Sticker Shock on a Mountaintop

Sitting here on my computer, surfing the internet for a jogging stroller while fighting off the global warming induced arctic chill with a gas burning furnace and a hot mug of Costa Rica’s finest bean, it’s pretty difficult to know where I really stand on the subject of energy. Certainly, the current direction leads no place I want to go, but when it comes down to putting my money where my mouth is, what other options am I given? Do I live without the stroller, the internet, the coffee? The only thing I really need is the heat. When it comes down to it, the rest I guess are luxuries.

Most of us would agree that we don’t support mountaintop coal mining practices but few of us could point out the place where the power we consume comes from, let alone source the myriad raw materials that go into each of the products we consume. Proponents claim consumers drive the free market, but this is only partially true; it is those with capital who control capitalism. Subsidies like Appalachia coal shovels alter the shape of the commodity market, obliterating the landscape and destroying natural processes. No part of the system has been left to function unmolested, unregulated. Individuals do not build the houses in which they live; industry does. They are constructed with singular function in mind; that of an efficiency for profit, not shelter. Farmers do not grow food for people; they produce crops for corporations. Consumers have little say in what products appear at market. They simply make their choice from among what is offered, often with price as the only determinate factor, and always without a clear understanding of what truly was their cost.

I have seen of late a number of exposes bent on revealing the actual cost, measured not in dollars but in death, of our having anything we want anytime we want it. Red Gold, The Cove, Food Inc, iLoveMountains.org; they all relate a similar story. Our way of living is killing every other on Earth. After a month of immersion, I am overwhelmed. Faced with this much reality, I want nothing more than to stick my head in the sand, order that stroller for Lil Steve from Wal-Mart, and sip my coffee.

Few if any of us are in a position to step out of line completely. There are very few places left in the world where one can go and practice a purely subsistence based existence, and even fewer of us who are capable. To live in these times is to be a part of this epoch of human history. Whether I want to be or not, I am part of the global community that is the dolphin slaughter in Taiji, that is genetically engineered crops in Iowa, and that is mountaintop coal mining in West Virginia.

What I gathered from all this, after calming my nerves with a cup of airlifted Costa Rican pura vida, is that we are, deliberately as well as inadvertently, asleep at the wheel. How can the practice of selling dolphin meat or producing electricity from coal dust be stopped when I don’t know where the products I consume come from or what it costs to get them here? How can I properly vote with my wallet under such circumstances? Simply put, I can’t, even if I wanted to.

For a year now, Washington has been abuzz with the term transparency. What a godsend that concept would be, if only it were applied universally. Who would buy a new jogging stroller for their Lil Steve if it had “Five mountains, seventeen thousand penguins, and countless generations of brook trout were destroyed in the making of this product” written on the side of the box? A few of us, yes. But not as many as before.

Personally, I don’t want to support mining operations that remove mountaintops in West Virginia or ruins the Bristol Bay salmon run. But I do want that jogging stroller for Little Steve, and I don’t think that those two desires are necessarily at odds. If subsidies were removed from commodities and actual environmental costs of production were assumed by consumers, I believe the free market system would force that capital be moved into cleaner, more efficient processes. The price on that jogging stroller might, and most certainly would, go up, probably a lot. But if that is the actual cost of keeping around a salmon run or mountaintop, things that are of infinitely greater consequence than Lil Steve having a new stroller, I would be happy to pay it. At the very least, I would know that what I got was what I paid for.

The Greenest Lie on Earth

Though it may not have appealed to everyone, 350.org’s International Day of Climate Action garnered plenty of attention, making headlines on front pages of newspapers worldwide and resulting in over 19,000 images on Flickr. That’s quite an impression for such an innocuous number.

For those who don’t know, 350.org is an association of activists who believe 350 parts per million is the highest possible concentration of CO2 that can be present in the atmosphere without adversely affecting life as we know it here on Planet Earth. On Sunday, October 24th, the group held over 5200 events in 181 countries around the globe. Their goal was to heighten awareness about carbon dioxide emission and its possible contribution to greenhouse effect through visual demonstrations involving the number 350.

