Whats the Difference between America and Icelandic Sheepherders?

and other contemplations on global warming.

Lydia Fulton Thursday, December 16, 2010 Course Content & Objectives Why would someone change their lifestyle if it is already comfortable? That has become the question of the day. Isnt that what makes America great, the freedom to do whatever we want, whenever we want, as long as we have the money required to do it? In a story my dad often sarcastically relates, the day he realized how great America was, was the day he discovered that he could buy a pre-packaged pig-in-a-blanket from a vending machine at his office. In no other country could you find that, he would tell my six-year-old-self, and the truly unique thing about America is that you have the choice to buy or do just about anything, as long as it is economically viable. So now, why would we do something that seems less economically viable and less comfortable, if we already feel as if we are living well? Why pay more for local food if processed food is cheaper and easier for us to make? Why take the time to learn bike

maintenance and safety (not to mention the commute time increase of actually riding a bike) if we can just drive to work? Why buy expensive, but long-lasting products that we can keep maintained if we can just go to any number of cut-price stores to find replacements? The answer, of course, is, as we look at our lives, we find that it is not as comfortable as we would like to think. Our living rooms, which used to be a place of community, are now the place we

unwind in front of the television after a long day. Our kitchens, a place where we used to all share a meal with each other, are now only a quick detour for a little bit of prepackaged sustenance. Our roads, where we used to be able to see our neighbors and our friends, are now just impersonal highways on the way to work. Our markets, a former gathering place of those who provided us with our food, are now a quick chore on the way home. Our movies, which used to be thought-provoking and moving, now take important issues like global warming or consumerism and dumb them down to use as an impressive backdrop, like is done in movies such as The Day After Tomorrow and Avatar. Most importantly, our bodies, which we used to revere and recognize as the physical formation of our health, have become bloated and sick with many mistreatments. So why dont we recognize the aspects of our lives that only make us worse off? I think it is the fact that we are still in a transition period: we dont recognize what the danger is because it is not yet fully upon us. Lets face it, as bad as things are right now, at least the prevalence of overweight adults is only about two in every three, and not edging towards 90% or more of all adults. With all the opportunities that we have to become overweight, we should be glad the percentage isnt higher. Even the homeless, who unarguably have the least opportunity for just about anything, are overweight, thanks to fast-food restaurants. We also have doomsayers like Al Gore warning us that some of our favorite cities could be underwater in just a few short decades, but right now, it doesnt look to me like the downtown of any metropolis I know is sinking underwater. This is the transitional period when things could be turning for the worst, and we have to recognize what these life-threatening possibilities are so we have the opportunity to turn our lives around so we can maintain a healthy planet for future generations.

Take me as an example. When I was a junior in high school, two years ago, I had a boyfriend whose family was really into eating a macrobiotic diet. In eating a macrobiotic diet, balance, or yin and yang, is a very important thing to consider. All foods are thought to have both yin and yang properties, but some foods, like brown rice, barley, oats, rye and other whole grains, are the foods that macrobiotics judge to have the closest to a perfect balance of these two properties. Foods like poultry, meat, eggs, and refined salt are not eaten by macrobiotics because they have too much yang, or they are too heavy and dense. Other foods, like sugar, alcohol, dairy, honey, chocolate, and hot spices are rejected because they are over-stimulating. Of course, all meals were made from scratch, as macrobiotics believe that putting positive energy into making food is the only way you can get positive energy out of eating food. At the time, I was unimpressed by the effort my boyfriend and I put into making each meal, and unimpressed by his steadfast ideas about how food is the basic thing that keeps us healthy and happy. But at the time, I, without knowing it, had no reason to doubt him. My mother has made my dinner almost every night for as long as I can remember, starting in the kitchen with some of the most basic ingredients one can buy in the store nowadays. Dinner with the family was a ritual, so much so that many Friday and Saturday nights I was unable to go out with my friends until after dinner with my family. I had no reason to doubt my boyfriends ideals, but I had no reason to believe them either, because home-cooked, well-balanced meals were all I had ever known. (And, to many people, a macrobiotic diet is just a little bit too extreme to seem natural. I remember my boyfriend telling me a story of how his parents were once so strict macrobiotics that they had gotten intoxicated off of a bunch of grapes.) My first real food guru was Michael Pollan. But then Pollan came to me at a more vulnerable time of my life: when I was going to college and had to, for the first time in my life,

