Ed-ja-ma-whuh?

This photograph was taken off the coast of North Berwick, a little seaside town in Scotland that boasts the Scottish Seabird Center which was (apparently) built at the behest of HRH the Prince of Wales. The gannets in this photograph are fairly common. The colony on Bass Rock numbers 120,000, and it only stands to reason that other improbably large colonies are scattered elsewhere on impossibly small rocks in the North Atlantic. So, you might wonder, why the hell did I have to go all the way to Scotland to see them?

One of the long-running themes of the Science-Based Medicine blog (on which I sometimes comment) is the despair at how seemingly intelligent people fall for things like homeopathy (which =/= herbal medicines, and that's a whole 'nuther game entirely) and the Anti-Vaccination Conspiracy. The writers on that blog especially bemoan the influence of idiots like Jenny McCarthy for their refusal to believe that vaccines are safe (barring rare genetic conditions), do not cause autism--and their refusal to shut the f*ck up already.

There's a connection between these two. I promise.

The McCarthy campaign* was fed by the rise in autism cases, an "epidemic", as the fear mongers like to call it. I have no idea how they picked vaccines to blame it on, since it's become apparent that it's genetics--but anyway: the point is that autism is only reliably diagnosed at around age 2, the age that coincides quite happily with the recommended age of administration of the MMR vaccine. For your average parent, who doesn't have access to neuroscience textbooks and Piaget's work, it's a simple cause-and-effect. If enough parents--just one other one will do--have similar experiences, you start to wonder if you've missed something. And if someone fakes research telling you that your experiences have been scientifically validated, well, there you have it! Proof that vaccines cause autism!

Both of these illustrations point to the importance of education through experience. In the first case, until I saw the birds for myself, I was inclined to think that these were rare. The second case demonstrates how even nominally intelligent people allow personal experiences to trump their better judgment (although the truly intelligent know when to back down in the face of irrefutable evidence). It's very hard to unlearn something that has a deep emotional significance (i.e., validation that your whack-job theory was right)--the corollary is, it's very easy to learn something that does.

So my interest in environmentalism arose largely because when I was 7, one of my mother's friends gave me, as a Christmas present, a little suction-cup-on-the-window bird feeder that came with a little book showing all the pretty birds I could see. It may surprise you to know that I never saw anything more interesting than a crow, but for some reason I got hooked on birdwatching. I'm the person who will stand and scan every last Canada goose in a flock in the hopes of seeing something different--something new. And I did, often enough to make me realize that birds were interesting creatures which in turn sparked even more interest in how to keep them around.

This is probably the main reason why most people just don't care about the environment to the extent that Greens do. In the suburbs of carefully tended lawns and decor-only plants, they don't hear the awesome chirping of a thousand frogs (or one massive bullfrog). The artificial environs mean that most of the smaller songbirds have to find homes elsewhere, so "wildlife" means robins and the occasional fight with the raccoon over the garbage. To enjoy the "outdoors", you drive to a park, where the wildest thing you'll encounter is a fairly tame mallard. If this is the sum of your wildlife experience, of course you won't feel it's worth protecting.

It's all very well and good to point to rising lines on graphs, but to paraphrase the Governator, we have to make Green connect with people like Coke and Pepsi have done with their legions of fans, and you cannot make a solid connection with guilt. Nobody ever got addicted to guilt. They get hooked by "cool!"

Next: Behavioral modification

*Isn't it ironic that Joseph McCarthy did the same thing in the 1950s? Coincidence? If Jenny McCarthy (their names both begin with "J"!) can ask us to believe that vaccines cause autism, then surely my indulging in some little fantasy connecting her, the Communist Party, and eventual world takeover by China is harmless. Right?

Taxes, Housing, Global Warming, and a Handbag

Indulge me for a moment: about six months ago I saw the PERFECT handbag in a store (ironically it's not on the website anymore). It was also €140. Definitely not an impulse buy--not that I make many of those. For six months, I dithered--spend the money and get a perfect bag, or just put up with schlepping my L.L. Bean backpack everywhere? Don't get me wrong, I love my L.L. Bean backpack. But there are only so many times you can terrify yourself into thinking that you've forgotten your wallet only to find it sitting smugly in the next pocket, or swear that the pen you just put in has to be there, before you start thinking that there has got to be a better way to manage your stuff.

