Just can’t stand to see someone else happy, ya know?
I have some pretty solid ideas about fossil fuels and American foodways (or lack thereof). I’m not presuming to have written or even read the definitive book, backed up with pages and pages of citations and footnotes from solid scientific research, on global warming– cause there ain’t one.
All those things are both independent and intertwined. I can speak about any or all three, and have made some decisions based on what I have gleaned that I am pretty pleased with. I’m not claiming I completely understand causation and have solutions. I sure as hell can’t predict the future and don’t trust anyone who says they can. I’m not even beating anyone else over the head with it, unless you call urging people to learn more beating someone else over the head with it.
I am, however, tickled to be thinking these things through and doing my own small part based on what I know or believe. What the hell is wrong with that?
Fossil fuels are bad on their own merits, independent of whether their emissions cause global warming. Current American agricultural, nutritional, and culinary (if you can call it that) standards are dangerous. It’s as simple as that. And it is because it is completely overrun by nationwide agribusiness.
Buying local food in season is good because it keeps money in our community and reduces emissions and reduces the slaughtering or storage or transportation or agricultural practices needed to get people what they want when they want it regardless of season or quality. And most importantly, it increases nutrition and drastically reduces incidence of foodborne illness from mild intestinal discomfort to e coli to brain eating bacteria that will kill you quick (Just take a look at Fast Food Nation, please, for me?).
And it is just not good for us to be completely divorced from the reality which produces our food. But it *is* good for us, especially for our children, to see and reap the rewards from the processes that grow nourishing, ethically and naturally produced foods. It is good for our children to understand the natural principles at work, and it is good for our children’s bodies to eat the products of local produce unadulterated by the chemicals and untainted by the environmental damage necessary for huge scale single-crop farming and transport across the nation and around the globe.
Fossil fuels produce useful but poisonous plastic and petrochemical byproducts that are omnipresent in our lives, from baby bottles to personal care products. They are becoming increasingly expensive, and increasingly require either kissing ass in tense relationships with unstable nations or invasion of badly needed wildlife habitat in our own nation. The chemicals they release into our air when burned are clearly linked in real live reproducible scientific studies to ills from cancer to miscarriage. It’s not rocket science, and it is not activism either.
And climate change is happening, regardless of the cause– it’s natural, and it’s unpredictable, and whether we are accelerating it or not is not nearly the issue that both simple preparedness and generalized concern about food and water supply for ALL HUMAN BEINGS and pollution should be.
I was talking to someone about Animal Vegetable Miracle and asking if he’d read it with me, and come to a discussion about it. I’m so tickled with that book, and I thought the guy would be too–he was the one who got all gung ho about our raised bed gardening, after all.
He said, I meant to forward you this link that questions whether global warming is even really a threat, and even if it is, it’s probably natural and trying to fix our climate to maintain our current lifestyle seems arrogant and fruitless. Fossil fuel and agricultural emissions are actually just a drop in the bucket. Etc. Etc. Etc.
That’s not even something I’m arguing. If we’re talking about climate change, why not just glean as many solid facts as possible from as many sources as possible, assess for yourself the risks and realities, and make your choices? I’ve been in that process for a while now, myself. I’m well aware that we don’t know far more than we know. But if we’re talking about our current lifestyle, yeah we’re doing just fine, rolling along, here in the USA. But what about their current lifestyle in famine stricken Africa? Or possible consequences, whatever those might be, of our current lifestyle? Let’s not do anything to alleviate those either.
I was treated to yet another sermon about how activists will cobble together a point of view (or latch blindly onto someone else’s point of view) and then go in search of facts to prove it. I pointed out, yes, as those who oppose the activists’ point of view will, simply because they dislike activists,
go in search of facts that disprove the activists’ point of view. Everybody does it. I feel like you’re attacking my viewpoint when you don’t even know my viewpoint, on the basis that it is ‘activist’. Did you even read my most recent article? No.
If wanting better nutrition for my family, enjoying the satisfaction of at least attempting to garden and produce food and create green space and habitat for living things, and along the way to having a great time trying out new recipes and ways of cooking and shopping and at the same time hoping to do something better for the environment is activism– call me a fucking activist. Jeez. And go find you some facts to prove what I am saying/thinking is wrong and what I am doing does not even matter anyway. Go ahead. If your facts hold up, I’ll adjust my worldview. If my facts hold up, you’ll just be pissed off and breeze on by.
I got a similar feeling to the feeling I had when someone said ‘Why do you have to take on all the racial and gender prejudice in the world, anyway? Why are you so rabid?’ It makes me feel pretty lonely in my supposedly intimate relationship, and because this person has been pretty rabid in publicising the very poor at best and in reality very dangerous careerist and profit-motivated pseudoscience that is our HIV-AIDS paradigm (something I took great interest in and informed myself about instead of asking him why he had to take on the danger posed to the entire world by the Pharmaco-AIDS industry on singlehandedly and rabidly) it’s also a pretty stupid thing to say.
Or like I felt when I presumed to ask that we split the work of a particular must-do task 50-50. How dare I ask such a thing?
I feel that way sometimes– like someone will find fault with one’s viewpoint just because they want to find fault with one, regardless of any facts one way or the other. I don’t feel like it’s a genuine debate or search for facts– I feel like I’m being blown off simply because I am actually daring to care or like they simply think it’s bullshit because it’s my viewpoint. If one of his coworkers said the same exact thing, he’d be like, damn, you really think so? I’d better look into that.
1. Before you accuse me of being some sort of hysterical activist, read what I actually wrote on the issue, and listen to what I have to say on it. I am actually a pretty balanced person with some pretty balanced views.
And this is the same guy who just bought us five reusable grocery bags. He must be a hysterical activist!!!
2. How about getting some facts on your own instead of putting down those who are already attempting to educate themselves and make some positive changes?
3. Go take your midol. Maybe you can be happy and hopeful too.
