Statistics

According to a new Harris Interactive poll, conservatives have some pretty strong feelings about Obama.

67% of Republicans think the President is a socialist, and 57% believe he is a Muslim.  51% believe he wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government.

Perhaps the most astonishing statistic is that 24% of Republicans believe that Obama "may be the Anti-Christ."  (Only 6% of self-identified Democrats believe he may be the Anti-Christ.  WHAT?!)

Be sure to check out some of the other lovely little tidbits at the poll site.

Nothing

I just finished Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy. What a great read!  I'll say straight up that while I am an academic historian, I know precious little about economics.  Luckily, Patel assumes his readers know, well, nothing--and yet he treat us as intelligent and thoughtful people at the same time.

He also has a sense of humor.  I loved the lightbulb jokes that showed his point.  I loved his pithy snippets of wisdom that pepper the book and had me reading lines outloud to my partner.  Best of all, he has FABULOUS footnotes--ones that simply support his textual comments but also literate inciteful ones that add depth to the comments he makes in the body. (Footnoting TS Eliot in an economic analysis? You get points from me.)

Before I read the book, I had heard that it was commie pinko drivel.  Well, with all honesty, that just does not condemn a book for me.  In fact, as a driveling commie pinko myself, that always makes me hope to find a soulmate.

But of course Raj Patel, while remaining a soulmate in many ways, is certainly not spouting radical leftist stuff.  He's talking in a more intellectual way (and perhaps a more thoughtful way) about more or less what Michael Moore was talking about in Capitalism: A Love Story: how unfettered capitalism can absolutely destroy true democracy.

I especially love chapter six. Here Patel talks about everything from the demise of the commons and the rise of accusations of witchcraft--to the creation of colonialism and the idea of the "savage"--to territorial use rights of fisheries. At other places in the book he talks about the politics of breastfeeding (a subject near and dear to my heart which also exemplifies many of his points). The whole book is a feast of ideas, combined with a critical thesis. Go, now, to your local independent bookstore or to your library and get thee a'readin'!

My Journey to Green

I grew up during the 1970s.  My parents, who had been activists in the Civil Rights Movement, were in those years teachers at a liberal-progressive college in the small-town rural South.  Watergate and the first Earth Day and the early oil shocks are foundational memories for me.

Even more important to my world view, however, was my grandmother.  She was not a lefty--not political at all, really--but she cared deeply about the place where she lived.  Granny had lived through the Great Depression.  She had also been widowed twice by the time she was 40yo.  The two experiences combined to make her a very independent and resourceful woman.

Granny worked full time at the same department store for almost fifty years.  She went fishing and crabbing and clamming to feed us with the bounty of what surrounded us.  She had an enormous farm-garden in her backyard.  She had a compost pile and rain barrels set up around her house.  She brought home every plastic bag from her job and folded them carefully for reuse. She knitted ferociously.

Granny's sister raised animals (from chickens to rabbits to peacocks) in her yard (and snakes and huge spiders in her house), collected wild mushrooms and foraging greens, and crocheted ferociously.  The two of them were quite a pair.

So I grew up with liberal commitments to social justice, taught to me by my parents.  And I grew up with the influence of my grandmother's commitment to a life led simply and plainly using resources to their fullest.  But I never considered myself an environmentalist.

When I finished college, I moved into an apartment and began cooking for myself.  I had been a more-or-less vegetarian in college, simply because the meat was so poorly prepared in the cafeteria.  But reading Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet totally changed my thought process about choosing food.  She showed me that my daily choices were fundamentally linked to social justice--and even to Granny-style self-reliance.  Buying into industrial meat production seemed like using more than my fair share and simply wasting so much of the earth's abundance.

I still did not think of myself as an environmentalist.  I was in fact put off by the message of such environmental tracts as E - The Environmental Magazine with what I saw as its emphasis on a more pop-culture, consumer-driven image of life than I wanted to live.  I'm not sure this is a fair representation of the magazine then, much less now, but it was my reaction.  I put my efforts into the anti-war movement (responding to Gulf 1) and to the feminist and GLBT movements instead.  And I studied history as I slowly worked through graduate school.

When in 2001 I started spending all my time with David, I began to hear more about environmentalism from him.  I was still resistant, honestly.  I've always cared a lot more about humanity that about the planet, if I'm going to be honest--and so doing things right for society seemed more relevant to me.  Cleaning up a stream in order to allow native peoples to fish there safely was one thing--but making things pristine, apparently so middle class hikers could enjoy nature, did not.  The idea of preventing indigenous people from continuing to live in the rain forests of the Amazon--all in an effort to protect the environment--seemed wrong to me.

Of course, now I see how social justice and environmentalism go absolutely hand in hand.  I'm sure people back then understood that as well, but I did not.  On the other hand, what I did know is that David was deeply involved in both movements.  The other thing I knew is that my instincts towards plainness and towards social justice often meant the two of us were heading towards the same place of personal action.

David and I fell in love.  We eventually decided to have a child.  But I was reluctant to make that step until we had really confirmed that our dreams for the future were reconcilable.  Before we even started dating, David had told me he wanted four children.  I, meanwhile, had decided at the age of seven that I would have only one.  (And as any of you who know me realize, I am incredibly stubborn once I have made a decision.)

In an effort to convince David that 'onlies' are perfectly happy and normal people, I started reading up on raising only children.  One of the first books I ran across was Bill McKibben's Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families.  This book changed my life in the way few books have.

First, it tapped into the issues of deep importance to David and convinced him that our future was definitely going in the same direction childwise.  Within just a few months, we were staring at two little pink lines and dancing around the room.