I finally did get the bag. And like all good purchases, I wish I'd bought it sooner.

I'm not in any position to make any of these types of home changes, but they are all things I'd consider doing. Alas, none of these are as simple as making a draft-catcher or lowering your thermostat before you go to bed every night. Most of these choices for lowering your energy bill require a hefty investment, but if done right, they can dramatically lower utility bills--and for now, they come with tax incentives.

So it might seem like a no-brainer to install a turbine, or get that damn leak in the roof fixed. But let's be honest--it's a lot of money. If you've so far managed to escape the recession, you've probably hunkered down and aren't inclined to spend a ton of money on anything, much less installing a new water heating system. Fair enough, in my mind--it took me six months to decide whether or not to get my bag, so I can understand debating whether to sink the cost of a new car into a heating system.

You'll notice, throughout the slide show, that the cost of the technology is coupled alongside the amount you'll save, usually expressed as a percentage of which bills get slashed. Obviously, this means that in order to break even on a $2000 tax break on a geothermal heating system that costs $8000 to install, you'll have to stay in your home for as long as it takes to run up $6000 in heating bills (if you use heating for six months of the year, and each heating bill is $200--a tad high--that means at least five years).

Obama is currently proposing a similar investment in green tech--his budget proposal includes $59 billions alotted to the development of renewable energy. It's a huge amount of money, but the potential for savings--dramatically cutting back on imported oil (even if most of it does come from Canada), no longer having to buy the lives of coal miners, possibly revitalizing the economy--are equally huge.

Which is great, but at distinct odds with the ultimate goals of the housing plan: to enable (some) homebuyers to stay in their homes. This wouldn't really be an issue if most of the homes that are victim to foreclosures were in well-planned developments, but most of these homes are in that dreaded no-man's land called suburbia. Or worse, ex-urbia (who the hell comes up with these names?). You know what I mean: the types of neighborhoods populated by McMansions, where it's a 10-minute drive to anything, where playgrounds are deserted because kids are sitting on their rapidly-expanding fat asses playing Super Mario on their Wii and thinking they're getting a workout. These are the types of homes which are worthless, and not just because of economic factors that burst the housing bubble. They're worthless for the very same reasons that New York City real estate continues to remain high-priced: functionality. Or, in their case, lack thereof.

What I call "functionality" is best described as a well-planned neighborhood, where everything is conveniently located and where you don't have to drive to get everything. Big Box stores (i.e., Walmart or Costco) require huge parking lots, and thus tend to be far removed from any residential locale, as they're ugly. If they're far removed, then you have to drive to get there. If you're driving, then there's no such thing as a "quick trip" to pick up some milk that results in just milk (something I actually do on a regular basis--milk is heavy when you're on a bike). It becomes a trip that begins in milk and ends with "Well, as long as I'm here, I might as well pick up..." So you end up buying a ton more crap that you probably didn't really need, in order to fill up the trunk of a car that's too big because you don't feel safe traveling down the freeway in anything smaller than an Explorer (oh, remember the days when SUVs were cool?).

In other words, we have a case of schizophrenic goals: one is to save the environment, the second, to save a lifestyle that is one of the most environmentally unfriendly that I can think of. Cars are one of the biggest polluters around (as anybody unlucky enough to be caught sucking tailpipe can attest to) and while they may be handy for getting you to and from that big box store, they are one of the major reasons why the US hasn't gotten around to slashing CO2 emissions to where they need to be.

