Tirade

Ask any enviro what the biggest problem facing the world today and I’d wager the response would be global warming. Sure GCC (global climate change) is tied into water quality, air quality, human warfare, species extinction, soil erosion, natural disasters, resource consumption, ecosystem health, ocean current behavior, drought, famine, economics, politics, greed, suffering, inequality, market valuation, externalizing costs, and corporate risk aversion. But I think that GCC is not the problem, it is the symptom. The problem is how we live and interact with each other and our surroundings. During my time in Thailand I have seen clear tangible examples of balls rolling uphill. These situations are ones where the net result to the world is negative. I’d like to find a way to turn gravity back on.

I have lived in the hill tribes among people who are subsistence farmers. Each family has a rice paddy and several plots of land on which they grow vegetables. The villagers set up a work exchange so that everyone’s rice gets planted, tended to, harvested and stored. Life there depends on making do with what you have. And they make way more than just ‘do.’ In Hoi Manow, the village that has hosted me the most, there is a volleyball court and several bodegas where people can buy eggs and noodles, cookies and soda. The villagers work hard. There is wood to be collected so that there is fire to cook with and there is weaving to be done so that there are clothes to wear. It is easy to look at the village and think about how simple they are. They sit on the floor, their toilets don’t flush, their roads aren’t paved and their food is not refrigerated. But if you get to know them you will see the complexity of their world. They are amazingly resourceful, making so much from so little. Everything in their world has multiple uses and applications. They employ vast amounts of information in how they interact with their surroundings. To decide what to plant on a certain plot they consider the slope, the soil quality, the proximity to the forest, the surrounding flora, the distance to the road and estimated labor requirements. They use different weed assemblages as indicators for soil moisture and worm density. Every villager has to be a craftsperson, a botanist, a cook, an animal breeder, a manual laborer, a lumberjack, a mule, a businessperson and on and on.

I have been thinking a lot about the contrast between the life of a person in the village and the life of a person in New York or Newton or Springfield. In Thailand they have a phrase that, literally translated, means, “Over speak.” It is what they say when you go too far in your speech, when you say something that is bold. I get it a lot. During the last trip to the hills, while Manop was weaving his truck around the rocks and holes in the road, I was asked if I could drive the route. I responded, “I have been here so many times I could do it with my eyes closed.” That statement elicited many cries of, “Ohhhh, you over speak.” But in America the default of our discourse is over speaking. Everyone is trying to be bold, to stand out, to elevate his or her position in life. Think for a moment about the degree to which our government has practiced over speaking in the past 6 years. In America secretaries turn in administrative assistants and garbage men turn into refuse technicians, getting drunk with friends for 2 years becomes an MBA, if you inject rats you’re a lab technician, taping down wires makes you the lead gaffer, walk silly and wear makeup and you’re a model, knock on doors and ask for money and you’re an environmental fundraiser, if you can talk about the postmodern dominant aesthetic paradigm then your canvas painted black is worth $10,000. Most people in the states do one thing and they repeat it day after day. But somehow its value gets inflated. Most people do not adapt, they do not employ creative problem solving, they cannot aggregate a great volume of information from many different sources, and the things they see and touch often have only one purpose, sometimes the only purpose is to been see on the owner. We desire, as individuals to create an impossible world of stasis, stability and consistency. When something breaks in the states you get someone else to deal with it. When you make a mess, you pay someone else to clean it up. We have people to whom we subcontract our childrearing and other major personal responsibilities. As a nation we are trying to buy our way out of our responsibilities as a result of our contribution to global warming. Our government hires consulting firms to sell the idea, based on fabricated science, that growing forests will fix global warming. The government then shops around to find a third world country that will plant trees and sign off on the paperwork that our government designed. This would be fine if you could install a forest where there was not one previously and allow it to grow without interference. But that is not how the situation plays out. Our efforts on paper to fix the problem actually make it worse.

A paper company making hundreds of millions of dollars every year wants to expand. A new paper mill requires a $50million investment and will bring in $2million a year. In order to feed the mill the company needs hundreds of thousands of hectares of land on which it can grow trees. It is able to use connected consulting firms, some of which have been involved in writing government policy both in Thailand and in the West, to get permits from the Thai government to build a tree farm on the pretense that the Thais will be helping to remove carbon from the atmosphere put there by the West. The company then gets its government connections to rate wild native Thai forests inhabited by minority ethnic groups as “degraded.” The company then cuts down hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest that give life to thousands of villagers. A whole ecosystem is gone. The company plants fast growing eucalyptus and contracts the villagers to cultivate the tree farms. The villagers have no food and no water because the forest is gone and eucalyptus cultivation is water intensive. They have to wait 3 to 4 years before they can sell the trees. They bare all the risk of the cultivation. And when the trees go to the mill to be made into paper the effluent from the factory is pumped into the environment untreated; villagers start dying and getting sick by the hundreds. The environment is shit and communities are damaged. On the upside, a company in Japan gets to save $0.62 on a box of paper. Is that a good thing? Are they going to be more, or less likely to recycle, conserve and reuse paper? How many companies are there in the US that have ever printed 100 copies of an important 100 page document only to find one typo, throw it all out and start over. This is the world we live in, this is what we value. In the end, the net effect of the economic benefit from the paper farm is more environmental destruction. We are missing opportunities to live more efficiently. We can reduce our global carbon emissions by one third using only existing energy saving tools and practices. This money we’d save from not buying the energy we’d otherwise use will pay for the change and put money in the globe’s pocket.

