This is a slightly longer version of the little article I wrote for my library’s monthly Reference Notes–

Every time we use a cell phone, a computer, an electric light, heat or cool our home or drive to work, approximately 80% or more of the energy (depending on where we live in the world) comes from non-renewable resource fossil fuels. Our appliances, even when not in use, are leaching power for tiny lights or clocks or sleep mode or pilot lights.

Demand for fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) is rising quickly, and production is becoming more expensive. The Economist points to nationalist and political tensions and the challenges of accessing oil in difficult terrain.

In spite of our concerns about the environment and global warming, pollution’s toll on our health, rising costs, and dependence on foreign resources in unstable regions, America’s cars and houses are getting bigger and bigger. The decline of urban quality of life and business opportunity creates suburban sprawl. We commute to work and school, and drive across town to get groceries that have been transported across our nation or around the world. Families relocate to find jobs or affordable housing, and we lose small local communities and must drive long distances to spend time with friends and loved ones.

Meanwhile, rising superpowers China and India extend American-style fossil fuel burning amenities to their immense populations.

Soaring gas prices are a major problem for working families who are also facing the foreclosure crisis and rising food prices. Each year Americans die because they cannot afford to heat or cool their homes. In Fueling our Future, Robert Evans notes that pollution from fossil fuel burning has been linked to heart disease and cancer, and a 2001 study at Harvard linked it to infertility and early menopause as well. The International Panel on Climate Change found that as the earth’s temperature rises worldwide drought is not certain, but likely (Evans 13).

For those of us not profiting from the fossil fuel energy industry, this is all a bit of a worry.

In The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook, Greg Pahl’s expert sources predict that a horrific energy crisis could be upon us any time between 2010 and 2037. Visions of California’s rolling blackouts, or of the gas lines of that made the US look like a struggling Communist bloc nation during the 70’s dance in our heads.

A comfortable lifestyle using less energy and using energy that does not create pollution or greenhouse gases and does not depend upon tense relationships with antagonistic foreign nations is possible now.

But energy is a commodity-to be produced, bought and sold in the greatest quantities and at the highest profit possible. This model is not just incorrect for our energy future (no pun intended). It is a dangerous gamble.

Scientists and entrepreneurs with excellent ideas are struggling to gain a financial toehold to launch and improve sustainable, pollution- and waste-free technologies to run our homes, industry and transportation with renewable or sustainable resources.

Resources at Montgomery City County Public Libraries sum up the advantages and disadvantages of renewable or sustainable energy.

At this time it actually costs more fossil fuel energy to create biomass and biofuel than they yield. They produce carbon dioxide and may compete with food production for land. If they are managed as commodities like fossil fuels energy, consumers risk the same vulnerabilities we face today- severe weather and other events can result in shortage and drive up price

Hydrogen fuel cells are incredibly efficient, but cost more to produce than they yield.
Solar power is endlessly renewable and free of pollution but requires large surface areas to yield power even approaching the scale of fossil fuels.

Many are opposed to the stately ranks of giant sculpture like windmills needed to produce wind electricity on any great scale. Storage of any renewable energy produced is an important issue still to be solved. Daytime and evening demand must be more carefully balanced with renewable energy resources to insure an adequate supply.

Nuclear power and our long term dream, nuclear fusion, are incredibly efficient, with no greenhouse emissions. Much like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on a purely statistical basis this seems to be our best bet. Evans details ways nuclear power production has become much safer (124-26) But the millennia-long legacy of nuclear waste, the dangers of uranium mining, and the tragedies at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island make many wonder if it is worth the price.

If we don’t own profitable stock in an energy trader, what can we do?

Evans states that we must reduce demand / consumption and work for greater
efficiency (174). In the wake of the 2001 energy crisis, California’s efficiency mandates and credits for using alternative energy created both great grumbling and great opportunity.

California is now a worldwide model for reduced consumption, but its hugely profitable Sempra Energy, for example, is still building infrastructure for and trading huge amounts of natural gas in the unregulated energy industry. Efficiency and reduced consumption are key, but not enough. According Evans and Pahl’s sources, the transition from mostly oil, coal and natural gas to mostly renewable energy must go forward quickly.

