by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
first time, “study chair Donald Hargrove said. “Today, the Procter & Gamble
subphylum alone outnumbers insects two to one.” The sharp rise in consumer
product diversity—with more than 200 million new purchasing options
generated since 1993—comes as welcome news for those upset over the
dwindling number of plant and animal species.
“Though flora and fauna are dwindling, the spectrum of goods available to
consumers is wider than at any time in planetary history. And that’s something
we can all be happy about,” Hargrove said. University of Chicago biologist
Jonathan Grogan said, “Any complex system, whether we are talking
the Amazon rainforest or the Mall of America, needs a rich array of species/
products if it is to survive. That is why, in light of the crumbling global ecosystem,
it is increasingly vital that we foster the diversification of the global
marketplace by buying the widest range of consumer products possible.”
—FROM THE HUMOR NEWSPAPER, THE ONION
OCTOBER 21, 1998
Though it’s a parody, this story from the humor newspaper the Onion is painfully close to the truth. The more we buy, the faster natural species disappear. And the damages accelerate every minute. As you read this chapter, at least thirty acres of farmland and open space are being bulldozed to meet a still-burning demand for suburban “starter castles.” Each one of these homes typically requires an acre’s worth of trees, as well as the equivalent of a house-size hole to provide minerals for concrete, steel, and other construction materials.
Our demand for buildings, fuel, and consumer products sends huge draglines, combines, chainsaws, bulldozers, and oil rigs inexorably into pristine wilderness.
“Industry moves, mines, extracts, shovels, burns, wastes, pumps, and disposes of four million pounds of material in order to provide one average middle-class family’s needs for a year,” write Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins in Natural Capitalism.1 According to the United Nations Environment Program, Americans spend more for trash bags than 90 of the world’s 210 countries spend for everything! In an average lifetime, each American consumes at least a reservoir of water (forty million gallons, including water for personal, industrial, and agricultural use)2 and a small tanker of oil (2,500 barrels).3 Experts at the U.S. Geological Survey predict that world oil production will peak within ten to twenty years, then begin its final, costly decline.
Depressed yet? Facts like these hit us like urgent, middle-of-the-night phone calls. Nature, our mother, is not looking well at all. Virtually unnoticed by the media, she’s been admitted to the emergency room, with a critically elevated temperature and hemorrhaging chest wounds. Hours later, distant relatives of Nature (we typical Americans) wait in chilly air-conditioned rooms for news of her condition (or a Married with Children rerun, whichever comes first). Compulsively, we consume snacks, cigarettes, and electronic games as we wait, somehow oblivious that we are carriers of affluenza—the human disease that strikes Nature like a dozen hurricanes.
ON THE PAPER TRAIL
Most weeklong backpack trips eventually include a weight comparison of the stuff in everybody’s pack. On a sixty-mile hike on Vancouver Island’s West Coast Trail, Dave’s sixteen-year-old son Colin insisted his pack was heavier than his father’s, because it contained more of the shared food supplies. Dave maintained that anyone whose pack contained the tent, ground cloth, and cook stove was carrying the lion’s share. When your stuff sits on your back, you tend to perform cost/benefit analyses on each object. As they slowly made their way up the coast of Vancouver Island, across suspension bridges and moss-covered logs, the debate about the relative value of the stuff was a recurring topic of conversation. “You shouldn’t have brought so many snacks,” Colin needled. (Each carried his own energy bars, powdered drinks, and nuts.) Dave countered, “What if the park provided a trailside scale, so hikers could settle these differences of opinion? Then we’d find out who’s doing the work.”
“Next time pack a scale,” Colin suggested, shrugging his shoulders.
