Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto

Elinor Ostrum, 1933-2012

When Italian-English explorer John Cabot “discovered” the island of Newfoundland in 1497, he marveled at the ocean’s abundance of North Atlantic cod. Cabot’s journals claim his men could fill their stocks by simply dangling baskets overboard. When English printers published news of Cabot’s discovery, commercial fishers flocked to what became Canada. But, as Cabot sailed with Bristol seamen, some historians suspect that Bristol fishers harvested the waters now called the Grand Banks even before Columbus.

Elinor Ostrum is the only woman to date to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Her reputation rests mainly on her first book, 1990’s Governing the Commons. In this book, Ostrum demonstrates how traditional agrarian societies manage commonly owned resources, like pastureland. She commences the book by describing how a Turkish fishing village partitioned access to their patch in the Aegean Sea, ensuring everybody has equal access to prime waters without depriving anyone else.

I remember reading Ostrum’s description of folk governance and thinking: that sounds great, but one diesel-powered trawler with a five-mile line could ruin that arrangement for everyone. Ostrum wrote her book to refute Garrett Hardin’s 1968 classic The Tragedy of the Commons, which postulates that humans will inevitably exhaust commonly held property. Generations of economists, like Ostrum, rebut Hardin’s claim by noting that, for centuries, humans didn’t exhaust the commons; that’s a Twentieth Century phenomenon.

Archeological evidence suggests that Newfoundland was the last part of the Americas to receive permanent human settlement. But the Maritime Archaic people, a lost culture known only by their artifacts, settled the island around 9,000 years ago, and humans have occupied the island ever since. Humans, both indigenous nations and European colonists, survived side-by-side with Newfoundland’s caribou herds, abundant timber, and Grand Banks fisheries for centuries, and all four flourished. The relationship seems highly reciprocal.

Now the timber, caribou, and fisheries are critically endangered. Deep-water fishing, once an artisanal trade conducted with hand tools in wooden vessels, is now performed commercially by steel-hulled ships with diesel engines and massive refrigerator compartments. Those who could afford these massive pollution machines could haul enough catch to feed the lucrative European and North American markets, while artisans lost revenue on scale. This became an embodiment of that capitalist truism: Them that has, gets.

Garrett Hardin, 1915-2003

Garrett Hardin based his treatise on the theories of Thomas Malthus and the behavior of single-celled organisms in laboratories. Malthus claimed that humans’ ability to procreate will inevitably exceed nature’s ability to grow food, leading to resource depletion and catastrophic die-offs, which Hardin verified among paramecia, which exhaust all their food, then starve. Malthus (a former clergyman) believed the most charitable action was to let the poor die. Hardin preferred benevolent intrusions into market economics.

These conclusions contain stacked assumptions. Malthus assumed that conditions he observed among Surrey peasant farmers, in a historically unique time of economic upheaval, represented humanity overall. Hardin assumed that microorganisms in laboratories behaved like wild microfauna. Both are wrong for comically obvious reasons. Surrey was heavily impoverished by aristocrats adjusting poorly to the rapid transition to industrial capitalism, while lab samples don’t reflect wild conditions, where food replenishes itself, while predators thin the wild microbiome.

For centuries, humans managed natural resources fairly responsibly. This includes indigenous American populations, which (generally) regarded land husbandry as sacred duty, and Europeans, who simply lived on the land they worked. Then the Enclosure Movement happened. Once-shared resources, like Hardin’s hypothetical pastureland, became private property, which one could license to exploit. Same with mineral resources, wild game, and even residential land. Communities, which once governed resources jointly, became atomized, competing for access to scarce staples.

Newfoundland fisheries didn’t collapse because “fishers” depleted the ecosystem; they collapsed because industrial trawlers depleted the ecosystem. And industrial trawlers happened because the government distributed fishing licenses, subsidized oil extraction, and collected taxes in ways that disadvantaged small operators. The Grand Banks yielded a record haul in 1968, then fell precipitously; yields tumbled around ninety percent in five years. A two-year federal fishing moratorium, introduced in 1992, has been extended indefinitely for over thirty years.

In other words, technology and policy combined to endanger the once-lush Grand Banks. Because humans assumed the trend lines would continue forever, they made no transitional plans; Newfoundland’s economy collapsed overnight. This bears consideration, not just for Hardin and Ostrum’s debates, but because it can happen again. As America has recently drawn in its own record harvests, powered by million-dollar equipment and ammonia-based fertilizer, we must think carefully about whether we’re following the same path.

The chain of thought continues in Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto, Part 2

Hanging Onto Hope While Everything Around Me Is On Fire

Back in the 1980s, my father used to collect aluminum cans as a form of exercise. In those days, people regularly just chucked cans, food wrappers, and other litter out of moving car windows. Anyone old enough to personally remember the Reagan era will recall that American roadsides, especially urban roadsides, were consistently choked with post-consumer waste.

So my father would take a lawn-and-leaf bag and go walking aimlessly. The walk gave him necessary low-impact exercise and time to clear his head. And he knew it was time to start home when the bag approached full of the aluminum cans he collected. He would take the full bags to the local recyclery for cash, and use the proceeds to take us kids out for burgers.

After eating, he insisted we dispose of our wrappers correctly.

Once upon a time, American attitudes toward waste were, by today's standards, appalling. A New York PR professional coined the term “litterbug” in the 1940s, but the notion that post-consumer waste was “disposable” created the persistent idea that we could just pitch waste anywhere and trust the Lord to handle it. And way too many of us just did. Part of America's anti-urban sentiment in the 1970s and 1980s referred to the trash on every street and sidewalk.

I was too young to understand when things changed, but they did. In the early 1990s, my dad's walks took much longer, and our burger runs became less frequent. At some point, he started coming home with his bag only half-full. Around the time I finished high school, these walks stopped being worth the effort for him. He stopped carrying the bag with him, and he walked much more predictable, programmatic routes.

That was a loss for Dad, of course. His litter-collecting ambles had been an important part of his exercise regime since before I was born. But even he acknowledged that it was a net good. He couldn't find recyclable litter because fewer people were creating litter; more people accepted that they had individual responsibility for the common good. And streets were far cleaner.

Such changes in public morality don't happen in a vacuum. A combination of public education, media campaigns, and changing local laws overpowered the notion that litter was a “victimless” offense. The more people who accepted their responsibility for clean streets, the more pressure on those who dragged their heels. Eventually the momentum became irresistible.

Not that nobody tried to resist. Some people absolutely insisted on their right to litter; some still do. When I was in college, the campus conservative student group sold t-shirts with a disfigured recycling symbol and the logo “Environmentally Unsafe And Proud Of It!” They turned their sloppiness into a political status and a social identity.

Yet the very fact that they did so proved that they were just fighting the tide, and they knew it. Even while wearing that t-shirt, I watched several of them throw their food wrappers in the trash, and their soda-pop bottles in the recycling. The shirts had a brief, voguish popularity, then vanished as the wearers realized they didn't look brave, they looked like dickheads.

We saw similar fates for other once-popular actions: smoking, for instance, or driving with ethylated gasoline. Or racism, or hating on LGBTQ+ populations. These were once commonplace to the point of being bland, then they became agitated political positions, then finally identities. Because the more obvious it became that these were unsustainable behaviors, the more momentum built against them.

As I write, we're witnessing rapid reversal on some of these positions. The incoming administration has passed sweeping revisions that empower racists, homophobes, and irresponsible environmental attitudes. It's easy to think that, because these actions have government approval, it's impossible to stop them.

But I take comfort in their militant aggression. The administration has to fight so viciously because they know they don't have the momentum on their side. I will admit that losing government support for a more just, more responsible society is a massive setback. But they're fighting so hard because, fundamentally, they know they're losing.