Sustainable profit is possible.

Even as pollution caused by China’s industrial revolution - fueled mostly by coal and other fossil fuels - spawns whole ‘cancer villages’ within China and washes up onto America’s shores, the richest man in China is worth 4.8 billion dollars because he can barely keep up with demand for his solar modules.

But until policymakers and consumers make a move on a massive, nationwide scale, our best chance for improving our health and saving our endangered ice caps, species, and pocketbooks is one family, one business, one building at a time.

Montgomery Public Library offers many excellent books on creating homes, buildings and lifestyles that employ alternative energy or greatly reduce dependence on fossil fuel energy, from Solar Power your Home for Dummies (690.83 DEGUN) to Eco-Renovation the Ecological Home Improvement Guide (643.47 HARLAN).

Greg Pahl takes it even further. He supports the Community Supported Energy (CSE) Model. Consumers can choose local energy just as they are choosing to purchase local food to improve nutrition and reduce environmental toll, animal cruelty and disease outbreaks (for more on the advantages of local food, see Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, 641.973).

Pahl notes that hydroelectric power on a massive scale is very powerful, but major sites in America have already been developed (causing great disruption and damage to the environment. However, on a local,community scale, where geography and river flow permit, hydroelectric power would be excellent and environmentally benign (Evans 104). Evans even mentions burning solid waste or capturing methane gas from landfills (102).

Solar power is also much better suited to a distributed application. On a community or local level, fields of mirrors the size of Rhode Island would not be necessary for solar power to make a huge difference, and in places like Arizona, peak production would coincide with peak need.

My money is on solar power, based on an episode of National Public Radio’s Science Friday program. But local communities can make the best decisions based on their unique resources, geography and values. Community energy requires greater responsibility, but it also keeps 3 to 4 times more money circulating in the local economy than absentee ownership (Pahl 267).

“Local communities… tend to be better stewards of their immediate environments because they know that if they are going to continue to thrive they need to conserve those local resources… While the global free-market economy has repeatedly demonstrated that it has no soul or compassion, most communities by contrast are blessed with both (Pahl 268).”

Take advantage of the resources the library offers to learn how to live well while consuming less. Learn about the various options and voice your informed opinion within your community.

Most people don’t set out to harm animals or turn a blind eye to unimaginable cruelty, and we certainly don’t set out to give our children food that is substandard nutritionally and in fact may even do them harm.

But agribusiness is so powerful, it has blocked every effort to legislate humane and safe processing of meat, dairy and poultry products, and gets very scary when advocacy groups attempt to get the word out.

The siren call of doing what we’ve always done, of insisting on cheaper, more convenient foods is loud in this hassled, stressful, disjointed, lonely era.

The nutritional wisdom our parents gave us worked when we were growing up, and it is hard to shake. Heck, when I hear that someone has a respiratory or viral problem, my first plan is to make them chicken soup with lots of black pepper and garlic. That stuff really works!

But for the most part, the wisdom we grew up with no longer matches the reality of how our food is raised and made and therefore how healthy it is (isn’t) for us. Factory farming, treating meat, dairy and poultry animals as product instead of as living beings who suffer pain, disease, and inhumane living and slaughter conditions, takes a devastating toll on our bodies– mad cow disease, insane amounts of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides retained in the tissues of meat animals and in dairy products, and disease actually caused by improper feeding of the animals themselves. It takes a devastating toll on our environment — I am always so glad to trot out the statistic that factory farming of meat, dairy and poultry/eggs is harder on our environment than our gas guzzling, foreign oil dependent cars.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper to give up meat than to buy one of those fancy hybrid cars that still depend on unrenewable, expensive, and foreign petroleum based fuel to run?

Then there’s the medical evidence that the low level but constant toll on our immune system due to food intolerance– dairy, wheat, or food additives– can over time impair our immune systems or even cause them finally to attack our own bodies. We don’t know it until it’s too late though. If I could afford to drop out of my life, I would go to Naturopathic Medical School tomorrow to learn how to research these things and get the word out to our nation. (I should start a scholarship fund with a paypal link on here, huh!)

Then there’s the reality that if we used our grain production to feed humans instead of farmed animals… nobody on this earth would ever have to go hungry again.

