1. Most high profile community leaders and organizations aren’t modeling awareness of sustainability issues, sometimes even at a basic level.
2. Almost all development and expansion efforts continue to incorporate a car-centric model of transportation and community zoning/planning.
3. Most of the focus on environmental education is targeted at individuals instead of at businesses, factories, and government organizations, the latter groupings being the ones that tend to use the most resources.
4. The notion of conducting “green business for green living” has been widely adopted as a goal, but also significantly watered down in its impact, often to the point of minimal actual benefit.
5. Sustainability-oriented efforts and organizations are fragmented and overlapping, despite valiant efforts of a number of projects to bring them all together at the same table.
6. The status of and appropriate use of natural resources has been made into an emotionally charged political or religious debate, which often leads to an avoidance of the topic for fear of offending.
7. There are basic educational challenges in the community about the question of how food is produced and where it comes from.  For many people, food is effectively created at the grocery store.
8. Some people seem to feel that solely by financially supporting one environmental organization or another, they’ve “done their part” for sustainability efforts in the community.
9. Our ability to transform the community mindset about sustainability issues doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the realities of peak oil, climate change and economic despair.

(These are some locally specific issues on top of some other challenges I’ve already identified, e.g. our personal fears around sustainable living.)

So, what are some paths forward that might address some of these challenges?

1. More organizational collaboration and communication.  It might be hard, it might be messy, but it has to happen.
2. More effectively mobilizing community members who care about these issues and who can have an impact on decision-makers
3. Asking corporations / factories / governments to participate as much or more than individuals in making Richmond and Wayne County more self-reliant.
4. Clearly defining sustainability and environmental concepts and terms, to avoid watering down or misapplying them.
5. Creating strong advocacy efforts, or better fund the existing ones
6. Bringing in speakers from other communities with success stories, real life experiences, practical suggestions that we can begin implementing today.
7. Work to untangle the science of sustainability issues from the emotional, religious, and political connotations.
8. Continue education about issues of peak oil, climate change and economic trouble, and how they impact our community.

That’s one set of challenges and possible solutions that I see.  What are the challenges and solutions you see in your community?

I’ve asked a version of this question before: Must we become the change we wish to see in the world? You can maybe tell that there’s a theme here – impactful personal lifestyle change is not often convenient, and sometimes it is downright scary.  But that’s not a reason not to spend as much energy and time as it takes to try to live more sustainably, right?  Change has to happen with each person individually before we can expect the system to change, right?

Or does it?

There’s an essay out there that’s been weighing on me lately, bothering me, in fact.  Essays like this don’t bother me unless either (A) I know they’re speaking the truth and I’m having a hard or slow time integrating that truth into my own life, or (B) I know that they’re missing something important in their treatment of the subject, but I just can’t put my finger on what it is.  In this case it may be some of both.

The essay is “Forget Shorter Showers: Why personal change does not equal political change” by Derrick Jensen.  Jensen basically says that it’s problematic to see an individual living more sustainably as an effective political act, and that devoting time and energy to doing so is not necessarily worth it unless it’s personally rewarding for you.  His reasons:

1. Simple personal living as a political act is focused on harm reduction, instead of on helping bring about needed positive change
2. Simple personal living assigns the blame, guilt and burden to individuals for addressing sustainability issues, instead of to the entities (corporations, governments, etc.) who are creating and perpetuating the problems.
3. Simple personal living as a political act accepts the capitalist redefinition of people from citizens to consumers, reducing our forms of action to “consuming” and “not consuming.”
4. If we don’t question the intellectual, moral, economic and physical infrastructure that create destructive, unsustainable ways of life, but insist that we want to personally be a part of the solution, the inevitable conclusion leads us to self-destruction (or, as Jensen puts it, suicide).

I’ve rephrased some of Jensen’s reasoning, so I hope you’ll read the full essay to get his original thoughts.  But here’s my take on what he’s saying and my original question:

I agree that it’s silly and self-defeating to expend significant resources on personal change without also challenging the pieces of infrastructure that cause harm in the first place.  I do think that a balance can be found more easily within the construct of a community than it can within an individual’s life.  Some people may be really good at effecting personal lifestyle changes while not so good at doing the work needed to challenge a broken economic system, and vice versa for someone else.  Working together, a community unit can do both effectively.

I also agree with Jensen that we must not accept the premise that we as individuals hold the sole power to make our existence as humans more or less sustainable, and that our mechanisms for doing so are choosing what products we do and don’t buy.  I feel embarrassed that I spend any time worrying about making sure the hallway light is off when I’m not using it as I drive by empty strip mall parking lots lit up like daylight, using far more energy than my hallway light ever will.

But I also know that corporations, governments, etc. are made up of individuals just like us, and so I believe that there is power in changing individual minds, modeling sustainable living for each other, and planting seeds of possibility.  It may not be as powerful as getting that strip mall to change their lighting practices, but it’s not nothing.

Jensen concludes his article by saying “the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.“  I know a number of people who believe that they’re doing both – that by navigating systems of oppressive power well, they are playing a role in confronting them, changing them, and even taking them down.