Please don't get me wrong. Victory is far from a forgone conclusion. If we get discouraged and squander the energy, we will lose momentum. To win, we need to keep standing up for a just society and a broad, inclusive definition of citizenship. But I still believe the weight of history is on our side. Victory is ours for the demanding, as long as we remain mindful of the moment.

No, Don’t Give Up Your Dogs and Cats

My cat Max. Does this floofy face look like it could survive in the wild?

Do dogs exist? This may sound like a frivolous question, but hear me out. Because of selective breeding and other human intervention in canine genomics, the word “dog” refers to a panoply of domesticated creatures. It’s difficult to devise a definition of “dog” expansive enough to include breeds like chihuahuas and huskies, French poodles and St. Bernards, while also excluding closely related species, like wolves, foxes, and coyotes.

This week, former lifestyles editor Ellie Violet Bramley wrote an essay for The Guardian entitled The case against pets: is it time to give up our cats and dogs? Bramley, a dog owner herself, admits pet ownership brings humans great satisfaction and wellbeing. However, the relationship is unequal: pets descended from predator species are unable to roam, hunt, and otherwise fulfill their biological imperatives. Bramley considers these restrictions cruel.

I appreciate Bramley's point. As a cat dad, I know my boys feel cribbed when kept indoors, and have lost their natural predatory instincts; the pigeons living in the tree outside my door apparently enjoy taunting my boys when I permit them outdoor time. Imagine every rottweiler kept as apartment pets by city dwellers, who think taking them to the dog park on Saturdays is sufficient exercise time. These animals atrophy for lack of natural environment.

However, Bramley relies on what rhetoricians call an “essentialist” argument, that members of some group have some shared essence that we can’t define, but we know exists. In Bramley’s view, cats and dogs haven’t become essentially separate from their ancestors. Dogs remain, in essence, wolves, while housecats remain African wildcats. This is why evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins rails against essentialist arguments: they blunt our ability to see change.

Bramley’s essentialism becomes visible if we even briefly imagine releasing our household pets. Will your teacup maltipoo crossbreed successfully bag enough prey to survive, breed, and integrate into the wild? Doubtful. Though Jack London romanticized dogs’ untamed nature in The Call of the Wild, most pet owners know their beloved critters have the survival instincts of a cabbage. They’ve adapted to live with human companionship and support.

I’ve written about this before. First, “nature” doesn’t really exist; humans shape every environment we encounter, for good or ill. Simultaneously, though, “nature” is remarkably resilient, rushing into niches humans leave vacant and creating their own adaptable ecosystems. Household animals have become what James Paul Gee calls man-made monsters, biological entities adapted to live with and serve human needs. Other man-made monsters include pigeons, racoons, and… humans.

My cat Pele, trying to channel his ancestral African wildcat

A popular internet meme describes cats as “apex predators” trapped in cute, fluffy bodies. But examinations of feral cats’ stomach contents reveal they mostly survive on garbage, not prey. That’s why feral cats proliferate in cities and towns, but scarcely exist in wilderness environments: because without humans, they’re helpless. With proper veterinary care and nutrition, household cats frequently live twenty years, but feral cats’ life expectancy is about three years.

Dogs, especially mutts, are somewhat more adaptable, but not much. The numbers speak for themselves: Britannica estimates there are approximately 65,000–78,000 wolves in North America, while best estimates indicate around ninety million household dogs in the United States alone. Friendly dogs flourish in human companionship, while standoffish wolves suffer. If boredom is the price of prosperity, well, millions of human cube farmers can appreciate that.

If Americans, just Americans, turned their pets loose, most wouldn’t flourish. Millions would stand outside their former owners’ doors, howling to come back inside where the food and water bowls live. Those that accepted their fate would, mostly, get devoured by coyotes, raptors, and other predators, which would cause predators’ numbers to swell, and would distort the ecosystem. The few surviving pets would become predators or scavengers themselves.

Human intervention in animal genomics made these changes, and these changes cannot be unmade. Our pets, livestock, and scavenger species exist, regardless of Ellie Violet Bramley’s moral qualms. Because humans created these man-made monsters, we have a responsibility to steward them. This means spaying and neutering, as Bob Barker insisted, but also making sure cute fuzzy animals have the exercise, mental stimulation, and pack companionship they need.

Our ability to steward our domesticated animals parallels our ability to steward the entire environment. Our pets suffer from the same late-capitalist demands currently causing rapid global warming: exorbitant working hours, habitat destruction, and a carbon-dependent economy. Relinquishing our responsibilities to our pets won’t make anyone happier, and could blunt our ability to comprehend the pressures destroying the world outside of our man-made doors.

Yankees and Ayn Rand and Bears, Oh My!

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate and American Town (And Some Bears)

Tiny Grafton, New Hampshire, was carved from New England’s forested wilderness before the Revolution, by a cadre of committed tax-dodgers. Its character has changed little in the intervening 260 years. When a committee of Libertarians, jazzed on Internet forums and ideological fervor, went looking for an existing small town to colonize for their values, Grafton looked amenable. But the Libertarians failed to plan for Grafton’s encroaching wilderness.

Advance PR for Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s first book is somewhat misleading. It implies that Libertarians, unified by an ethic of complete hands-off government, remade Grafton in their image, then bungled it when New Hampshire’s swelling bear population invaded. This isn’t what happened in Hongoltz-Hetling’s actual telling. If you’re seeking ammunition to deploy against Libertarianism in online arguments, this book isn’t it. No, Hongoltz-Hetling has written something different altogether.

To start, the bears, mostly American black bears, didn’t follow the Libertarians into town. Hongoltz-Hetling describes the first attack, when a previously unexpected bear swooped into Jessica Soule’s lawn and gobbled two of her kittens, happening five years before the Libertarians arrived. New Hampshire’s dark, moody wilderness, once nearly obliterated, has been gradually returning for about seventy years, bringing bears, coyotes, and bobcats with it.

Second, the Libertarians less remade Grafton, which already was chronically tax-averse and had few public services, than exaggerated its already lawless tendencies. The Libertarians took a community, which had never been particularly large or prosperous, and colonized it with anti-government values, though they frequently didn’t agree what that meant. The result was chaotic, and for many, ended in tears.

Despite this, Hongoltz-Hetling, a Polk Award-winning freelance journalist, tells a remarkably complex and humane story of people whose ethics worked well on paper, but faced unanticipated obstacles in real life. He anchors most of his story on two transplants who experience Grafton through unique lenses. John Barbiarz basically invited the Libertarians into Grafton, then couldn’t control them. Jessica Soule and her cats lived in fortress-like solitude as bear encroachments increased.

Libertarians are a big-tent philosophy. Grafton attracted survivalists, revivalists, conservative anarcho-capitalists, centrist Christian utopians, and progressive hippies. They agree that government should generally leave individuals alone, but beyond that, they agree upon little. While some Libertarians attempted to create businesses, churches, and other community amenities for Grafton, others clung to the town’s margins, prepping for the Apocalypse, and foraging like… well, like bears.

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Stoked with ethical fervor, Grafton’s Libertarians disrupted town business, did dangerous things intended to provoke confrontations with bureaucrats, and drained town coffers. As John Barbiarz describes it, they wanted the freedom of Libertarianism, without the concomitant responsibility. Though Libertarians believe the Free Market will fix everything, without repaired roads and basic public services, Grafton’s economy collapsed. The general store, Grafton’s last business, shuttered in 2018.

Meanwhile, the bears became increasingly fearless. Once edging toward extinction, New Hampshire’s forests, and the bears that occupy them, have resurged. But these aren’t like the bears Grafton’s colonists terrorized. Once afraid of humans, these bears have become brazen, wandering into town, preying on domesticated animals. Bears have adapted to human environments. They’ve apparently developed a taste for cats, not normally part of bears’ diets.

