It seems everyone's finally getting on the down-with-plastic-bags bandwagon. There are plastic bag bans popping up all over North America. And, where it isn't yet mandated by city ordinance but very much on the lips of the public, local markets and natural food chains alike are opting for the paper-only policy. Alternatively, customers are being encouraged to bring their own reusable shopping bags and forego disposables altogether. Personally, I like this option the best. What irritates me, though, is the way in which reusable bags have become yet another product in the marketplace--a cultural cliche that, for $40, better make the right statement about the person carrying it.

I got to thinking about this as I was standing in the check-out at Capers the other day. Don't get me wrong, I like Capers. They do a great job of labeling what's organic and local and the brands they sell are generally what I'm looking for. And, thankfully, they don't put a lot of impulse-buy crap at the till like most stores. However, there was one product I saw at the Capers check-out that really irked me--a reusable nylon shopping bag that neatly stuffs into a pocket-sized pouch with a carabiner attached. There's nothing wrong with the product, per se. In fact, the convenience of being able to carry it on a key chain will no doubt ensure it gets used more frequently than the oops-I-left-it-hanging-on-my-doorknob variety. What irks me is the fact that there has arisen a whole new industry around reusable bags--probably the out-of-work makers and sellers of disposable plastic bags.

Everyone can agree that disposable plastic grocery bags are a bane to the environment: it's a waste of energy and resources to keep making them and it's a waste to keep filling landfills with them after their intended single use. Plastic takes eons to break down in a landfill and it's made from oil, a resource that took so many eons to form in the earth that it is non-renewable in human time. Reusable bags are definitely a better alternative, but they, too, have to be manufactured at a cost of resources and energy. Whether they're cotton or canvas or nylon, the raw materials come from somewhere and they will need to be in a constant state of replenishment. (Ahem... isn't nylon also a petroleum-derived synthetic? If sustainability is the goal of reusable bags, maybe they should be made exclusively of sustainable materials.)

It isn't as if everyone will be issued their ration of reusable bags, end of story. No, the bags will get lost, damaged, worn-out (hopefully from use) and people will need new ones. Thus, the reusable shopping bag industry is a necessary fact of 21st century life... or is it? Who doesn't own a back-pack, briefcase, or large handbag? If you carry one of these on a daily basis, you're already carrying a reusable bag! So use it!

I just got back from an all-day outing to IKEA in Richmond (near the airport, for non-Vancouverites) and, though I'm grateful I got to spend time with a friend who was only in town for a day, I'm exhausted from spending what feels like an eternity in stop-and-go traffic in my POS car. It's a 25-year-old Volvo 240 Wagon, but the charm stops there: the transmission's manual; the power steering seems to be, too; the seats are leather and the air conditioning doesn't work. It's physical labor to drive the thing and, quite frankly, it makes me not want to drive. I'd rather be on the bus with a good book.

So, I'm proposing a moratorium on new car manufacturing. There are enough cars on the planet already. Hasn't anyone noticed the sad state of dealerships lately? They've got countless thousands of new cars sitting around that nobody wants and that they can't seem to give away, even with $500 of free gas. Why should precious resources be used to manufacture even more new cars when there are tons of old heaps like mine just waiting for someone to show them a little TLC?

(Don't think that the advances in fuel efficiency bestowed upon newer models are really going to save the planet; they're just keeping the sprawled-out car culture charade alive a little longer. It's a little like skipping the bacon on your double cheeseburger or switching to products that claim to be "low-fat" once you've attained morbid obesity on a diet rich in meat and processed food. You know a more appropriate dietary change would be to start eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains--in other words, a complete 180--but you don't know how to give up the charade. In the same vein, people who drive "fuel-efficient" cars are kidding themselves if they think they're not still using the same fuel as the rest of us--yeah, I get it, they use less of it, or else they have an excuse to drive more. Either way, they still pollute; even bio-diesel-fueled vehicles produce greenhouse gases, which constitute a more real environmental threat than peak oil, anyway.)