And where do they need to be? That depends on who you ask. I don't think we'll ever get around to pre-Industrial age levels, nor do I particularly cherish the idea of living in the eighteenth century. But it's safe to say that we'll need extraordinary measures to keep CO2 levels below critical. As the world's population grows, as developing countries move from the present participle to the past tense, their power needs will grow, too. So while we might very well be able to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% by cutting back, that's not going to do a whole lot compared to a 40% increase by those who've just discovered the joys of the Tata Nano. ("Fuel efficiency" is one of those insidious phrases that make you feel good while continuing to contribute to a problem that wouldn't exist if you didn't buy the damn car to begin with, and if you're buying a car that small you might as well ride a bike)

We can't get somewhere without figuring out where we want to go, first. Obama made his presidency on the promise of being able to make those hard choices--let's see if he can.

Y'know? Part 3 of a series on Energy

Supporting organic farming is great--or is it?

The core problem with organic farming is that its yields are lower. I've seen numbers run the gamut from a mere 20% to 50% and sometimes more, depending on where the study was done and which crop was assessed, but the fact remains that, in order to produce the same amount of food as conventional methods of farming, you have to plant more food. If you're growing non-GMO foods, you must also contend with the possibility of a crop that's significantly weakened by non-optimal growth conditions (drought, heat, cold).

Growing food takes energy--moving water, machinery, fertilizer, etc. Therefore, organic farming takes more energy, and therefore lies in direct conflict with our earlier premise of using less energy/water.

Aside: I support organic farming, but that's because most of our organic produce comes from a small-scale local farmer. On that scale, the benefits of not poisoning the environment outweigh (at least, I think so) the detriments of additional energy expenditure. But the point of that little rant about organic is not to say that it's bad, but rather to make people realize that it's not all good.

This micro-dilemma illustrates one of the problems with our environmental policy: we don't know what we want. Actually, for the most part, we don't know that we don't know what we want. And that's a problem, because it makes successful policies impossible to implement.

Do you want to save water? Then stop supporting farming in the deserts of California--even if they are organic. Do you want to cut back on the use of fossil fuels? Support a carbon tax, or sign up for more nuclear power stations (and in the meantime increase research funding for better breeder reactors).

You'll notice I don't mention anything like turning off the tap when you're not using it. They help, but not nearly on the scale that shutting down--or starting up--an entire industry would (beef comes to mind). And when it comes to conservation measures, scale matters. One paper cup of coffee doesn't strike anybody as the difference between life and death, but scale that up by a few million, and it's no wonder doomsday conservationists love to point out how we're drowning in our own sh*t.

"Industry" is the scale that the federal government operates on, and so to effectively change policy, that's the scale environmentalists are going to have to start thinking on, too. And there's the rub: on an industrial scale, most of the best environmental policies are the worst PR--heh, it's a good thing Greenpeace doesn't read this blog, advocating nuclear power as the most environmentally sound and all that jazz.

The other stickler is the knowing-that-we-don't-know bit that I discussed earlier. This will present the biggest issues to any serious attempt at changing federal policies for how we want to safeguard our resources. It's easy to say, "Energy independence," but hard to acknowledge that this may mean paving over deserts with solar collectors and actually using Yucca Mountain for the purpose for which the $13 billion project was intended. "Resource conservation" sounds good--until you realize that it means stopping the subsidies being sent to grow millions of dollars' worth of produce in the desert.

Right now we don't know what we want to achieve, so deciding whether any of these sacrifices are worth it is difficult at best, and political suicide at the most probable. Here's hoping that we'll figure that out, and soon.

The End of Days

According to NEWSWEEK, Christianity is declining in America. Depending on where you stand on the spectrum of religiosity (devout believer vs. atheist), and which axis (monotheism vs. polytheism), this could be a great thing or a terrible thing, or a piece of non-news, some bit of fluff that takes up your bandwidth that you don't particularly care for.

I thought I was in the last category. To me, religion has always been a non-issue--I'm a scientist by training, and science and religion, while not mutually incompatible, have their differences, and I'll freely confess my bias towards a rational system of thinking. Religion doesn't interest me (except where it interferes with science), so I tend to ignore it, even though it is apparently very important to a lot of other people.

How important to how many? Well, I don't know, and more to the point, I don't care enough to go Google the answer. The point I'm about to make doesn't need exact numbers:

Could it be that this drop in religiosity is the turning point in people's relationship with the natural world?