Though the Libertarians and bears apparently colonized Grafton separately, they formed a mutually reinforcing loop. Libertarians’ disdain for regulations caused them to sloppily handle trash, which bears loved to raid for cast-off food. Bears’ fearlessness around humans provided Libertarians justification for one of their favorite causes, open-carrying firearms for personal defense. The situation was compounded because some Libertarians shot bears, while others fed them.

Hongoltz-Hetling describes a community fraught with bitter competition: bears versus humans, old Graftonites versus colonists, and sectarian feuds among the Libertarians. Without a guiding philosophy, civic life in Grafton begins drifting. The town becomes too cash-strapped to fight fires, while New Hampshire becomes too broke to manage its spreading wilderness. Soon Grafton becomes the site of something nobody expected: New England’s first unprovoked bear attack in a century.

Though a journalist, Hongoltz-Hetling tells the story with a novelist’s aplomb. His descriptions of bear depredations have an almost Stephen King-like atmosphere, while his descriptions of political wrangling resemble John Grisham dramas. He cites statistics and creates a historical context where necessary, but throughout, the human narrative of Grafton’s unwinding takes center stage. We feel like we’re watching our hometown’s final days.

It would be easy to waste a story like this assigning blame. Though Hongoltz-Hetling clearly has his sympathies, he’d rather emphasize the human aspects. His story is terrifying, complex, and frequently heartbreaking, much like life.

When Rural News Becomes World News

Nebraska generally only makes national and world news when something awful happens. Charles Starkweather, for instance. But the most common reason Nebraska, where I live, makes the national headlines, is because weather becomes extreme, like when blowing snows close Interstate 80, one of America’s major transcontinental arteries, or droughts threaten meat prices. In spring of 2019, record snows followed by record rains destroyed a huge portion of my state.

I recall this, not to elicit your sympathy or tell anyone that they should pay Nebraska better attention, but rather, because my state isn’t alone. Just days ago, I discovered that similar history-making rains are currently destroying eastern Kentucky, a state with a similar economic backbone of agriculture and light industry. I remember, in 2019, complaints from flooded areas that mainstream journalists were ignoring the devastation. This year it’s happening again.

Many major journalism outlets don’t even have stringers positioned in the worst-hit regions for environmental destruction like this. Sometimes, on those rare occasions when Nebraska makes national headlines for weather-related devastation, national outlets will buy printed reports or camera footage from locally based reporters. The AP apparently keeps a paid stringer in Lincoln, in case something newsworthy happens. He doesn’t post very often.

Not that national venues ignore rural America altogether. Barely three weeks ago (as this posts), national-grade journalists flooded Iowa for the 2020 Presidential caucuses. They slavishly followed candidates (mostly Democrats) around the state, recording them knocking on doors, shaking hands, and ginning up morale among volunteers. Then the caucuses happened, the candidates moved on, and the journalists folded their tents and followed. The Midlands retreated to insignificance.

St. Louis-based journalist Sarah Kendzior writes that Americans living in “flyover country” grow accustomed to getting routinely ignored. Life in the middle of the map requires a reëvaluation of what we consider “fair,” Kendzior writes, because the difference between the richest and the meanest citizens is increasingly small. Those who muster enough money, or have so little they can affordably walk away, leave this region for coastal cities, which have something ours don't:

Jobs.

Please understand, this isn’t sour grapes. I understand that national and world news happens in major cities, which have access to money, instant media technology, and populations ready to attend camera-friendly events. Cities create a reciprocal relationship between reporters and events: things happen in places which have journalists ready to report. And journalists stand ready to report where things happen. This feedback loop makes simple sense.

But in the near future, what events demand reporting will probably change. Until now, human-made circumstances, like economics and technology, have demanded journalists’ attention, and journalists have obliged. Going forward, what we euphemistically term “acts of God” will make national and global headlines, and places with sparser populations will get first and hardest. Nobody is prepared in those areas to report; the media apparently expect somebody competent  to rush in later.

This pattern has already begun. Besides Nebraska, the entire Missouri and Mississippi River Valley system saw record-setting floods in 2019; the Mid-Atlantic region was socked by massive floods in 2018; the Lower Mississippi was devastated in 2017; and, to quote USA Today, “U.S. had more floods in 2016 than any year on record.” Devastating weather events are becoming normal… if you see and recognize the pattern.

A pattern which even I, a dedicated news-follower, completely missed until it hit my home last year. Floodwaters from the 2019 Nebraska floods came within eight feet of my front door. I was personally fortunate, because my building didn’t actually get infiltrated. Several friends weren’t so lucky; some were driven from their homes when water entered. One friend had her home flooded a second time while still conducting repairs from the previous flood.

In 2019, Nebraskans complained on social media that our state’s devastating floods got ignored in national media. This was perhaps an exaggeration; sources like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal did, indeed, run wire-service reports on the flooding. But the reporting usually got buried in “regional news,” only got two or three paragraphs in websites, and otherwise got nodding acknowledgement without much real, attention-grabbing coverage.

Now it’s happening again. Floods are socking eastern Kentucky, an area journalists ignore except during massive coal-mining disasters. The pattern becomes clear to those who see it: those places where the vanguard of environmental damage is happening, are least likely to have coverage. Thus it becomes easy to pretend life continues unchanged. Because destruction is happening, but nobody tells us about it.

Building an Economy From the Soil Up

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 94
Wendell Berry, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

What would a fair and just economy look like? This isn’t a new question. It isn’t even new since the Great Recession, when reckless speculation proved much American economics was founded on air. People of wisdom and learning have asked that question since at least Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and come no closer to an answer that satisfies everyone. Poet and farmer Wendell Berry suggests we’ve been looking in the wrong direction.

Berry, who has worked the same stretch of Kentucky highland his entire life, grounds his economy in judicious management of resources; and for him, the foremost resource is land. His use of “land” broadly encompasses water and air, forests and pastures, which humans must manage, not merely use. Humans arise from land, and humans create money; any economy that places money first inverts, and thus destroys, the natural order.

America, and the world generally, has fallen under sway of “autistic industrialism,” in Berry’s words, a laser-focused belief that man-made technologies will solve everything. This finds its apotheosis in a financial services industry that sees its dollar-sign output as superior to whatever it places a price on. And it works exclusively through creating ever increasing demands: Berry writes, “Finance, as opposed to economy, is always ready and eager to confuse wants and needs.”

Likewise, this economic model has concentrated land-use decisions in the hands of putative experts who don’t work the land. Chemical companies, government bureaucrats, and absentee landlords uniformly overrule the hard-won experience of people who once owned and husbanded the land they worked. This creates a vast gulf between who receives the short-term benefits of land exploitation, and who pays the long-term price.

This book comprises two sections. The first, shorter section involves five essays and speeches Berry delivered in the immediate wake of the 2008 financial services disaster. His primary target, however, isn’t bankers; it’s a culture-wide malaise that systemically mistakes money for value. This produces a breakdown that isn’t merely industrial, but moral: “We tolerate fabulous capitalists who think a bet on a debt is an asset.”

Wendell Berry

Berry’s second section involves older essays, dated from 1985 to 2000, about ways he sees an intimate connection between American economic values and our respect for the land. He witnesses how agricultural mismanagement has resulted in massive topsoil erosion; how mineral mismanagement has strip-mined coal, leaving behind hollow mountains and toxic rivers; how community mismanagement has separated individuals from the neighbors they live among.

These aren’t incidental losses, either. We cannot replace lost topsoil by dumping new dirt and saturating it with petroleum-based fertilizers, because topsoil is a complex relation of earth, organisms, and organic matter, that we don’t really understand. But those who profit from mismanagement care little for understanding, Berry writes: “The advocates and suppliers of agri-industrial technologies have encouraged us to think of agriculture as an enterprise occurring on top of the ground.”

