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Hope and Peaches

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If you are paying attention, the world is not a super fun place to be right now. 

Donald Trump’s recent reelection has been a source of despair for many who hoped that a Harris presidency would secure LGBT rights, the right to abortion and reproductive health care, and decisive environmental action.

This comes at a time when we’re already experiencing the highest rates of loneliness and isolation ever recorded. The urge to throw in the towel, curl up into a ball and hide from the world is strong. Most people I have talked to in recent weeks say the same. Trump’s reelection feels like a death blow to a vision of a hopeful future already on its last legs.

But it doesn’t have to be. 

In the face of isolation, it’s time to build community. In the face of environmental degradation, it’s time to live sustainably. In the face of national failures, it’s time to act locally. It is time to take experimental living seriously. 

Experimental living is a fairly broad term that describes movements like the Back to the Land Movement of the 1970s and the cohousing movement of today. But really, experimental living is structuring our lives, primarily in the domestic sphere, differently from societal norms and expectations. Experimental living sounds really broad, but means living all of the calls to action above. It means living in community with others, prioritizing sustainability, participating in local government and living in line with our values. 

Given that even dual-income families are struggling to meet expenses, alternatives like co-ops, multi-family housing, and intergenerational intentional communities could be the answer. Cost of both elder and child care can be offset by intergenerational living, multi-family housing allows home ownership even when house prices are prohibitive. Shifting the ideal of adulthood and family from a nuclear family to a broader web of interdependence makes possible other dreams, like home ownership, and strong family bonds.

This may seem like an idealized version of communal living, and it is. No community is without conflict and many family structures fail to provide support, even when living intergenerationally. But these are issues worth working to address seriously, especially when there aren’t other options. Even something as simple as offering or asking help from a neighbor lays groundwork for when there is conflict on a bigger scale. 

I am not suggesting that we all immediately sell all our property, move to the country and live out our dreams of communal living, but I am saying, in the face of the pain, social backsliding, and environmental crisis of this era, we should consider it.

There is a Bloom County cartoon that my father and I quote often that goes like so. The first character is listing all of the things that are wrong in the world, and finally ends with “It’s a rotten world!” to which the second replies, “…with great peaches”. In trying times, I try to remember what my peaches are. Community, the people around me, and the hope that there is a better future coming, one with great peaches.

Loving and Living on the Margins

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“We’re a non-violent Catholic lay community, but we try to get it right,” says Brayton Shanley, hands on his hips in the front yard of Agape. “There are a lot of folks out there who don’t do it right. We always say, ‘you gotta do it right’.” 

The most striking thing about Brayton is his deep commitment to the ideals of his faith, especially when living intentionally on, as he calls it, “ the margins”.

Brayton and Suzanne Shanley are the cofounders of the Agape Community, outside of Hardwick, Massachusetts. Agape is a lay community—meaning religious but not part of the church. Pronounced ‘ah-gah-pay’, the name is a Greek term which in Christian theology means unconditional love, specifically spiritual love that expands to all people. It was this name, and the fact that Agape has been around for so long, that drew me to their community in the first place.

Photo from the Agape Website

For many who have been hurt by the Church through oppression or rejection on the basis of gender, race, or sexual orientation, many images of organized religion create a hostile environment. Much of the work that Agape does is to counter that legacy of harm, to “do it right” and live in line with Jesus’s teachings of non-violence and activism.

I have always been interested in intentional communities, places where people try to live everyday life both together and in line with their values. Many intentional communities were founded in the late 1960s and 1970s, as part of the Back to the Land Movement, and while a few remain active, the vast majority have dissolved. 

Agape remains. And the main question on my mind as I took the three hour journey there was: why?

Agape was founded in 1987, but Suzanne and Brayton – the founders and my hosts – began their work in the mid-1970s, drawing on their Catholic and Quaker faith traditions. Inspired by the work of Milwaukee Fourteen, a group of Catholic priests who protested the VietNam war and Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, also nonviolent Catholic activists, they organized for disarmament and non-violence throughout the 1970s-90s. 

When I arrived in the early evening, there were several cars in the steep driveway that leads to Agape. Next to the late fall garden, still volunteering some late rainbow chard and a truly astonishing amount of parsley, two houses stand, woodsmoke drifting up from their chimneys. Above the doorway of the main house was a rainbow flag that read: “Peace”. It felt like home. 

I stood in the yard for a bit, taking in the surroundings. Small placards beneath most trees offered dedications to lost loved ones, calls for peace, prayers for healing. A keffiyeh, a scarf symbolizing solidarity with Palestine, winding between pumpkins on the porch. A St. Francis statue sat next to the door, a small bird perched on his shoulder. Every corner revealed symbols of the deep calling for peace and non-violence that are the founding light of Agape. 

Photo taken at Agape

As I walked up to the main building, and ventured a timid knock, a shout from behind me brought my attention to an older man with a shock white hair, half jogging towards me, with a cordless phone in his hand. “We’ll be right with ya’! Glad you could make it.” He gave me a hug and then hustled back into the house behind him. This was my first introduction to Brayton Shanley. 