Let's not underestimate the importance of this Jewish book in our lives (the Bible's Old Testament is the Jewish Torah, and the New Testament--well, Jesus was a Jew). To this day Creationism's bogeymen are still lobbying to have their "point of view" taught as a science (I don't mind if you teach creationism as literature, philosophy, or as part of a theology course, but it's not a science). The Bible is still being misused as the main point of denying gays the right to marry--nowhere does the Bible actually state that marriage is a union between a man and a woman (and you have to wonder what exactly transpired between Moses and Aaron, Peter and Paul). The Good Book was instrumental in shaping the American West, what with Manifest Destiny driving good Christian soldiers onwards in the wilderness, and the taming of the "savages" and the landscape.

I doubt that we will ever be rid of every Judeo-Christian presence in our lives--and I don't think that's a laudable goal, either. Man needs religion, as a psychological crutch if nothing else, and if you take away the Bible you'll end up with something else. Worse, probably.

The Christian point of view: the world is there for humans to use as they see fit, God granted dominion to Man, animals are dumb beasts that don't have souls. Hardly edifying, if you ask me. Yes, Ecclesiastes asks us to be humble and realize that we are all stardust, but by and large the Christian Bible asks us to see the world as a gift of God--and relieves us of our responsibility to the environment.

Granted, this "responsibility" is a social construct. We don't really have a responsibility to keep the world in shape. God knows, if walruses were the dominant species, we'd have been f*cked a long time ago. As it is, humans are the dominant species (in terms of effects on the planet, I know we are woefully outnumbered by six-legged creepy crawlies), and for better or worse, we are the ones calling the shots about where water goes, what gets built on which land, what trees get cut down, what animals get shot and eaten, what plants get put where, and so on.

There's nothing new about that--we've been modifying our environment for ages. But what's changed is our awareness of how our modifications affect the environment around us, and eventually, us, again. Evidence is mounting against the Christian view that "God made the world so we could use it", and for the view that we are the stewards of our own future.

The optimist in me likes to think that the decline in religion marks a new type of environmentalism, one that has nothing to do with "living in harmony" and all that hooey, but rather one based on the fact that we're all stuck on this floating rock together, and the Big Guy in the Sky isn't going to hand us a shovel when we dig ourselves in over our heads in our own sh*t. Admittedly, a ten-percent decline in the number of self-proclaimed Christians isn't going to make a hoot of difference in the grand scheme of things, but then again, every little bit helps.

Here we go again...

Sometimes I feel like I should title this blog "Everything the Greenies tell you is wrong". Except that, well--I actually do care about the environment. But what bugs me most about many green blogs is that they simply don't make sense.

Today's MSN article about conventional versus soy candles is a case in point: the idea is that burning conventional, paraffin-based candles are more toxic than burning candles made of soy wax. At first glance, this seems plausible--after all, paraffin is derived from petroleum, and we all know how it feels to be stuck behind a diesel truck inhaling the noxious fumes.

But then, ask yourself: what exactly is wax? All waxes are collections of long-chain alkanes and esters, varying only in the details of structure and the lengths of the chains. Soy-based wax, for that matter, doesn't even exist--it has to be manufactured, from soybean oil, using the same hydrogenation process that produces trans-fats.

(And here, I must digress for a moment on the lovely irony that the very people who say that eating trans-fats are terrible for you, would advocate burning them)

In other words, the chemical composition is more or less the same, and if we're talking about combustion, the end products are--wait for it--exactly the same. In other words, you'll get a lungful of chemical smoke no matter what you burn. In other words, if you want to avoid toxins in the air, don't burn stuff.

The only valid point the article makes is that there could be lead in the wick. According to some, 30% of candles have a lead wick (lead in the center of the wick). That would be very bad. But the study that the statement was based on makes no distinction between the usual paraffin candle and the plant-wax based candle. So to assume that all 30% of paraffin candles contain lead wicks, while all plant-wax based candles do not, is still a logical fallacy.

Ex-president Bush was often criticized loudly for ignoring the science and sticking to his agenda, especially on environmental issues. This just goes to show that the knife cuts both ways...