You can tell me about the money that is being made from the tree farm. About how the government benefits and the company and the shareholders become more wealthy. I know about trickle down and rising tides floating boats. But you’ll be telling me about people who have cars being able to afford sheepskin seat covers. And seat covers eat resources. Everything you own asks you to own more. Buy a lamp, need a bulb, buy a vase, need a flower, buy a vacation home, and the need list is huge, buy a car, need a gas station, a drill rig, an oil refinery, an international shipping conglomerate, a crew to wash oil off of seals in Alaska, and a pharmaceutical company to develop the drugs to treat the cancer caused by the VOCs that your car pumps into the atmosphere. To say nothing of needing an army of 150,000 to kill 300,000 while failing to bring stability to a region whose two biggest exports are the black gold that is killing the planet and blind hate for you and your family. And if you believe that in the end you are helping those villagers, you need to think about what kind of help they most need. I don’t think they need TV so they can learn about and want cell phones and nice clothes and shampoo that will make their hair shiny. I think they need to see how much they have. How their lifestyles make for strong supportive families and communities and how skilled and knowledgeable they are about working with all that their environment provides. And the biggest need is for us to learn from them. The cultural exchange is going the wrong way. The Dali Lama has written extensively on the difference between the developed and the developing worlds. He says that the pain in the third world, of disease and hunger and the hardship of life is smaller than the pain in the western world. He doesn’t just cite our drug use and suicide, adultery and crime. He describes the persistent emotional and spiritual damage we inflict on ourselves. He writes about the pain of greed, desire, anxiety, competition, secrets, judgment, injustice, deceit and the other numerous plagues of the mind. In Buddhism, Dharma is truth; it is the true actual state of the world. Meditation allows Buddhists to cultivate the ability to see through the artifice in the world. Buddhists seek to appreciate what they have, they learn to live in the moment and they strip away the cache placed on things. They look past the status, they deflate the constructed perspective, and they abandon the artifice. If we could just admit that there is so much wrong, that so much is false, that America and Americans have serious problems, we could move forward.

Have you ever looked at an alcoholic and felt sorry for him or her? You see someone who has squandered the power of choice. Make the wrong decision enough times and you can no longer make any decision; you lose control. America is 5% of the world’s population but it consumes 25% of the world’s resources, including oil. We are oilholics. We sit at the global bar acting like assholes, fat and spilling our drink on the floor. And for what? Does our presence in the world help other countries? Do we even work to fix the problems we have at home? We just keep drinking. Prada and Lexus, plasma and HD, gold plated and diamond encrusted, private bath and master bedroom, product placement and brand recognition, super sized and double wide, laser guided and rocket propelled, genetically engineered and chemically preserved. If we continue to export our way of life all over the world and into the smallest and most isolated parts of it we will live on a dead black planet full of people who are starving, maybe not for food, but for things and money and companionship and closeness. I worry that it is too late for us in the West to learn what is really important, too late for us to see that what the villagers have is so valuable, too late to change how our economy functions, how power networks, how we decide what to value, or how we construct contentment.

We live in a world where the few people who benefit financially are able to game the system so that they can turn happy people and green ecosystems into slaves and places that cause sickness. And neither those affected nor those who object have any power to stop the few people who benefit.

What did those villagers do? The ones who raised the eucalyptus for the paper company. For 10 years they tried to work with the paper company. They borrowed money to farm and they sold the trees. They asked why they were getting sick and they watched more and more tree farms being built. Things got worse. Then they protested. For 15 years thousands of people and hundreds of NGOs worked to stop the eucalyptus farms. People marched and spoke out. They held conferences and wrote reports. They attacked government and company buildings. They burned tree farms and tree nurseries. Letters and newspaper articles were written. The paper companies and the consulting firms said the villagers, NGOs and citizens were being paid to oppose the tree farms by competing paper companies. In 1997 the government changed its policy: no more new eucalyptus farms. Does this story make me hopeful? Yes, it is good for bedtime. But take a step back and look wide. Take it all in, all over the world, every country. I like Canada, but I just found out that even though, to prevent domestic cancer cases, they made using asbestos in any quantity in any building material or manufacturing process illegal in Canada in the 1980s, they still process and package it for export to third world countries. Health officials in India see increasing cases of mesothelioma every year, tens of thousands of people are dying. I thought we had fixed this problem. But someone still has money to make. Look out at the socio-political landscape. It’s a place where logic and reason does not motivate action or change. There are thousands of uphill battles to fight. I think about who is fighting whom, what the issues are, how everything is interconnected, where the control is concentrated and when it all started to go bad. And I feel hopeless.