After a tour of St. Brigid House, where Brayton and Suzanne live, we went into the main house for dinner. Symbols of faith decorated every surface, from the mantle above the fireplace, to the door which leads to a small one-room chapel, complete with a beautiful stained glass window mounted above a natural driftwood cross. 

I offered to help with dinner, feeling sheepish about their open hospitality that asked nothing of me, while offering so much. Instead, Suzanne simply offered a hug in greeting, and shepherrded me down to their office to chat. Here, too, were countless photographs of Swamis and Catholic priests, clippings of newspapers, portraits of leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Suzanne sat me down with a plate of chips and homemade salsa verde, and said, “So what would you like to know?” 

I asked her to tell me about Agape. And with a twinkle in her eye, she began with its founding in the 1980s and their fight against nuclear arms, and then moved on to talk about their push against the death penalty in the U.S. and towards interfaith peace in the Middle East. The stories Suzanne told affirmed that what Brayton had said outside was true: these were people who were walking the walk, ‘the real deal’, you might say. 

Agape’s ministry extended to death row, where Suzanne and Brayton developed a long-term relationship with Billy Neal Moore, a formerly incarcerated man who would become the first confessed murderer to receive a full commutation of a death sentence as a result of the Shanelys’ support. In fact, as I was sitting in an Uber on my way to Agape, Billy and Suzanne were in their kitchen, on the phone with Moore, sharing the most recent events and struggles in their lives. 

Agape prioritizes non-violence in all things, in community, in activism, in speech, in food and lifestyle. Any conflicts within the group were addressed by sitting down and trying to find common ground. Even though it can be difficult, sometimes, to avoid harm, it is time for community members to part ways, Suzanne said. 

The Agape houses are built and heated with wood harvested from the property around it. All of the logging is done with conscious choice and respect to the natural world. Before dinner, Brayton’s tour took me through the design of the St. Brigid House, with its straw bale construction and solar panels. Agape has been vegetarian for years, but recently, went vegan to further reduce harm to the environment and animals. 

At Agape, alcohol is not allowed and intimate sexual relationships are discouraged on the premises, even for guests. Despite all of these restrictions and the challenges of experimental living, people love to experience Agape: Some come for a weekend. Others stay for years. As Brayton says, “it’s a calling…it’s not easy, but it’s a calling.” 

I have looked at dozens of intentional communities, many of which were also founded in the 1970s and 1980s but have since dissolved. Interns and volunteers help keep Agape afloat, along with long term support from a network of religious and secular partners, but it did lead me to wonder how Suzanne and Brayton cope with the transience, the flow of people, interns, workers, friends, in and out of their community. 

Unbeknownst to me, Agape was facing that exact question, as she and Brayton enter their 80s. “People come and they stay and they get nurtured and so welled up with the beauty of intentional community …and they don’t land,” she said, with a sigh. Despite a lively community and hundreds, if not thousands, of supporters, Suzanne and Brayton are the only original two that remain full-time residents. 

Eventually, Brayton came down and interrupted my conversation with Suzanne. It was time for dinner. Around the table and over some of the best vegan food I have had in years, Sister Judy from Ipswich and Dixon, who had prepared the lovely meal for us. I had been there for all of an hour or so, and yet I sat around their table, chatting and laughing with them. We talked about the struggles of raising children in intentional communities and about the related phenomenon that Suzanne describes as “launch, but not land” that characterizes so much communal living. 

The idea of a “calling” kept coming up throughout the night, as we gradually moved from discussions of meaning and compassion, religious and otherwise, to the more concrete, as I asked about how Agape handles healthcare, conflict resolution meetings and all the other nuts and bolts of communal living. The calling required to live this kind of life—a life dedicated to love, peace, and deep, deep non-violence—isn’t one that can be brought down by loss or insecurity, especially at points of transition.

I had come to Agape, curious about how they had managed to have the longevity that they have had over the years, and was almost disheartened to see how small the actual residential community is. Children raised and moved out, interns gone for the season, the Agape I visited was one of deep love, support, compassion and very few people.

As the night went along, I started to question the assumptions I had coming to Agape. As Brayton and Suzanne retired to bed, and I lay in one of the cold upper rooms, warm under a quilt blanket, I realized that the sorrow and fear of loss, the idea of a failed community, just because of the number of lasting residents, was of my own creation. Things don’t have to be permanent to be valuable. They don’t have to be unchanging to be impactful. Agape is living proof.

Everyday Utopia: Putting Modern Utopian Movements into Historical Context

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Kristen Ghodsee is no stranger to communism— or at least, “closet communism.” That is what her family called it when her and her daughter, conveniently the same size,  began sharing their clothing freely during the Covid 19 pandemic. 

In her book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Ghodsee leads with the impact  Covid had on her family life in order to then unpack how political and economic upheaval can drive people to seek alternative experimental lives—or, in other words, to seek utopia. 

Ghodsee’s so-called “closet communism” reflects the fundamental point of Everyday Utopia: we engage in the kind of open sharing that is demonized as “communism”—only that it is limited to the context of our own homes. 

A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Ghodsee  has written several books on the topic of communism and socialism. In Everyday Utopia she takes a step back, surveying  the multitude of experimental living that has existed for millennia. 

