March 23rd, 2011 by Chris Eng

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Bill McKibben
(Knopf)
ISBN: 978-0307399182

There is a very simple argument at the heart of Eaarth: we’ve fucked the planet to the point where we’re living on a terrestrial body entirely different from the one we’ve always known and now we have to find new ways to live on it or die. Funnily enough, this is essentially my core philosophy these days. When all the various books and documentaries were coming out over the past several years waving their arms and saying, “OMGWTFBBQ! IF WE DON’T ACT NOW, RIGHT NOW, EVERYTHING IS GOING TO GO TO SHIT,” I stood back saying, “But we’re not going to act now, right now, because it’s too easy for humans to ignore the things happening around us and for us to absolve ourselves of any responsibility in order to keep living our comfortable lives. By the time we actually have visible evidence of our own wrongdoing, it will be way too late for it to matter. In fact, it’s probably too late right now.” And in that sense, the first half of Eaarth is no different from other books of its kind, but its second half, where McKibben tells us what we can do to help fix things, diverges dramatically from the fold.

He doesn’t tell us how we can fix the planet—that option’s kind of off the table now—but he does provide suggestions on how mitigate the damage we’re doing and maybe even roll it back a bit. What he suggests is mostly common-sense but it still needs to be stated loudly and repeatedly: we need to institute global policies supporting urban gardening (it’s been done before—multiple countries encouraged citizens to grow Victory Gardens during WWI and II) and revitalize our sense of community in urban centres and through a reintegration into smaller, rural communities. And while none of that is particularly new, what is refreshing is McKibben’s down-to-earth (if you’ll pardon the pun) attitude. Because unlike messianic enviro-preachers who sermonize about the non-stop benefits of doing exactly that, McKibben knows there will be drawbacks. There will be things we’ll have to give up as a society if we ever want to make a massive change like that work. Some of our big city cosmopolitan attitudes, for instance–McKibben acknowledges that while a return to small town/rural lifestyles is essential, small towns are not always the most open and nurturing toward non-traditional or outsider values.

He addresses this point, though, when he talks about how much more broad our field of vision has become thanks to the internet and its positive impact on social diversity, and for that reason he argues it is vitally important we keep the internet operating at peak levels, both for communication and for the spread of knowledge, because although we’ve done an incredible job of forgetting pretty much everything that was common knowledge three or four generations ago, we’re going to have to remember it faster than we forgot it and the internet’s the best channel for that.

There will be sacrifices in our new, more unpredictable, smaller (in scope, if not in size) planet, yes, but McKibben’s sense of realistic optimism which pervades the second half of the book is extremely heartening and that’s exactly what we need now right now. The time for blind hope about the world fixing itself (or even us doing it) is over. We need pragmatists willing to assess the situation and offer informed choices so we can move forward as a race. McKibben is one of those people, and for those reasons I find myself firmly back in the environmental fold, infused with optimism about the fact that I personally and we as a species can do something about the mess we’ve landed ourselves in.

If you’re feeling beleaguered by news reports, give Eaarth a read (and turn off the news—a lack of sensationalistic reports does wonders for the spirit). It just might revitalize your enthusiasm about finding ways to re-connect with this weird new world we’re living in.

August 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
(Vintage)
ISBN: 978-0679314837

At some point, my aunt asked me to review something happy in order to help assuage my cousin, who apparently is going through what I went through a year or so ago and is suffering a bit of the “PEAK OIL IS HAPPENING TO US AND CIVILIZATION IS GOING TO COLLAPSE AND WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE IN A ROAD WARRIOR-LIKE WASTELAND!” And my mom, after I handed her my copy of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (because I thought she might appreciate the info therein), asked, “This isn’t going to make me depressed, is it?”

Yeah, I guess there’s a lot of gloom and depression mixed in with environmental books nowadays, because (depending on who the author is) it’s either too late or almost too late to fix things in the world, and while that may be the actual state of affairs, it’s not exceptionally heartening to have it repeatedly hammered into your skull. This review, then, is for my cousin, mother and anyone else who may want to read a book review of something inspiring a certain degree of hope.