It seems that ever since the Age of Reason, everything has had to have a number. Though quite useful in terms of ratio, these specific magnitudes are insignificant, because assigning numbers never really changes anything. It wouldn’t matter if I said the speed of light was 299,792,458 meters per second or 7 billion; the qualifying consideration in the matter is that it’s a physical constant in relation to the rest of the universe, and no amount of quantifying is going to alter that fact. If people want to put the upper limit on CO2 at 350 parts per million; I say fine. It doesn’t make a difference whether it’s 350 or 750. The underlying assumption is that there is a physical limitation, a point beyond which any more carbon is simply too much.

Along with the iPhone, carbon is huge right now. Carbon cycle, carbon sequestration, carbon footprint, carbon sink, carbon offset; the terms conjure up concepts at once logical and quixotic. It’s like name dropping; just mentioning carbon instantly elevates a dialogue to a higher level, into a realm both influential and sublime.

I really don’t know how I feel about carbon, but I am quite certain about where I stand on carbon footprints, the evaluation of which is currently all the rage. That the practice is just a mechanism for the continuation of bad behavior is readily apparent from discussions regarding carbon credits and the proliferation of carbon exchanges. It’s a springboard for discrimination and elitism, a way of preserving an untenable lifestyle while maintaining an air of superiority at being “greener than thou”.

John Muir is quoted as having said, “Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe.” A personal favorite of mine, this musing was in the forefront of my mind as I read an abstract of an article by David Owen on Treehugger.com that claimed New Yorkers Are the Most Eco-Friendly People in the US - Without Even Trying.

Though interesting as an introspection, this assertion contains as much rubbish as a New York city garbage barge. In examining their respective carbon footprints, it is plausible that careful manipulation of the calculation’s scope and structure could result in a smaller quantity being assigned to an individual New Yorker household than to an average two car garage commuting ranch dweller in rural or suburban America, but arrival at this product is completely dependent upon process. Measuring the personal energy bill of an individual living in a New York high rise with central heating or the number of gallons of gasoline consumed by a subway riding Manhattanite without considering the carbon footprint of this attendant infrastructure, to say nothing of global environmental ties, is mere subterfuge. It is pure artifice, aimed at substantiating a standard of living while turning a blind eye upon its true price.

Deforestation in Third World and emerging countries is driven by the market pressures of wealthier nations. Clean air and water in America comes at the cost of dirty air and water in China. Beef served in Manhattan steakhouses is grazed in Montana before being shipped cross country to market. The carbon footprint of an average New Yorker is not contained within the city margins. It is imprinted upon the entire globe.

All figures aside, simple facts remain. There is no cleaner way to exist than through a simple agrarian subsistence lifestyle. This is the mode of living advocated in the philosophies of naturalists such as Muir and Thoreau; a human existence based on the stewardship of locality, not the sprawling disassociation of the contemporary American landscape. If each were left to rely strictly on their own means, the State of Vermont would continue to sustain itself, albeit in a much different way, long after Manhattan lay in ruins.

New York is a flower; a beautiful, fragrant flourish created and maintained by the larger organism that supports it. Although extremely efficient, our cities depend completely upon other regions of our country, and the world, for their sustenance. They are as inseparable from the whole as fruit from the vine.

Until the developed world moves away from an economy based on comparative advantage and cheap energy and embraces a system comprised primarily of provincial production architecture founded in basic natural processes performed at a local scale, there will be no hope for a balance between humanity and its global environ. Unfortunately, there is no easier answer, no science and technology that will save us, and no amount of statistical analysis will suffice to change our physical state. We must take ownership of our ecologic inclusion, make claim to the earth that sustains us, and root ourselves in its soil. We cannot push our impact to the periphery and deny the existence of what we cannot see. To survive, we must sacrifice. There must be dirt beneath our fingernails and muck about our feet, and we must accept it as our own. Like any catharsis, there will be growing pains. But I, for one, believe the call to arms that is the environmental movement is really only an expression of our deeper longing for a simpler existence and that we, as a whole, prefer life as a butterfly.