Everyday Utopia starts with the feminist, intellectual community of Kroton, founded by Pythagoras (better  known for his works on triangles) around 500 BCE and concludes with the modern cohousing and family expansionist movements of the 2020s, covering the wide range of concerns that have faced experimental living communities.

 Experimental living is by nature, experimental, and as such range far and wide in their ideologies. Ghodsee makes the argument that early monasteries, both Christian and Buddhist, served as models for the experimental living communities that followed. Some, like Charles Fourier’s combination factory and housing units in France in the late 1700s, supported an integrated form of communal living to maximize productivity. Others, like the 19th century Oneida Community in Upstate New York, were organized around radical or ‘heretical’ religious beliefs, such as non-hierarchical worship or women’s equality.

As a feminist scholar, Ghodsee uniquely incorporates the role that women have played in these movements, both as intellectual drivers of experimental living, and also as beneficiaries of models of labor, child rearing and domestic life that characterize many experimental living initiatives. This sets her approach apart from earlier studies.  Around the world, women have been and still are expected to do the unpaid labor of cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and providing emotional support. Given this, experimental living often aims to make these shared tasks, giving  freedom to women who want to spend their time elsewhere. 

The concrete examples Ghodsee uses to expand readers’ imagination suggest how we might change our own lives, either radically or hesitantly, into our own utopias of experimental living. As she writes, “change is always fueled by the perseverance of those who believe that we can do better.”

Ghodsee skillfully unpacks even the most radical ideas for structuring interpersonal relationships. For instance, the polyamorous, so-called ‘complex marriages’ of the Oneida perfectionist religious community, where social reproductive roles were shared by all adults, are still considered radical almost two centuries later. In giving attention to these alternative relationships, she challenges the reader to question the societal ideals of monogamy and the nuclear family. 

Still, Everyday Utopia shies away from some of the downsides of utopias and the failures of those who strive to create them. And when experimental living goes wrong, it causes real harm. For example, the antisemitism that Charles  Fourier propagated in his communal living spaces furthered an already deeply antisemitic streak in 18th century French society, which would resurface in the late 1800s with the Dreyfus affair. Other communities that have engaged in polygamy often have issues with sex-based violence and can intensify patriarchal control, as some sects of Mormonism. The isolation of many intentional communities also makes it difficult for vulnerable people to get help and support if leaders abuse their power.

Even as it acknowledges the downside, Everyday Utopia is asking the question “can’t we do this better?”, in search of what everyone is seeking: the good life.  Maybe someday, we’ll find it. It won’t be easy, but as Ghodsee reminds us: “hope is a muscle we must use”.

Degrowth: End of Society or Vision of the Future?

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Image Source: Kamiel Choi

Degrowth is a bit of a buzzword these days. Some of the press is bad, like the WIRED article titled “Why Degrowth Is the Worst Idea on the Planet.” Some of the press is good. Bestselling books like Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel make that case. And like all hot button ideas these days, degrowth is fervently debated on X.

What is degrowth?

Degrowth, in the most limited sense, questions economic ‘growth’—an ever-expanding GDP, for example—as the goal of economic policy. In modern day politics, economic growth is considered not only to be a net good, but a hallmark of a healthy society. In fact, this is one of the few issues both presidential candidates Harris and Trump can agree on. Trump said this explicitly in the 2024 debate, promising a “bigger, better and stronger” and Harris got more specific with her highlight on growing the “clean energy economy”. In a political climate so polarized, “growth is good” is something most everyone seems to agree on. 

The idea of degrowth has been around since the 1970s, when French economist André Gorz coined the term while studying economic policy specifically—but until now, it hasn’t gained much traction in a culture that leads with ‘growth is good’. With existential climate apocalypse looming, so too are questions about the status quo.

Public vs personal approaches

As concern about climate change comes more into the mainstream, people trying to live with less impact on the environment often adopt terms like “degrowth” from academia to describe lifestyle choices that they are promoting. Zero-waste, slow living, communes, intentional communities, anti-consumerism, right-to-repair, ‘live local, think global’ and de-influencing are all social and personal approaches to the degrowth movement, focusing primarily on individual choices that shift families and communities away from relying on a system of infinite economic growth to a low consumption model of living. While most have good intentions, they can seem a little out of touch. Think vegan food influencers and TikToks telling you to get rid of your washing machine. 

The other camp is far closer to Gorz’s original technical usage of the term: the public policy of degrowth. Proponents of this interpretation push for economic and social policies for degrowth, such as moving away from GDP as an indicator of prosperity, and redirecting efforts from sustainable development in the global North to sustainable degrowth, such as prioritizing winterization of existing structures over building new LEED-certified buildings.

In contrast to their vegan, anti-consumer counterparts, policy degrowth advocates usually focus on national and international investment and subsidies systems over individual consumer choice. Some like Jason Hickel do advocate for a complete overhaul of the global economy, but most take a more moderate approach, asking that governments stop using a booming economy as an indicator of wellbeing and instead focus on human needs.

Why are people so mad? 