So, why a moratorium on new car manufacturing? Precisely because people will not be compelled to give up the car culture charade until they feel the effects of it physically and financially. Fortunately, the relentlessly rising cost of fuel is starting to take a noticeable toll on people's wallets and, thus, they're driving habits. In case that's not enough, if we adhere to a moratorium on new car manufacturing for, say, ten or fifteen years, then everyone will be driving an old heap and the simple task of driving to the office--once so comfortable, even luxurious--will be work in itself. If driving becomes, not only outrageously expensive, but physically draining as well, then maybe people will finally be compelled to do less of it. At the very least, then, driving would be a physical task more akin to walking or biking, and more people would probably choose to do the latter if the former weren't so effortless.

Who's with me?! Down with new cars!

If someone asked me to wax poetical on pigs, this article from Salon is what I'd come up with... almost to a tee, all the way down to the grandmother canning tomatoes and the fond memories of reading Little House in the Big Woods as a girl. The author describes making her own bacon and the feeling of eating food that you've made yourself from scratch. That feeling of empowerment is, I think, what will move people to a more sustainable lifestyle. Sustainability is about more than making this or that choice in the marketplace: it's about participation; it's about producing what you can and relying on those you know in order to free yourself from dependence on global supply chains and corporations.

Check out this article from Mother Earth News.

I was just piecing together some thoughts earlier today on food production as suburbia's salvation. Everybody likes to complain about what suburbia is lacking: culture, art, entertainment, public transit, real community... the list goes on and on. We rail against the big-box stores and the McMansions, the under-utilized public spaces, the over-sized parking lots and the drive-thru lanes, but one thing suburbia has going for it is land and lots of it. It's not even the size of the stores or the houses that's really the problem (we'll save the eco-footprint talk for another time), but the culture of sprawl that has filled in the gaps and the automobile culture that gave rise to it.

Much of suburbia was once arable, productive farmland that fed neighboring towns. Tearing down farms to build ostentatious homes for ostentatious people was a grave misappropriation of land, but that land could be made productive once again. What if suburbanites started tearing up their lawns to create gardens both beautiful and edible?! Talk about relocalization: it just so happens that suburbs are already divided into communities small enough for most people to know one another and large enough to form committees, time banks, and other forums of exchange. How cool would it be if at the center of every cul-de-sac there was a Saturday morning market where neighbors could exchange food, crafts, and services? Meeting more of our daily needs within our local communities could mean less people working outside the home... and less commuting, traffic, and smog. How does that sound?

I said it in my first blog entry, and I'm going to say it again: people, read Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher! One of the key concepts to come out of this work is that of "appropriate technology." The idea behind appropriate technology is that by making use of technologies that give proper consideration to the natural, social, and cultural capital of the community for which they are intended, natural resources, energy, and human dignity can be spared. For instance, most developing nations have a dearth of reliable energy, but a whole lot of man-power (i.e. population), so why not put people to work achieving object X instead of wasting valuable energy on a high-tech solution that leaves people sitting around feeling useless?

I'm bringing this up because the most recent post on my new favorite blog, Homegrown Evolution, features a simple, outdoor "rocket stove" as a starting point for a discussion of appropriate technology in the West. Usually targeted at the development of poor, third-world nations (as Schumacher lays out), their point is that low-tech-nologies can, and should, play a role in western societies too.

I have thought for years that we make too much use of convenient, but wasteful technologies here in the West. We have a gadget for everything but none have more than a single purpose--and then you have to buy another one when the first one breaks because its nothing more than cheap crap because it's made in an Asian "Special Economic Zone," or some such place with bargain-basement taxes. I ask you: Is an electric can-opener really any more more convenient than a manual one? Seems a pretty wasteful re-invention of the wheel, if you ask me. Ever seen a morbidly-obese person use an elevator to go up or--even worse--down a single flight of stairs? I bet you have and I bet you didn't wonder how they got that way. Even with a stroller, I don't bother with automatic doors; it may be cumbersome for me to hold the door with one hand and push my stroller through with the other, but I'd rather not make senseless use of electricity when I have four functioning limbs of my own and plenty of calories to burn.