That hike was a pivotal experience for both father and son. They “got” the value inherent in unmarketed, pristine nature—in their lungs, and in their senses—especially the sense of being alive. They reaffirmed a lesson that brought Dave to this book and Colin to a first stop as an Outward Bound instructor: You don’t need as much stuff when you genuinely appreciate the value of what’s already here. As their heads cleared, other forms of wealth than money came into focus: the biological abundance of the rain forest and ocean around them, the social and cultural wealth of the indigenous inhabitants of Vancouver Island, and wellness, surely the most valuable wealth of all.
Originally constructed as a survival route for shipwrecked sailors, the West Coast Trail provides spectacular vistas of bright blue ocean and white, pounding surf, often through dark silhouettes of shady rain forest. Tide pools filled with starfish and crabs, families of bald eagles soaring silently overhead, and the breathing spouts of hundreds of humpback whales all speak of nature’s abundance.
Yet the beaches were littered with the trunks of dead spruce and fir trees, river-borne escapees from a logging industry that has transformed much of the island’s natural capital into barren terrain. One photograph from that trip shows Colin standing on a sawed-off trunk the size of a small stage. He and his father were graphically reminded that many of the products they consumed back home had their beginnings in this particular bioregion, where 10 percent of the world’s newsprint comes from.
If asked that week what Vancouver Island was good for, they probably would have said in exhilaration, “Wilderness. Let it regenerate.” If the logger whose flatbed-semi can transport three 80-foot tree trunks had been asked the same question, he’d have said, “Timber. Let me harvest it.” The issue isn’t a simple one, especially since Americans consume a third of the world’s wood. After returning home from their travels in Canada, Dave resumed his higher-than-average consumption of paper, being a writer, while the logger probably looked for a great, convenient place to take his kids, being also a father.
Although logging companies leave curtains of trees along the road to hide the damage, Dave and Colin caught glimpses of barren patches of land through the trees, spotlighted by afternoon sun. But less obvious was the fact that operations like these force society to work harder. Though hard to track directly, water utility bills go up when logging sediments pollute rivers that supply drinking water. Taxes go up when roads and bridges are washed out by floodwaters that run off clear-cut land. The price of lumber and paper goes up as companies feel compelled to advertise how “green” their practices are. In short, we each write checks and work extra hours to smooth over the “out of sight, out of mind” sloppiness.
OUT OF MIND
In the Middle Ages, people carried sticks of burning incense, hoping to ward off the plague, which they believed was caused by foul smells. Seven hundred years later, we still fail to make critical connections—for example, between what we consume and what’s happening to the world. We buy plantation-grown coffee, not realizing that each cup of coffee exposes another migratory songbird to potentially lethal pesticides in coffee plantations. Like Rachel Carson, we no longer hear chirps in our own backyards, but we don’t make the connection as we take another sip of coffee. The songbirds no longer fly thousands of miles each year from Central or South America to our backyards because they’re dead. And if they do survive to return home, chances are good their northern habitats are covered with roads, houses, driving ranges, and parking lots.
When we buy a computer, it doesn’t occur to us that 700 or more different materials went into it, converging from mines, oil derricks, and chemical factories all over the world. The sleek, colorful machine purring on each desktop generated 140 pounds of solid and hazardous waste in its manufacture, along with 7,000 gallons of wastewater, and abo
ut a fourth of its lifetime energy consumption. Every year, more than twelve million computers—amounting to more than 300,000 tons of electronic junk—are disposed of.4 According to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, by 2006, when the market for flat-panel and digital TVs expands, 163,000 TVs and computers will become obsolete every day, and only a small percentage is expected to be recycled. The point is, when we buy a computer, all the rest comes with it, even if it’s out of sight, out of mind.
What about junk mail? Most of it comes as commercial advertising, but even the nonprofits are guilty on this one. As Donella Meadows wrote, it takes 150,000 direct-mail appeals to garner 1,500 memberships in a given organization. “That means 148,500 will be thrown out. Made from trees, printed with inks by fuel-consuming machines, collated, labeled, sorted by other machines, loaded into pollution-spewing trucks, delivered to mailboxes, loaded into other vehicles headed for (20 percent) recycling stations or (80 percent) landfills.”5 When we toss a piece of junk mail without complaining, we encourage junk mailing.
