Reading Response #9

To understand what sustainable development entails at its core, it is useful to look at chapter 8 of James Speth’s Red Sky at Morning. In this chapter, Speth lays out six ways in which the current world of unsustainable environmental degradation can transition towards a sustainable one. Such transitions are aimed at directly addressing the drivers of deterioration, enhancing the prospects of success for environmental agreements, and facilitating environmental governance (152). While sustainable development is not opposed to economic growth as the means to preserve or enhance the quality of life of human populations, it also underscores the insufficiency of growth alone to facilitate the transitions necessary for sustainability. For instance, in the case of freedom of mass poverty, one of the transitions that Speth looks at, economic growth must be complemented with social welfare measures and international aid programs that can ensure the reduction of poor populations that otherwise are compelled to erode resource bases for their subsistence (154-155). A different aspect of the transition towards sustainability also involves the development and employment of environmentally benign technology that can allow reductions in pollution and resource consumption while maintaining expected growth, such as wind electric generation (157-158).

Even though the transition goals that Speth examine might seem implausible at times, local production efforts such as those described by Winona La Duke show that sustainable practices are not only plausible but already being implemented with considerable success. La Duke points out how locally controlled power production produces a shift from the centralization of energy generation to a more democratic mode of production, where increased accountability and control lead to more efficient production of renewable energy (27). That is not to say that there are no challenges, such as the need to guarantee greater access to markets and power lines for wind energy producers (28). Socolow and Pacala’s work in “Stabilization Wedges” also demonstrates how readily available forms of technology can be used to achieve the stabilization of carbon emissions to less than double of preindustrial levels by 2054 through increases in efficiency and conservation, decarbonization of electricity and fuels, and natural sinks (968-971).

One of the options to decarbonizes fuels is the production of biofuels (971), but this option is challenged by some commentators such as Michael Grunwald, who argues that demand for biofuels has increased the demand for corn, driving its prices up, which has caused production of soybeans to decrease and its own prices to go up as more farmers cultivate corn, expanding agricultural areas and displacing cattle pasture, which in its turn has resulted in increased deforestation of the Amazon (42-43). The result of the deforestation is the reduction of the carbon sink capabilities of the Amazon, thus contributing to higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Moreover, Grunwald argues that higher prices for corn affect the poor and hungry of the world through rising food prices, asserting that the amount of corn needed to fill out an ethanol-fueled SUV could feed a person for a year (41). However, Grunwald does not consider that such use of surplus corn might actually be more efficient, and that if the demand for corn for ethanol production did not exist, that corn would simply not be produced as to be available for his hypothetical corn-loving person. He also argues that carbon emissions caused by the use of corn and soy ethanol coupled with the deforestation that its production allegedly causes is equal to double the amount produced by gasoline emissions (43). Again, his analysis is flawed, for he only takes into account fuel burning for gasoline but in the case of ethanol he considers its production process as well. To be fair, he should also consider the associated environmental costs of production and transport of gasoline, which would cause his equation to look significantly different. Nevertheless, there is much sense to his argument, and it should be taken as a sample of the challenges that need to be resolved in order to achieve the goals of sustainable development.

Reading Response #8

Besides from being a highly illuminating and entertaining read, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma poignantly critiques today’s food industry in America. The book points to the connections between the industrial practices of food production with issues of public health and environmental degradation (Pollan, 9). It also looks at different ways in which people within and outside the food industry are attempting to change the dominant paradigms of the system. One of such efforts is represented by the Polyface Farm, a place whose revolutionary approach to farming curiously consists on simply working alongside nature instead of trying to increase production in spite of nature. Nevertheless, such logic is incompatible with the logic of the market. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Pollan’s account of the role of government policy in the development of the current state of industrial food production and the problems that it engenders. Pollan holds the government as well as some powerful firms accountable for the ubiquitous presence of cheap corn in the industrial food chain. However, it is also necessary to consider the actual nature of the economic system that informs such government decisions to understand the real scope of the food problem that Pollan concernedly points to.

Pollan does a fantastic job at presenting the inherent incompatibility between free markets and food production. The core of the issue lies in the inelasticity of demand for food as a result of the limited capacity of the human stomach to hold food at a given time (54). Thus, changes in price have a negligible and after some point null effect on the consumption of food. In spite of this, the government has promoted subsidizing policies to cheapen food, and particularly the basis of food production: corn. This not only hurts farmers, who are locked in a monopsony relation with a single grain elevator to buy their corn and soybeans, but it also has degradation and pollution effects on land and water (52-54). Government subsidy policies make farmers strive to increase their yields as the only way to increase profits, which results in a surplus of corn that must be allocated somewhere in one way or another, such as using it as cattle feed in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. These places in turn cause additional health and environmental problems, like the contamination of air and water with toxic waste and the propagation of antibiotic-resistant pathogens (67).

It is also important to notice that it is not only the government who has shaped the current state of food production based on corn surpluses. Pollan makes mention of companies like Cargill and ADM, who together buy around a third of American corn. These companies, Pollan observes, are intimately involved in the corn industry by selling pesticides and fertilizers, operating elevators, brokering and shipping exports, milling corn, using it as cattle feed, distilling ethanol, and manufacturing high-fructose corn syrup. They also engage in powerful lobbying to maintain the subsidies that keep the industry going (63).

Even though I share Pollan’s indignation about the issues related to the food industry and the overproduction of corn, I must say that it should not be surprising at all. Such a state of affairs is to be expected in the unrestrained capitalism of the quintessentially neoliberal state that is the US. Capitalism will inevitably favor larger farms and efficient modes of production, without considerations for the negative impacts of a diet based on processed corn and much less for things like allowing a chicken “to express its physiological distinctiveness” (132). After all, the nature of capitalism is about accumulation. I am reminded at this point of Aristotle’s claims in his Politics about what constitutes the good life. He categorically rejected accumulation for accumulation’s sake (that is, capitalism) as the basis for the good life. Instead, he advocated a life of necessary subsistence that would allow for contemplation and that would also entail an appreciation for the things due to which man is able to live (such as the animals that he eats). Nevertheless, for as long as we live under a system of obscenely free markets, the good life that some farms like Polyface are trying to reclaim will elude the majority of us and likely the generations that will follow us as well.