make my own food decisions. I was eating more processed food and less balanced meals than I ever had before, and I was beginning to feel the stress it had on my body. Thats when I read The Omnivores Dilemma, and it put words to the food rules that we all inherently know. Pollans book, through careful research and actual first-hand experience, explores three different types of food: industrialized food, small-scale and large-scale organic food, and scavenged and hunted food. Pollans book concentrates how we are defying the natural food order, not just with our own processed food, but with our tampering of our stock animals food, too. We feed cows in feeding yards with the surplus of our government-subsidized corn, which cows are not built to eat, and so they get sick, and to keep them from getting sick, we give them antibiotics. So we eat food that is full of antibiotics, which make us sick, in addition to our unbalanced meals already making us sick. Reading about this process, where each negative consequence is treated with something that itself has a negative consequence, made me miss the familiarity and wholesomeness of my mothers food. That book made me become a vegetarian, while I was still not even a week into reading it. My ex-boyfriends family became macrobiotic for a very pertinent reason: his dad had cancer, and eating such a balanced diet actually had miraculous effects for a long time. My need to start thinking about how I ate might not have been as serious as that, but at least I finally had a need. Most people will probably find that they, too, have a need to evaluate what they eat, whether it is because they are overweight or unhealthy, or if they find that, too often, on days they dont eat well, they feel lethargic and sickly. More importantly, it is essential to understand that our body is a microcosm of our entire planet. If our way of life is pillaging our body of its health, as we can see it is, how can we expect it to treat our planet any better? Why would we want to have a lifestyle that harms us and our home? As our extensive (and adequate) instruction on ecology taught us, a concentration of

a harmful substance in a producer is increased tenfold in the consumer. Isnt that enough to make a person care about the planet, even if they really just care about themselves? In addition to Michael Pollan, the global sustainability prophets who influenced me the most were Casey, the tour leader from the wastewater treatment plant, and Sue, from Marra Farm, and her husband, John. Sue and John really inspired me because they were so into what they were doing, had so many innovative ideas, and were so convinced in the integrity of their actions. Sue, who is something of a radical, displayed the most conviction of any of the prophets: she was not afraid to say it as she sees it, saying that our actions are raping the planet. She devotes what seemed to be a normal work weeks hours to Marra Farm, a

community garden, and to teaching children in a nearby elementary school how to farm. It was a little shocking to see someone who seemed to have such a gentle soul refer to our actions as the rape of the planet. She seemed to be the radical of the couple, though: her husband, John, was less eccentric when we visited their home so he could show us all of its green innovations. The creativity of their house was astounding: the angle of the roof was calculated so sunlight would be maximized during all seasons; there were at least two ways of heating water, with two or three additional ways still in the works in Johns head; and the solar power panels on the roof were so efficient that during the day time, they would produce enough power to put an excess into the community grid. Some people find the sustainability movement distasteful because its ideals will take us back to the stone-age. John was the perfect example of a way to disprove that theory: what he showed us about the house that day included some of the most innovative mechanical creations I have ever seen. Who knows if we even saw all of his inventions, because he kept on thinking of other inventions of his to show us, from recumbent bicycles to ways to heat the bathroom floor from underneath the tile. Those who think that

sustainability will take us back an era or two do not understand the philosophy of sustainability: that we take the best and the healthiest of each era to contribute to our model of a sustainable society. As we move through life and learn many things (at this class has taught me to do), we can only hope to learn what values are worth keeping. From the past we take the idea of food as a builder of community, as we develop relations with our farmers and begin to treat cooking and meals as a family ritual again. From the present, we take the distribution and specialization of labor, so not everyone has to be a farmer if that is not their dream in life. The future, hopefully, will offer us new solutions to mass transportation, growing urbanization, and other such social complications. But, if the sustainable food movement proves anything, it is that not all things can be improved upon: and one of those things is local, homemade food. Casey from the West Point Wastewater Treatment was inspiring for quite a different reason: that, in reality, her passion was not what she was doing with her life. She was an Environmental Studies major at Seattle University, and she said to us, Do you think that I thought that I was going to working at a wastewater treatment plant after I graduated? Let me tell you: No. She works there because she feels what she does makes a difference and likes educating people so they can make their own good decisions. She also is not too caught up in the sustainability movement, because she recognizes that, as things are right now, it is near impossible to live completely sustainably. What she wants is to encourage the movement that is leading us toward a sustainable existence. She reminds me of Michael Pollan, when he writes that he does not want to write and talk about eating sustainably any more than any other person. In the final chapter of his book, as he is sitting around the dinner table with friends and family eating a meal entirely hunted and gathered by those people who are at the table, relating each individual food items story, he thinks of how he looks forward to the time when we no longer

have to talk about these things: when we all know where our food is coming from, when we all know who grew and raised the food at our table, when a homemade meal is no long a brag but a commonplace occurrence. These are the reluctant leaders, those who recognize where we have gone wrong and want to steer us back in the right direction. We are taught, from high school on, to question the accuracy of information we come across. We are so used to this concept of always questioning that the easiest attack on a persons argument is not to make a counter-argument, but to simply question their sources. Who is it we really trust the most to tell us facts? Is it scientists, because scientists often report different results, or report these results while emphasizing different things. Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth is largely discredited because he made nine critical errors: thats enough mistakes to completely take all attention away from the main idea of the film, which is simple enough: that we need politicians who support environmental reform. The short documentary The Story of Stuff is attacked for being one-sided and not being supported by actual economic theory. The only message The Story of Stuff really wants to tell us is that our current pattern of consumption is unhealthy for the planet. Are we all so critical that we cannot even listen to new ideas? As was the case with me and not heeding what I ate until I went to college, the best way to change a persons philosophies is to allow them to have their own experience, and then draw their own conclusions.

