Part One: Life
1. Our Story Begins
The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
—Thomas Edison to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931)
When the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, every single fish between Akron and Cleveland died, and Time magazine’s coverage led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. That same year, an offshore oil platform disgorged more than one hundred thousand barrels of crude oil onto the beaches of Santa Barbara, California, killing every sea creature in its path and spurring the organization of Earth Day, which is now observed around the world.
Convincing people to examine their energy use is like trying to get them to quit smoking or to eat more healthfully: they already know that they should do it, but there’s a billion-dollar industry working round-the-clock, inventing new ways to make sure that they don’t.
2. Who We Are
Of the world’s ten countries with the lowest gender gap (that is, the least difference between male and female health, opportunity, and participation), seven are also considered high-income relative to the rest of the world. Conversely, six of the ten countries with the highest gender gap (that is, those with the most difference between male and female health, opportunity, and participation) fall into the low-income categories
…most of the want and suffering that we see in our world today originates not from Earth’s inability to provide but from our inability to share
3. How We Are
No highlights.
4. Where We Are
No highlights.
Part Two: Food
5. Growing Grain
Where are you from? I’m not asking where were you born, but rather, where you grew up. What was the first thing you remember seeing out the car window? Desert? Ocean? Plains? Mountains? Trees? Buildings? More to the point: If your world ever falls apart, and you lose everything, where is the place that you will turn to, and then return to?
This is an interesting question, and one that I honestly don’t know the answer to. At first blush this could be a sad response, but perhaps it is also freeing? I feel like I could figure things out and be content wherever I am.
Soybeans are harder to not grow than to grow: they get their nutrients from the bacteria trapped in their roots, while corn plants require lavish applications of fertilizer.
Fifty years ago, a plot of land the size of a basketball court was required to produce one bushel of corn; today, all that is needed is two parking spaces.
Today, more than five million tons of pesticides are applied to cropland each year the world over—that’s a little more than one pound for every person on Earth, and it represents at least a tripling in the manufacture of pesticides since 1969.
…fungus DNA is a chain with millions of links, human DNA contains billions of links, and plant DNA can approach a trillion links.
I would not have guessed that plant DNA was longer than human DNA.
The largest farms in Iowa are twice as big as the island of Manhattan and harvest more than a million bushels of corn every single year.
6. Raising Meat
About one million animals are slaughtered for food every hour in the United States.
30 percent of the fresh water used by humans on planet Earth is spent in the production, maintenance, and slaughter of meat animals.
If every American cut their red meat and poultry intake by half—down from four to two pounds a week—it would free up 150 million tons of grain.
We currently share the earth with more than eight hundred million undernourished human beings.
Sooner or later we will have to reconsider the fact that every year, we actively waste 90 percent of the grain we feed to animals, in exchange for a little meat and a lot of manure.
I appreciate the perspective these stats provide.
7. Finding Fish
The relatively short digestive tract within fish means they require food that is very high in protein, compared with animals that live on land. To supply this protein, aquaculture facilities use a feed made from smaller fish that have been cooked, pressed, dried, and ground into meal.
This is astonishing to me. The raw amount needed is vast, but then also the resources required to grow that food, compounded by the effort and resources needed to process it into usable food … all to produce something that is simply an input to the process of food for us.
To get one pound of salmon, you need three pounds of fish meal. To get a pound of fish meal, you need to grind up five pounds of fish. Thus, each pound of cage-raised salmon “costs” fifteen pounds of fish from the ocean.
8. Making Sugar
At present, three out of four of the food items that Americans purchase have had refined sugar added to them in order to make them more attractive to the consumer.
This year, the United States will import enough refined table sugar to fill Yankee Stadium three times over.
9. Throwing It All Away
The three hundred thousand inhabitants of Saint Paul, Minnesota, produce about thirty-six tons of feces and 150,000 gallons of urine each day.
While gross to think about, it seems important to realize and understand how these stats scale up from our individual contributions. I imagine we rarely think about our collective impact, let alone our participation in that.
It’s true that the total population of Philadelphia hasn’t changed much since 1980, but on average, Americans eat 15 percent more food each day, which translates into 15 percent more…well, you get my drift.
Not just global population growth but also the amount consumed and eliminated by that population. Wow.
…a large fraction of the world has yet to share in even the most rudimentary benefits conferred during our decades-long global pursuit of more.
America, which makes up 4 percent of the world’s population, generates 15 percent of the world’s organic waste.
…much of the angst expressed about overpopulation is a red herring for the fact that a very minor part of the earth’s population has done and is doing the majority of its damage.
This is a critical point that I need to learn more about.
We live in an age when we can order a pair of tennis shoes from a warehouse on the other side of the planet and have them shipped to a single address in less than twenty-four hours; don’t tell me that a global food redistribution is impossible.