Surprise

After this week's vitriol and/or blasphemy (if you're truly devoted to the Green movement) it may come as a surprise to learn that I am actually entirely for conservation efforts, protecting ecosystems, reducing pollution, and just generally all of the principles behind it.

What I am trying to get at is that true environmental change will not come from swapping your bleach for a "plant-based ethanol" cleanser (just buy a bottle of bottom-shelf vodka--it's probably cheaper and does a better job). It means, above all, using less. You can't toss out what you don't buy, you can't waste what electricity you're not using, and you can't pollute with what you don't have to throw away. The rest, eating less meat, eating less "crap" (anything that comes out of a package) in general, being more aware of what you throw away, reusing what you can, and recycling, are all just icing on the cake.

It also means getting real about the changes you make in your life. We've swapped out most of the cleansers in favor of a homemade concoction. We make our own laundry detergent, and line-dry all of our clothes (well, that's actually because we can't afford a dryer...). The random-crap closet (I'm a rather artistic sort, so I need to keep my stuff somewhere) is organized using old house-paint buckets, scraped clean. Most of the furniture in our apartment was built, or inherited as gifts/cast-offs from relatives. We ride secondhand bikes. And the biggest meat-eaters around are our two cats.

Now, I don't expect everybody to do the same--though if everybody did the carbon emission problem would probably vanish overnight (relatively speaking, a few years in earth-time). But I think it's safe to say that what we do has a greater impact on the planet than the trendy yuppie who buys organic strawberries in the dead of winter and puts them in the trunk of his hybrid SUV. The environmental impact of that guy is more of a mixed bag, because he's got so many factors going both for and against him. Yes, his SUV is a "hybrid" (in that the battery is used to give more power to the engine), so it gets slightly better mileage. And let's not kid ourselves on how much gas it takes to move those organic strawberries from Argentina, either.

The point is, it all comes down to a matter of less--less stuff, fewer complications. Fewer complications, and the easier it will be to move us to a more planet-friendly place. Less really is more, in this case.

Unintended consequesces

This post is about cats.

The first cat is the one in the photograph, hours after I picked her up off the streets of Philadelphia. She is one heck of an unintended consequence of my living there.

The other cat story is "Operation Cat Drop", or WHO screws up big time. In a nutshell, in the 1950s, DDT, seen as the panacea against malaria, was applied everywhere there was a mosquito. The end result was that the WHO had to airlift cats to jungle villages in Borneo.

In retrospect, perhaps the connections should have been obvious. But because life as a whole is so interconected, it is hard to figure out which connections make the difference between plans working out, and plans failing miserably. I don't think, short of developing a time traveler, it will ever be possible to foresee every consequence of the things we do to the environment.

However, what we can do is drop the thinking, as much as we like it, that one single cause is the source of our misery, and one single thing can fix it. Ultimately, we can't know everything, and there will be cases where doing nothing is far worse than doing something, as uninformed as the action may be. But for the majority of non-emergent cases, accruing the knowledge of as many connections as possible will help us make better decisions about how to go about doing what must be done.

The other thing we can do is stop trying to "fix" things. Plans for adding changes to an environment usually go more wrong than letting the environment come back to balance by itself. For example, the forest fires in the western part of the US cause as much damage as they do, because more people live there, and because the US Forestry service once made it a point to put out every single fire, despite that the trees in the West evolved in such a way that they required fire to manage their growth. With their growth running rampant, a lightning strike would be like tossing a match on a pile of tinder.

The environment cannot be "fixed" like a car. If you fix your carbeurator, you don't accidentally ding your boss's car, and dinging your boss's car doesn't give your secretary a flat. Unfortunately, this is much the way biology works--or seems to, until we realize that there are connections between the cars that we just haven't seen yet.

The best we can hope for is to minimize our influence--stop polluting inasmuch as it's possible, quit meddling in the affairs of the forests, cease changing the course of rivers, desist with taking the life on this planet for granted. Conservation is essentially a conservative effort, in that the best thing we can do is as much nothing as possible--we don't cut down forests, we don't pollute. Of course, this isn't possible, as people have to eat, food must be shipped, money must be made, life must be lived. But minimizing our impact on the environment is something we can all make an effort at--and should. After all, who can resist doing nothing?

