Sustainability

I've been pondering sustainability. It's a huge buzzword, but I don't think anyone really understands the concept very well. I don't think we can. It is something lost to modern society like arrowhead making and sadly, how to build cities.
Wait. Arrowhead making and building cities? What the hell?

There was an excellent series of articles in a recent Economist issue (subscription required) about the current fad of organic food. Taken on the face of it, buying organic makes you feel good. You're helping the small farmer. You're keeping chemicals out of the food supply. YOU'RE STICKING IT TO THE AGRO-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!!! Yes! I hate the agro-industrial complex. Between them, the petroleum-automobile industrial complex, and the pharm-healthcare industrial complex, I'm not sure which one I hate the most.

But as with anything that makes you feel good, it's probably bad for you.

According to the newspaper, (which I suspect to be fairly balanced and has decent fact checkers) organic isn't so great. And it has to do with production and systems. It is widely known that production efficiency (read: lack of waste) drops as you scale up, i.e. 10 machines can produce 10 toys and hour, but a machine with the combined power of 9 of those machines may be able to produce 12 toys an hour.
Scalabilty has it limits, but the general line of the articles was that sticking it to the Man via "local food" results in 100 family owned organic farms, each with all the oil-burning machinery (or even methane producing work animals), each driving their half-full emissions spewing '79 Chevy C10's 50 miles into town to the local farmer's market (and driving them back home empty). Or you could submit to the industry and have one large systematically efficient professional farm connect to a logistical trucking company that fills double trailers to the local hypermarket.
Okay, fine there is a huge change in carbon use with buying local, but what about the chemicals? Well the chemicals gave us the ability to "feed" six billion people wihout having wars over food (now we just kill each other over oil and diamonds -- both MUCH more valuable than food. Have you tried the new oil-dipped diamond diet? It's delicious!) Those chemicals, the newspaper argues, gave us The Green Revolution.

But I would argue differently. Like all revolutions, they usually just lead to another system that is bound to fail. Thanks to all the chemicals put into nature, we have extrodanary rates of cancer, birthdefects, and several other diseases. You could even argue that the Green Revolution (and the wars of power over the food supply, or rather market share) gave rise to the dreaded Healthcare Industrial Complex, which gave rise to the Insurance Industrial Complex, which is currently crippling GM and Ford.

So here we are at the end of the Green Revolution (food production rates haven't risen in years, that's why the industry is looking at franken-food). While it is true less people are starving in Africa due to inability to grow (I guess cleaning my plate of all those peas as a child solved that one) the Revolution really benefited the US, later the EU and then Japan (and only now really hitting India and China et al). It's not because people were starving, but rather it increased the food supply to the point of MASSIVE overproduction. How else could we be having a serious conversation in the US about using corn for fuel? Humm, I could eat or I could use that food to feed my SUV so I can drive to Wal-Mart and pick up a box of Entemanns. ( I will give into the fact that most of this corn isn't really palettable, but maybe if it was organic they could sell it as the latest heirloom corn for extreme profits at Whole Foods.)

Say you are producing bluejeans. And somebody makes a technology that allows you to produce a million pairs of jeans for just a penny each of cost. And the technology is given to you free by your local land-grant institution. But they also give this technology to any other jeans producer. So soon everyone is making millions of jeans, and the price of jeans in the store falls to less than a penny. As an industry, you do two things: In order to keep the national jeans production firmly in this country, the government is lobbied to pay you not to produce jeans. Second, you find new markets for your jeans.

This is exactly what happened with food in the US. Corn producers figured out that the vegetable could be used to make high fructose corn syrup. Because corn is so cheap, Coca-Cola soon figured out how to replace good old sugar with HFCS. As an added benefit, when HFCS enters the body, it doesn't produce the same "I've had enough sweet" triggers as sugar does. So they can just sell us more Coke. A perfect system.

So thanks Green Revolution for the diabetes. (I'll quiely ignore the victim mindset here for a moment, which is a whole other post).

I not blaming corn. It's just an example of the manufacturing economics mindset, creation without any notion of need or overall sustainable benefit to society.

This is why we've lost any ability to be truly sustainable. We've created an economic system that values this mindset, as can be seen in the production of automobiles, homes, corn and Cheetos. I'm also not arguing for a return to a pre-industrial life.

But this idea extends deeply into urban design. And this is the irony of the downfall of GM and Ford.

Modern urban design is about bringing together many small parcels into one large parcel. It began in the suburbs, something fueled directly by GM when they bought up all the streetcar tracks and replaced them with buses. Most new development has nothing to do with increasing the quaility of life of the city but about centralizing the ownership of land. This decreases (usually) the amount of detail in a city and increases the distance between instances of interest, thus making walking less attractive and increasing the need to drive.

Put simply: The more we drive, over time, the fatter we get, the more we eat crap food full of chemicals, the sicker we get, the more doctors want to cure you, the more technology needed and specialists to fix you, the higher the health care costs, in the end that health insurance restricts and hampers the car companies ability to turn a profit.

More to come...