It may come down to the math of the situation, in equations where we can’t know all of the variables right now.  If enough people effecting personal lifestyle change or working within broken systems is enough to actually make a lasting difference, then we’re all set.  If it turns out that the systems of power and corporate/governmental destruction and resource consumption are far more effective than we could ever hope to stop, then we better hope that our individual decisions along the way were personally rewarding, as memories of a life well-lived in the face of a world breaking around us may be the only reward we get.

How does the math work out for you?  Is personal lifestyle change worthwhile and effective?

So I thought I would start an inventory of some of those fears, and see what else you might have to add.  By exploring our fears and understanding what they are, maybe we can find ways to help each other address them.

When we have conversations about living more sustainably, what are we afraid of?  What makes us a little anxious, a little hesitant?

1. Will I have to give up the things in life that I enjoy most?
2. Can I still do the traveling and exploring that I want to do?  Can I still enjoy the open road or take that trip overseas?
3. Will I have to completely change the way I run my business?
4. Are over-zealous tree-huggers going to try to tell me what I can and can’t do with my life?
5. Will I still be able to enjoy the foods I like?  Will I be eating some miserable and bland diet?  Don’t they want me to give up meat because someone isn’t brave enough to stand the thought of a dead cow?
6. I want control over my land and my property, but aren’t they trying to tell me what I can and can’t do with it?
7. Is someone else trying to tell me what’s best for my children?  Are they saying I’m a bad parent?
8. I don’t have the time or knowledge to grow my own food – how do they expect me to survive without groceries from *-Mart?
9. I really like my car – do they want me to give it up?
10. I’ve always wanted to have kids, but they’re talking about controlling the population – yikes!
11. There’s not enough money in our budget for the kinds of changes they’re talking about – who is going to pay for this?
12. Environmentalism is such an issue for the political left – how can I explore it without being a traitor to my conservative, right-leaning affiliations?
13. I’m worried that we are spending all of this time talking about recycling when there are more pressing issues to deal with!
14. These sustainability ethics seem to clash with my own political/moral/religious world view – I need to defend it or my beliefs will be trampled.
15. Our way of life is a great one.  I’m worried that these people aren’t patriotic and are trying to destroy what our country is all about.
16. This blogger nut wants me to reflect on my fears, and I have better things to do.
17. “Being misunderstood or even worse ostracized by friends and family who don’t understand or agree.” – from Becky in the comments
18. “Do I have to live with (and trust) other people?” – from Jim in the comments
19. ?

What else are we afraid of?

[W]here does this drive for relocalizing come from? Perhaps it has to do with a vague sense of ethical rightness more than anything scientifically verifiable. University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt classifies such efforts as attempts to attain (and potentially guilt others into) a sense of moral purity. “Food,” he says, “is becoming extremely moralized these days.”

The problem, of course, is that purity is hard to come by in a world as complex as ours, and simplistic answers often have consequences that their proponents do not intend. Consumers should think twice before jumping on the localvore bandwagon.

I’m all for thinking twice before jumping on any sort of wagon, but I think Mr. Hisrich’s logic is flawed in a number of places. Read on for my point-by-point analysis of his column:

In April, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University published a study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology that all of the transportation associated with the American food supply chain accounts for only 11 percent of foods’ climate impact.

You can view the full study online. The basic conclusion that they make is that the transportation of food isn’t as big a factor in carbon footprint as the production and other factors, and so that we might be able to reduce our footprint more by changing our diet — eating less meat and dairy, which create the most pollution — than we will by changing where it comes from.

This study seems well done, and convincing in its assertion that food miles are only one part of overall considerations when it comes to the environmental impact of food choices. Of course, carbon footprint is not the only reason many people like to eat local; there are lots of other benefits, including the relationships that come with knowing who is growing your food and how, and the proud self-reliance that comes from being able to eat off of the land we live on.

And, “It’s still useful to think about transport,” says David Pimentel of Cornell University, an ecologist who has conducted life-cycle analyses of food’s energy use. He recently calculated that if a typical American drives home with a 1 pound can of corn, 311 calories of fossil fuel energy are used to transport the 375-calorie corn in the can.

In fact, by focusing on local production, emissions may actually rise. This is because growing foods in the conditions best suited to their production can often offset the relatively small impact of transportation. In the United Kingdom, for instance, fewer emissions are released by importing milk and apples from New Zealand and tomatoes from Spain than devoting the energy and resources necessary to produce them locally.

One of the core tenets of the local food movement is not only to eat food that is produced locally, but to avoid foods that can’t be produced locally. Mr. Hisrich is correct that if we try to grow avocados and oranges here in Indiana in the dead of winter, we’ll of course use much more energy to do that than someone growing those foods in a climate naturally suited for it. So while the point is technically correct, it unfairly ignores some of the ethos of the local foods movement – few people are suggesting we try to grow every kind of food here just to satisfy our “exotic” cravings.

[W]hat the growing local advocates encourage often has less to do with an actual weighing of the costs and benefits of local farming than it does with a value judgment about what should be good for rural economies. While one might be able to argue that eating local improves the lot of a particular group, it is more difficult to argue that spending more for local produce improves the economic well-being of either local shoppers or the local economy as a whole.

