Waste is a Spiritual Matter

A conversation about ethanol recently took a surprisingly emotional turn. My friend, from a large Asian country never far from food emergencies, told me how wrong it feels to him when Americans waste food, or play with it, or in the case at hand, drive it.

This was refreshing even as it was urgent. Because food is life. It should be felt, not just consumed. In fact, there's something deeply human about strong feelings about wasted food.

Meanwhile, the New Republic's Vine - their environmental blog - takes a look at wasted food. As it turns out, roughly 50% of the food we humans produce gets wasted. In poor countries it's market inefficiencies (food rotting in the fields etc.); in rich countries it's too much market efficiency (Food is so cheap that we buy more than we can use and throw it away.

Vicarious Vicariosity

My beloved FC Basel qualified for the UEFA Champions League this week. Today they were matched for the group phase against FC Barcelona, Sporting Lisbon, and Shakhtar Donetsk of Ukraine.

I've followed Basel since the 1980's, when I lived there. Back then, the team was in the Swiss division 2, so I can claim to have followed them since they were really bad.

Here is the Question: what does it mean to follow a team vicariously like this? I mean, I live in another country, never watch their games, and know no other fans.

Photo Credit: Flickr User keepthebyte

Manufactured Landscapes

My iPod doesn't actually come from a copper mine in Arizona. It comes from China. And when it eventually gets destroyed, a lot of it will go back to China a scrap and possibly as toxic waste.

Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary I saw recently, on DVD from the library. It's really stirring in its silent depiction of the industrial landscape of the workshop to the world, China.

Here's the trailer. I really recommend it.

Where My iPod Comes From

It is sometimes difficult, in our globalized economy, to conceptualize the connectedness of our consumer products. If, for instance, our bread contains foodstuffs from a half-dozen states and three or four countries, we can be excused ignorance of truly complicated items like computers.

It was a little sobering to recently visit an enormous copper mine in Arizona. (Copper, of course, is needed for circuitry.) It's kind of hard to represent just how enormous this production was, so here are two attempts.

First, a few pictures. The first two are satelite images, screen shots from Google; the third I took from the blue shed in the background of the tire picture above:

Now, here's a panorama with my pathetic camera:

They extract miniscule amounts of copper from all this rock a few grams to the ton, I believe. So mines have to be this big to even stay in business, even at today's sky-high prices. It's the only business model that works.

I'm trying to grow beyond knee-jerk opposition to mining. We oughtn't judge mining in the Sonoran Desert under the same criteria as mining in Armenian forests, for instance.

Reclaiming Friendship

Andy Crouch has a new essay on culture-making.com about online social networks (scroll to August 18, because I can't find a way to link to individual articles).

[Courtesy of Andy's comment: here's the link. Thanks, Andy!]

Looking at Twitter in particular, he points out that there is a limit to interpersonal relationships people can handle: somewhere around 150. Beyond that, as he says, "our little brains get overloaded. But online social networks are not just relational tools; they're also tools for "broadcasting".

It may well be that many of the most powerful media of the next generation will have this hybrid quality—keeping us connected, in some thin but real sense, to our "real" friends, but also allowing us access to the thoughts of folks like Barack Obama. And the second group, the "broadcasters," will likely be the drivers of whatever business model eventually makes these networks sustainable.

True enough. But it's important to add one detail, important from the perspective of humanness: online friends are not identical to real friends. The difference lies in love.

Dr. Venn can help us here:



In this model, set A represents people to whom I am bound by love (broadly conceived); set B represents people to whom I am bound by online social networks. The intersect are those people I know online, and whom I love.

This is an idealized, of course: love resists facile quantification, so it's hard to know where real loyalties lie. One test, of course, is the sickness test: who will come for a visit weeks and months into a sickness? Survivors of such illnesses often testify of surprise about who came and who didn't.

The other source of the confusion is cultural, not technological: as a culture of individualists, we really have no handle on loyal friendship. We are lonely, we don't know how to have friends, and we don't know how to be friends.

So when Myspace et al. use the human word friend to denote a morally neutral technological relationship, our confusion only grows. Adolescents, of course, who are in the process of that most traumatic of splits--away from parents--are doubly confused here.

Then there is the cross-cultural. Americans as a rule are far more prepared to use the word friend than people of more communal cultures. I have, for instance, found old Swiss classmates of mine on Facebook, people with whom I spent years in the same room. But I wouldn't dare add them as friends, because they weren't friends, in the Swiss sense: they weren't people who'd cross the world to be by my deathbed, or visa-versa. And so they remain unconnected to my Facebook account.

But since we live in a hybrid culture, and since Facebook and Myspace remain thoroughly American, I am also friends with people I don't even know, or in the case of Johnny Cash's Myspace account, people who are dead. (I share the latter relationship with 302,000 people, around the population of Pittsburgh.)