I couldn’t bring myself to read all of Gene Baur’s Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food. I knew the stories of the animals would break my heart. I already know enough, from many horrifying things I’ve seen myself, read in firsthand accounts, and read in my favorite book advocating for a vegan diet, Skinny Bitch. But I did read the section about what to do now that we know what’s wrong with meat. Here are some of the nuggets I gleaned from Farm Sanctuary.

According to a 2003 Gallup poll, nearly 2/3 of americans support stricter laws regarding the treatment of farm animals.

“A respected group of health professionals at the American Dietetic Association has this to say: ‘Well planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence. Vegetarian diets offer a number of nutritional benefits, including lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein as well as higher levels of carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium, potassium, folate and antioxidants such as vitamins C and E and phytochemicals.’” (219)

You might want to think twice about that foie gras…

Forcefeeding ducks and geese to make it leads to terrible injuries, impacted food in the animals’ intestines, immense pain, suffering and disease especially of the liver… is that a liver you really want to eat?

Whole Foods declined to sell foie gras when it saw the apalling conditions in which it was made. It made public its concern about egregious industrialized abuse of animals. Whole Foods has allowed animal rights activists to present the facts at shareholders’ meetings, in order to make informed decisions when choosing which products to sell.

On the other hand, the eggs sold under the Wegmans’ name are produced in the battery cages that 80% of veterinarians surveyed declared inhumane in a 2004 survey. The chain has ignored its customers’ requests to sell cage free eggs, and retailiated against investigators and animal rights activists by prosecuting.

Did you know that animal cruelty laws do not apply to farm animals? The meat, poultry, and dairy business can treat animals with as much cruelty as they want to, in the name of efficiency and production. But farm animals are 98% of the animals in this nation.

Legally, farm animals are essentially property and product. Conduct that would be considered cruelty to a dog or cat is perfectly acceptable for cattle, calves, chickens, pigs and any other animal farmed for meat or for milk and eggs.

“How could we come to accept that the massive institutional cruelty at the center of factory farming is normal?” asks Gene Baur. “Ironically…the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires, in theory anyway, that animals be rendered insensible to pain prior to being bled to death. But it excludes poultry, and even in the case of mammals it has not been properly enforced. Numerous investigations continue to document persistent violations of the act in the nation’s slaughterhouses.” (187)

In most states, farming exemptions protect farmers and slaughterers as long as what is being done to animals is ‘customary.’ (189)

Slavery, including murder, lynching, whipping and rape, and child labor including incredibly inhumane working conditions were once customary too.

So you call yourself a Christian? Here in the South, most of us do. We pray before meals. We pray before ball games. We pray before public meetings. We pray for our elected officials, who wear their Christianity upon their sleeves even as their private vices, missteps and dysfunctions leak out to the rest of us. And we eat a LOT of meat.

I have lived in the South for 24, almost 25 years. I learned quickly to adore sausage gravy biscuits, bacon, ham, chicken fried steak, big greasy burgers, chili dogs and fried chicken, macaroni slathered in cheese, rich delicious ice cream and a tall delicious glass of milk with my Oreos. But you know what? I also learned to love, truly be grateful for, dinners that were a plate full of black eyed peas, homegrown green beans, potatoes and corn.  I’ll never forget going home from college one nasty, impoverished winter to eat a wonderful meal including the tenderest greens and carrots that were still thriving under my parents’ cold frame in the back  yard.

If my baby asks me why I don’t eat meat, I tell her, in age appropriate terms… if she wants Chick Fil A, I still take her to get it. She’ll decide for herself when it’s right for her. That’s why I don’t get down on her or anyone else who is still eating meat and dairy. Sadly, their health will suffer for it, but some day maybe enough of us will be thinking this way and getting the word out that a societal change for the better can finally roll in.

Think good, humane, organically raised food is too expensive? Farmers are proud to note that we are spending less than 10% of our income on food. But what we are saving is lost due to the degradation of communities, the environment, loss of nutrition, and the skyrocketing cost of health care due to our horrible diet and the illness caused by the additives, chemicals, pesticides, disease, and hormones that enter our bodies through our staple foods.