Secondly, it transformed how I saw environmentalism.  It was scholarly (something I have a weakness for), non-materialistic, and full of emotional honesty.  McKibben introduced me to a world of green thinking that was rooted in both social justice and deep kindness.

Knowing that Bill McKibben has been such a powerful moral voice within the environmental movement since the year I graduated from college (from the same college from which he graduated!) makes it seem remarkable to me that I stumbled across his work through the back door of parenting choices.

Parenting choices led me further down the environmental path.  I made the choice to have a homebirth with a midwife because it was a self-reliant low-resource option.  We used cloth diapers because they felt luxurious compared to a plastic bottom, but also because they are lasting and use fewer resources.  (In fact, our son's old diapers are still being used by others, a full decade later.)  The luxury and ease of cloth diapers led me to start using cloth menstrual pads, and then to start using cloth bathroom wipes.  We breastfed because it was the natural thing to do, because it was healthier for mother and baby, because it was both cheaper and easier than formula feeding, and because it seemed like the responsible use of the resources we have. We coslept--which avoided the crib.  We carried our baby in a cotton sling rather than a complex large stroller.  The idea of simple plainness motivated many of my choices--but by this point I was recognizing that being plain and being green often went hand in hand.

There was one more step that totally pushed me over and made me into a card-carrying environmentalist.  I'll share that story tomorrow.

*  *  *

Thanks to Erin for raising such a fabulous issue for this month's APLS carnival.  What a lovely time of year to play over our pasts and see what led us to where we are today.

350!

We're off to the big march in downtown DC today, braving the rain. Where are you going to mark 350ppm?

Check out 350.org's list of actions if you don't have something already planned.

Going No Impact

My 10yo son and I are participating in the No Impact Project this week. Although for many years my family has been  involved with the environmental movement (as well as committed to lessening our own ecological footprints), the No Impact Project gives us an opportunity to talk about these issues more, learn to take more extensive steps, and make connections with other participants. I certainly felt that way during Crunchy Chicken's Low Impact Week.

Isn't this mass experiment just hype, a stunt?  Isn't it in some ways counterproductive since it leads the "consumer" (formerly known as the citizen) to feel responsible for climate change rather than the government and large corporations acknowledging their profound role and responsibility in this problem?

Perhaps so. I will end this week by talking more about the problems of personal versus political action.

But for now, I am taking Bill McKibben's words to heart: "The first step, clearly, is to take personal responsibility--to cut your own impact." He goes on to explain why personal action is not enough. As he writes, "If we want to have as little impact as possible on the planet, we must have as much impact as possible on its politics. At this point we're not going to solve this one lightbulb at a time--we're going to solve it one planet at a time if we're going to solve it at all." He recommends No Impact Week as not only a way to "minimize your personal [impact]" but to form a community of people actively making not only changes in their lives but changes in the culture that will then allow our politicians and other leaders to step up to the plate, that is, to "maximize your political impact."  Personal change turns us into actors.  When we see ourselves as effective people, we can have much more powerful voices for political change.

In addition to doing right by the planet, going "No Impact" is truly the way to do right by ourselves. By pushing ourselves to live up to what we say we believe, we're asking ourselves to face up to ourselves. Instead of letting ourselves get by with easy rhetoric, we are allowing ourselves to grow, to bloom into more responsible and effective people--on this issue but also on all other issues.  It is a way of celebrating the potential of humanity--and the potential of ourselves.

(Check out the reference to this essay on the Huffington Post!)

A Time for Action

During the second week in December, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen, Denmark at the United Nations Climate Change Conference with the goal of putting together a new global climate treaty, replacing 1997's Kyoto Protocol. It is essential for industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, for major developing countries like China and India to limit the growth of their emissions, and for poorer countries to get financial help adapting to the impacts of climate change which many already feel.

In the run-up to Copenhagen, many individuals and groups have helped set the stage for citizen action.

* * *



Today is Blog Action Day, an annual call for bloggers to discuss one issue of crucial concern to the world. This year's topic is Climate Change. Bloggers across the world, regardless of the normal topics of their blogs, are writing about the crisis facing our environment.

* * *



Coming up on October 24 is the '350' Day of Action.

As 350.org explains, "350 parts per million is what many scientists, climate experts, and progressive national governments are now saying is the safe upper limit for CO2 in our atmosphere." Although for most of human history levels have hovered around 275ppm, we are now at 390ppm–-and this number is rising by about 2 parts per million every year. As NASA's Jim Hansen has pointed out, above 350 we will no longer have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."

As long as we stay above the 350ppm border, we risk reaching tipping points and irreversible impacts such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and major methane releases from increased permafrost melt.

The brilliant Bill McKibben puts it this way: "It's not as if we have a choice. The most useful thing about having a number is that it forces us to grow up, to realize that the negotiations that will happen later this fall in Copenhagen aren't really about what we want to do, or what the Chinese want to do, or what Exxon Mobil wants to do. They're about what physics and chemistry want to do: the physical world has set its bottom line at 350, and it's not likely to budge."

To help our world leaders understand how essential it is to come up with a climate plan that includes cuts significant enough to reach that 350ppm boundary, 350.org has organized a Day of Action. Groups all over the world will participate, representing their support for this target. As the organization says, "We're calling on people around the world to organize an action on October 24 incorporating the number 350 at an iconic place in their community, and then upload a photo of their event to 350.org website. We'll collect these images from around the world and, with your help, deliver them to the media and world leaders. Together, we can show our world and it's decision-makers just how big, beautiful, and unified the climate movement really is." Check out some of the creative ways people have gotten together before on this issue.

Using this map, you can find a group near you to join on the 24th.

* * *