Really, you can think of calories as the medium of exchange whenever energy is being used--whether it comes from a power plant or your own muscles, and your own muscles are always going to be more efficient because there's no intermediary uses of energy from production to use, as is the case when transmission lines and middlemen are used. Which is more energy efficient: taking twenty-or-so steps to get to the second floor of a building, or relying on the century's worth of human ingenuity, research, and manufacturing that went into the completion of the modern elevator (not to mention the electricity to operate it unnecessarily). How are the two even comparable? Because every person that took part in the design and building of the elevator ultimately got paid in calories: dollars, yes, but dollars are only valuable as a means to an end and everyone's ultimate aim is to feed themselves. (more on the natural origins of the economy another time)

Why, in the grossly-obese West, do we sit back and let machines do the littlest things for us, things that we are perfectly capable of doing for ourselves? Not only do we infantilize ourselves by presuming to be so incapable, we lose out on innumerable opportunities to exercise, i.e. for our bodies to perform some much-needed metabolism and burn some calories. It's always been a wonder to me that people are content to sit on their butts all day--from home to car to office on their butts--and then waste an hour in the gym every night when they could've just gotten a little exercise here and a little exercise there throughout the day had they walked, biked, and done things manually.

Doing things by your own power rather than farming out your body's metabolic functions to power plants and gizmos, seems to me the ultimate instance of relocalization. Why? Because performing a given action with the use of appropriate technology makes the most efficient use of energy, in calories, decreases reliance on external inputs of energy and resources, and increases reliance on others in the community. And the three, taken together, resonate nicely with relocalization as I see it.

Next on my list of books to read: Slow Is Beautiful.

Who out there didn't love the original SimCity? OK, I can see how city planning details such as water works, garbage collection and tax structure, which arrived in later versions of the game, might bore a lot of gamers out there. But, c'mon people, the original SimCity (I played it on SNES, but it was also released on PC) should definitely rank as a classic. I can honestly say that it taught me everything I know about how a city functions as a whole, and how its constituents (residents, but also businesses and industries) are physically, financially, and legally connected.

Well, I did take some development/sociology courses in college, but really the foundation of my understanding lies in SimCity. For those who weren't into it, the goal of the game is two-fold: as SimMayor, you want to ratchet up that approval rating as high as it'll go, and ultimately build a megalopolis of 500,000. Yeah, whopper of a city, eh? (Actually, there's one other plot feature, and for some it's the crux of the game: major destruction!)

The highest approval rating I ever achieved was 92%. I did this by following four simple rules: bulldoze not a single square of trees and decentralize, decentralize, decentralize. In the fairly small, but open spaces in the forest, I included several industrial and commercial zones and as many residential zones as the combined total of the others. No direct roads? No problem. No traffic, either. I used roads in that particular city, but I frequently built cities with no roads at all, only mass transit services. This was a sure-fire way to eliminate traffic and smog problems, which citizens frequently complain about, negatively affecting a mayor's approval rating. If SimCitizens could have complained about having no roads, I suppose they would have, which is exactly why mass transit really works best in conjunction with decentralization. If there are places to work, eat, shop, and have fun all in a reasonable walking or biking distance from one's home and mass transit rides are only a once-in-a-while thing, then the inconvenience of having to use them isn't really annoyance at all: use that time to read a magazine or listen to a podcast. Leisure time, relaxation, is sure to increase approval of more than just the mayor. Taxation, on the other hand...

And, who would've guessed? The basics of tax law are also to be found in SimCity. The original featured a much simpler tax structure than subsequent versions: a single, across-the-board tax rate for all residents, businesses, and industries. Simple, yes, but deceptively so. The obvious lesson is that high taxes make businesses close and residents move away; low taxes invite new residents and allow industry to thrive. In a nutshell, the same goes for the real world. What happens when a SimCity grows too fast and spends too much? Raising taxes to generate income will only drive people away, but lowering taxes to attract new businesses and industries will lead to a deficit. Sound familiar? If so, it's because everything you need to know about city and regional planning, you learned from playing SimCity.

I'll have to ruminate on this a little later... the baby's up from her nap.

Any SimMayors out there want to share their highest approval rating? Leave a comment. I'd be curious to hear other recipes for success with this game.

If you read my previous post, you know I like cooking and crafting my own foods from scratch. I recently participated in a fermentation workshop led by a guy calling himself Sandor-Kraut (not sure if he came up with the name or if others thought it fit him). I later checked out his website and came across this article, which discusses small-scale economies with relation to a couple lacto-fermented food products that the author likes to experiment with, root beer and ginger soda. In it, he explains why he refuses to scale his production up and make a commercial venture out of the product, as friends and family have suggested. I completely agree with his view on the value of small-scale production and thought the use of an actual product or business idea as an example helped explain the economic side of things really well. Check out www.wildfermentation.com for more on fermentation in general.