Berry admits revising America’s economy to reflect the values it has already consumed won’t be easy. In some places he says he doesn’t know how economists could implement his vision. In others he has some insight, but admits the needed changes won’t be easy. They mostly involve changes in ownership and allotment: local businesses, local people, and smallholding farmers who own the land they manage.

This necessarily involves placing value on the invaluable. Currently, traits like family and community, or the good of preserving heirloom skills, have no economic value, because they don’t have a GDP price. But we’re currently witnessing the long-term consequences of their loss, in devaluation of land, business, and family; in rising health costs for people worked like machines; in food substantially lacking nutritional value.

This book doesn’t involve much factual data-wrangling; Berry’s interest lies in philosophical foundations, not actuarial spreadsheets. However, I cannot ignore statistical evidence demonstrating his accuracy. Journalist George Pyle has written that postage-stamp-sized farms pay their own bills, avoid chemical runoff, and remain in families better than massive, 10,000 acre industrial farms. Small, distributed agricultural economies have measurable value, but only when we measure in the long term.

Berry’s essentially Distributist model would seem familiar to G.K. Chesterton, whose motto, “three acres and a cow,” makes sense here. (“Forty acres and a mule” wouldn’t be inappropriate.) To Berry, like Chesterton, economic justice requires humans to directly control, and make decisions about, their living, and both philosophers see such control beginning with how we manage land. The ripples, though, extend throughout the economy.

The Great Plastic Straw Distraction

Wow, talk about a straw man argument!

I’ve seen little move faster than the Great Plastic Straw Meltdown of 2018, except perhaps the backlash against it. Plastic straws are toxic, non-biodegradable, and contribute to clogging our oceans with continent-sized islands of trash; but the disabled, stroke survivors, and the elderly need straws to swallow liquids. Whose goals are served by each side? Why are they so strident? And are they both missing the biggest question?

The outrage around plastic straws assumes you, personally, eschewing your disposable sissy stick with fast food, can halt the planet’s mounting collapse. Really? Seven billion people, many of them creating trash every day, and you expect me to believe one simple habit change can fix the problem? Of course not. Because the problem isn’t one throwaway product, it’s a massive throwaway culture. My straw habits barely make a dent.

To even reach the restaurant where my disposable straw becomes an issue, I must drive my carbon-burning car across roads paved in carbon-emitting concrete. I must travel from one air-conditioned environment to another, often idling at red lights and other traffic controls. God knows how far my beverage was shipped before my straw came anywhere near it; colas require ingredients imported from Africa in diesel-burning container ships.

Our economy is premised on an assumption of limitless inexpensive goods, services, and energy. We expect food to be fast and cheap, cars to be as attractive as they are speedy, and houses to have autumn-like comfort even in bitter winters and scalding summers. We burn lights all night, heat water we never use, and live unbelievable distances from our jobs. And we discard unbelievable quantities of domestic refuse.

click to enlarge

As a construction worker, I have firsthand insights into the ways our economy generates waste. Depending on the job size, we throw away more garbage daily than my house generates in a year. Off-size scrap, slightly damaged product, trimmings from site installation, and workers’ personal trash, all go straight into the dumpster. Though some materials, particularly unmixed metals, get recycled, they’re the definite minority.

Some of this waste is manifestly harmful. The United States Gypsum Corporation, America’s largest drywall manufacturer, warns builders to return unused scraps of product to them for recycling, because if that stuff gets landfilled, it can acidify groundwater. Yet I’ve witnessed how this almost never happens. Drywall leftovers go straight into the dumpster, because saving and returning it is costly and time-consuming, and cost efficiency triumphs over all.

I prevent some of this waste by grabbing packing pallets that would otherwise get landfilled, and rebuilding them into rustic furniture as a hobby. I’m proud of how my skills at furniture-building have progressed in recent months. But as an individual, I can only redirect limited amounts of product from the dumpster. I’ve watched perfectly good structural wood get landfilled because I couldn’t possibly take, store, and use any more.

hus my problem with the “individual responsibility” model inherent in the plastic straw debate. My individual decision to not take a swizzle stick cannot possibly make enough difference, amid all the waste generated by our system, in the trash going into our landfills, waterways, and oceans. No matter how solemn my intentions, I can’t do enough to really change the trajectory of an economic structure that demands cheap, disposable stuff.

Whether you use or refuse plastic straws is a distraction, plain and simple. Though I haven’t tracked the controversy to its source, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover industry front groups have pushed this low-grade moral panic on America’s buying public to make them feel personally responsible, deflecting attention from the system that profits whenever we throw stuff away. Rampton and Stauber write extensively about how this distraction motivation works.



I don’t want to disparage the impulse to do right in our consumption habits. But the “ethical consumption” model pushed in the anti-straw argument essentially standardizes the idea that the market environment simply exists, and isn’t created by laws, practices, and traditions. It exonerates manufacturers who create massive waste in generating our cheap stuff. And it offloads responsibility for ethical choices onto individuals who, by definition, cannot do enough.

By all means, if it’s within your power, refuse the plastic straw. Something is better than nothing. But don’t think, because you’ve skipped the straw, you’ve done your part. Use that as a launching point to transform, not just yourself, but your relationship with a system dependent on massive human indifference. And don’t get distracted by those who want you to think you’ve done enough.

Welcome to Fatland

You’ve probably seen something like this image recently; several versions circulate. Don’t write another article on obesity in America until you explain why fatty, unhealthful foods cost more than their healthy, nutritionally complete equivalents. And I’ve seen several answers back, like: well, if you only eat McDonalds then yeah; or, anything is cheaper deep-fat-fried than prepared in a healthy way. I’d like to offer just one possible explanation.

You’ve probably heard lots about America’s notoriously subsidized agriculture. Because of massive monetary transfusions used to keep farmers working and food affordable, American crops are often cheaper than the dirt they grow in. That’s especially true with today’s inflated land values. When NAFTA lowered trade barriers, subsidized American-grown food hit Mexican markets below the cost of growing, causing rural poverty to hit seventy percent in Mexico.

But those subsidies don’t go just anywhere. Since the Great Depression, America has subsidized just five staple crops: corn, wheat, rice, sorghum, and cotton. These staples all have long shelf lives, which makes their market value very volatile: oversupply can last a long, long time. If farmers overplant lettuce, it’ll rot within a matter of weeks. If farmers overplant corn—and who know’s what’s too much at planting time?—markets could be destabilized for a year.

So, America has decided we owe our planters of cereal grains and natural fibers the dignity of a stable income. After all, an unstable grain market owing to oversupply jeopardizes farmers, but we still need to eat. Grains provide dietary fibers that we all need, and unlike fruit or salad greens, we can ship corn to where it’s needed. Why not, therefore, dedicate public money to ensuring people who grow our corn aren’t rolling the dice on uncertain markets.

Except that hasn’t been the effect. By subsidizing only a few crops, we’ve created cash incentives for farmers to overproduce these grains at massive numbers. Cotton is so cheap now that we use it to make disposable shop rags. According to agricultural journalist George Pyle, American farmers currently produce twenty times as much corn as American consumers can possibly eat. All that oversupply has to go somewhere.

And that “somewhere,” overwhelmingly, is animal feed. American agricultural policy doesn’t directly subsidize livestock agriculture. However, we have Earth’s cheapest meat, because by encouraging oversupply, we indirectly subsidize cattle farming. Cattle raised on grass, like God intended, reach market weight in about two years. Cattle raised on corn, fed to them in confined feedlots, reach market weight in about fourteen months. It’s a cash boon for livestock farmers.

A typical confined animal feeding operation—in this case, a hog pen

Stay with me here. The wheat used in making buns is directly subsidized. The beef slapped between those buns is indirectly subsidized. Even the cheese used to make the burger taste less like dead flesh is subsidized, because dairy oversupply keeps threatening to crash market values; the government buys excess dairy and pours it on the ground to stabilize prices. Does the government want us to eat more burgers?

