Living the American Green

First of all, full disclaimer that “locowashing” is an awful portmanteau – almost (but not quite) as bad as “he-cession.”

This cracks me up though, it really does. Thanks to the apparent trendiness of bioregional eating, the ad wizards hailing from the four corners of corporate fantasyland have decided that it would be a tremendous idea to “go local” themselves. Unfortunately – there doesn’t appear to be a crystal-clear understanding of what exactly “local” entails…

A few examples, ranging from the mildly bile-inducing to the full-on, gut-bustingly, milk-snortingly hilarious:

The one that started the attention was most likely the Frito-Lay corporation, whose marketing campaign in early 2009 gently nudged attention from the quality of the product itself to the “local people and communities” who grow their potatoes. The logic is sound, I guess, in an infuriating know-it-all 6th-grader kind of way: “Potatoes have to be grown by somebody, don’t they? And those people are growing them somewhere, aren’t they? So the potatoes are local to the place where they’re grown. Right?” My favorite feature of this ad campaign? It would have to be the “Chip Tracker” gadget that let’s you pop in a zip code and learn exactly which ”local community” has painstakingly and lovingly grown your potato chips, hopefully taking long, picturesque siestas and relaxing with big pitchers of iced tea and 2.5 children per farmhouse.  (For the record: mass produced chips are not small-batch delicacies. It’s a neat gimmick to give you the location of where potatoes are sourced, but dollars to donuts the Chip Tracker kicks out the closest farm to your zip code without telling you anything about how millions of bags of chips are actually shipped and stored around the country.)

But it’s not just Frito-Lay. Far from it. 

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Nausea. Rising. Mixed strangely with…optimism?

Let me back up. Since last week, delegates from all over the US Episcopal Church have been meeting in Anaheim for General Convention – the triennial conference where missions, visions, and directions are discussed, cans of worms are opened, and inevitably, a bishop or two feels the need to secede from the church. 

If you haven’t been following the the bloggings and twitters and myface updates of the popeosphere, there is a shitstorm of epic proportions underway in the Anglican Communion, ostensibly about same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBT clergy, but once you dig into the skin of the thing it goes much, much deeper. All the way into the nerve endings of our modern terror that we can’t take any our sacred assurances so much for granted anymore – and the resulting doubling-down on those assurances and rage against any suggestion of the sort.

I promise this relates to the environment. Bear with me.

So in 2003 the Episcopal church appointed one Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, to be Bishop of New Hampshire, and the levees burst. About a third of the worldwide Anglican family was ready to boot the American apostates out on our ears, several Episcopal dioceses in the US ran willy-nilly in the other direction from the nasty gay bishop and some signed up as missionary outposts of the Nigerian church. Meanwhile, the Episcopal leadership was praised as prophetic and progressive by those who are personally or professionally invested in modern Christianity being able to coexist with respectful listening, theological humility, and human rights.

To temporarily stave off schism, though, a moratorium on queer ordination was passed in 2006, which meant facepalms heard around the world from those who had hoped for a new chapter in Christian treatments of the body and sexuality. Then the dioceses who had been stomping their feet about Bishop Robinson broke away anyway, and the 2009 General Convention had the healthy majority necessary to repeal the moratorium. And now the consensus appears to be that the Episcopal church has 1) become a standard-bearer for religious progressivism and 2) put a nail into its own coffin as a part of the Anglican communion and set ecumenical relations back about two decades.

About par for the course in an Anglican synod.

I could write about this for hours from all different angles, but I’ll meander my way to where the environment comes in.

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Oh children. We’ve been flying by the seat of our pants around here with business, campaigning, and general tomfoolery, which I hope explains why we haven’t posted anything in a week and probably will be a bit thin on the ground for a while longer. But in a spirit of reconciling our sorry selves with you, dear reader, here are a couple news articles that one could read in any variety of ways – anything from elation to jelly-booted terror.

Fast-Food School Vicinity Ban: Prudent or Tantalizing?

So New York City councilmember Eric Gioia is trying to get a bill passed in the city that would prohibit the opening of new fast food establishments within 0.1 miles of a school. Now, granted that’s only two blocks in New York speak, which is no great preventative measure if you ask me, but there’s a bigger question at hand. I support in theory any acknowledgment by the city that fast food is a factor of childhood unhealthiness and unknown chemical imbalances later in life, and I respect the effort. But kids that want something are remarkably committed to getting it. Cigarettes, booze, energy drinks, you name it – prohibiting it may have the reverse effect of making it even more desirable than it already is. I used to babysit a kid who was incredibly lazy EXCEPT when going dramatically out of his way to acquire something his parents wouldn’t let him have. If enough noise is made out of this bill if it gets passed (and rest assured, the non-issue-obsessed e-media being what it is, noise will be made), expect to see a sharp increase in the amount of fast food consumed by rebellious high-schoolers at lunch.

So what can be done? Either try to keep kids indoors for lunch (which, I know from experience, will produce an epic shit-monsoon that no school wants to deal with), or go ahead and pass the ban and make fast food less convenient and hope to Moses, Mary, and Mohammed that they just don’t find out about it. So, I guess: shhhhhhhhh. Wait. I screwed it up already. Sigh.