Delusions of Goodness

One of my favorite scenes is what I call the "Chemical Corridor" down the New Jersey Turnpike. It's captivating in its utter unnaturalness. It jars with every sensibility of mine in terms of aesthetics, stands against everything I believe in (to be addressed on Friday) in terms of natural products and nature, and is just inherently alien. I'd love to photograph it; alas, I've never been in a car standing still long enough to do so.

The Chemical Corridor is where many of the so-called "natural flavorings" are developed. It houses some of the largest companies which manipulate molecules to give you an experience of food which lies in conjunction with your expectations--fries are crispy, cookies are crunchy, chocolate is chocolate-y, and strawberry-flavored anything tastes like strawberries (source: Fast Food Nation). It is the heart of everything synthetic and unnatural.

Which begs the question of what exactly constitutes "natural"? On a molecular level, the vanillin in a vanilla bean and the vanillin extracted from waste wood are EXACTLY the same. The reason why genuine vanilla extract sells at a premium over the vanillin extract? Because it comes from vanilla beans. The example that Schlosser gives in his book concerns almond flavoring--extracted from the pits of peaches and apricots, it has trace amounts of cyanide. Mixing clove oil and amyl acetate, on the other hand, has no cyanide. But the first is a "natural" flavoring, and eagerly consumed, whereas the second ends up in cheap almond-flavored...stuff, for want of a better word.

Another issue with the terms "natural" and "unnatural" has to do with the connotation of purity, wholesomeness, and health. I'm staring at an advertisement for an all-natural body wash (we're going to ignore the fact that deriving some of the ingredients from plants is hardly a natural process) that uses safflower oil as the main cleanser. It has, as a side-by-side comparision, the chemical sodium lauryl sulfate, a chemical that is frequently used in soaps and shampoos. It lists the pros of safflower oil and the cons of SLS, and it's pretty obvious, at first glance, which one is better for you.

After a second glance (this ad really rankled me, and you'll soon see why) it becomes quite obvious that safflower oil is not, in fact, the main cleansing ingredient, as SLS is in conventional soapy products. It is, in fact, merely the agent by which the cleaning agents are carried. And there is nothing to substantiate the claim that someone with sensitive-enough skin wouldn't react to cleansers derived from coconut oil. Lastly, there is nothing to keep you from using the body wash to clean your garage floor, as SLS is. It wouldn't be very cost-effective, but you could, if you wanted to.

Of course, advertisers have to make the product look good--they have to sell a "lifestyle". When you get right down to the molecules, it really doesn't matter where it comes from--you take enough, it'll kill you. Tea tree oil is an effective mold-killer but it's also toxic to cats. I also find it smirk-worthy to note that nobody objects to drinking coffee or smoking cigarettes--the latter pours at least 60 carcinogenic compounds down your lungs. And the greens profess to be irked that the fumes from an occasional bleaching of the toilet bowl are irritating to the lungs....

The point is, "natural" is all in our heads. Sure, cleaning agents might be derived from plants, but does the "privilege" of coming from a plant necessarily make a molecule any more "natural"? The Green Guide recommends using plant-based ethanol as a stain remover--ethanol is ethanol is ethanol is ethanol. It's what gets you drunk; whether it comes from plants or distilling vodka doesn't matter a hoot, the molecular formula is still C2H5OH, and it still works the same way.

Maybe natural products are better for us. But first we have to quit deluding ourselves when we pick up a $5 bottle of all-natural spray cleaner, and realize that what we are paying for is the privilege of knowing that everything in that bottle was somehow derived from plants. It does not mean that the products are necessarily any safer, and it does not mean that the product is necessarily any better for the planet than, say, sodium carbonate (washing soda), which simply dissolves into comparatively simple ions. Let's take a good hard look at what's in the bottle first, before patting ourselves on the back.