Of course not. They just don’t want farmers subject to the instabilities of market fluctuations. Readers old enough to remember the “tractorcades” of the 1980s know that farmers are more beholden to market forces than most other producers. As we learned in 2008, housing oversupply is bad for home builders; but builders can store their tools, pull in their claws, and wait. Farmers, to keep their families together, often have to sell their land.

This says nothing about side effects of agricultural policy. Subsidizing only five crops has led to massive monocropping, which overtaxes the soil of certain nutrients. To keep the land producing crops, farmers saturate it with fertilizers derived from hydrocarbons. American farms today produce more greenhouse gases than cars do, not from inefficiency, but because farmers need the five magic crops to show a profit. And nutrient-depleted topsoil washes away whenever it rains.

That seems simple enough. The makings of a burger are directly or indirectly subsidized, while the makings of a salad are not. If the ways we spend our money reflect our cultural values, then apparently we place higher value on maintaining certain food crops than on encouraging Americans to eat well. This approach, though moralistic, isn’t wrong. Maintaining the status quo is cost-efficient, while changing the system, even a system that causes bad health, is scary.

Designing an agricultural policy that would result in more diverse crops, better land management, and healthier foods at more modest prices, will challenge even seasoned legislators. Even in today’s environment of armchair quarterbacking, I don’t dare extend myself this way. But somebody must. Because the meme isn’t wrong: we won’t tackle American obesity until ordinary Americans can afford better-quality food.

Wild Weeds and the End of the City

David Seiter with Future Green Studio, Spontaneous Urban Plants: Weeds In NYC

The very name “weed” implies a plant doesn’t belong. We use it to describe dandelions in a manicured lawn, or crabgrass in a tomato patch, or sunflowers in somebody’s cornfield. We rip them up by their roots, spray them with noxious chemicals, and otherwise seek to destroy them whenever they appear. But what if our conception of weeds is all wrong? What if weeds represent the future of nature, and hope for our changing cities?

“Spontaneous Urban Plants” began as an Instagram hashtag specifically spotlighting New York’s thriving untended gardens. Red Hook-based landscape designer David Seiter became interested in how plants flourish without human attention, even despite human opposition, in the midst of humankind’s vast built environments. This book mixes the best elements of policy manifesto, wildlife identification guide, and and coffee table art book, for a product that could have implications, and consequences, far beyond Seiter’s Brooklyn home base.

Despite being one of Earth’s most densely populated places, Seiter writes in his introduction, New York dedicates approximately one-fifth its land area to parks, greenbelt, and other dedicated nature. (Compare two percent of Shanghai.) But nature doesn’t remain politely confined to cultivated spaces. Sidewalk cracks, untended lawns, abandoned factories, and other disturbed soils provide sustenance for massive arrays of plant life. New York’s wild and untended plants, under Seiter’s camera, have a lush, edenic abundance.

Aided by his Future Green Studio collective, Seiter has made a dedicated study of the way plants refuse to obey human limitations. He makes a persuasive argument that, for many city children, untended weeds are the first, sometimes the only, nature they’ll ever see. Goose grass and pokeweed may annoy urbanites who believe sidewalks should remain flat, grey and lifeless. But many city kids discover nature through weed growth—and discover how nature remains uncontrollable.

But this isn’t some romantic paean to nature’s abhorrence of vacuums. Weeds aren’t only good for their own sake; Seiter argues that unintended weeds contribute materially to city life. Some control stormwater runoff and prevent soil erosion. Others make good food for wildlife, and even for humans. Some weeds have medicinal properties. Some weeds even restore soil seemingly irredeemably damaged by human callousness. A thriving urban landscape has measurable human benefits beyond their superficial annoyance.

Ailanthus Altissima (Tree of Heaven) in its common urban environment

But to receive these benefits, we must reëvaluate what makes plants weeds. Many landscape designers have a romantic attachment to “native” species, and expunge plants imported globally, like red clover or Tree of Heaven. But Seiter contends, with substantial evidence, that many “native” plants are ill-suited for urban environments. Frequently, plants categorized as “invasive” and treated with massive sprayings of Roundup (a chemical so dangerous, it requires hazardous waste disposal) are better-suited for city soils.

Following his reasonably brief, but informationally dense, introduction, Seiter transitions into two-page spreads on individual plant species. This includes three photographs of common weeds in their urban habitats, with detailed descriptions of their foremost benefits and liabilities, identifying characteristics, and most common growing conditions. This includes the ecological benefits individual plants provide, and their human benefits, like how edible or medicinal they are. Seiter makes an engaging introduction for urban foragers, amateur botanists, and others.

He also makes a charming art book. He takes pains to show plants in their most beautiful conditions, though those conditions aren’t always pretty. When he shows us Virginia pepperweed growing through a sidewalk pothole, flowering silk trees reaching long branches over a concrete wall topped with razor wire, or Queen Anne’s Lace in the shadow of a Coney Island roller coaster, we understand nature and man-made space exist in tension. Hint: nature always wins.

Seiter isn’t naïve regarding nature. He realizes many plants aren’t always beneficial. He acknowledges when weeds provide what he calls “ecological disservice,” like spreading allergens or choking out other plants. For most weeds, this means acknowledging a mixed nature: milk thistle can quickly overtake urban meadows, but it also provides the only sustaining food for monarch butterfly larvae. Some plants aren’t mixed. Seiter has an entire chapter on plants like ragweed, which just need uprooted.

This book focuses on plants of New York specifically, and the American Northeast more generally. Don’t use this book to forage edible weeds in Minneapolis or Fresno. But it isn’t just about one narrow area. Seiter exhorts readers, regardless of their place, to reconsider their relationship with weeds, and with untended urban nature. Because humankind, and our spaces, don’t exist alone. We’re part of nature, and someday, if we’re lucky, we’ll return whence we came.

Can the Environmental Debate Be Saved?

Frederic C. Rich, Getting to Green: Saving Nature: a Bipartisan Solution

Environmental protection once enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt were ardent naturalists, preserving natural domains for hunting, camping, and general aesthetic pleasure. Richard Nixon and Congressional Democrats, offended by flaming rivers and chewy air, collaborated to pass sweeping environmental protection laws. Amid partisan rancor, environmentalism offered rare bipartisan goodwill. But America has passed no meaningful environmental laws since 1990. What changed?

Frederic C. Rich, Manhattan corporate attorney and sometime Green activist, calls the partisan split The Great Estrangement. He traces the history of how American conservatives, once nature-friendly and conservationist, became ardently anti-environmentalist, and the debate devolved into Left versus More-Left. He also postulates (awkwardly late) a solution to return conservatives to the discussion, opening the possibility of reversing a quarter-century stalemate. I just wish he weren’t demonstrably wrong.

Rich describes how tubthumping media spokespeople like Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich turned movement conservatism against environmental issues. The outcome baffles him: “It is not entirely clear,” Rich writes, “why these efforts succeeded in arousing in so many conservatives an active antipathy toward Greens.” But to us dedicated news-followers, it is clear: anti-environmentalism was part of a massive slate by which hyperpartisan leaders screened out “Republicans In Name Only.”

Like Rich, I’m a discouraged former Republican. I witnessed the Great Estrangement from both sides and finally concluded that the Global Warming evidence, though incomplete, was more complete than evidence that vaccines prevent disease, or that smoking causes cancer. The evidence maybe wasn’t airtight, but it was robust enough to justify action. My right-wing former fellows answered that charge by moving the goalposts, forcing me to abandon them.

This makes Rich’s sudden shifts onto excoriating environmentalists feel weird. He aggressively chastises environmentalists for harboring pinkos and partisans. The counterproductive environmental rabble-rousers he cites lack Glenn Beck’s media reach, or Newt Gingrich’s political might, but Rich believes that, if such people exist at all, they’re undermining the Green cause. Without stating it outright, Rich essentially demands environmentalists punish heretics and dissidents as avidly as movement conservatives have.