If you continue eating meat eggs and milk and you care about animal welfare, Baur hopes you’ll avoid factory farmed meat, milk and eggs. (219) Ask questions about where your grocery store gets its wares. Evasive answers or reluctance to answer might make you think about shopping somewhere else. Think critically. Visit the farm where your eggs, milk and meat come from. Think hard about those giant greasy portions, more suited to an agricultural way of life where our meat, dairy, poultry, vegetables and grains were produced by backbreaking work. Eat enough to live, and to enjoy. Savor your food. Think about where it comes from. Visit Farm Sanctuary in New York or California.

We can do it. Each small thing that each individual does will eventually add up. Maybe it’s insisting on humanely produced (cage free) eggs and investigating where and how your meat is raised and slaughtered or how your dairy products are produced. Maybe it’s giving up meat. Maybe it’s purchasing meat from a small farmer who raises animals humanely and slaughters in ways that reduce suffering. Maybe it’s shopping at the farmer’s market to get local food (much, much more nutritious than food that has been shipped around the world), or even simply trying out and incorporating one vegetarian or vegan dish into your family’s menu each week until it gets easier to shop and cook vegetarian/vegan.

So what’s the holdup?

There’s help and support. Take a look at localharvest.org, happycow.net, vegdining.com, vegforlife.org and the USDA’s Alternative Farming Systems Information Center.

It’s taken me some time to get going on my vegan cooking. The first step was baking… I knew that if I could not bake delicious sweet treats the deal was off. But I bake cakes, cupcakes, cookies, and muffins that are just divine, and often very beautiful. After that, giving up dairy and eggs was a breeze.

The next step was trying many different recipes in hopes of finding foods that were delicious, cruelty free, and satisfying. Some vegan recipes are just ‘eh’ and I never use them again. But some are so delicious. The litmus test is my husband– he does not like foods that try to mimic meat and dairy dishes– hates soy meat, hates soy cheeses and sour creams and ice creams.

But if he says, I like this every bit as well as a Taco Bell taco, or this is so delicious I don’t even notice I’m doing without meat, I know it’s a keeper. Even my baby ate her lentil-filled tacos, her baked chimichanga, her Tofutti Cutie ice cream sandwiches and home made carrot cake mini-muffins (absolutely STUFFED with nutrition! So good I would consider them a legitimate substitute for dinner! and yummy!) and absolutely delicious home made vegan chocolate chip cookies with great gusto. I’m especially happy about the tofutti cuties, because I just found out my dad has an immune suppression problem caused by the nasty chemicals retained in dairy fat. And my baby LOOOOOOVES her some ice cream.

I’m glad to share the recipes that we’ve found to be so delicious that we dont’ feel like we’re missing out. Just write me at kimwilsonowen@hotmail.com.

And remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Do whatever little bit can do, and don’t sweat the rest. Implement slowly. Small things do add up.

Life’s a labyrinth. Here’s the latest installment in my China fascination.

A few years ago my mom, in a fit of midlife growth, suddenly decided she would teach English in China for several months, two different times.

A Vancouver BC librarian contacted me out of the blue a few years ago, here in deepest Dixie (of all places!) for information about a young Chinese woman pilot whose small plane crashed here in the thirties.  A Chinese pilot? A woman? Here? In the oat field that eventually became part of the country club golf course?  My dear colleague’s labor of love, involving contacts with people all around the world, resulted in the book Sisters of Heaven.

Then my book group read Haruki Murakami’s Wind up Bird Chronicle, and in its explication of modern Japanese culture (beautiful, lyrical, gritty, mystical, meaningful, not in the least dry like “explication of modern Japanese culture” would imply) an old soldier details his days of cruelty and deprivation in Mongolia in the 30’s.

I love Amy Tan and Anchee Min. My women’s book group read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and had a wonderful discussion.  Is the mindset toward women and children nowadays really as different from the culture that produced footbinding as we like to think? 

So China’s been much on my mind. I’m drawn to it. I hoped to go teach there myself and take my little one with so that she could go to Chinese kindergarten, though I’m still ruminating on that. With a good job, bills to pay, a letter of entree into the magnet school, and concerns about what my little one would experience there as a girl child in a culture that seems to be very hard on children in general, I haven’t made a determination there yet.