The premise of The 100 Mile Diet is simple: a couple decide that all they’ll eat for a year are those things which can be produced within a 100 mile radius of where they live. The premise provides ample opportunity for elitism, snobbiness and hard-linery to proliferate in the book and could have easily turned into a proscription for Righteous Living, but it is miraculously devoid of more or less any of that, instead making its case as a sensible suggestion. This is a marked difference from the usual doomsaying environmental bestsellers who seem to think that telling you “IF YOU DON’T LIVE YOUR LIFE THIS WAY, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” is a practical and non-alienating course of action. In fact, without trying to give too much away (SPOILER ALERT: they make it through the year), at the end of the book they go back to eating some of the things they weren’t allowed to. But that’s essentially Alisa Smith and JB McKinnon’s point: for all of us to move into an ethical future is for all of us to live as ethically as we can and do the best we can; not to embrace some unrealistic hairshirt environmental dogma which requires us to martyr ourselves for unattainable goals that nobody else cares about.

No, there is no coffee grown within a hundred miles of Vancouver (which, coincidentally, is where I’m from and where Smith and McKinnon are based). But there are free trade and ethical choices you can make in your coffee consumption. Or black tea. Or chocolate. Because again, no one is asking you to be a monk—just do what you can. What the book does encourage, though, is putting in the footwork and not giving up in your quest for viable alternatives. By putting themselves in a situation where they couldn’t bend the rules, they were forced to keep looking for things like wheat, which—despite the lack of grain farmers on BC’s coast—they eventually found. Yes, we who occupy the Vancouver/Victoria area tend to be a little spoiled in our options, because most things can be grown in our neck of the woods, but wherever there have been permanent settlements of humans, there have been the means to thrive locally. Of course, that equation has become pretty skewed with the rise of the metropoli—you can’t feed a city of 1,000,000+ on purely organic, locally raised food (not under our current structure, anyway)—but the general principle is sound.

But why, you wonder to yourself, would I want to eat locally in the first place—what’s the point? Well, there are a few of them.

- Locally grown food is more nutritious. It’s not that organic produce has a bigger selection of vitamins or nutrients than vegetables grown on industrial farms, but local produce is generally picked much closer to its sale date than the stuff in your supermarket. Since produce accumulates nutrients as it approaches ripeness, it only makes sense that a tomato picked the day before it’s sold will be more nutritious that one that’s picked and shipped when it’s still green.
- Locally grown food is likely to be more ecologically sound. Some small-scale farmers use toxic pesticides and chemically-laden fertilizer, but not all of them do, and if you’re buying from the grower personally, you can ask what their standards and practices are yourself. Plus, on a very basic level, locally grown food is good for the environment because growing things benefits the environment. I hope I don’t have to explain this point.
- Buying local is also good for the economy—your local economy. It will probably cost more to shop that way, yeah, but if and when post-peak oil becomes a reality, food prices will start to go through the roof regardless, and I’d rather pay higher prices and support someone I know on a first-hand basis because I buy from them all the time than funnel my hard-earned food dollars into a faceless corporation’s coffers in exchange for some comparatively bland food.
- Which brings us ’round to the last (and possibly most) compelling reason: locally-grown food tastes better. It does. Seriously. Vegetables are delicious enough to eat steamed with maybe a touch of butter. Dishes in general require very little seasoning due to their nearly overwhelming natural flavours. No, the stuff we’re used to eating in packages isn’t what food is supposed to taste like—it’s a “good enough” approximation of a home-cooked meal. Somewhere along the line, though, we forgot what scratch-cooked food was actually like and accepted the food corporations’ assertions that what they were giving us was the real deal—besides, it was faster and even if it wasn’t excellent it was still, well, good enough. But the thing you have to prepare yourself for is that once you start eating local food, “good enough” isn’t good enough. You may keep eating it, but you’ll likely come to view it as filler in between the meals made with organic veggies and meat.