Frederic C. Rich

Statements that organized environmentalism has become “too leftist” make little sense, coming directly after describing how movement conservatives made anti-environmentalism a shibboleth of membership. If liberals kicked conservatives out of Greenpeace, that’d be one thing. But movement conservatives don’t believe the debate exists. Republicans have thrown their lot in with Young Earthers and seven-day creationists, yielding the Nixonian middle ground altogether. That’s not leftists’ fault.

Environmentalist circles remain fraught with debate. What needs fixing, and how? What constitutes reliable yardsticks for environmental health? If right-wing answers aren’t forthcoming, it isn’t because solutions are prescriptively partisan. We can’t say only one side dominates the debate, when the other side has walked away. If the Chiefs quit a half-finished game against the Broncos, we wouldn't say the game became “too Denver,” we’d say Kansas City forfeited.

Rich crossed my line when he pilloried Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate both broadly and incorrectly. Rich misrepresents Klein’s thesis so completely, I must conclude he never read beyond the title. I’m less familiar with Rich’s other cited sources, especially conservative sources post-2004 (when I left the movement), but if he’s warped one source, he’s probably skewed others. That includes sources I’d otherwise disagree with.

If I cannot trust Rich’s history, I have difficulty stomaching his future remedies—which he starts so late, I admit my mind had already wandered. His history, riddled with factual inaccuracies, hindsight bias, and “he-said-she-said” quibbles, doesn’t lend itself to reliable predictions. This book reeks of what sociologist Duncan J. Watts calls “creeping determinism.” I wanted to like Rich’s ideas; but sadly, early chapters write checks later chapters can’t cash.

Historians sometimes describe a certain kind of specious historiography, “Whig History,” where amateurs describe history as a progress toward liberal democracy, knowledge, and goodness. I’ll postulate an opposite, “Tory History,” which describes history as a decline from some putative peak of greatness, usually just before the historian got that first workaday job. Rich situates the pinnacle of environmental bipartisanship just before his adolescence. Everything afterward is a steady downhill slide.

Because book publishing has long lead times, Rich couldn’t have known this title would appear just as Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination. However, that makes this book entirely timely. Not only in Rich’s mostly unfulfilled premises, either; it’s timely to remind Americans that appeasing a factually wrong opponent makes you factually wrong, too. We need bipartisan solutions to nonpartisan problems. But not at the cost of objective reality.

Bringing Water to the Promised Land

Seth M. Siegel, Let There Be Water: Israel's Solution for a Water-Starved World

“I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
   and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
   and the parched ground into springs.”
—Isaiah 41:18

As 2015 winds down, and we look backward on history’s hottest recorded summer ever, perhaps it’s time to consider the future. As entrepreneur and philanthropist Seth Siegel writes, changing rain patterns severely threaten human populations. The California drought offers a foretaste of impending crop failures, urban stresses, and ecological catastrophe. Siegel directs our attention to the one nation with a long history of forward-thinking water policies: Israel.

The state of Israel has pioneered important advances in how to use and improve our water consumption since before the state existed. They've developed ways of moving water from where it exists to where the people need it, allowing high-yield agriculture in regions traditionally arid, even in historic deserts. They’ve improved water use techniques, increasing farm yields with less water, while cities consume less, leaving farmers and wildernesses more.

Siegel provides an intriguing mix of history and science, describing not only what advances Israel has made in water management, but also why it made particular advances. He describes the unique political, economic, and geographic pressures shaping Israeli water policy. The mix of intense regional water close to lifeless desert was, recently, almost unique to Israel. But as Siegel notes, if environmental trends continue, similar conditions may soon exist globally.

First, Israeli culture doesn’t disparage water. Children never sing “Rain, rain, go away.” Israel nationalizes water access, making all water everywhere a common good. While American libertarians campaign to repeal laws against rainwater collection, Israel maintains a strict enforcement policy: rain barrels aren’t a right. Hoarding or misusing water isn’t abstract moral wrong; Israel considers water abuse theft from the people, and prosecutes water hogs accordingly.

Because water is scarce and distributed unequally by nature, sharing and distributing water has the same aura of civic responsibility in America that we get from, say, joining the military. Responsible water use isn’t some mere principle; it’s a foundation of common civic government. By basing much public philosophy on communal responsibility to water, Israel’s government might superficially resemble American conservatism; but it expresses very different impulses in actual policy.

But Israel couples this nationalizing with incentives for more egalitarian, democratic water management techniques. According to Siegel, much municipal water in Europe and America gets lost to leakage, but Israel has created technologies designed specifically to curtail leaks and limit mechanical waste. Especially since home leaks often aren’t noticeable until they’ve created significant structural damage, the shift to preventative identification has both public and private benefits.

Israel's National Water Carrier, a triumph of modern civic engineering

Israeli engineers, working through public-private partnerships, have invented more intense, ecologically specific irrigation technologies: Siegel extols drip irrigation, invented in Israel and now more commonly being adopted in other nations and continents. Israeli agronomists have created new plant variants that put more growth into edible fruits and flesh, less into inedible stems and foliage. This boosts agricultural yield from limited water applications, costing less in transpiration and wastage.

Israel’s National Water Carrier, which moves water from the moister north to the arid south with minimal evaporation, rivals the Interstate Highway System as a marvel of public-spirited engineering. Israel has found ways to recycle urban wastewater into clean, fresh irrigation, and connect water where it is with soil where water’s needed. Siegel describes the public commitment to water in ways familiar to Americans praising George Washington every July 4th.

This book describes technologies, social movements, and other important forces in language accessible to non-specialist readers. He describes very intricate advances in aquifer management, farming, and sewage removal, without bogging down in terminology. Siegel’s storytelling resembles a novel: much like Leon Uris, he makes Israeli history moving and alive. He’s just discussing water, and water policy, rather than war.

Siegel delves into the history of Israel’s water consumption style. It didn’t just intend to create better water usage; many of its techniques were invented to facilitate land grabs in places like the Negev before Partition in 1948. Some readers might find the political opportunism distasteful, and the implications for Palestinians who farm in more time-honored ways has harsh undertones, but Siegel spotlights the advances themselves, not transnational politics.

Informed readers realize water management issues aren’t one nation’s problem anymore. Droughts in California and floods in Texas signal new times for handling clean, drinkable water. Siegel’s descriptions of Israeli advances give world peoples hope that, as climate changes, human ingenuity can manage these changes proactively.

Air, Soil, and Water—the Hard Choices Await

Robin Attfield, Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century

As I write, many locations near my prairie hometown had their earliest 100-degree spring days ever, following a winter alternating between arctic cold and appallingly dry warmth. While media pundits dither over he-said/she-said fake debates and false equivalencies, global warming is unfolding mainly as scientists anticipated. Plus we can’t drink our well water anymore, while ragweed and toxic black mold grow everywhere. We’re overdue for serious planning.

Welsh ethicist Robin Attfield lays out the terms in current and imminent debates surrounding environmental change so we can engage the issues in real, not TV, terms. Because so many venues have reduced important debates to personalities and profiles, Attfield’s intricate definitions of terms serve valuable corrective measures. While his academic prose sometimes runs to impenetrability, his attempts to clarify humanity’s top global issue is both timely and welcome.

First, this isn’t a scientific text. Though evidence-based scientific reasoning remains dismally rare in climate debates, Attfield focuses, as his title implies, on ethical concerns: not possible options, but good options. For instance, what are we saving the earth for? Do we defend the environment for humanity’s sake, or because species and habitats have intrinsic value before humans arrive? Why we save the earth colors how we save the earth.

