mass movement that translates into anything meaningful politically will probably need to be spiritual and ingrained in people's everyday lives. Their term for such necessary groundwork is "pre-political."

If you doubt that what they say is true, look around you. How many people are talking with passion about what can be done positively with the climate crisis? Al Gore is the poster boy of environmental "eco-apocalypse"--great for laying out the science, but equally adept at scaring the shit out of young children.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger are the same guys who propose getting us accustomed to the idea of adapting to a hotter world. What's wrong with that? Cope with it we must, no matter how much or quickly we reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

It's clear to me that what they say is true about the untapped potential for change: people are hungry for an inspiring narrative. Both political parties and mainstream environmentalism don't offer one. Until they do, and until a massive Apollo-like green energy program is launched, harnessing the great talents, energies, and aspirations of Americans, we will be left with buying compact fluorescent bulbs and trying to feel good about it.

P.S. Ted Nordhaus is not to be confused with his uncle, Yale economist William Nordhaus, who writes extensively about the economics of climate change.