The majority of the people who take to the Internet to complain about degrowth are responding to political degrowth supporters, but are spreading their message using the imagery of personal degrowth advocates. In a society where growth is not only good, but essential for survival, any push back against that is experienced as threatening. For many contemporary economists, who have dedicated their studies and often their careers to the advancement of growth, degrowth is a dangerous movement that threatens to crash the economy and spread some quasi-Marxist, socialist, global new world order where no one is allowed to eat meat or own a car. 

Pragmatic environmentalists also oppose degrowth because, however valuable it might be, they see the total overhaul of the economy as dead-in-the-water in the current political landscape. Instead, they argue that harnessing the power of economic growth and incentives—such as design competitions or cheap solar panel production—will save the planet from all its climate change woes.

Feminist opposition to degrowth is lesser known but also important.  The current ‘washing machine debates’ give a snapshot of how conversations about individual degrowth are shaped by personal privilege. The washing machine transformed the lives of women starting in the 1950s. They along with other time-saving appliances allowed women to work outside the home, while still fulfilling traditional roles as wife and mother. There is an implicit belief underlying critiques of personal degrowth that only those who have forgotten the struggles of past generations would choose to give up these technologies that shape the world today.

A similar debate concerns how people with disabilities who rely on systems for medicine and adaptive technology would cope without these. The vast system of international shipping that fuels the global economy also delivers ingredients for the manufacture of life-saving medication, like insulin. Aspects of consumption like plastic straws and disposable paper towels are a convenience product many enjoy, but can play a huge role in a disabled person’s day to day life. Unequivocally, the type of personal degrowth choices that are promoted are at odds with technologies that empower disabled people to have agency in their own lives. 

These two critiques of degrowth get tangled in the current debates, clouding both the meaning of degrowth as a term, and sending these two different communities sailing past each other, fighting a strawman army of their own making. 

Why should people care?

While people on the internet have a lot of thoughts about degrowth, the theory may seem out of touch with the current struggles and needs of people on the ground. Political degrowth is an abstract idea being debated in even more abstract terms, where thinkers throw around acronyms like GDP and ILO. Even the personal degrowth of pristine, zero-waste households plastered over the internet that are used to sell metal straws and reusable coffee cups seem out of touch for most middle class consumers.  Why should anyone with a job, bills, family to worry about, care about degrowth?

One reason is that, for better and for worse, economic policy shapes the lives of everyone. Conversations around tax rates, development, sustainable or otherwise, inflation reduction, and budgeting all start with an implicit assumption that growth is good; growth will bring more people health, wealth and happiness. 

How do we go forward?

Popular eco-friendly ideas like sustainable development, buy-less, and the Green New Deal are often seen as a panacea to the problem of climate change. This thinking is understandable. Human suffering, particularly at the hands of the natural world, is scary. An uncertain future is scary. And people respond with the hope that if we just find the right solution, the silver bullet, weed out the bad apples, and then we will be okay. 

In focusing on washing machines and other conveniences, we fight amongst ourselves, stuck in a cycle of judging, justifying and defending. The degrowth debates, in their chaos, remind us that it is easy to talk about big ideas on the Internet, it is easy to make sweeping generalizations about how people should live, and it is easy to be distracted by tech bros on X. What it is hard to do is think critically, imagine a better world and fight to create it, present with the now.

As Andre Gorz reminds us, “theory always runs the risk of blinding us to the shifting complexities of the real world. [Instead, we should] live completely at one with the present, mindful above all of the wealth of our shared life”.

Cultivating Hope: Community-Owned Regenerative Agriculture as a Way Forward

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Birdsfoot Farm remains a sturdy, if subdued, tribute to an alternative way of living and farming.

Next to the slightly peeling Obama 2008 bumper sticker sits one with a small white and blue quotation: “Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” 

The quote dots the bumpers of the eight or so cars parked in front of the 150-year old barn of Birdsfoot Farm in Canton, NY. Founded in the 1970s as part of the Back to the Land movement, the farm now supports a small cohousing community, a K-12 school, and vegetable plot that supplies produce  to local families and businesses. They host Maypole Dances, an annual Garlic Festival, and weekly potlucks in the main kitchen. They live mostly self-sufficiently, with the occasional luxury bar of chocolate and movie night in town. It is, in many ways, an agrarian utopia. 

This image is not the reality for the vast majority of agriculture that occurs in the United States today. Instead, the food and agricultural landscape is dominated by farms that span millions acres, plant corporation-patented seed corn, and rely on massive center pivot irrigation systems.  Many pay starvation wages to largely undocumented migrant workers who lack the political power to advocate for better conditions. 

Additionally, the switch to industrial farming has dovetailed a shift to majority cash crops, animal feed, and ethanol production, leaving only 2% of American agriculture dedicated to fruits and vegetables, like Birdsfoot is. Of that 2%, the majority of it is in California, with produce then shipped to other states for distribution. 

Industrial agriculture, according to a 2022 special feature review article from the journal Sustainability Science, is a major contributor to “climate change, biodiversity loss, and severe impacts on soil and water quality”, all of which are increasing in intensity and human impact. Around 34% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, with the majority of that being from industrial agriculture. It also causes harmful algae blooms and ‘dead zones’, like the Gulf of Mexico dead zone which spans 6,705 miles. 