Method When I was young and fussy, my father had many creative ways of teaching me how meager my problems were. One of his favorite methods was to take me to a map of the world we had in a room of our house, so big it almost covered an entire wall, point to a small island in

Oceania, and say, See this island? This is the island where the person who cares about you problems lives. Write them a letter and you might just get some sympathy. I learned pretty quickly that the things I chose to whine about at age four were not important enough to merit attention in the real world. The epilogue of this story is that my island (or what is more accurately called an atoll) in Oceania, the island-of-the-person-who-cares-about-my-problems, is called Funafuti and is one of the islands that is now under threat because the rising water level caused by global warming is sinking it under the ocean. Now my dad jokes that I wont get a letter back because the person-who-cares-about-my-problems is wearing a lifejacket and has bigger problems of their own. Before this class, this was the closest I was to being a first-hand witness of global warming. Field trips on Friday are what made me passionate about this class. I dont think I would be concerned about our current lifestyle if I had not seen, for myself, places like the garbage dump, the wastewater treatment plant, and Marra Farm. It was shocking to me to see the bottom of the landfill lined with hundreds of discarded mattresses that looked to be in perfectly good shape (or at least from my distance.) The wastewater treatment plant was so important simply because it was so informative. I had no idea that each time I flush the toilet, I use more water than I drink in a day, more water than I probably even drink in three or four days. The most dismaying thing was that industrial waste only accounts for 1% of what West Point treats (though this is kind of skewed because most industrial complexes have waste treatment plants of their own.) This means that almost all of the water being used is by people like you and me, as we take our long showers, wash many loads of laundry, and leave the faucet running as we brush our teeth. This story runs parallel to the misconception of the increase of greenhouse gases: many people think it is mostly due to byproducts from manufacturing, but it is actually greatly

due to the carbon dioxide released by all the cars we drive around. As that famous line from the old cartoon Pogo goes, We have met the enemy and he is us. The trouble is it is difficult for the government to regulate the individual, because it is so against the American philosophy. From the field trip also came faith that we can improve our situation. Marra farm was a plethora of different types of food from different cultures all over the world. A family from South-East Asia has a plot there, as does a man from Mexico. There was an array of small, plain plots that children from the local elementary school were learning how to tend. The farm, a city block in the suburbs of Seattle, felt like a pastoral farm even in the middle of October, when many of the crops were dead. At the Cedar Hill Landfill, the tour leader, Wally, told us of his first-hand experience in the positive effects of recycling. He said that the area used as the landfill from 1995 to 2000 had been 55 acres, the area used from 2000 to 2005 had been 35 acres, and the area used from 2005 to 2010 was 26 acres large. Its not like King County, the municipality Cedar Hill Landfill serves, has lost people in the past fifteen years. In fact, just the opposite is true: Seattle and King County is becoming one of the most popular places to live in the country. The only explanation Wally can give for this occurrence is that recycling is truly helping. Through this experiential learning, I have recognized the problem, but also the hope. We think that nothing like this threat to our civilization and our future has ever occurred before, but the past is scattered with tales of civilization faced with similar challenges, some of which have survived, some of which have failed. The Sumerian civilization of 4000 BC had a major flaw in its irrigation system. The Euphrates River was diverted to irrigate their fields, but this made the underground water tables rise, saturating the fields. Then, all of the water would evaporate off, leaving only salt. The Sumerians chose to grow barley, a plant that was more resistant to the

high salinity of the soil. But because the Sumerians were only treating the symptoms, salt concentrations continued to build and, as food production declined to nil, so did the civilization. A similar series of events contributed to the decline of the Mayans. Deforestation and soil erosion (probably coupled with a change in climate) decreased food production which created social conflict as groups fought for the small supply of food. Iceland, in contrast, has a success story. Six hundred years ago, Icelanders realized that the over extensive grazing of their sheep was leading to soil depletion. The Icelanders, instead of letting things run their course, got together and figured out how many sheep the area could support and set quotas for all the farmers to follow. They preserved their grassland and their wool industry continues to thrive to this day. We have the skills and the knowledge of 15th century Icelandic sheepherders, so whats stopping us from setting policies that will save our planet for future generations? We just all need to recognize the problem, and accept who is creating it, and be prepared for change, with the hope that our future civilization will be just as comfortable. The Icelandic sheepherders might have feared that reducing their number of sheep might keep them from being profitable, but they took the risk and have an active wool industry to this day. However, the unique thing about global warming is that the negative impacts will not just affect one civilization, but all of civilization. To really start in a new direction, we all have to live sustainably, because we have to recognize that the bad things that are happening to the-person-who-cares-about-my-problems in Funafuti will eventually be on a big enough scale to affect other parts of the world. What we need to do, is to figure out if we are really up to the challenge of changing our lifestyles to save the planet. Are we willing to give up our right to a pig-in-a-blanket from a vending machine in order to save the planet and, ultimately, our species livelihood? If anything, this class has given

me the knowledge and the imagination to be an active member in my community in trying to spread these ideas and to be a leader in propagating them.

Bibliography Brown, Lester. Plan B 3.0. 1st. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008. 9-10. Print.