If you like DIY projects and getting your hands dirty in the garden, if you let Laura Ingalls Wilder take you away to a magical place as a kid, here's a website you should definitely check out: www.homegrownevolution.com. Mr. and Mrs. Homegrown Evolution, as they refer to themselves, are a couple of "urban homesteaders," gleaning as much sustenance from the land that an average residential plot in Los Angeles will allow. I'm hooked! I can't wait to see if Mrs. Homegrown Evolution gets the fermentation of wild grape leaves just right!

Who doesn't love food?! I love food! I love cooking and experimenting with food... mainly because I love eating food. Beyond just preparing a meal from store-bought ingredients, I love crafting food from scratch--culturing my own yogurt, hand-kneading and baking fresh breads... mmm. My next project will be homemade mozzarella. My husband will take care of the home-brew. I love the slow and patient task of nurturing food-bearing plants (well, any plant for that matter--I love plants, too) to full maturity and ripeness. Every year I plant a wider variety of vegetables in my backyard garden. I have blueberry and raspberry bushes, too, and I love to eat the fruit, unwashed, right off the bush.

All of these activities, besides ultimately being enjoyable to the palate, are enjoyable to the soul. There is something so deeply satisfying about producing one's own food for one's own consumption--all the better if one can produce enough to share with friends and family. I guess it's in my blood.

My mother's parents, the grandparents that I saw all the time and to whom I'm usually referring when I say "grandparents," were both from rural North Carolina farming families. They learned from their parents, who learned from their parents, and on and on back to who knows where and when, the ways of the land. And, to this day, they maintain a very large garden on their 1-acre lot. When I was a kid, I played in that garden. They called it weeding and they called it harvesting, but us grandkids called it playing. The best mud pies in the world were made with Maw Maw's garden soil. To keep us out of her way when she prepared dinner, my grandmother would send us kids out to pick tommy-toes fresh off the vine (that's North-Carolina-speak for cherry tomatoes).

They grew everything under the sun: tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, peppers, squash, potatoes, beans, peas, carrots, pumpkins for Halloween, and plenty more I'm forgetting about. They even had a few fruit trees, apples and peaches I believe. After harvest-time, I remember helping my grandmother with the canning of tomatoes and green beans, the freezing of corn and peach slices. She taught me how to make fruit preserves so good I stopped eating jam when I moved away from home because no store-bought jam ever compared to the stuff I grew up on.

To many it sounds like a lot of work, but I guess my grandparents did all this because it was a satisfying way of life, a way of life they'd always known and that everyone around them also practiced to some extent. Also, having grown up during the Great Depression when millions of Americans had nothing to eat, they realized that one is never entirely poor if one knows how to plant. Food is life: it is nature and it becomes us. It binds us to nature and to know how to cultivate it is to know one's place in nature.

The vast majority of mankind has always been involved somehow in the procurement of food--be it hunting, gathering, farming, or shepherding. The expansion in the 20th century of industrial agriculture has allowed a kind of divorce of most people from the land that provides their sustenance. Now, 1 in 100 people can do the farming for everyone, freeing up the other 99 people for "higher" pursuits and leisure. Isn't it ironic that many people choose gardening for their leisure-time activity?

The technologies--petroleum-based, chemical fertilizers and pesticides; energy-intensive refrigeration; energy-intensive farming equipment; long-distance transport--that allow the industrial food system to function on such a large scale are in large part responsible for the grave environmental situation we now find ourselves in. But, most people see no way out: food comes from the supermarket, end of story. Many people cannot envision where their food would come from if it weren't for corporate-controlled supermarkets stocked full of products grown, processed, and packaged by mega-corporations like Monsanto and Phillip Morris (yeah, your Kraft Dinner enriches an American cigarette-manufacturer). Funny thing, their grandparents probably would hit them over the head for such childishness--"Get off your butt and grow it yourself!--it hasn't been that long since most people knew how to get food.

