better, cheaper, greener?
A few months ago, I finally had the chance to read Whole Earth Discipline, the 2009 manifesto by Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame (among many things). He ranges over a variety of forces that are changing the planet and its potential habitability for humans, and also addresses the kinds of technologies he thinks must be part of any real solution. The section that was most illuminating to me was about urbanization and the notion that because of density of both people and services, cities–including the slums in the densest of cities–are greener than rural areas. While the general point is unsurprising, his drill-down observations about slums, and his belief that important solutions to environmental degradation will come from the ingenious social and technological solutions that abject poverty necessitates, was a point I had not come across before.
It came to mind again this morning as I read economist Nany Folbre’s vaguely bittersweet reflections on Juliet Schor’s new book, Plenitude. Schor there extends her arguments against maintaining the prevailing institutional and cultural norms of the US, as these norms “lead us to make decisions that are bad for us and for our ecosystem” (Folbre). Folbre wants Schor’s proposal, which is that we cultivate greater self-reliance as step one in undermining the existing form of the economy, to be viable. Sadly, she is quite doubtful.
Folbre begins to sketch out her concerns by saying that “by self-reliance, she [Schor] means less reliance on the market — increasing production of goods and services for one’s own consumption, such as growing food, building houses, even small-scale manufacturing.” However, she sees such self-provisioning largely as a luxury, and sees wage employment and urban life as potentially liberating and potentially far greener than their counters. In these claims, she echoes Brand’s points in W.E.D.
Still, she recognizes many benefits that self-reliance generates–like strengthened social ties and the happiness that those ties tend to generate.
One benefit that she doesn’t mention cropped up in Jennifer Saranow Schultz’s piece in the Bucks blog this afternoon: a link between some of these self-reliant behaviors and health.
In April, the market research firm Sentient Decision Science conducted a survey about financial behaviors, and asked about how frugality due to the economic downtown affected people’s actions, particularly those with health impacts.
According to the results, 45 percent of respondents said they have cut back in the last year by cooking at home more often; 30 percent said they were spending less on junk food; 13 percent said they have reduced driving costs by walking or riding a bicycle to work; 10 percent said they have reduced spending on alcohol; and 7 percent said they were growing their own food.
I was psyched to see those numbers, because cooking at home and growing one’s food are not only a frugal way to get healthier, they are also a way to get greener and more self-reliant. Yet, far too often, they are posited as too expensive, indeed, as elitist. Folbre herself observed that
sharp income inequalities and a shockingly high unemployment rate make our cultural fascination with amenities like slow food, folding bikes and hand-knitted sweaters seem almost cruel.
Such a critique arises in relation not only to Slow Food, but also to local food, organic food, etc. And despite the widely touted benefits of cooking at home, exhortations to make one’s meals are often deemed “unrealistic” given time constraints, availability of ingredients, etc. And thus, cooking dinner also gets coded as a luxury.
I shan’t rant about the ways that this argument is, itself, rooted in privilege. Rather, I want to head right to the happy chase: the “luxury” of eating home grown, home cooked food is being more widely enjoyed. And not by folks who are regarding it as a luxury. This is great news because eating thusly can alter one’s appetite for market food. Yes, yes, a real tomato makes the ones we usually find in stores seem pallid; that’s the first outcome. And while it’s in some ways no small thing, Schor is intimating that the result is potentially much more expansive. It’s not simply that becoming more self-sufficient enables people to create a home-cooked version of a familiar restaurant meal, it’s that the premises about what constitutes a meal, a good meal, a satisfying meal, a perfect meal, all become fungible. And changing those premises can help alter our relation not only to market food, but also to all manner of things that markets had seemed to define.
So let’s bring on the fun(gible)….
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