Culture-Makers, to use Andy Crouch's term, have low-hanging fruit here: Friendship, real friendship, is a lost art, but one which has strong support in scripture and church tradition. Culture-Makers concerned about the individualism in American culture could do worse than look at Reclaiming Friendship, to steal the title of Ajith Fernando's out-of-print, pre-Myspace gem.

Sense of a Place that Never Really Was

I’m not big on graphic novels, because the stories too often play second-fiddle to less-than-compelling artwork. Sometimes I read about such and such a story being “deep” or “sweeping” and I end up feeling like I’ve eaten unseasoned soup.

This is one of the wonderful exceptions. White Rapids, by Pascal Blanchet. It's the story of a company town in remote northern Quebec, built around a hydro-electric dam. The company provided amenities resembling mid-century North American middle-class life, in exchange for the hardship of living in utter isolation [map] with a few hundred other employees and families.

It's a short book, with fanciful art deco drawings conveying a Utopian nostalgia, something I normally find quite off-putting. But the Never-Never-Land effect works here, in part because it feels like outlandish propaganda by a loaded and megalomaniac company, one willing to impose an impossible town on an unforgiving landscape, at great expense, for the even greater profits that would follow.

In light of that history, Utopianism is the only possible design choice, like Las Vegas in the desert.

Here's the artist's website.

Not all racial boorishness is racism.

Racism is alive and dangerous, from genocide on down to exclusion. It's an issue of the heart, and needs to be dealt with as such.

That's why I'm not all that upset about the Spanish basketball team's "slant-eye" photo-op. Making fun of somebody's facial features is just provincial. It's something that's funny when you're a child, and is no longer interesting when you grow up.

But when we use words like racist where stupid would suffice, we risk dilluting the importance of addressing racism.

Consider this, from Feyenoord (Rotterdam, Netherlands) fans, chanting against Ajax of Amsterdam (a team associated with Jews, albeit with no Jews on the roster:

Hamas, Hamas, the Jews into the Gas

It's around 0:25 of this clip. the Dutch is "hamas, hamas, joden aan het gas":



Comments below the clip (in Dutch) argue the finer point that they hate Ajax Jews (the largely gentile fans), not Jews in general.

Ian Buruma attended one of these matches while writing Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerence:

"F__ing Jews!" [Feyenoord fans] went again every time an Ajax player touched the ball, even if he was a black Surinamese. "Cancer Jew!" they shouted when the blond referee from the northern province of Friesland whistled for a Feyenoord foul.

And then I heard it for the first time, a sinister hissing sound from hundreds, maybe thousands, of beer-flecked mouths. I didn't know what it meant, until [Buruma's friend] Hans explained it. The sound got louder: the sound of escaping gas.

In Budapest soccer stadiums, players of a side owned by a Jewish businessman were greeted by rival supporters shouting: "The trains to Auschwitz are ready!" In the Olympic Stadium of Amsterdam, the fans were a touch more inventive.

In light of such creepy populist passion, it seems trite to accuse the Spaniards of racism. Racism is deadly, and shouldn't by dilluted by association with stupidity.

One Week's Haul

One Week's Haul
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant

Becca and I have been members of a local CSA for several years, and this summer's been one of the best.

Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), for newcomers, is simply pre-buying membership in a farm's produce, in exchange for weekly baskets during the growing season.

Basically, you buy into the risks and bounty of a given farmer's year, and you commit to a relationship with that producer.

CSAs put the eater and the grower in close contact. We have to speak to one another on a weekly basis, something that rarely occurs at the supermarket. The system also helps the local economy in big ways and small: together we're helping our region, our county, become a little closer to agriculturally self-sufficient.

If, as Homeland Security is always saying, our national food supply is at risk for bio-terror attack, the best solution is to diversify the supply.

Meanwhile, there's an added benefit to a CSA: the food is way fresher, and tastier. So, for example: this week we got okra, chiles, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, apples, peppers, onions, and a melon.

The produce is seasonal, of course. Earlier it was lettuce, garlic and strawberries; later it'll be acorn squash, potatoes and the like.

This is significant. Eating is, as Wendell Berry put it, an agricultural act. It is profoundly humbling to understand just how connected we are to the work of growing food in fields.

In the abstraction of our daily lives from the real world of gaining our life from the dirt, we are impoverished where we needn't be, and in the ease with which we fill our bellies, courtesy of our convenience culture, we are robbed of the very humility that can help us retain our sense of human finiteness.

To visit, then, with Mr. Pierce, as he asks about my baby, while packing my food--this brings about way more than entertainment and tasty tomatoes. It is goodness (broadly conceived).

