Sustainability

A refresher for the interested:

... Since the 1980s, the idea of sustainable human well-being has become increasingly associated with the integration of economic, social and environmental spheres. In 1989, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: "[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” ...

What does this mean for food? At its simplest, that we should feed ourselves today without compromising the ability of future generations to feed themselves, or otherwise meet their basic needs.

As I wrote yesterday, it also seems a very contrary to the basic human instinct to create a better future for one's children to leave future generations with a diminished ability to care for themselves. In political terms, to leave them with a worse standard of living than we now enjoy. It seems worth drawing attention again to Lakoff's point about the dominant corporate perspective:

... Finally, for those in the business world: Corporate interests are constantly putting forth arguments based on cost-benefit analysis. But the very mathematics of cost-benefit analysis is anti-ecological; the equations themselves are destructive of the earth.

The basic math uses subtraction: the benefits minus the costs summed over time indefinitely. Now those "benefits" and "costs" are seen in monetary terms, as if all values involving the future of the earth were monetary.

As any economist knows, future money is worth less than present money. How much less? The equation has a factor that tells you how much: e (2.781828...) to the power minus-d times t, where t is time and d is the discount rate. Now e to a negative power gets very small very fast. Just how fast depends on the exact discount rate (that is, interest rate), but any reasonable one is a disaster. The equation says that, in a fairly short time, any monetary benefits compared to costs will tend to zero. That says there are no long-term benefits to saving the earth! ...

The presumption that future people will be, in essence, infinitely richer than we are and capable of solving any problems we leave behind seems overly optimistic.

In regards, once again to agriculture, industrial agriculture promotes erosion and degradation of the soil. It promotes the rapid drawdown of fossil water and surface water supplies in regions where the overall trend is towards increasing droughts, as well as maintaining soil conditions such that water is more likely to immediately be drained to open waterways. It continues to put chemicals that we haven't evolved to metabolize or excrete into the food chain, where they circulate and bioaccumulate - chemicals and heavy metals whose lifetime burden for an adult human may only markedly decrease in women who breastfeed, as they pass their toxins on to their helpless infants. It's made farming such an unappealing profession that its median age has steadily climbed in the US, depriving us slowly but surely of the human capital needed to maintain a diverse food supply.

In the decades since the industrialization of agriculture, a system of practice relating as much to distribution and purchasing concentration as to means of production, US citizens' health has flatlined, then declined. We are already worse off than our parents, but there are those who want to stick with this disastrous present course and see how it goes. Maybe even more profits can be had by making the next generation sicker than the present.

The best that defenders of industrial agriculture can say is that people aren't always made worse off by it. Oh, only some people get cancer and diabetes from what we're doing. Only some ecosystems are ruined. We can't do any better, they say.

How sorry, unimaginative, uninspired, and morose a perspective.

I'd rather like to think that we could have a future where our food system was an aid to maximum attainable health, for ourselves as well as the habitat we depend on for clean air and water. I like to think that we could preserve our current biodiversity, with all its many beauties and benefits, and still eat well.

I like to think that we're creative and intelligent enough to overcome the obstacles in the way of achieving these goals. We did figure out how to land people on the Moon, build the Internet, map the genome, put up skyscrapers, maintain satellite broadcast and cell phone networks, etc. I think we're up to the challenge.

The industry responsible for Agent Orange and DDT thinks that this is an unserious and irresponsible view. They have shareholders to think of, after all.

(Photo credit: Brooke on Flickr.)