Category Archives: Tragedy of the Commons

What does it mean to change the system?

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I’ve spent the last 10 days and nights at protests across Seattle on police brutality in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But the demands of protesters go well beyond policing and criminal justice and stretch into areas of education, jobs, and voting rights.

Demonstrators are constantly speaking in ways similar to how we talk in this class.

“This isn’t about one thing, it’s about changing the entire system,” is a common theme I’ve heard from protesters I’ve talked to in my role as a reporter.

And this idea made me think about how this class is structured not about food in a vacuum, but instead of food as a system that is part of an even larger system. You can change one part of the system, but the change won’t truly be visible and rightful until the system is entirely overhauled.

For example, on the protest side, people are calling for Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to resign, but demonstrators note they will only replace her with someone similar and nothing will change for Black people in this city. This is not systemic change.

Mapping of the food and agriculture system showing its complexity. (Source: https://medium.com/@agwelker1/fixing-our-food-agriculture-system-with-systems-thinking-892893805df9)

And on the food side, one person can stop eating meat or consume more responsibly, but that won’t make a lasting dent in emissions from cattle. This is not systemic change.

Outlawing chokeholds and cutting police funding in half won’t make so much meaningful change for the Black community in changing outcomes. What is needed is economic assistance, educational opportunities, and justice for 400 years of wrongdoing that would start to make up for this country’s wrongs.

And similarly going vegetarian won’t get us substantively closer to a sustainable food system. What is needed is accountability, strict regulation of consumers, and likely a wholesale change in how people around the world consume food to get to the point where our antiquated structures are no longer harming our world.

The point is that true change isn’t as easy as one might think and that’s why it takes so damn long.

Carbons Credits and Food Aid: Why Consumption Solutions Won’t Fix a Broken Production System

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A phenomenon that is currently sweeping through the ‘environmental’ movement, is the concept of carbon credits; paying a variety of different merchants for performing carbon offsets. The most recent of these carbon markets are farmers hoping to sell their ability to sequester carbon in the soil through no till agriculture techniques. This is the idea discussed in, “Is carbon farming a climate boon, or boondoggle?” an article reviewed by one of my classmates (Anuras). This Blog post is in response to their blog post expanding on their critique of the carbon credits movement in general.

 

Anuras brings up a good point when they say, “Further, affluent consumers are drawn to climate friendly solutions such as carbon sequestration but do they … simply commend themselves for doing a good deed.” This statement helped me realize the connections this style of response for carbon sequestration has to the response the U.S. has taken

Developed Economy, Max Gustafson

with surplus grain supplies. Rather than address the problem at its source, the policy and production level, the solution the current system comes up with is to expand the consumer market, taking an overproduction problem and selling the solution back to the public as a consumption problem. They tell us that if we just give enough food away in the form of foreign aid, re-capture just enough carbon, simply consume enough, then we won’t have to change the way we live.

However, like we discussed in class, the people most likely to be impacted by the coming climate change are not those doing most of the consumption or emissions, but those in developing countries, the very same group of people most damaged by the processes of dumping surplus crops as ‘food aid’. We can no longer rely on individualistic solutions like carbon credits that inherently rely on consumption, to solve systemic issues. Our ‘perpetual growth’ economy is being fueled at the detriment of developing nations and climate mitigation. To truly address these institutional issues beyond buying some ‘green’ or ‘fair trade’ products we must come together as active citizens instead of passive consumers. It is up to us: we can either voluntarily change the way we live now or let climate change choose for us at a deadly cost in the future.

 

 

Globalization to Sustainable Development

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When I read EO’s post about Chocolate, I started to think about the many exotic foods I eat on a daily basis. In America, it has become so normalized to see foods that are grown around the world in all different seasons at the grocery store every day. Some of my favorite foods: mangoes, coffee, avocados, and chocolate are things that only a few centuries ago, people living in the Pacific Northwest wouldn’t have even known to exist.

While preparing for the contemplative practice on chocolate, I was amazed that the cacao farmers in the video had never tasted chocolate and didn’t even know what their crop was being used to make.

Once, when I was in Mexico, I visited an avocado farm where they were being grown to export to the United States. Earlier in the day, I had been to a market where they were selling apples from Washington. Then, I went to a coffee shop where the beans had been grown in Guatemala. It amazes me how globalized the food system is and how normal it seems to most people.

