Fire-eater

“Why bother?” is an apt question. Some say cynical, but most of us may wonder about being bothered with many things in our lives. It’s also a riddle posed by writer and professor Michael Pollan, author of the books, The Omnivore’s Dilemna, and In Defense of Food. His editorial titled “Why Bother?” appeared in the first annual Green Issue of the New York Times commemorating Earth Day, and addresses recycling, the environment and sustainability. He asks why should we bother recycling when our consumption outweighs it? Why turn a light off if the coal plants are constantly blowing the tops off of mountains and burning more coal? Why should one bike to work if it doesn’t change the fuel companies’ bottom line?

Coming out swinging, Pollan clearly and succinctly articulates the global problem of climate change, and the need for radically reduced consumption. He unceremoniously expresses dissatisfaction with much of the current “green movement” culture and writing, and the environmental diagnoses in popular journalism on the subject. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s book and now Oscar-winning film, is chosen by Pollan to be harped on specifically. He gives measured kudos to Gore for raising awareness to the issue, but he spits in derision at the film’s final prescription: that we change our light bulbs. Pollan mockingly retorts that changing one’s light bulbs is clearly not enough, in and of itself, to reverse our current trend.

In the opening of the piece, he correctly assesses that Gore only asks Americans to change our light bulbs because he believes that we Americans can only change our light bulbs. Pollan implores Americans, as the energy companies’ largest consumers and easiest to blame, to take more impact-producing and symbolically relevant steps to right the listing ship. So what will reverse our current trend?

The overall analysis coming out of the green movement over recent years has seemed to cease most of its thinking and is satisfied asking everyday folks to make costly efficiency upgrades to their homes, buy hybrids to carpool in, change their light bulbs, and even go vegetarian. The current Utne Reader and Mother Jones magazines are littered throughout the back pages with quack advertisements, hawking their commercial herbal supplements for your erectile dysfunction, while the mostly-insipid articles in the front chastise you for not drinking soymilk, or not voting Democratic, either of which may conclusively explain the limp dick. They seem to consistently fail to address the consumer-mentality relationship to corporatism, and therefore, relation to global dominance and dependence on the financial industry.

Michael Pollan investigated factory-farming and scrutinized agri-business for his previous books, and many prior articles and lectures. He is a trusted expert on the subject of genetic-modification of food, as well as a proponent of buy-local movements and of individuals engaging in permaculture. This is where he seems to break cleanly and strongly from the rest of the environmental movement at large. “For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve our problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing”. He is insisting here that an “evolution” in our consumer habits will never be enough. He continues, “Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess”. Displaying at least a somewhat-evolved sense of self-awareness, he acknowledges that he is also a specialist. One who, in his words, “sit(s) at a computer, thinking about climate change”. He also continues to pedal his best-selling books like a specialist, and charge exorbitant speaking fees at the universities that can afford it. But he does arrive at an obvious and very pragmatic answer with this article, a few-birds-with-one-stone response.

What is Pollan asking us to “bother” with this time? Growing some of our own food. And on he proceeds, to gently pitch himself a softball and make a great case for this no-brainer, knocking it out of the park.

The infrastructure we rely on for necessities such as heat, food, and water make our population dependent on large, abstract and faceless organizations that can gouge prices or withhold services at a whim. We are dependent on a number of levels, such as on our politicians to solve our domestic and international problems, on multi-national agri-business to feed an increasingly populous and unhealthy consumer base, or on our media for entertainment, to assure us that everything is fine, as long as we recycle. There’s only a million more examples. Have you ever unclogged your own sewer main, or changed your own oil in your car? Congratulations, you have opted out, finally free of the rampant consumer-mentality that plagues us, and gone D.I.Y. Good move. The bad news is that now the sewer is working and your shit is flowing into your children’s drinking water more rapidly and your combustion-engine, metal meat container now burns polluting, CO2-emitting fossil fuel at an increased rate, suffocating us all. And it’s termed more “efficient” while doing it. So off we go, peeling out on the pavement while we laugh at the irony. So while giggling, we ought to be compelled to take more steps, right?