Organized environmental responses have been historically circumscribed by near-term thinking. Not only large-scale polluters, whose motivations are widely known, but even environmental activists have maintained narrow horizons. Banning coal-burning power plants would alleviate some problems, but at what human cost? Would carbon capture technologies fix global problems, or just create new incentives to thoughtless consumerism? Easy answers aren’t forthcoming. Ethical environmentalism requires seeing empirical evidence, and seeing beyond it, too.

Cost-benefit analysis has its detractors. Back in the 1990s, a famous poll indicated Americans would support environmental reforms “at any cost”—a position Americans rapidly walked back when real costs revealed themselves. Attfield recognizes every human action has moral implications; we do nothing abstractly, but rather, every choice forecloses on other choices. He persuasively argues that tools for morally uplifting decision-making exist, if we would just use them.

Attfield has no interest in climate change deniers. He spends no particular time debating whether global warming, soil salinization, water pollution, and other environmental catastrophes are really happening; like north of ninety-seven percent of climate scientists, he simply takes these issues as proven. But how to answer these issues is far less obvious. Simply saying “don’t do these destructive things” isn’t good enough, because ramifications echo down the line.

We’re not, say, in any position to abandon carbon-burning technology yet. How, then to ameliorate the damage atmospheric carbon does to global temperatures and UV rates? Economic measures, like Cap’n Trade, essentially permit rich capitalists to hoard pollution credits, ensuring the status quo perseveres for those with money. Horse-drawn idealism likewise punishes those who cannot afford it. Where do human interests and environmental necessity converge, or do they?

As just this one example, among Attfield’s many, demonstrates, obvious answers generally prove unsatisfactory. Because environmental degradation distributes its consequences blindly across the globe, we cannot think in national, regional, or class-based terms. Attfield spends entire chapters on global citizenship, in the old Jeffersonian ideal of “citizenship,” because we cannot life with blinders on any longer. We must, individually and together, act for the future we will eventually inhabit.

Don’t undertake this book flippantly. Attfield dedicates his largest effort to defining terms. Sometimes, in areas of empirical scientific discoveries, this is fairly easy. But in areas science cannot easily designate, definitions must expand to include controversial ideas and conflicting viewpoints. Attfield strives to remain scrupulously fair, and though he excludes ignorance merchantry and flat-earth pseudoscience, he struggles to include every legitimate disputant in his intellectual landscape.

Therefore, many concepts cable news treats as concise and unchallenged, Attfield examines from diverse viewpoints. Readers weaned on facile binary TV debates may find Attfield’s nuanced, philosophically dense approach overwhelming. Hey, I read philosophy, and I find Attfield very difficult. But he’s addressing very, very difficult problems, which grow more difficult with prolonged inaction. Mass-media debates prolong dialog while encouraging passivity. Attfield’s difficult philosophy empowers us to act.

I’d like to pause and acknowledge this book’s publisher. British-based Polity has established itself as a top-ranked masthead for international philosophy, political science, and history. I’ve recently reviewed several Polity titles, by distinguished authors like Paddy Scannell, Christian Ingrao, and Jacques Lacan. By publishing (or re-publishing) some of today’s most important authors, they truly improve today’s global intellectual climate. They’re truly doing noble work.

Mustang Meadows

H. Alan Day & Lynn Wiese Sneyd, The Horse Lover: A Cowboy's Quest to Save the Wild Mustangs

Career rancher H. Alan Day purchased South Dakota’s failing Arnold Ranch in 1988, expecting to turn it into a cattle operation, like the two ranches he already owned in Arizona and Nebraska. Then he met Dayton “Hawk” Hyde, cowboy activist. Hyde told Day about the wild mustang herds controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, costly animals that needed constant attention and couldn’t run free. Suddenly Day found his mission.

Day constructs his memoir like a classic Western novel: the proving story of a man discovering life’s mission on the land, where all pretensions melt away. Day fights intransigent government bureaucrats, hidebound cowboys, and city suits who believe they can tell country people how to behave. But his love for these confined mustangs keeps Day motivated. Then, when he gets permission for his wild mustang sanctuary, his next battle begins.

People claim to love wild horses, which have historic standing in the American West, besides just being gorgeous animals. Their rearing outlines, with muscular legs and rearing manes, are iconic even to people who’ve never ridden the range. But unlike cattle and sheep, mustangs are economically precarious. While some can be tamed and turned to ranching, many mustangs just hoover prairie grass and anger agriculturalists.

These are the proverbial wild horses that couldn’t drag you away. Mustangs are strong, willful, and spirited. Hard experience has taught them to distrust humans, who often consider them vermin and chase them away, sometimes with guns. Nobody thought Day could domesticate herds numbered in the thousands; Day resolved to prove everyone wrong. The Arnold Ranch, rechristened Mustang Meadows, became America’s first wild mustang refuge.

An adept storyteller, Day mingles autobiography with a holistic description of ranching, as both a business and a personal vocation. He describes his lifelong romance with horses, beginning when his father gifted him an undersized mustang, sized just right for a growing boy’s legs. Day remembers horses’ names, habits and dispositions. He describes them with nearly human qualities, and sometimes with downright heartbreaking poignancy. Horses, to Day, are family.

He also describes moments of remarkable violence that remind us how ordinary people treat animals. Descriptions of capturing mustangs by paralyzing them with gunshots across the spine, or disciplining willful horses by whipping them until they bleed, make the blood run cold. Not everyone loves horses like Day, and these snapshots of stunning inhumanity underline why Day resolved to bring nonviolent techniques to horse ranching.

Day pioneered a technique called “gentling the herd” on cattle adopted onto his Arizona ranch. It involves pressuring cattle to stick close together, reminding them who’s in charge. This involves minimal effort from human ranchers, and allows the animals to remain essentially wild, provided they recognize humans as dominant. But to ranchers accustomed to using force to control and domesticate livestock, “gentling the herd” proved controversial, to say the least.

Worse, Day has to persuade skeptical cowboys to attempt his unorthodox technique on mustangs, much wilder and more ornery creatures than cattle. They have limited time to sand rough edges off 1500 animals and get them onto strange pasture, and several hands insist it can’t be done. Throughout, Day must contend with the one creature more high-strung and volatile than wild mustangs: the cowboys who ride them.

Day admits his technique resembles Monty Roberts’ famous “natural horsemanship” techniques, commonly known as horse whispering. Though he began gentling the herd before Roberts became famous in the mid-1990s, the overlap of techniques is pointed and conspicuous. Perhaps, when times are right, good ideas just bubble forth like water in the desert. One hopes Day’s techniques catch on, because they’re not only more humane, but more environmentally sustainable, besides.

Despite Day’s sometimes technical topics, he never bogs down in jargon or abstruse cowboy-speak. His story has a novel’s dynamic flow, mixing Western horseback action with a family epic and a concise memoir of ranch life. In talking about government wheeler-dealing, innovative animal husbandry techniques, and more, it would’ve been easy for Day to become impenetrably dense, but he doesn’t. His storytelling never loses immediacy through long, hot, horse-filled seasons.

This book will appeal to multiple audiences. Casual readers interested in a compelling memoir or modern Western will find plenty to enjoy. Fellow ranchers interested in lower-cost, ecologically supportable techniques can mine Day’s experiences for useful pointers. This isn’t a niche book just for horse people; it touches hearts and minds across disciplines, even a pointy-headed city slicker like me. This fun, touching, smart book won’t let you go easily.

Amazon Economics vs. the Good Green Earth

It’s everywhere. Stacked on countertops, spilling from overfull trash cans, hiding behind furniture where exuberant housecats batted it months ago. Every week, it seems I remove another garden-sized trash bag full of it. It’s packaging. Paper wrappers, heavy cardboard boxes, manila envelopes. I practically need a backhoe to shovel all this packaging from my house to the trash, and more seemingly arrives every single day.

