Here’s a pair of articles that I came across independently of each other but share the same theme of smashing some cherished liberal shibboleths (don’t you just love that word?) in favor of thinking about adopting a more realistic and ultimately more thoughtful approach to the issues involved.
First, there’s this July article from Forbes magazine by author James E. McWilliams in which he argues that “locavorianism” is rather misplaced in some of its intent by not adequately taking into account an accurate calculation of the “carbon footprint” involved in the production and transportation of food products. The case can be made, as he makes it with the example of lamb produced in New Zealand, that it’s possible for a food product produced half-way across the globe to be not only more economical, but more environmentally friendly than a similar locally-produced item.
This second Forbes piece from a few weeks later is an interview with McWilliams, who has recently published a book entitled Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly that fleshes out this critique and makes several more about some of the assumptions of locavorianism. As you might imagine, his criticisms have won him very few friends among the proponents of locavorianism, and, as the Forbes interview points out, some of his arguments that favor efforts from agribusinesses like Monsanto and ADM have caused critics to accuse hm of being a shill for those corporations. Here’s a review of his book from a “green design” website called Inhabitat that is actually quite positive about his critiques, which seem to be more about finding a way to real change than the trendy faux change embraced by so many foodies.
Which is a good segue to the next article, from the July/August issue of Orion Magazine, entitled “Forget Shorter Showers”, by activist and author Derrick Jensen. Jensen gets right to the heart of it by decrying the popular slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally” — engaging in your silly feel-goodism bits of trendy “Look at me, I’m saving the Earth by taking shorter showers” activities is tantamount to doing nothing at all. Adding up all the little things people do with the intent of “saving the planet” still does not come close to the real change that could be effected by bringing it to the corporations and the government (in particular, the military), whose deleterious effects on the environment and on human populations vastly outweigh the small-potatoes of consumer impact.
The counter-argument to Jensen’s charge has traditionally been “you can’t fight the power, so I’m doing what I can at my own level”, but his counter-counter-argument is that if we all stopped wasting time recycling cardboard and cutting up six-pack rings to save the dolphins, we could indeed have far more political power than we are currently willing to assume. He argues, very correctly I think, that Americans in particular have been so thoroughly brainwashed by corporate propaganda that not only do we assume we are powerless, we actively deny the ultimate responsibility of industry and government for the root causes of the problems. The list of feel-good bullshit activism is a mile long, but an inch deep in terms of really addressing the problems. Consider the hazy and vaguely inspiring rhetoric about “change” that helped to launch Barack Obama into the White House and the subsequent flurry of do-nothing activities his administration has engaged in while essentially handing over the keys to the financial industry, the insurance industry, and the defense industry, and I think you can see what Jensen is getting at. His answer: cut out the nonsense and let’s get busy with the bigger picture. We are more powerful than we know.