The Case Against Organic

Chemicals are everywhere. Since the dawn of time, we've used salt to preserve our meat, and later, saltpeter. Lye (sodium hydroxide) was once used to make soap--if you read the cautionary warnings, suddenly your average shampoo, laden with "chemicals", doesn't sound so bad. We've been making use of opium for five thousand years, and magic mushrooms ever since someone mistakenly added them to his soup.

So when the Greens declare a war on chemicals, what exactly do they mean? Gram for gram, the most deadly poisons are found in living creatures. Take jellyfish, for instance--we all know they sting, and that their stings hurt. But when they start "blooming", when massive numbers float through the oceans in packs, they can do serious ecological damage, on the scale of industrial disasters. I would be hard-pressed to seriously consider a ban on jellyfish, though.

This is not to say that pesticides and herbicides are, by any means, harmless. Organophosphates are NOT fun things to play with. But let's examine what chemicals have allowed us to achieve, and then ask whether we are willing to do without them, before we decide to ban them altogether (I know there is no serious talk about banning the use of pesticides and herbicides, but the most dedicated Greens probably wouldn't mind).

One of the main areas that Green folk like to stump about is organic farming, which is farming without any synthetic herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers. "It tastes better" and "It's healthier" are the usual claims; I've never been able to discern much of a difference. And maybe that has to do with the fact that I don't live in, say, California, so the spinach that was fresh off the organic farm has been sitting in the back of a semi for three days, so that by the time it reaches the store it tastes the same as the conventional spinach, grown closer to home (and therefore has no need to sit in a semi for three days). But regardless, it's hard to be against organic farming, until you think about what it means for your wallet:

Until the advent of modern farming (my definition of it can be found here), farmers were largely at the mercy of drought, plague, flood, hurricanes, earthquakes--anything that upset the growing process could be considered a natural disaster. The weather, alas, is neither predictable nor controllable, and that's doubly true now that global warming is such an issue. The fact that we have such an abundance of food and that it costs so little to the consumer, is testimony to the power these chemicals have that enable us to grow so much food at such low prices (farm subsidies help, too). Giving up chemicals would require giving up cheap food. And if you thought prices were high now...

Chemistry has played a role in EVERY aspect of human life, from the indium in your LCD screen that lets you read this, to the semiconductor that makes up the processor, to the tanning process that gives you a soft leather jacket, to the wine you drink and the clumping agent in the kitty's cat litter. Unless we're willing to go back to the Stone Age (because bronze involves smelting, and therefore charcoal, and therefore cutting down trees), we had damn well better come up with a much clearer definition of what we mean when we say "let's get the chemicals out of our lives".

And before I get reamed for this: I am not trying to say that organic farming is bad for the planet, or that pesticides and herbicides are good. Even I don't believe that. But when you start looking at the bigger picture, things get complicated--what if food is priced beyond the range of the poor? Maybe that's not a big deal in the US, where the deal is "food or gas", but it can be a big deal in poverty-stricken areas of the world, where there is no question--everything must go towards food. I am trying to point out that without a clearer definition of what we mean by "chemicals", the logic ultimately takes us to an illogical conclusion.

Chemicals: morally neutral

The story of penicillin is an interesting one: Alexander Fleming discovered that a mold had contaminated his bacterial culture (legend has it that his lab was so dirty, it wasn't actually a culture). By serendipitous luck, he realized that there was a ring around the mold colonies around which no bacteria grew. Upon filtering the broth, he found that it could kill bacteria, wasn't toxic to mice, and had a broad range of activity, at miniscule doses.

The idea that World War II was the best thing that could have happened to the world has been tossed around by those with a historical bent. It wasn't until the Second World War that, given the success of sulfa drugs, penicillin's possibilities became recognized. By 1943, production was 800 million units of this drug by growing up massive cultures of mold and isolating it from the culture--being able to eliminate infected wounds and pneumonia was probably a powerful morale-booster (source: Napoleon's Buttons).

And then things went wrong. Or rather, they didn't go wrong: life happened. Doctors forgot that bacteria have been around for 3.5 billion years--and if they could survive the PreCambrian Extinction, the KT Collapse, the fall of the dinosaurs, and our nuclear testing, a molecule from a mold that they most likely evolved with over the course of the last 2 billion years would merely baffle them, at best.