Since I started accepting review books six years ago, I’ve received literally thousands of individually wrapped packages. I cannot count how many books I’ve received, much faster than I can read them, and I’ve graduated to reviewing CDs, DVDs, software, small electronics, kitchen utensils… In short, anything I’m qualified to review, at manageable risk, I’ll accept. (I appreciate manufacturers seeking my opinions on diapers and feminine hygiene, but I’ll pass.)

But every review product comes individually packaged. Even products originating from the same handling source get their own boxes, envelopes, mailing tubes, or whatever. I enjoy receiving these products, because I enjoy helping quality products find their market, plus my entertainment budget approaches zero. But shipping waste exceeds food packaging, damaged goods, and any other household waste I produce. I cannot calculate how much shipping trash I discard weekly.

Technology advocates tout this as commerce’s coming wave. Brick-and-mortar retailers will dwindle, providing only perishable foods and other high-turnover goods, while Amazon, eBay, ModCloth, and One Kings Lane will dominate consumer retailing. Yet every time I think of that, I look at the overwhelming piles of waste I produce: besides packaging, consider the carbon burned in shipping, the warehouse worker-hours, the costly road maintenance. E-commerce produces too damn much waste.

Industrial capitalism has long struggled with its waste output. This might’ve seemed like an academic discussion in early capitalist days, when heavy industry meant the occasional coal-burning Sheffield factory or sloppy Rockefeller oil field. But changing commerce models have diversified waste production patterns. Anyone who’s ever received one of Amazon’s famous shipments, overstuffed with absurdly unnecessary packaging, has participated in the problem.

Though most shipping material is produced from paper pulp, and is nominally recyclable and biodegradable, that doesn’t soothe my doubts. Unlike metal recycling, which pays modestly, paper recycling has vast marginal costs, meaning you only get paid at hugely high volumes; most recyclers buy paper at pennies per ton. High storage costs, bulky transportation, and low return means most paper never gets recycled, going straight to the landfill.

It’s hardly better there, though. Because space is valuable, most landfilled garbage gets pressed down, buried deep, and covered with more trash. More than about eight or ten feet down, landfill environments are anaerobic, meaning airtight, inaccessible to the oxygen which makes biodegradation possible. Putatively eco-friendly scrap will linger, largely intact and immune to decay, potentially for centuries; my trash will outlive me by orders of magnitude.

When Amazon unveiled its prototype delivery drone last year, media spokes-folks celebrated this breakthrough in convenience. I cringed at its extravagant energy consumption. Though touted as having electric batteries, and thus not burning carbon itself, its batteries would nevertheless almost certainly get charged from today’s coal-fired electric grid. One click, I receive my books or DVDs or clothes in three hours, and whoops! My carbon footprint goes through the roof.

Whenever I haul another plastic bag full of paper waste to the curb, I’m aware I should do more for God’s green earth. I don’t have to landfill my waste output. I don’t even have to accept the stuff people thrust my way. But fixing the problem directly exceeds my blue collar paycheck’s elasticity. And though I’m uncompensated for my reviews, this free stuff nevertheless positively offsets my living expenses.

Fixing the problem would create general benefits for humankind, but only at great personal expense. Participating in the problem costs me nothing, but creates diffuse ecological liabilities. Therefore, any means of separating from the problem equals permitting “Amazon economics” to pick my pocket, albeit indirectly. The problem is systemic, and therefore the system itself needs reformed; but such altruistic collectivism has become politically and socially unpalatable in this post-TARP economy.

I enjoy the convenience produced by Amazon and other eCommerce. But its current model relies upon automotive engines, paper milling, and electric generation technology that hasn’t advanced in nearly one hundred years. Like the housing bubble, the Amazon economy cannot survive as-is indefinitely. If Americans, and humans generally, hope to continue enjoying this convenience, we must address this waste production liability now, before it creates a dangerous, disgusting crisis.

The Human Strain

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Since multi-celled life began around 600 million years ago, natural history has seen five mass extinctions. Life’s trend line favors greater complexity: more than twice the number of life forms exist today than right before the dinosaurs vanished. Yet five times, the number has contracted violently. Scientists who study and classify life’s profound complexity say we’re now facing a sixth mass extinction, the first caused by one species’ actions.

New Yorker journalist Elizabeth Kolbert takes two tacks in her analysis of extinction. She considers extinction as a philosophical concept and scientific fact, while also exploring current circumstances where entire species are vanishing under human eyes. The results are often astonishing. Our understanding of Earth’s biome continues evolving, but Kolbert cannot escape the consequence that humans, inevitably, change all life around ourselves.

Natural philosophers once couldn’t comprehend the idea of extinction. Whenever explorers encountered bones of vanished animals, they invented extravagant explanations how the bones arrived: Noah’s flood, or mythological creatures, or we’ll find them across the horizon. Even Thomas Jefferson, himself a noted naturalist, couldn’t compass the idea that species might vanish. This even as European colonialism changed environments wherever white plows broke the soil.

But French researcher Georges Cuvier examined the evidence and could only conclude: entire categories of species no longer existed on earth. Cuvier identified mammoths, pterodactyls, giant sloths, and other vanished species. But he didn’t just prove that species had vanished in the past; he proved that species could still vanish today, changing how humans perceive our relationship with nature. Any species could potentially vanish—including, imaginably, us.

Globally, innumerable species now face critical jeopardy. Kolbert travels to witness heroic efforts to preserve the Panamanian golden frog, tropical corals, and complex Amazonian biomes. But extinctions resist easy explanation. Traditional narratives, like global warming, habitat loss, or hunting, prove too simplistic for Earth’s complex, shifting biology. One factor underlies all likely explanations, though: species are vanishing because of human actions. We’re annihilating species we haven’t even identified yet.

Humans pushing other species off the brink is nothing new. Science has demonstrated that ancient “megafauna,” like mastodons and moas, vanished when early humans overhunted them. We probably also exterminated Neanderthals, too. But circumstances have changed today. Humans know the consequences our actions are producing, and have the choice whether to continue. Unlike our ancestors, we can no longer sit back in ignorance, blind to the consequences of our actions.

This makes today’s extinctions different from the past. Each of the “Big Five” had different causes: depletion of breathable air, or global cooling, or the Chicxulub asteroid. Some mass extinctions have happened slowly, and one happened in one violent day. But never before has one species so thoroughly changed Earth’s ecology. Humans so completely dominate Earth today that some scientists recognize a new geological era, beginning around 1750, the Anthropocene.

Essentially, humans aggressively reverse natural history. Earth separated the continents to create separate life spheres; our transportation technologies bring these spheres together, turning ordinary species into invasive weeds. Earth pulled carbon out of the air, creating a temperate, breathable atmosphere; we turn that carbon into fuel, burn it, and create the most carbon-soaked conditions our planet has seen in forty million years. We turn Earth’s clock back.

Kolbert doesn’t completely disparage human activity. Though our consumption has driven many creatures to, or past, the point of extinction, we’ve also worked to prevent that very effect. Professional scientists and interested volunteers strive heroically to prevent extinction. Species long vanished in nature survive because humans persevere. But even this proves Kolbert’s underlying thesis, that human action, not wind and water, now dominates Earth’s surface.

One recalls the invisible morals Lee Van Ham warns about.

Notwithstanding her title, Kolbert admits we aren’t in a sixth mass extinction event. Yet. Though many, many species are critically endangered, and extinctions currently occur far beyond what ordinary biology explains. But growing knowledge and humans’ ability to make moral decisions make reversal of this dismal trend possible. Humans could restore Earth to the unprecedented diversity that life enjoyed relatively recently. The question, then, becomes: will we?

Humans act. That’s our nature. Unlike, say, the tropical trees Kolbert spotlights in one chapter, we don’t just strike balances with nature; we make choices, devise plans, and act. But in our technological we’ve accepted complacency as the price of comfort. Kolbert calls humans to choose against passivity and dedicate ourselves to reversing our destructive ways. The burden lies on us now. Will we listen while we still have time?