And what if you’re in a position where you don’t have access to a farmer’s market or its equivalent? The 100 Mile Diet also has buckets of inspiration to go around. Thanks to the non-preachy, non-guilt laden approach, you may find yourself inclined to do some gardening by the time you’re done… or bee-keeping… or cheese-making… or salt-distilling… or, for that matter, any combination of the above. None of these are impossible, and not all of them are necessarily very hard. We (as a culture) had most of the skills it takes to do those things up until 100 years ago or so—we’ve just forgotten them in the meantime. Smith and McKinnon have written a book encouraging us to reacquire them, and I’d encourage you to do the same. Moreover, I encourage you to do it for purely selfish reasons (on your part) but toward an altruistic end. You may or may not contribute to the ultimate salvation of our world by buying local food, but you’ll certainly contribute to the betterment of your diet and palate by doing so. To paraphrase Buckley’s, it tastes awesome and it works.

June 30th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller
Jeff Rubin
(Random House)
ISBN: 978-0-307-35751-9

The premise is simple: there is a finite amount of oil in the world and pretty much everything we consume relies on it. Therefore, as oil supplies dwindle, everything is going to start getting a whole lot more expensive.

Your groceries? Shipped from California and New Zealand. Your consumer electronics goods? Shipped from China and Asia. And the shipping boats and cargo planes they come over on use a cubic assload of fuel. Jeff Rubin’s prediction is that as the cost of fuel rises, the cost of shipping those goods will also rise to the point where it is simply more cost-effective to make them domestically.

But while he asserts that industry will start to come home, that’s not as small as he thinks your world is going to get. The most obvious side effect of expensive oil is expensive gas. Driving will start to become untenable; plane flights almost unthinkable. We, as a world, will return in many regards to the situation over 100 years ago when most people stuck close to home. Vacations were had in your own province or state and not in a different hemisphere. We aren’t going to reach a point where the gas runs out and we turn to a Road Warrior-esque standard of living (not in our lifetimes, anyway, all you Lord Humunguses-in-training), but our lives will be less luxurious and more spare.

And if that were the only thing Rubin had to say on the matter, he probably could have condensed it into a long-ish essay without too much of a problem, but he has also taken pains to explain everything in depth and make connections to things that you may not have automatically assumed were associated with the problem of peak oil, i.e. that the underlying cause for the financial crash last year wasn’t subprime mortgages, but in fact oil prices. And that leads to the double-edged sword of going in-depth on financial issues. Rubin needs to do it, because various fiduciary concepts are central to his arguments, but in doing so he creates sections of the book that are bone dry. I’m interested in what he has to say—deeply interested—but you just cannot make talk about inflation gripping. To his credit, he tries, and he has crafted an otherwise very readable book, but in order to get across various ideas connected with the forces at play he needed to explain some economic concepts which do not make for a breezy read. They’re not impenetrable, but they do require extra effort to assimilate and often bring the pace of the book to a screeching halt.

The other problem with talking about economic concepts is that it’s hard to objectively evaluate what he’s saying. “Oil caused the financial crash last year,” he proclaims. “Here’s why!” And what he says sounds right, but since I have no background in economics I can’t actually assess it with any degree of confidence. Still, his background in economic journalism makes for a more even-keeled book and its tone is much more grounded and practical and less hysterical than many of the other “surviving peak oil” books on the market these days.

Economics aside, though, most of his basic arguments are basically unassailable, like:

- “The key to downsizing the role of oil in our economy is micro decisions made every day by households and consumers, not macro decisions made at the level of monetary or fiscal policy.” (Because while fiscal policy is incredibly important, none of the decisions made at the top is going to have lasting significance if we keep consuming goods and energy at the same rate we always have.)
- “Figuring out how to get the most out of what we have at our disposal is going to be the key to adapting to a smaller world, and that applies to assets like infrastructure and trained workforces more than anything else.” (Which will come into play as we switch to a more locally-produced economy and our former-barista friends and neighbours figure out what other skills they have to contribute to it.)

One of the main arguments in the book—not explicitly delineated, but made plain in the subtext—is that we can choose now to reduce our energy consumption and move toward a local-based economy as individuals or we can have the decision made forcibly for us at some point down the road when it’s much less convenient. Nothing we do is going to make moving into a post-peak oil world entirely painless, but shifting toward a sustainable lifestyle now will make your life—maybe all of our lives—easier in the future.