Drug resistance to penicillin illustrates the premise that chemicals themselves are morally neutral. They are "good" or "bad" only depending on how we use them. A molecule of DDT has no more of a moral code than a brick. But apply it cautiously, or ruthlessly, and people either praise it, or loathe it depending on what value is at stake.

It therefore makes no sense to malign chemical additives, pesticides, and herbicides because of what they are. But that does not grant free license to contaminate our waterways with mercury and pour sulfuric acid into the air. Just because the molecules are morally neutral does not mean we can afford to be.

And here the problem lies in the fundamental "good" and "bad" of the whole Green movement. Just where do we draw the lines, what are the goals, how can we achieve them in a meaningful way? Any one aspect of the Green movement (fewer pollutants, less greenhouse gas, clean water, clean air, no GMOs, organic foods) ultimately fails to see the big picture, and usually fails to consider the social ramifications of what each one recommends.

For instance, if organic farming were to become the mainstay of food production tomorrow: yields of organic crops are usually lower than conventionally-grown produce (usually about 20-50%, depending on the crop, the farmer, the region, the weather), so an organic farmer would need to produce more in order to get the same amount. He must therefore spend more time tilling his fields with a motorized vehicle, adding more greenhouse gases to the environment than the conventional farmer. Now, of course, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the organic farmer most probably does less harm than the pesticides sprayed by the conventional farmer. But how much more, and if your goal is to reduce greenhouse gases, then the organic farmer loses out.

What the Green movement needs first is to define what it wants to achieve in no uncertain terms. Then it needs to look reality squarely in the eye and accept it for what it is.

And the reality is this: we like our bread soft and unmoldy after a week in our pantry; we like our pet's food in conveniently stored and handled packages. We like that our cars don't rust and our pet don't have fleas, that cleaners work without too much elbow grease and hassle. Chemicals, while they can do a lot of harm, can't be blamed for everything, not when the choices we make concerning them are so selfish when it comes to our own time, energy, and money. These choices lie with us, not with the chemicals.

Environmentalism: chemistry edition

There is no question that environmentalism is important. But there is little consensus as to what it means to be environmentally conscious, what the impacts of our actions are, and where the ethical boundaries lie. There is even less consensus as to a definition of "reasonable lengths" one should go to in order to be "green".

These are big questions--I could probably blog for the rest of my life answering them (giving my version of the answers). However, having learned that it's better to be able to digest what you've chewed off, I've arbitrarily decided to focus on chemistry and environmentalism instead.

I say "arbitrarily" but my decision was based mostly on National Geographic's latest edition of the Green Guide. I love the National Geographic Society--that they can make the public aware of issues in countries like Myanmar (recently Burma) speaks to the immense power of photographs, and the prowess of the photographers they hire. I'll be frank and say that their articles are somewhat lacking for completeness, in that many of them do not cover the topics in the detail that I would like, but that's excusable, because nobody does, and it's a magazine, not a book.

But what irks me the most about the Green Guide is not the incompleteness, the logical fallacies, or their not thinking through the ramifications of their actions (or doing so in such a limited fashion that they fail to see the bigger picture--systems biolgoy, anyone?). It is, rather, that the language used assigns a moral standard for things that are "morally neutral" (a wonderful turn of phrase by J.K. Rowling). They imply that chemicals are bad for the environment, which is most likely true. But they also assume that natural products are good, which is most assuredly NOT the case.

This week I will be expounding on this dichotomy, in the hope that I might get some of you to think about the Green movement differently. I wholeheartedly encourage embracing the Green movement (in part because I no longer have to feel like the only twenty-six year-old in the Western World without a car*). But the messages that some of the groups tout are...not exactly doing the Green movement any favors.

To be discussed this week:

1) Chemicals are morally neutral
2) The extent to which we rely on chemistry
3) Natural as better--or not
4) Unintended consequences of greenery (strictly involving chemicals)
5) What it means to be green, the chemistry edition.

*Yes, that was meant in jest.