Now my book groups are reading A Year Without Made in China.

At first glance this book seems like just another product of the bottom feeding confessional literary (unliterary) circus produced by blog culture. Everyone thinks there’s something universal and saleable about their personal experience–my huge life crisis and the ensuing three months in each of three countries learning about three life tasks, for example. I LOVED Eat Pray Love, so don’t think I consider this always a bad thing. I encourage everyone I meet to have their own blog if they never have before, because everyone should, must, express themselves, and I don’t like to think of anyone missing out on the exercise in regular writing and internet use that blogging offers. I blog constantly, and every time a book comes out, I think, why not me? My attempt to cook a gourmet meal every day for 365 days. My wry, defiant chronicle of my failures in my first years as a mom (my blogging attempts fall under that category).

I just feel uneasy about it as really good writing/reading.

Anyway, A Year is a pleasant read. The author and her family are likeable– I like her even more because she’s a southern writer! and her work reflects the social trend toward more responsible, or at least more informed, consumption. But I wanted more. Everybody knows Made in China = Bad.  I wanted to know, exactly what is the problem with buying Chinese-made goods? 

I’m a huge Marxist– as in, I believe every human being deserves the basics of food, shelter, education, family, community, work, and the arts. When people do not have access to these, crime and criminal social injustice and cruelty ensue. Children are starving, being separated from their parents, starving, losing out on education, whether in Darfur or in the heart of urban America. I follow with a mixture of admiration and heartbreak the stories of nations and rulers who have at least paid lip service to the idea of each according to ability and need.

But paradoxically, and I hate to admit it, I believe (for lack of a better paradigm, but I’d be glad for someone to give me one) in a sort of Darwinist way that the developing world inevitably must go through the same paroxysms of cruelty and inhumanity that England and the US went through during the industrial revolution before we arrived at our (at least for most of us) comfortable standard of living.  I read once upon a time that if every single person in developing countries made just two dollars a day, they could eat and have shelter and some human standard of comfort. And the way to make this happen, the way for folks in developing nations to attain a standard of living somewhere above poverty is capitalism.  As companies from industrialized nations come in to purchase Chinese parts and products, they are (to varying degree) imposing more, um, American standards for safety, wages, and time.

Easy for me to say… living years after the industrial revolution, feeding at the public trough, in an air conditioned office, living beyond my means instead of recognizing how many have so little, how blessed I am to have all that I do, and saving up for a rainy day.  But I have the bourgeois luxury of musing on it from my armchair, and I think it’s my duty to at least think about it and try to make conscious choices in what I buy.

So where is China on that industrial paroxysm continuum, then?

Alexandra Harney does a good job of documenting the price for Chinese ascendance. In The China Price  she offers tons of documented facts, personal stories of Chinese workers and factory managers, and knowledgable commentary about the cultural context. She manages not to weigh in emotionally, although she does assign responsibility.

Chinese workers, most very young or with impoverished families to support, are killed and maimed due to horrible working conditions. Cancer villages and widow towns dot the Chinese landscape. Chinese pollution shows up on the West coast of the US. Chinese factory managers, whose hours are just as inhumane and whose pay is often just as low– or their personal funds are drained in their hope of staying afloat– use a numbers game and falsified documents to try to appear to be adhering to fair labor standards, because to adhere to fair labor standards would drive the factory out of business, and many officials charged with making sure fair labor and safety standards are in place turn a blind eye. Wal Mart’s inevitable and witless commentary is present as well.

Many Chinese workers and their families have turned to studying the law and combining forces to sue for benefits after injuries. The seeds of something better appear to be planted and sprouting, slowly. But according to Harney, we all pay The China Price.

The responsibility lies as much with the global consumer as with Beijing, she asserts. If the Chinese government spent as much time and energy policing factories as it does political dissidence, they could eradicate most if not all criminal abuses of workers and maintain China’s place in the world market. But our, the consumer’s, appetite for the cheapest goods is an equal contributor. In other words, if we as individuals are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem.

So bravo, Sara Bongiorni!

I look forward to seeing how our book club discussions shape up.