Of course growing more of our own food and buying local is more fuel efficient. A fleet of trucks was not sent in every direction for two-thousand miles so that you could have a kiwi in January. That succulent, fresh kiwi needed ethylene chambers to ripen them, and polluting chlorofluorocarbons were used to refrigerate them, all en route to the consumer, gross inefficiency and ecological ignorance and arrogance marking its path. One might ask what entitles someone in Alaska or Nova Scotia to a kiwi anyway, but Pollan doesn’t seem to be willing to take it that far. Clearly, if Mr. Pollan’s logic about localizing our food source is correct, then growing most of our own food is better yet, right?

He says, “Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves.” He correctly asserts that the way in which we feed ourselves contributes to no less than a fifth of the world’s total carbon output. He also briefly focuses in on the problems of delegating representatives to go to far off places, only to be subjected to overwhelming commercial interests and phalanxes of highly-paid special-interest lobbyists. Of course they’ll sell out, he seems to say. Of course they’ll follow the money. With readers following hopefully, it seems that Mr. Pollan is going to satisfy our intellects as he goes on.

He states that buying locally also helps a sense of community re-develop in that part of our mind that is now firmly occupied by fast food, supermarkets, strip malls and outlet stores. He practically begs us to realize that sharing produce with your neighbors while drinking a beer you brewed yourself sounds satisfying in many ways. He is right, but not many people have the time away from our respective “specialties” to pull this off, and Mr. Pollan fails when the opportunity arises to give his readers permission to discard these “specialties”, much as Gore failed in his own cynical reasoning. That guy tells us to recycle, and this guy tells us to rip out our lawns and plant a garden as if we were changing a light bulb. The bare minimum, intellectually and energetically speaking.

Pollan whines, “even in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet “virtuous,” when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue—a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue—became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment—buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore—should now set you up(to be ostracized)”. Poor Michael Pollan. Poor, rich, famous Michael Pollan.

We don’t need electric cars, we don’t need efficient light bulbs, and we don’t need to grow all of our own food. We have already been down the food road, at least, and it’s not a big deal. Food is preserved, becomes a commodity, as then does land, for which the purpose of intensive farming is realized, and so on. Hierarchy in some oppressive form will be soon to follow. Tribalism, agrarianism, feudalism, industrialism, nationalism and corporatism happen. It is tiring and frustrating that Pollan seems to see this, yet holds back, and decides to write about being made fun of for being “green”. Whether it is to identify with suburban readers or to keep from alienating his publisher makes no difference to the planet.

It is cynical on his part, not to take the argument as far as it needs to go, and it feels patronizing to assume that the people you are talking to, the people who cared enough about what you’re talking about to buy your book, are only capable of very little. Humanity is clearly at a crossroads and needs a radical and unmeasured approach to our situation. Protests of, “but our economy might fail”, should be of no consideration, no consequence and no excuse at all. In fact, as our “economy” drives on, parasitic and cancerous, it is the main thing that keeps in place two of the things that Pollan previously lists as problems: pollution and corporate domination of our energy and food. Among them needs to be included militarism, consumerism and the politicization of our human necessities. We need to ask ourselves why there is a “financial industry”, as industry, by definition, produces something. What does this financial industry produce? It may take a paradigm shift that could require a total forgetting to rid ourselves of the patriarchal and dominance-mindedness that undermines our best intentions and more, giving ourselves permission to take the largest satisfactions from the tiniest, most incomplete gestures, such as the changing of a light bulb, or the buying of a carbon offset.

What does Pollan have to say now? “Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals… resolved that they would simply conduct their lives ‘as if’ they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that help(ed) take down the whole of the Eastern bloc.” Nice work, Pollan. You have identified our malignant economy as something as, if not more, oppressive than totalitarian communism, but seem to suggest that to fix it, we rent ourselves Zip-cars to drive to your overpriced speaking engagements and plant some tomatoes to offset the inflated cost of your latest book.

He even has the audacity to take a morally superior stance over his readers, in reference to the garden, “At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen.”

I hope that once a year on or around Earth Day, as the streets of the nation are littered with millions of copies of the latest Green Issue of the New York Times, Pollan remembers that that is his litter. This is his garbage. I can’t believe that the keen intellect that wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire is now satisfied with this. That’s real cynicism.