In addition, competition from imported fruits and vegetables is making farming financially unviable for many families. Dulli Tengeler, the primary farmer at Birdsfoot, is grappling with that reality. In 2019, her total income was $3,200, with two kids in college. “We had a great year working together in the gardens and I am happy, and the happy factor is not to be underestimated, but it is not sustainable.” 

Dulli (right) and Goldie (left), in a back field at Birdsfoot Farm.

 

The solution, according to the article’s authors, Cathy Day and Sarah Cramer, lies in what is called regenerative agriculture. 

Regenerative agriculture focuses on improving “the ecological conditions of a farm, while also producing food”, according to Day and Cramer. Regenerative agriculture is a departure from the massive industrial agriculture that has become the American standard of food, feed and ethanol production. Farms that practice regenerative agriculture use fewer external soil amendments, smaller fields, and more diverse crops and are more resilient in the face of climate change.

Regenerative farming is not a new concept.  Remember the six inches of topsoil and rain model of cultivation on those  bumper stickers? Farms like Birdsfoot demonstrate what a more regenerative  model of farming looked like.

The researchers  investigated how this model can be expanded upon and made more viable for struggling farms. Day and Cramer focus on unpacking regenerative agriculture policy, adoption and education. Given how powerful industrial agriculture is, policy that supports smaller farmers is a tough sell to many legislators.

Shifting laws, especially within the American Farm Bill, which outlines American agricultural policy, subsidizes industrial agriculture heavily, is key to making regenerative agriculture viable. Making no- or low-interest loans available to farmers who use regenerative practices or subsidizing labor costs are both policy changes that could have a real impact.

Outside of policy, modern approaches for community and support, like farm to table networks that help fund farmers making the switch and internet communities for sharing ideas. Encouraging farmers to explore new financial models and sharing approaches that work locally are also essential. 

At Birdsfoot farm, a CSA model has been the main reason they remain viable. Birdsfoot also hosts young farmers to come and learn regenerative agriculture techniques who will then continue to bring those principles and techniques to their own farms, highlighting the role of educational networks for farmers. 

While it is by no means a solution to all of our environmental problems, switching from an industrial agricultural model to a regenerative one would reduce the ways in which the current systems perpetuate harm and leave communities vulnerable to climate change and soil degradation. Still, Food produced organically and on a smaller scale through regenerative agriculture is often prohibitively expensive to consumers. The benefits of regenerative agriculture do not fundamentally address the problem of how to implement these changes in a way that doesn’t lead to the creation of food shortages or or more economic hardship, given that cost-saving is a real asset of industrial agriculture. 

So, what to do? Expanding welfare programs, like EBT benefits, to cover CSAs and other models of food distribution is key to reducing harm for those undergoing the shift from industrial to regenerative agriculture. Farmers themselves also play a role in accessibility, such as Birdsfoot’s “Buy a Share, Give a Share” program, that allows wealthier families to contribute to their community by sponsoring an anonymous CSA share. When moving forwards to regenerative agriculture, Birdsfoot Farm, and Dulli specifically, is an inspiration, modelling a path, rather than a destination.

 

Farmers Market and Foraging: Eating Local Could Reduce Metric Tons of Emissions

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The frozen shrimp prepared at the worst buffet in town have traveled more than most Americans. It’s a questionable food choice and questionable from an environmental perspective. When most groceries in the United States travel thousands of miles to get to consumers, emissions add up quickly. 

A recent study from Nature Food shared how transporting groceries creates upwards of three billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year. This is 8% of all global emissions. The study tracked carbon emissions from all supply chains and every country. Their estimate is more than triple previous studies that lacked this level of complexity. 

Current supply chains span countries and continents. China and the United States are separated by the largest ocean on Earth, but trade between them is common. The US trades with Canada, Brazil, most of Europe, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and others. Year-round cravings for seasonal vegetables like zucchini and tomatoes and tropical fruit like dragon fruit, mangos, and lychee are indulged. Trucks, ships, vans, and planes all emit greenhouse gasses as they travel thousands of miles between countries to deliver these foods. As world trade increases, emissions are rising.

Take, for instance, frozen shrimp in Massachusetts. Shrimp raised in Ecuador is shipped to Shanghai (10,000 miles). The shrimp is packaged and sent to Los Angeles (6,400 miles). This is then taken by truck or train to Boston (2,900 miles). Altogether, that is over 19,000 miles for some frozen shrimp, 

These miles and emissions are mainly caused by the US and other high-income countries. High-income countries represent 12.5% of the global population, but 46% of international emissions from food transportation. Having a wealthy consumer population means foods are brought from around the world to satisfy cravings for tropical fruit and out-of-season food. While these global foods are undeniably delicious, they cause an inordinate amount of harm. It does not have to be this way. 

There is still a way to get healthy, diverse, and delicious food while reducing emissions. The researchers recommend eating locally. Consumers would still get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables year-round from the area, just not the ones with high emissions. Changing to a more local diet could curb excessive greenhouse gasses. Eating food made in state would carry a lower emissions tag than shipping food across the country. 

