Radical remedies for the status quo

Once in a while, an actor of the struggles of sustainability is taking over the blog to express their joy, anger, annoyance or just comment about anything they care about in the sustainable world. This is an open space, so their opinion may differ from mine, but this is what the world is about. Have a good read!

Today, I let the stage for my dear Terry Madeira, who is giving her opinion on change, and discuss why quick fixes won't bring what we (and the planet) need.

Where was I? That’s right – change must be radical. Let me demonstrate with an anecdote:

A few years ago, I volunteered on an organic farm in southern Belgium. Besides growing fruit and vegetables (oh sweet, sweet tomato greenhouse), the farm also acted as locale for one- and two-week spiritual retreats centred around dance, yoga, and mindfulness. Miso soup was part of the breakfast buffet. One morning, I was coming back from the strawberry patch with my favourite fellow volunteer; a sharp, bearded Irish vagabond. We were on our way to breakfast but stopped to watch one of the groups as they were wrapping up a meditative practice. I remember this morning well because it was then that Rory (the Irishman) made an observation with such wide applicability to human behaviours that I am still reminded of his words regularly years later. “These people” he said in a tone of regret “they come here and wake up early every morning to meditate, eat their three balanced meals and think: man, I feel great. I will keep meditating. I will stick to these light meals, I’ll keep practicing my dance, or yoga, or mindfulness. But then they go back home to the visual, noise, air, and mental pollution of rush hour traffic on the way to and back from work, and because none of their responsibilities have disappeared, because nothing else back home has changed, neither does their routine. They return to a lack of time for dance, or meditation, or a healthy diet. They have to change their lives if they want to create space for changing the way they feel.”

Our mental and physical well-being shouldn’t be the fleeting focus of biyearly holidays. It is absurd to expect a fundamental change in lifestyle upon return to the same daily routine. Or foolish to believe in the ability of the latest one-week ‘detox diet’ to remove, long-term, the little belly pouch where you keep those extra cookies. (Instead, maybe embrace the pouch. But I won’t digress.) As a society, we love quick fixes even though all empirical evidence suggests (in lifestyle, health, or the environment): change, to be effective and long-term, must be more profound. Reconsider the topic of lifestyle, for instance. In his Praise of Idleness (1932), Bertrand Russell puts forward some deeply cogent arguments in favour of 4-hour rather than full-day working days within the context of industrialised society. He makes a compelling case for more leisure time resulting in movement away from passive pastimes of mindless consumption, and towards endeavours requiring some active expenditure of, say, intellectual capital – including, I suggest, efforts aimed at more resilient, equitable, and sustainable communities. There are a lot of tried-and-tested methods of community gardening, plastic use and waste reduction, resource pooling and so on, but destructive and wasteful lifestyles are perpetuated by those who profit from them by making them, in many ways, a lot more convenient. A radical re-evaluation of today’s work ethics could change that. (Read the full essay here: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

Suggestions for radically changed practices exist for a wide range of sectors of human activity, of course, and the environmental catastrophe we are currently experiencing make their more serious consideration and wide-scale application increasingly imperative. In their Introduction to Climate Change Economics and Policy for instance, authors FitzRoy and Papyrakis discuss the opportunity for change the 2007/8 financial crisis could have been for a market make-over in favour of sustainable solutions. Money could have been invested into a transition to low-carbon economies by, among other methods, creating a large number of jobs within the ailing construction sector with a view to retrofitting buildings so as to make them more environmentally friendly. As is often the case, a more sustainable strategy could have killed numerous birds with one stone resulting in a whole host of additional benefits generally overlooked or ignored by economists, policy-makers, and the general public. Instead, money was pumped back into troubled financial institutions, thereby failing to create jobs and reinvigorating an economic system which had, of course, put us in that precarious situation in the first place.

The point FitzRoy and Papyrakis are highlighting is that a drastic overhaul of current MOs is both possible and desirable, in a world where tweaking car engineering here and there for an added ‘environmental’ feature just won’t cut it anymore. Take another sector in dire need of a make-over: agriculture and the rest of today’s alimentation monster tangled up in convoluted food chains. In their commendably comprehensive paper on food security (openly available here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5967/812) for example, Godfray and colleagues write that, to feed 9 billion people by 2050, “radical” changes will be necessary “in the way food is produced, stored, processed, distributed, and accessed”. A fundamental, systemic change of current food production and distribution mechanisms as needed in the face of the major obstacles to real and long-term food security for all. One of these, for example, is the rapidly shrinking land area available to produce our food, considering the competition with other uses and the vital ecosystem services provided by (relatively) untouched land, such as the carbon sequestration and water cycling that are the convenient products of a healthy forest’s workings, as is that neat oxygen production. Whether we go for the soft cheese, hard cheese, or no cheese at all; the local produce or the organic in plastic wrapping, won’t determine how, for example, we spread the use of existing agricultural techniques and technologies like integrated pest management, agroforestry etc. for sustainable intensification (i.e., increasing yields on the same area of land). Here again, small adjustments and conscious personal choices are inadequate means to the necessary radical change in human practices from a sustainable development perspective.

Perverse numbers on hunger (according to the above paper, one in 7 people do not have access to sufficient food) juxtaposed to equally upsetting numbers of food waste (30-40% – more than a third – of all food is wasted) are another case in point. And while in less developed countries, food is lost as a result of lack of resources for adequate pest management/ storage/ transportation, perfectly good food ends up in landfills in the Western world (where there are hungry people, too). The amount of food lost – and with it the squandering of fertile land, water, fertiliser, petrol, and-so-on-and-so-forth, not to mention human labour – is truly monstrous, and no ever-so-local vegetable boxes or oh-so-organic fruit baskets can address the problem before the food system isn’t broken down and restructured more judiciously. Laws such as the one passed in France in 2016 that oblige big supermarkets to donate items approaching their best before date to charities are steps in the right direction. Of course, a lot remains to be done even so, considering that, in France, according to the Guardian, almost 70% of the food wasted is actually thrown out by households.

Surely, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel every step of the way when it comes to the organisation of our society? No – only where the wheel is a self-reinforcing vicious cycle of environmental destruction and growing, unjust human inequality. There, it is the roots of obvious malfunctions that must be pulled out, rather than treating the sickly plant. That’s where change for the better must be radical to be at all effective, must go beyond a handful of individuals making their conscious personal sustainability choices, must feed the bigger picture into land-use/ policy/ market transformations. Thankfully, blueprints for these ‘new wheels’ are out there already, a lot of bright minds draw some very clear pictures of how society could me improved and our activities could be made more sustainable. In Russell’s words: “… there is no rational ground for despair: the means of happiness for the human race exist, and it is only necessary that the human race should choose to use them.”