The divorce between people and the land they ultimately, if unknowingly, rely on, reduces people to the status of mere consumers. In the context of an industrialized agricultural economy, the relationship between producer and consumer is anything but equitable. Mere consumers have very little say in how their food gets produced--like what chemicals, antibiotics, and growth hormones are used on food intended for human consumption--and producers have no obligations except to the bottom line and the shareholders who have an eye on it. Of course, the recent surge in the organic sector of the grocery industry is good news: people want clean, healthful food and they're buying accordingly. Also, the recent interest in local foods (a la 100-Mile Diet) is a good indication that people want to get closer to the land, if not by starting their own gardens, at least by buying from producers who are smaller in scale, more likely to use sustainable growing methods, and geographically closer to home. The rise in oil costs, and therefore transportation costs of all kinds of commercial goods including food, will take its toll on consumers in the form of rising prices on imported foods. If the prices at your local farmer's market seem high, consider that the prices you're used to paying for conventionally-grown, supermarket food have always been artificially low because they've never accounted for the full costs of conventional food production. How do you put a price tag on wildlife habitat destruction, species extinction, CO2 emissions of freight traffic, loss of farmland to urban sprawl, contamination of groundwater, etc., etc.? Consumers have never been asked to pay for these aspects of their food, mainly because corporate-control of the food system mostly kept these inconvenient truths hidden from public view and the distance between producer and consumer ensured it would be a long time before people started finding out... But, hey, it was profitable while it lasted!

Okay, enough already! What am I going to do about it? Well, complain for one. Those who know me know it's what I do best. At least airing grievances in a public forum like this gives the illusion of eliciting a response from others. If others are on board, maybe they'll want to do something, too, to free their food from corporate control. So, two: blog about it. And, three: plant, water, weed, harvest, culture, ferment, can, freeze, preserve, cook, bake, eat, and relish the satisfaction of nurturing my soul and myself! I'm no ring leader, here; I can tell that just from looking around Vancouver at how many people maintain food-producing gardens in their front yards, their backyards, in containers on porches and patios, roof-top terraces, and community gardens for those who literally have no soil to call their own. It gives me hope to see the renewal of this lost art. My grandparents would be happy--a little confused as to how we got to this point, but happy nonetheless.

I recently joined facebook and was intrigued to come across a group discussing something called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Proponents of human extinction argue that healing the earth and brining nature back into balance will require the total annihilation of the human race and that those of us who are educated enough to be aware of the looming environmental crisis should stop having babies. Well, actually, proponents argue that everyone on earth should stop having babies, but let's face it, this is a First World movement. I'm interested to know what others think of this idea. The following was my contribution to the group discussion:

Overpopulation is indeed a problem, but I disagree that total annihilation of the human race, whether voluntary or not, is the way to go about solving it. In fact, extinction will only leave a hole in the ecosystem, replacing one imbalance with another.

The answer is not for the smartest, most capable, and most progressive people on earth to swear off having children. These people need to do all they can to help further the economic, social, cultural, and human development of nations less fortunate than their own. Development of those parts of the earth where overpopulation is most threatening will, ultimately lead the people of those nations to voluntarily have less children. The key is, though, the voluntary aspect cannot be applied top-down; it has to grow up from the people themselves out of their heightened sense of security and their optimism about the future.

I realize it will be argued that economic growth means more consumption and more environmental degradation. But, I think it will only be a temporary condition while middle classes arise that will be educated about environmental degradation and economically stable enough to do something about it. I remain optimistic: twenty countries have already achieved zero or negative population growth.

I had no idea I had a blog on here. Interesting... So, I guess the idea is to keep the gods satisfied I'm doing something to relocalize. I love the very concept of relocalization, by the way. I've always been a fan of small spaces and close quarters.

In college I read a book called Small Is Beautiful and it surprised me how, for being a book on economics, it made so much sense! I had never conceived of smallness as something that could be applied to the economy. Being a young adult in the era of globalization, terrorism and climate change, I had certainly given a lot of thought to the problems of modern society and how better to organize it, but now I started to gain a sense of the fundamental role the economy plays in society.

Another book that monumentally influenced my thinking on social matters was The Breakdown of Nations, which makes the case for a dissolution of today's major nations into smaller units of autonomous political and social organization. It is argued that the citizens of such "city-states" are generally more creative, more productive, more prosperous, and more content. Hmmm... productivity, prosperity... sounds like we're talking about the economy! Yes, small-scale economies and small-scale societies go hand-in-hand! Relocalize!