One way to supplement this diet is foraging. Collecting berries, mushrooms, nuts, roots, and leaves growing in parks, backyards, and mountains would reduce emissions further while bringing in more diverse offerings. Forageable plants can be found everywhere, including in cities. While wild plants are most abundant in the spring and summer, food can be foraged at any time of the year. They provide nutrition without the emissions of grocery stores. It’s also free and acts as an alternative to the highly consumerist and globalized food system currently in place. There is still a variety of new, healthy, exciting flavors to try, but it comes from where people already live. 

Reducing emissions needs to come from all over, and food consumption is a great place to start. As the researchers showed, eating local is one solution to a larger problem. Working to limit international transportation of food may be the thing the Earth needs to fight back against climate change. 

Waking from the Good Life; Agrarian Movements and Their Legacy

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For many young people, the threat of climate change looms large in our collective consciousness. Questions that used to characterize young adulthood, like career choice, moving out, and the decision to have children have taken on a surreal quality to them, as many young adults believe that we won’t have a future, economically or biologically. Some choose to address this despair with standard fair nihilism, some by channeling their energy towards social causes and some respond by posting videos of themselves making bread on TikTok. 

Figuring out what do do in response to ecological collapse, overconsumption, economic hardship and disconnection from the land is seemingly part of every young person’s psyche these days, manifesting in the cottagecore aesthetics, frenzy around foraging, and the rise of homemaking and farming media that gain millions of views on social media. And of course, a call to return to the land, to live in agrarian communities, close to neighbors, in harmony with the earth. 

Many young people about to enter the job market joke about moving to the countryside with friends and herding goats, or vegetable farming or any wide variety of agrarian pursuits. We laugh and chuckle. “God, I want that so bad.” “I’m sick of online. I want to disconnect, unplug.” It becomes the kind of joke one tells to alleviate longing. We joke, but we also dream of agrarian utopia, of hard labor, and rightness with nature.

Whatever TikTok and other social media may imply, our generation is not the first to ever think of this radical movement away from the hustle and bustle of modern life. The idea of an agrarian utopia is a common thread throughout the history of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s idea of a yeoman nation of small farmers lie at the heart of much historical republican thought. Amish and Mennonite communities in the U.S. offer a religious version of the same dream. 

More recently in the 1970s, swaths of people moved to rural areas and started co-ops, communes, and intentional communities in what is referred to as the Back to the Land movement. The Back to the Land movement was a part of the social upheaval of the 70s, along with the literature from the Beat Generation, protests against the Vietnam War and second wave feminism. Gary Snyder and other famous thinkers wrote inspiring manifestos about a return to agrarian ideals, local communities, the commune model, and self sufficiency. Importantly, this wasn’t a movement of farming communities reaffirming their livelihood, but people, usually from cities, choosing a separate more ecologically driven lifestyle. 

The dream of the return to nature, back to the land, agrarian utopia is often a far cry from the reality of disconnecting from our modern systems of consumption. There is a reason most of us in the United States think of the Back to the Land movement as failing. Some of these communities still exist, with Maypole Dances, Garlic Festivals and CSAs, but the farmers are aging out of their work, and their children are either not able or interested in continuing their parents’ ideologically driven lifestyle. 

Newcomers to these communities often stay for a few years and then when the stresses of either the work or the chafing of a close community become too difficult to manage, they leave. Agrarian communities that have persisted prior to and after the Back to the Land movement are communities like the Amish, which impose a strict, often religiously backed social code of conduct. The liberal, secular, self-sustaining communities of like minded people that were hoped for in the Back to the Land movement have not remained vibrant. Financial troubles and mass exodus of jobs meant that most communities founded as part of this movement have since been abandoned, farms sold and families departed. 

Given this history, it seems that this recent resurgence of back to the land thought and images of agrarian utopia online are destined either for failure or religious orthodoxy. In light of the climate crisis and the economic fears that hang over this generation, it is worth exploring what it is that caused these previous movements to fall so far from their idealistic beginnings. If we can learn from the past, perhaps we can avoid some of the pitfalls that those before us struggled with. The goal of this project is to explore the rise, success and fall of so-called Back to the Land movements, and unpack both the missteps and virtues of the new online discourse of agrarian utopia. 

How to Change the World: a Review of “Under a White Sky”

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Image: Lacey Berg

There are two ways to deal with an environmental issue: do nothing, or do something. 

We’re at a critical moment in deciding the fate of the planet as we know it. Since we joined the planet’s cast of characters, human activity has changed the course of rivers, driven species to extinction, and altered the composition of the atmosphere. Climate scientists have identified a 2 degrees Celsius increase in the planet’s average temperature as a tipping point beyond which climate catastrophe is unavoidable. “Business as usual” is projected to raise average global temperatures by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius. 

But we aren’t totally doomed. In the past year, I’ve witnessed humanity weather a pandemic and widespread political unrest. Through all of the worst parts of it, I learned that like it or not, we’re here to stay on this planet and the least we can do is try to make life better.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, examines what happens when someone decides to do something to make life better. You might recognize her dry humor and candid descriptions of frightening climate scenarios from her 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Sixth Extinction. Under a White Sky continues to explore how people have changed the earth.

She argues that human civilization is essentially an experiment in defying nature that has entirely reshaped the world. Since the advent of agriculture, people have been making large-scale changes to their environments in the hopes of improvement. Welcome to the Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch defined by the impact of human activity. 