This is why you're fat (double cheeseburgers with chicken nuggets for buns).

Monsanto and Your Future, or, “Really, FDA?”

Sing, Muse, of Michael Taylor! Of the Monsanto exec who at any given moment is either employed by the US government in a capacity of regulating the dangerous practices of the agribusiness industry, or (if it’s tuesday, thursday, or sunday), is in the agribusiness industry writing deregulatory proposals to be approved by the FDA. One of the architects of Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (the same one that some studies and European governments have suggested contribute to health irregularities and weirdly early puberty in milk-guzzling kids), he was also one of the FDA authorities who approved that very wonder cocktail under Clinton. 

And now! After another corporate foray, Taylor is back in the FD, back in the FD, back in the FDA. Appointed by Obama’s administration. Cool.

Now, all the environmentalist listserves that grace my email have gone into varying shades of apoplexy over this, demanding immediate censure of anything with two thumbs and a government paycheck. IF there is a silver lining or an alternative spin to this, it is that despite the long history of cronyism and impending mollycoddling of Monsanto and the other three Horseman of the Apocalypse, Taylor has in fact been pretty tough on food sanitation issues and will probably do more to crack down on such dangerous embarrassments as the peanut-contamination fracas earlier this year. I guess he’s of the “tough love” school of regulating his buddies, like the coach that wants you to succeed but isn’t afraid to make you run a few extra laps (for the record, that may be the first sports analogy I’ve ever successfully used). But if regulation of dirty agrifactories is achieved mainly by redirecting funds and manpower from the watchdogging of the special-interests science that leads to things like rBGH, as is, well, likely – then we’re no less screwed than we already were.  And I’d really like to be less screwed than we already are.

Michael Taylor. With a mustache.

This is why Nate Silver is Hot.  It sounds like this Energy Bill could get through the Senate — the place reason goes to die and one of the least democratic organizations in the country.

Of course, the concern becomes, as Nate puts it: how much can you hang on the Christmas Tree before it bends and breaks?  It’s a tricky question as to where “breaking” happens.  Many think that it already happened during the House vote, and that the crumpled, broken remains of xmas presents and pine shards are already being swept under the rug.  I choose to look at the metaphor more along the lines of a tree that is severely strained but — because of it’s relationship to the Christmas Spirit — represents goodness and happiness none the less.

I completely and un-apologetically love Tom Perriello. The new freshman Congressman from my spot in Central Virginia is out in front of this Climate Change bill, willing to stake his young reputation on the process of changing the way this country thinks about energy. Any politician who is willing to say: “what’s the worst thing that can happen — I wont get re-elected?” clearly has his head in the right place. Now, we have not yet answered the deeper question of if this is a good bill: I will table that question until we have some concept of what the Senate version of it looks like. Please, Senate. Please make sure that Tom’s vote (and risk) is not in vain.

Regardless: thank you, Tom, for being a leader that Virginia can rally ’round. You, sir, are a hero! Also — can I just say: Virgil Goode is all that is wrong with Politics in VA, and he is already running to regain the seat that he has been sliming on for years.

Scene One. Setting: the conference room of a library. A screen is pulled down as if for a PowerPoint slide presentation. Chairs are lined up in rows. A breakfast spread – fruit, bagels, cream cheeses, tea, coffee – is laid out on a table, stage right.

Enter Everyman, dressed in blue jeans and a gray shirt. He is carrying a bicycle helmet. He walks slowly, but confidently, taking in his surroundings. He is sweating.

Everyman fills a plate for breakfast and listens to the other people in the room.

Attendee 1: So I found that with a small initial cost, I could cover my roof in solar panels. It seems expensive, but if you take advantage of all the subsidies out there you can do it for just a couple thousand bucks. And my electricity bill now? Usually about $16 a month. 

Attendee 2: That sounds amazing…I was thinking about going that direction myself, but I decided on the green roof instead…got rows of soil up there, some mosses and herbs, and I don’t need to use my air conditioner any more! Of course, it’s hard to get away with that in the city…

Attendee 3: It is, yeah, but I’m in this engineering class in college where we’re working with “solar ivy,” which is made from photovoltaic “leaves” that you can string onto the outside walls of buildings like morning glories. It’s still a prototype for now, but it’s the wave of the future…

Everyman takes it all in as he is drinking his coffee. Black, no milk. This may be a symposium on green business, but there’s no guarantee that they avoided the pharmaceutical soup that passes for commercial milk. Wait, this is a stage direction – I probably shouldn’t be editorializing. Shit, the fourth wall’s broken again. 

the wave of the future, according to Attendee 3

Everyman (stepping into the conversation): It sounds like you’re working on some really exciting stuff…I’m interested in what the role of education might be in all this. Do you think these building projects can be replicated on the larger scale of a school, where they can double as laboratory space?

Attendees 1, 2, and 3 examine Everyman. They take in the bicycle helmet, the absence of dairy in his breakfast, and the apparent inter-generational perspective. Judgements are formed, standards and stereotypes spring into action. Turf lines invisibly harden. Nobody wants to rise to the bait, but it’s too late – a full-on game of Green-Cred Poker is underway.

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