Every time we eat a fast-food burger, an unseen 600-gallon tank of water comes with it, counting both what the cow and the feed crops drank.6 And when we ceremoniously open the little jewelry boxes with the glittering gold wedding rings in them, six tons of very drab ore are invisibly connected to the rings—lying in a tailings heap back at the mine, often polluting a stream.7
REAL PRICE TAGS
The distinction of being the mother of unseen impacts and hidden costs goes to the automobile. Imagine your sticker shock if the price tag on your new SUV included not only the car’s FOB price, but also the full environmental and social costs of the vehicle. The sticker would cover most of the vehicle’s windows to list those hidden costs, but here’s an executive summary:
THE REAL COST OF YOUR SHINY NEW LIGHT TRUCK
Congratulations! You’ve just purchased a vehicle that will cost $130,000 by the time it’s paid for! (In fact, if you’re in your twenties and finance new vehicles like this one every five years for the rest of your life, you’ll spend more than a half a million dollars in interest and payments.) That’s impressive. As an average American, you’ll use your vehicle for 82 percent of your trips, compared with 48 percent for Germans, 47 for the French, and 45 for the British.
The cost of a thirty-mile round-trip commute in this vehicle will be about $15 a day, assuming gas prices remain at current levels. At that rate, you’ll spend on average more than $3,500 annually to get to and from work. When insurance, car payments, maintenance, registration, fuel, and other costs are added together, you’ll spend more than $8,000 a year to park this vehicle for twenty-two hours a day and drive it for two.
Your vehicle generated 700 pounds of air pollution in its manufacture, and four tons of carbon. It will burn at least 450 gallons of gas every year, requiring more than thirty-five gas station fill-ups. You’ll spend three full days every year vacuuming, polishing, and cleaning the windows of the vehicle and waiting for it at the auto shop. When you divide the miles driven by the time spent to buy and maintain your car, you’ll be going about five miles an hour—even slower than rush hour in L.A.
Your new vehicle will contribute its fair share to the following national costs:
▪ 155 billion gallons of gasoline burned annually
▪ $60 billion spent annually to ensure Middle Eastern oil supplies
▪ 40,000 fatal car crashes annually, and 6,000 pedestrian deaths
▪ 250 million people maimed or injured since the days of Charles Olds (1905), and more killed than all the wars in America’s history
▪ 50 million animals killed annually, including at least a quarter million of “extended family”: cats, dogs, and horses
▪ Noise and pollution that inhibit sleep and contribute to radical increases in asthma, emphysema, heart disease, and bronchial infections
▪ One-fourth of U.S. greenhouse gases, which increase drought, hurricanes, and crop failures
▪ 7 billion pounds of unrecycled scrap and waste annually
▪ More than $200 billion annually in taxes for road construction and maintenance, snow plowing, subsidized parking, public health expenditures, and other costs that come directly out of pocket
▪ A total of more than $1 trillion a year in social costs8
Happy motoring!