Ten thousand years later, Kolbert examines how “people try to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”

 Kolbert chronicles some truly ingenious human interventions in nature: electrifying the Chicago River to kill invasive carp, building a replica of a unique hot spring in California to save a rare fish, and breeding “super corals” that can withstand marine heat waves, to name just a few. Spoiler alert: none of these ideas went according to plan.

The great limitation to the remarkable cleverness of people is that we can’t predict the future. Imagine explaining the consequences of planting some grains to somebody 10,000 years ago. Now try to imagine what humanity might look like 10,000 years from now. Kolbert proposes enormous philosophical, existential questions, then inserts her voice to remind readers of what it’s really like to live in the world every day. We’re ill-equipped to answer questions of thousand year consequences when thinking about what’s for dinner feels like planning in advance.  

But we can try. And we do try. And we will continue to try.

Under a White Sky ends with a cutting edge idea for saving the planet: solar geoengineering. Solar geoengineering sounds simple enough: block out some sunlight to keep the planet from warming too much. Many people are philosophically opposed to geoengineering because of the dangers of “playing god,” but we already live in a world that’s been fundamentally altered by human presence and activity. 

Instead of asking whether or not we should blast sulfates into the stratosphere, Kolbert wonders what it would be like to live under a white sky, in a world with a little less sun. She calls on history for a little clarity. In 1815, Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia, killing tens of thousands of people and filling the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide, one of the compounds popular among geoengineering researchers. The eruption had cascading effects worldwide. 1816 was known in New England as the “year without a summer.” Crops froze in Massachusetts in August. The gloom inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There were also brilliant sunsets.

Dan Schrag, a geoengineering researcher at Harvard, tells Kolbert “people have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar geoengineering or not.” In his view, “the highest priority for scientists is to figure out all the different ways this could go wrong.”

And there are so many ways it could go wrong. While scientists make recommendations about geoengineering, ultimately the implementation of any project will be a political decision. How will governments address issues of environmental justice when implementing geoengineering? Who will fly the planes that spray sulfates into the atmosphere? Where will they spray them? When will they stop?

My argument for geoengineering boils down to this: we’re probably screwed anyway, so we might as well try. But I read this book on a series of brilliantly sunny spring afternoons, and I shivered thinking about how awful the weather would have to be to inspire Frankenstein. Even though Kolbert’s frank and funny tone steers the narrative away from nihilism, I’m left wondering if humanity could survive a dark age. 

In the final pages of the book, Kolbert uses ice cores from Greenland to reveal the surprising history of earth’s climate. Air bubbles in the ice cores are time capsules for thousands of years of climate history. The past ten thousand years have been fairly stable, climate-wise, save for the centuries since the Industrial Revolution. But before the last ice age ended, the climate fluctuated wildly; temperatures swung up and down by as much as 8 degrees Celsius at least 25 times in a period of about 3,000 years. 

Human civilization’s short history coincides perfectly with a stable climate, a novelty we’ve mistaken for the norm. Now, we have to figure out how to define our future on an unfamiliar planet.

Kolbert’s conclusion departs from more traditional environmental sentiments about restoring nature. The world is different now than it used to be– we changed it. In the future, the world will be different than it is now. Maybe we’ll embrace geoengineering to help stabilize the climate. For all the things that go wrong, I think we owe it to ourselves to also imagine how things could go right. 

It’s Time to Rescind This Trump-Era Restriction on the Clean Air Act

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Photo: Gene Daniels, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

 

I, like 7% of US kids, grew up with asthma. One family road trip to California turned into a nightmare when we stopped for gas just inside the San Joaquin Valley. I had barely hopped out of the minivan when I felt my lungs tighten. Within seconds, I was doubled over, wheezing. Every inhale felt like needles were poking into the walls of my lungs, and every exhale was a pathetic little puff. Luckily, I had easy access to my rescue inhaler, and I made it out of the situation safely. But the memory will always stick with me.

This was my first run in with the realities of air pollution, but this isn’t a story about me, or even about the San Joaquin Valley, where twice as many kids have asthma compared to the national average. It’s about an arcane system of environmental rules that leaves us all vulnerable to such threats

Like me, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan was once an asthmatic kid. Now, the EPA he leads has the power to improve air quality for all of us, asthmatic or not. And you and I have the power to help him do it.

In December 2020, after Donald Trump knew he’d be leaving office and President Joe Biden would be his successor, the Trump White House raced to cement its legacy of environmental deregulation.

One of their last-minute actions is especially concerning. It has the unfortunately long title “Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Benefits and Costs in the Clean Air Act Rulemaking Process.” From here on out, I’ll just call it the Cost-Benefit rule. Trump’s EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler, touted the Cost-Benefit rule for improving consistency and transparency in rulemaking.

The rule requires EPA economists to split up the expected economic improvements from any new Clean Air Act rule into “benefits” and “co-benefits.” Benefits are narrowly defined as improvements directly targeted by a new rule, while every other improvement gets relegated to co-benefit status.