Segregation as euphemism

Segregation simply means keeping things apart. But a word so burdened with history means nothing simply.

Segregation (along with its South African cousin apartheid) has a long track record as a prescription (not just a de-scription) for racial life in America: black and white were to be kept apart by force of the law.

But a thought has crossed my mind in recent days: segregation is a euphemism. That is, it's a delicate way of saying something far worse.

Segregation is a euphemism for isolation. Keeping people apart was not really the goal; after all, even in Bull Connor's country black and white were in constant contact. Somebody needed to cook and do laundry and change diapers, after all.

No, it was never about keeping people separate. It was always about keeping people in their place.

And while segregationists were able to distort scripture to justify their purposes (i.e. don't marry Canaanites), isolation can't be justified with scripture.

Isolation gets uglier the more you look at it. It's dehumanizing, degrading and destructive.

That's why segregation is shameful. That's why isolationists needed to hide behind the euphemism of segregation.

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[photo credit: sxc.hu user pixelstar

I'm reading about headscarves

I'm now reading a terrific book called Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Religion, the State, and Public Space.

This is by American anthropologist John Bowen, who was living in France for a few years while the French were debating (and passing) a law banning Muslim headscarves in the public schools.

Far more than a political story, Bowen explains the French political/social worldview, which proves incredibly useful. I've been following this story for years, and having it explained in worldview terms helps immensely.

For instance: Bowen notes that the French tend to view social freedoms as coming from, and being guaranteed by, the state. Any weakening of the state will ultimately threaten human rights.

Since Muslims believe that Islam contains ultimate truth, most believe their religion needs to be lived out in all areas of life, not just in private.

But the French tend to view publicly assertive religion in terms of their lengthy struggle with the Catholic Church. For a century after the revolution, the Church insisted on "integrism", or the Church's dominance in all of life.

The French state prevailed by the creation of laïcité, usually translated as secularism. All public life is to be secular, according to this line of thought, because only a secular public space can guarantee freedom of thought and conscience.

When a Muslim girl wears a scarf--a veil as it's called--in school, the guardians of laïcité feel this is an assertion of Islam's superiority over the secular space.

Wisconsin Citrus

Despite its harsh winters, Madison (and the surrounding Dane County) is one of the United States' food capitals. Between year-round farmers markets, seasonal ones in almost every town, dozens of community gardens, abundant Community Supported Agriculture offerings, farmer-owned cooperatives, and an environment teeming with fish, turkeys, and other cuddly edibles, this is one of the country's regions best prepared to survive a national disruption in commodity food supply.

But some foods simply can't be grown here. Like Lemons, and Coffee. It's too cool in the summer and the season is too short.

So what's a place-conscious person to do? Find stand-ins, of course. This summer I've been making "lemonade" from sumac berries—something I'd never done before, and which frankly always sounds just a little too granola for me. But it's cheap (free), and fun, so why not? And it's good. Sort of citrus-y tart, and beautifully red.

Meanwhile, the Isthmus (a local paper) is profiling a berry farmer who's experimenting with seaberries as a legit substitute for oranges.

[Farmer] Secher is thinking big. He's not looking to create niche products, but a new fruit market "we can mainstream regionally—one that's sustainable environmentally, economically and socially." He dreams of regional processing and marketing and the infrastructure to make it happen.

This isn't necessarily starry-eyed thinking. Kiwifruit, for example, was a niche crop, closely associated with New Zealand (but native to China) until the mid-twentieth century, before it gained institutional support from big bad USDA. The USDA is now looking at Lingonberries and others.

Ecologically speaking, we should put a lot more work into feeding ourselves at a local level. There are countless foods we could be eating—far more than the twenty or thirty in the supermarket rotation. Most are either too widespread to be marketable (Dandelions, for example, make great salad), or too fragile to be industrially processed or transportable on a national basis (Paw-Paws, for example).

Introducing ...

His name is Silas.

Boomers Approaching, Hat in Hand

A new study shows what any fool could have told us: the majority of the Baby Boomer generation will outlive their savings.

In other words, we their children and grandchildren will have to pay for them.

The Baby Boomers, long ago nicknamed the "Me Generation," the people who brought us Woodstock and Yuppies, are now eligible for AARP membership. Millions of them are woefully unprepared for the challenge of old age.

Somebody will have to care for them, and that somebody will be whoever's in their prime productive years. In fact, loving elderly Boomers may well be the main thing we do with our next forty years. It will be an awesome responsibility, and an opportunity, too: we have before us the chance to reshape the history of generational relationships.

Adults throughout history have taken care of their parents and children simultaneously. What sets our generation apart is that we will have more old people than children to care for. Taking care of the Baby Boomers will be the greatest moral challenge our generation faces—how we do it will be the measure of our character.

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Photo Credit: Winnebago Industries