Lost Bearings

In Yakutat, a native man stopped his truck to tell me that, for huskies, the dogs were very well trained. It was a nice thing to hear. Sometimes because they’re not perfect I get fixated on their flaws and forget how wonderful they truly are. When you’re in heaven, I imagine it doesn’t take long before you forget you are there.

Other than that compliment, port call in Yakutat was disappointing; brutally so. As we were entering the bay, I kept checking my cell phone, hoping to see bars. No such luck. I hadn’t spoken to Brandi since Wrangell the night before, and I was feeling low. After Yakutat, we were heading out to sea, across the Gulf of Alaska, and there would be no talking with her until Whittier. I let the dogs off leash and watched them dive head first into snow banks along a lonely road leading God knows where.

When you are busy shaking a selfish fist at the world, it isn’t always easy to keep in mind that you were the one who put yourself in this predicament. There being no cell service in Yakutat is to blame for keeping me from a conversation with Brandi; never mind the twenty five hundred miles I put between us by taking a job in Alaska. Wireless transmission makes much more sense than buried or overhead cable in a tiny isolated outpost like Yakutat. A wireless infrastructure would be cheaper to install and easier to maintain than a traditional wired one. There is no reason why there shouldn’t be cell coverage here.

Necessity is the mother of invention they say. Later, while I sat on the ferry struggling with the mounting sense of estrangement I felt as we sailed away from just about everything I hold dear, I came up with at least half a dozen technological advances that would have allowed me to connect with the world outside. None of them were going to close the distance, but several had the potential to bridge the gap.

A cell phone is simply a low power radio which transmits its signal to tower antennae connected through computerized exchange switchboards to the cabled phone system. Each cell phone has two channels, one that transmits the conversation and a second that communicates with the cellular system. As the cell phone moves away from one tower and closer to another, this second channel informs the cell phone of signal strength and directs it to switch its transmit frequency from the far tower’s weakening signal to that of the closer, stronger tower.

Since the dawn of communications, repeaters have been used to carry messages over long distances. The Great Wall of China was designed so that each guard house would be within sight of another, so that signals could quickly be sent back and forth along the wall. In fire communications, radio repeaters bounce signals from mountaintop to mountaintop, providing contiguous coverage over vast and isolated ranges. Why not apply this concept to phone networks? Cell phone users in the United States number approximately 200 million. Add another channel to those handsets, and that’s a whole lot of repeaters.

If every mobile telephone handset was enabled to repeat signals, transmissions could be piggybacked through multiple handsets over distances much greater than a low power cell phone could ever hope to reach on its own. Cell phones are idle most of the time; software could be developed that detected nearby mobile radios and essentially turned each individual handset into a separate cell. In all but the most unusual circumstances, there would always be a chain of handsets linking an end user to an exchange.

In theory, that basic restructuring could also help me as I bobbed across the Gulf of Alaska aboard M/V Kennicott. Certainly technology exists that would allow the ferry to offer cell phone and wifi connectivity with the mainland via satellite, but a repeater concept could be utilized to turn each marine vessel into its own floating cell. A message could be bounced from craft to craft down a shipping lane rather than being beamed to a satellite or carried on a transoceanic cable. Would the investment in technology and infrastructure be worth it just to allow me to talk to Brandi? If you asked me that day, when I was cut off from my world by endless ocean waves, I definitely would have contributed my share to make it an option.

Personal concerns aside, it simply makes sense. Our entire understanding of economics requires revision if we expect all to enjoy a comparable standard of living. Traditional models for determining the economic viability of infrastructure development simply don’t account for the duality that arises between the local and global marketplace, between short term feasibility and long term practicability. Calculated vision must drive capital investment, not the whims of consumer demand and commodity pricing. A goal must be set; plans lain; and deliberate steps taken. What it is we are attempting to accomplish should be the compass needle guiding development; not whether an endeavor creates a financial profit over a finite time period.