A farmer in Mexico holds up his avocados to the viewer.

https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/avocado-growers-in-michoacan-take-up-arms-to-fight-for-their-crops/

Many experts are calling for a switch to a localized agricultural system. Whenever possible, I try to shop at my local farmer’s market and support small organic farms, but I wonder what would happen to the many farmers in the developing world that have adopted cash crops to export to industrialized countries.

Farmers in Central America are already facing challenges due to climate change, and I fear that a reduction in demand for exotic foods would exacerbate their problems.

Certainly, localized agriculture would reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, food miles, and water grabs, but I think that sustainable development and eradicating poverty will do more for climate change than anything.

Sustainable Development Goals: End poverty, end hunger, Healthy lives and wellbeing for all, sustainable use of water, education, gender equality, work for all, sustainable and modern energy, reliable infrastructure, reduce inequality, sustainable production and consumption, safe and inclusive cities, conserve oceans, protect ecosystems, halt biodiversity loss, and combat climate change.

Rescue Global: https://www.rescueglobal.org/

Rescue Global: https://www.rescueglobal.org/

Today’s Special: Grilled Salmon Laced with Plastic

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A lot of plastic garbage inevitably ends up in our waterways and oceans. Bottle caps, toys, plastic bags, and jugs are just some of the things that get washed into our oceans. But these aren’t the only source of oceanic plastic trash. Consumer products like toothpaste and facewash contain plastic microbeads that are used to provide scrubbing power, but they are too tiny to be filtered out by water treatment plants after they’re washed down the drain. Salmon and other creatures than feed on these microplastics by mistaking it for food or by feeding on zooplankton that have eaten the plastic.

Researchers once thought that microplastics ingested by fish remained in their guts. Removing their entrails before serving appeared to eliminate the risk of eating plastic. But new research is beginning to suggest that these tiny bits of plastic might actually move into fish flesh.

Plastic is now part of our food system and seafood is the third largest contributor of chemical-laden microplastics. What consuming all this plastic means for human health is hard to say, but it’s probably not good. Persistent chemicals like PCB’s and other contaminants in our waterways glom onto particle surfaces and carry endocrine-disrupting bisphenols, phthalates, and other toxic additives.

So, who is responsible and what can we do about it? These are not easy questions to answer but some of the things we can do is stop using products that contain plastic microbeads. Encourage governments to ban the sale of products that contain microbeads. Promote plastic take-back programs for plastics that are currently not recyclable. Use reusable bags and containers, not throwaways.

It remains to be seen whether or not we will successful wean ourselves off of disposable plastics but it’s a problem we should make every effort to combat.

Sources:

Article: https://thefern.org/2019/09/todays-special-grilled-salmon-laced-with-plastic/

Image: https://www.multipure.com/purely-social/science/dangers-microplastics-drinking-water/

The Hoarders, The Hungry, and the Problem with Individualism

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Above: Shoppers Stockpile Supplies in response to Covid-19 Pandemic                                                 Below: People Wait in Line at a San Antonio Food Bank

With the recent lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic and news stories dominated by pictures of empty grocery store shelves it is easy to feel like we will soon run out of food. Beans, medicine, and toilet paper are flying off the shelves and not just paranoid citizens are starting to stockpile, nations have also begun to hold on tighter to their resources.

Meanwhile, now more than ever the world’s hungry are in need. In the United States, food banks are being overwhelmed, and globally the World Food Programme estimates that 5.5 million people in central Sahel alone will be facing severe food insecurity in the coming months. The hoarders and the hungry; an epitome of a global food system that never seems to have enough to go around.

Yet, when you look closer into how that food is being used, there is an even more insidious note. Every year the United States wastes 40% of its food; 63 million tons a year. When 63 million tons of food a year is left to rot in one country alone, it is clear that the global food system doesn’t have a shortage issue, it has a distribution issue; a distribution issue exacerbated by rampant western individualism. People are, and have for a long time, purchased only with their own perceived needs in mind, without thinking about the larger scale implications that these actions have on others around the world. We live on a finite planet, with finite resources. Every meal you throw away is food that could have eased the hunger of someone else. It is time we wake up to the manufactured food crisis we have created, and in compassion, work toward a more equitable food distribution system, that decreases waste by calming the hoarders and feeding the hungry.