Let’s say a new rule targets sulfur dioxide emission to reduce acid rain. But reducing sulfur dioxide emissions will also likely reduce fine particulate matter emissions, which are correlated with use of rescue inhalers for asthma symptoms.

But all of the dollars saved when folks with asthma breathe easier as a result of our hypothetical rule don’t count under the Cost-Benefit rule. They’re just co-benefits.

Industry stakeholders flooded the EPA with public comments in support of the Cost-Benefit rule, giving the Trump EPA an easy way to rationalize the rule. Under the rule, polluters could push back against Clean Air Act measures by excluding co-benefits, which can play an important role in justifying new environmental regulations.

Excluding co-benefits made it easier for polluters to challenge Clean Air Act measures in court, slip out from underneath them, and continue polluting. If co-benefits can be ignored, or downplayed as they were under the Trump administration, new Clean Air Act measures are harder to justify based on cost-benefit  analysis  alone.

A decade after my asthma attack outside that California gas station, 82 million Americans still live in counties with air pollution above national standards. There is still work to be done. Lives are on the line. Counting co-benefits can save lives.

This is where the Biden EPA’s effort to rescind the Cost-Benefit rule comes in. It’s where we the people have the power! The EPA under Trump used public comment from industry to justify the creation of the Cost-Benefit rule, and the EPA under Biden can use public comments from you in its rationale for rescinding the rule.

From now until June 14, 2021, the EPA is collecting public comments on rescinding the Cost-Benefit rule. Please, for all of us who will breathe a little easier knowing that the EPA can use the best information available to make rules to protect us, submit a comment. When you submit a substantive comment, the EPA is required to respond to your concerns  in the text of the final regulation.

It’s time to take a stand against conservative politicians and corporate polluters weakening our environmental protections. The EPA is and should be for the people. We’re taking it back.

Can we geoengineer hope?

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Image: NASA Earth Observatory

 

I’ll admit it: I’m scared of the future.

By now we’ve all heard frightening speculation about a future of rising carbon emissions and intensifying climate change. I often find myself overwhelmed by the unrelenting reality that humans have thrown the entire planet out of whack and now we’re paying the price. Some days I see human extinction as the only possible outcome. Life in the meantime seems futile.

I’m not alone in my climate despair. Last year, the American Psychiatric Association reported that over two thirds of Americans are anxious about climate change. Young people especially are struggling with imagining a future in a world that seems so unstable. 

Resigning ourselves to climate doom won’t solve climate change. It makes us apathetic and unmotivated to look for innovative solutions or push for emissions reductions. If we want to stave off complete climate catastrophe, we need at least a little bit of hope.

Enter solar geoengineering, the brilliant and controversial idea to release reflective particles into the atmosphere to block out some sunlight and slow down the greenhouse effect. No other proposed climate solution would be anywhere near as fast, effective, or cheap.

A lot of people, including climate scientists and environmentalists, think it’s a terrible idea; it’s slapping on a bandaid while corporations continue to hemorrhage fossil fuel emissions. If geoengineering provides any relief, people might stop feeling the sense of urgency that’s driving other climate action.

There is a lot that could go wrong with trying to engineer the climate. Right now, the research is mostly computer models and speculation. A leading research group at Harvard had planned to conduct some of the first field experiments in Sweden this summer, but they were shot down by Swedish environmental groups and the Saami Indigenous people for failing to consider the interests of local communities.

There’s certainly merit to the criticism. Geoengineering shouldn’t be entered into lightly or without engaging local communities and prioritizing justice and equity. But as I teeter on the edge of a pit of climate doom, the idea that we could buy ourselves more time to get our act together is tantalizing, and I think we should consider it.

Reducing emissions on the scale we need to, in the time we need to do it, seems impossible. Even if the Green New Deal hadn’t crashed and burned two years ago, implementing its massive structural changes to zero-out carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner would be enormously expensive and challenged by conservative politicians at every step of the way. 

Geoengineering could give us a positive action to rally around and make us feel like we’re doing something. Even if it doesn’t work like we expect it to, it could reinvigorate climate action and pull us back from the brink of climate fatalism. 

Maybe we don’t need to geoengineer our way out of a climate catastrophe– just our climate despair.

Nobody can predict what a geoengineered future will look like, but we need to try to imagine it. Last summer, I learned a lot about prison abolition, and something I’ve been carrying with me is the importance of imagination. According to Angela Davis, imagination is one of the most important tools for solving big problems like the prison system. This works for climate change, too: imagine what you want a geoengineered world to look like, then think about what needs to happen to make that a reality.

I’m imagining a world where we’ve embraced geoengineering. It’s a world where fewer people have to move inland to escape rising sea levels, where coral reefs have time to adjust to warmer water, and agricultural belts continue to thrive. It’s also a world where I could hope to see a glacier in real life one day. Sure, it’s just speculation, but I think attitude matters. Geoengineering offers us the opportunity to reframe climate change as an opportunity to build a world we want to live in.

If we really want to stop climate change, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. But a simple answer isn’t always the easy one, and energy transition is going to turn our world upside down. Geoengineering could buy us just enough time to make that  transition thoughtfully, not frantically.

Geoengineering isn’t our only hope– it’s not even a real solution– but it could give us some hope when we desperately need it.