As we approach Whittier, messages from Brandi stack up thankfully on my cell phone. Sharp biting wind roars down off surrounding mountains and drifts snow against a massive structure on the hillside overlooking the port. Institutional in appearance, the concrete and glass construction is acutely reminiscent of Cold War era Soviet architecture.

That was once the biggest building in Alaska, a fellow passenger tells me. Vacant and deserted, it now more closely resembles the Bates Motel. Ghosts of bygone values peer from behind its empty windows. Previously deemed essential, it is now dispensable; a monolith to the fallacy of economics. Indifferent and unfeeling as dinosaur bones, its fossilized remains pay tribute to the high cost of false vision.

Good Luck With That

We don’t have cable or satellite, but in between episodes of The Colbert Report and The Daily Show streamed from ComedyCentral.com on Brandi’s laptop, we have been known to watch the occasional 80s flick from my collection of bargain DVDs. Brandi has a second hand TV she got from a friend, an old tube behemoth that weighs a ton, which has been sitting on the floor in a corner of the living room. We have talked about getting some sort of stand to put it on ever since she moved into the place, but the floor was working out well enough. That is until we got dissed by a six year old.

Our friends Jake & Lisa Pintok were over the other night for pizza and a game of Balderdash. Their young boys Ashton, Zachary, and Andrew came along as well. After a couple rounds of rather imaginative Balderdash answers, Lisa put a video on the television. This was an attempt to distract either the boys or Brandi & I; we’re still not sure which, as it was equally successful with both groups.

Before the video began, Zachary gave us all a concerned look. Since he had eaten most of his pizza and hadn’t injured one of his brothers in a while, everyone was curious as to what might be the problem. When Lisa asked him what was wrong, Zach’s answer was, “Their TV is on the ground.”

Fact was we had wanted to get a stand for the TV from the beginning, but we were trying to be responsible about it. Did we need a stand? Obviously, from Zach’s comment, yes we did. So much for reduce. We looked at all the second hand stores in town and watched craigslist; no luck. Okay, no love for reuse or recycle either. Wal-Mart was looming, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet, even if it meant suffering kinks in our necks from watching our ground bound television all winter.

Myself, I believe one of the central tenets of responsible consumerism and conservation is to obtain as much as possible from local sources. We live in Western Montana and there are trees everywhere. Let’s build a TV stand ourselves, I told Brandi. We spent her lunch hour drafting up some plans and took a Saturday trip to the lumber yard. Sure we could build it, we discovered, but not only did I not have the tools for the job, wood alone would cost us twice what we would pay for a pre-fab TV stand at Wal-Mart.

Now, I’m sorry, but this is too much to bear. I don’t care how you measure it; if you think this is the most economical way of doing business, your math is flawed. There is simply no chance that cutting trees in Canada, making particle board from them, shipping this wood to China, manufacturing a TV stand out of it, and then shipping the TV stand back to Montana is less expensive than it would be to cut trees in the Bitterroot, mill lumber in Darby, truck it to Hamilton, and have me bang together a funky TV stand on my own. Even if the math supported it, which I’m sure it doesn’t, it makes absolutely no sense to do things this way.

We need to change our business model if we are ever going to overcome the hurdles facing this nation and this world, this generation and those to come. The product path I describe above sounds ridiculous, but it is the reality more often than not. Given tax laws, wage disparities, and cheap fuel costs, I’m sure it appears profitable in the short run, but it is not viable over the long term. Not only that, it is irresponsible; economically, environmentally, and socially. It takes advantage of foreign workers, it wastes resources, and it robs from the local community. It may have worked for a time, but that time has passed.

Certainly, we could have lived without the TV stand. I’m not going to argue that point. The best thing we could have done is just ditch the TV altogether, but sometimes it’s good to temper the ideal with reality. Given the TV stand, the point I want to make is that I live in the woods alongside a bunch of loggers and carpenters who are unemployed due to a failing economy, and I can’t even find a TV stand made from local hands out of local lumber. Instead, thanks to poor mathematics and smoke & mirror financial deceptions, it makes more sense that I buy one made in China from Canadian pulp wood.

All I can say is: good luck with that. If you need me, I’ll be watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.