THE COST OF HIGH LIVING
Alan Durning of Northwest Environment Watch observes, “Everything we use in our daily lives has an ecological wake that ripples out across the ecosystems of the planet.” Durning and his colleague John Ryan traced the impacts of everyday products in a book titled Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things. Their coffee, for example, came from the highlands of Colombia, where a hundred beans were picked for each cup. The beans were packed in 130-pound sacks and shipped in a huge ocean freighter to roasting factory, warehouse, supermarket, and coffee cup. At each stage, energy and materials were expended to add value to their morning coffee. The beginning of the story is especially troubling:
Colombia’s forests make it a biological superpower. Though the country covers less than 1 percent of the Earth’s land surface, it is home to eighteen percent of the world’s plant species and more types of birds than any other nation. . . . In the late 1980s, farm owners sawed down most of the shade trees surrounding the coffee trees and planted high-yielding varieties, increasing their harvests, and also increasing soil erosion and bird fatalities. Biologists report finding just five percent as many bird species in these new, sunny coffee fields as in the traditional shaded coffee plantations. With the habitats of birds and other insect eaters removed, pests proliferated and the growers stepped up their pesticide use. Some of the chemicals they sprayed entered the farmworkers’ lungs; others washed or wafted away, to be absorbed by plants and animals. . . . For each pound of beans, about two pounds of pulp was dumped into the river. As the pulp decomposed, it consumed oxygen needed by fish in the river.9
“When I first started looking at the real costs of stuff,” said Durning, “a friend read my manuscript and said, ‘Oh I get it, what you’re talking about is guilt trips, not shopping trips.’ But it’s not really about guilt. It’s about creating a lifestyle that doesn’t require as much stuff to make us even happier than we are now. Simple things, like buying shade-grown coffee that reduces the use of pesticides. We need to be thinking about what we get, not what we give up.”10
Because few of us supply our own materials for daily life, almost everything we consume, from potatoes to petroleum to pencils, comes from somewhere else. “The problem is that we’re running out of ‘somewhere elses,’ especially if developing countries try to achieve a Western style of life,” says Swiss engineer Mathis Wackernagel.11
Dividing the planet’s biologically productive land and sea by the number of humans, Wackernagel and his Canadian colleague William Rees come up with 5.5 acres per person. That’s if we put nothing aside for all the other species. “In contrast,” says Wackernagel, “the average world citizen used 7 acres in 1996—what we call his or her ‘ecological footprint.’
“That’s over 30 percent more than what nature can regenerate. Or in other words, it would take 1.3 years to regenerate what humanity uses in one year.” He continues, “If all people lived like the average American, with thirty-acre footprints, we’d need five more planets.” (To find out the size of your own ecological footprint, take the quiz at the Redefining Progress Web site: http://www.myfootprint.org/.)
Wackernagel observes, “We can’t use all the planet’s resources, because we’re only one species out of ten million or more. Yet if we leave half of the biological capacity for other species (or if the human population doubles in size), human needs must come from less than three acres per capita, only about one-tenth of the capacity now used by Americans.”
The solution? No sweat, we’ll use the market. We’ll just go out and buy five more planets.
DARWIN IN REVERSE
It’s bad enough
that resource supplies, along with recreational and aesthetic opportunities, are wearing thin as the affluenza-encouraged plundering of the planet continues. But even more distressing is the fact that life on earth becomes far less diverse as habitats disappear. The loss of a key species from an ecosystem is like pulling out the wrong melon from a supermarket display. You create an avalanche of melons thunking to the floor, because each melon was supported by another. To give just one example, when sun heats up a mountain stream because clear-cutting has removed natural shade along the banks, it’s a holocaust for the trout population because trout thrive in cold water. And when sediment washes off the naked land into that stream, it plugs up the cobbled spaces in rocks that are hiding places for the baby fish. In turn, mammals whose diet includes trout lose an important protein source, so ecological services provided by those mammals are diminished.
Aeons of ecological work are quickly undone. The alarming truth is that hundreds of “melon avalanches” occur every day on the battlefields of resource extraction. Far from being just a rain forest phenomenon, habitat destruction and accompanying extinction are happening right under our noses. “A silent mass extinction is occurring in America’s lakes and rivers,” says biologist Anthony Ricciardi.12 His research indicates that freshwater species from snails to fish to amphibians are dying out five times faster than terrestrial species—as fast as rain forest species, which are generally considered to be the most imperiled on earth. Half of America’s wetlands are gone, and 99 percent of its tall-grass prairies. As these systems are being destroyed for development, agriculture, and other uses, 935 species in the United States (356 animals, 579 plants) are fighting for their lives.13