Zing.
Part Three: Energy
10. Keeping the Lights On
Because the global population has increased by 40 percent over that same time period, the total percentage of people living in poverty has decreased significantly.
This is where statistics fail us. It looks like we’ve lowered poverty but all we’ve done is grown the wealthy population, leaving the impoverished to suffer.
11. Moving Around
If, instead of flying, all two hundred of us escaped from the plane into two hundred separate cars and drove, individually, from New Jersey to Minnesota, we would have collectively burned 40 percent less fuel than we ended up using for that one plane by flying all together. If instead of using separate cars we had boarded a single passenger train, the total journey would have required only half as much fuel as was required for the gas-guzzling airplane that saved each one of us fourteen hours of travel time.
Quite appropriate to be reading this while spending a weekend exploring via public transportation … mainly trains.
…only 5 percent of Americans use any kind of public transportation on a daily basis. The rest drive almost everywhere they go.
The total cumulative distance that Americans drive each year is staggering: in 2015, it was equivalent to five hundred round trips from planet Earth to the (former) planet Pluto. Every day and on average, each American spends one hour in a car. Distance-wise, every woman, man, and child in America will circle the globe by car at least once during the next three years. We spend a good part of our lives in our cars—up until they maim or kill us, that is.
I have no words.
12. The Plants We Burn
…the amount of time required to transform living tissue into coal, oil, or natural gas is tens of millions of years at a minimum.
…the majority of plastic produced each year is consumed as disposable packaging.
This makes me so upset.
13. The Wheels We Turn
…wind and solar power, put together, provide less than 5 percent of the electricity used on planet Earth.
Part Four: Earth
14. Altered Air
No highlights.
15. Warming Weather
No highlights.
16. Melting Ice
If you took all the water on our planet and shrank it down to fit in a bucket, that bucket would contain one gallon, thick with salt, of sloshing ocean. The amount of fresh water, by comparison, would be three spoonfuls. Of those three spoonfuls, two of them would be frozen into ice.
17. Rising Waters
The oceans have absorbed most of the heat trapped by greenhouse warming, and seawater expands as it heats up. The average temperature of the ocean’s surface waters has warmed by more than one degree Fahrenheit over the last fifty years; more than three inches of the total global sea level rise came just from the swelling of a warmer ocean.
18. The Big Good-bye
Since the first Europeans showed up, North and South America have lost 88 percent of their tropical forests, 90 percent of their coral reefs, and 95 percent of their tall-grass prairies. The species that were adapted to those niches have all but vanished now.
This inspires me to research native species and create habitats for them as best I can on my property.
19. Another Page
…analyses from more than 150 different countries determined six factors that form the social foundations of the cross-cultural concept of happiness: social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity, absence of corruption in government, healthy life expectancy, and per capita income.
This is a good list to keep in mind. Especially in the US it is exceedingly achievable, and I can personally use this to gauge if various life decisions would quantifiably and significantly change my potential for happiness (in either direction).
There’s only one problem: driving less, eating less, buying less, making less, and doing less will not create new wealth. Consuming less is not a new technology that can be sold or a new product that can be marketed, and acting as if it can be is absurd.
Runaway capitalism and personal greed gets in the way. However at a personal level, at least I could live my own life in better harmony and balance while also reducing the impact of the rat race on my own health and happiness.
Each one of us must privately ask ourselves when and where we can consume less instead of more, for it is unlikely that business and industry will ever ask on our behalf.
Personal responsibility – something in depressingly short supply in modern culture.
Even if you consider yourself on the right side of environmental issues and a true believer in climate change, chances are that you are actively degrading the earth as much as, or more than, the people you argue with. An effort tempered by humility will go much further than one armored with righteousness.
Thank you for pointing this out. Everyone, including myself, needs to hear this.
Do not be seduced by lazy nihilism. It is precisely because no single solution will save us that everything we do matters.
Appendix: The Story of Less
I. The Action You Take
Can you make your personal investments consistent with your values?
I need to more closely investigate and evaluate what businesses and companies my financial investments are supporting.
Can you patronize a café that meets two of your criteria, while you search for one that meets three? Baby steps. No one can run before they can walk.
I don’t need the extremism of perfection, I need the consistency of progress.
II. The Difference You Make
…if you are a citizen of the United States or any of the other OECD countries, any steps you take toward austerity will have an outsize effect on global consumption.
For most homes and apartments around the world, it is by far the electric water heater that uses the most energy; having hot water usually amounts to about half of the total electricity used in your home.
What about tank-less water heaters? I need to investigate that.
Ironically, your television, your computer, and the lights that brighten your home—things you are probably careful to turn off when not using—contribute very little to your total electricity usage.
III. An Environmental Catechism
No highlights.
IV. Sources and Suggested Reading
No highlights.
Leave a Reply