I’d ask Mr. Hisrich to back that assertion up with some data, the “actual weighing of costs and benefits” of which he speaks. By definition, dollars that are spent on locally produced goods and services, given to vendors that live and work here, are dollars that will tend to stay in the geographical region to be spent again on other locally produced goods and services. This is why every economic development organization in the state works to bring businesses to their towns that will pay good wages to local workers who will then turn around and spend it locally. This is why local currency and time banks are popping up everywhere, and why our own Chamber of Commerce has a “buy local” program. Just because we’re talking about food, the principles don’t become any more mysterious.

What about impoverished farmers in developing countries who merely seek the chance to compete on a level playing field? This movement provides advocates of protectionism another rhetorical tool in their effort to prevent that from happening.

Quite to the contrary, the local food movement is part of a larger cultural perspective that seeks to remove the artificial protections that prevent people from sustaining themselves on their own land-base. If you take into consideration the subsidies, trade tariffs, import/export controls, immigration policies, monopolies and compulsory price controls, and injustices related to wage and labor standards that help create the “impoverished farmer in a developing country” in the first place, it’s clear that the leveling of the playing field needs to happen well before we get to the buying choices of the end consumer.

By encouraging communities to be more self-reliant, we actually help all communities move toward being able to make a sustainable living for themselves.

John Cloud, however, points out that local does not necessarily mean safe. When he asked Joseph Mendelson III, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a liberal Washington group that supports strong organic standards, whether local food should be favored, Mendelson replied, “I don’t know what local means. Do they use local pesticides? Does that mean the food is better because they produce local cancers?”

This is an unnecessarily flippant remark in a serious conversation, but I’ll address it anyway. Not every local food effort advocates the banning of all pesticides and chemicals from the growing process, and communities can set their own standards as they see fit.

The point is that when you can visit your local grower and see what practices they use to create the food you eat (or perhaps even help yourself!), you have much more control over and knowledge about what you put in your body. We only have to look back to this past summer and remember the food-borne illnesses that came from unsupervised, poorly conducted growing processes in an industrial agriculture setting to see how the safety of our food is improved when we’re more engaged in where it comes from.

So, back to the original suggestion Mr. Hisrich shared:

So where does this drive for relocalizing come from? Perhaps it has to do with a vague sense of ethical rightness more than anything scientifically verifiable.

I’ll promise not to be insulted by the suggestion that people in the relocalization movement only make certain decisions just because it might be the right thing to do, if Mr. Hisrich promises not to be insulted by my suggestion that he doesn’t quite know what he’s talking about here.

All across the country and world, communities are experiencing the forced contraction that comes with rising energy costs, failures of over-dependence on the global economy, and the isolation and disconnection of the culture of “suburbia.” Communities that are working to reclaim their identities and self-reliance are finding positive ways to move past those contractions, taking matters back into their own hands instead of waiting for the next factory closure or government bailout to set the course.

The local food movement is a core part of this, and while participating in it will mean different things for different communities, it deserves a bit more consideration than Mr. Hisrich’s column gives.  I do really appreciate that he’s taken this issue on and generated some conversation around it! I hope he’ll join us at the next 100-Mile Radius Potluck here in Richmond so we can continue that conversation together.

Must we really become the change we wish to see in the world?

As I try to work in my life and community to create a peaceful and sustainable existence, these are questions that churn in my head daily.

On a personal level, I think a lot of us struggle with living out the values we hold – we have aspirations and ideals about ourselves and the world we live in that can seem hard to enact, even when the path might feel clear.

But when you start to talk about how the rest of the world could be – even should be – the conversation goes beyond issues of self-discipline, time management, or having sufficient support and encouragement. When we talk about sharing a message with others about how we want the world to be and perhaps suggest they change their behavior to get there, it becomes a question of whether there’s a practical or ethical obligation to already first be living out that existence well as the messenger.

Some people say you have to transform your own life first before you can expect others to transform theirs at your suggestion. Do we?

In Favor of Evangelistic Integrity

There’s certainly an issue of credibility that comes with bringing a message of change or new ways of looking at an issue. If you can’t demonstrate that your suggestion is working well for you, how can you expect others to follow? If you don’t follow your own advice, how can you speak with any authority? This is probably why we subject our spiritual, political, and community leaders to such thorough scrutiny and hold them to a “higher standard” – if they’re to lead us in these critical areas, we think their levels of purity and integrity should be above and beyond ours.

Further, people generally look up to other people who model choices and lifestyles that they want to achieve themselves. When someone has fought a demon or barrier that we’re fighting, and we see that they’ve won, it gives us hope and inspiration. Just as we might only expect true solace in the loss of a loved one from someone else who has experienced a similar loss, we tend to open ourselves more to the teachings and suggestions of those who have gone down the path we’re on now and found something good.

As a practical matter, you can get a lot of useful information from practicing what you preach (depending on the topic). If I’m to encourage people to use a rain barrel to collect rainwater for re-use, it helps a lot if I’ve actually set up a rain barrel and put it to use, as opposed to having just read about it on the Internet. I can still offer the initial suggestion, but when they ask “how will I attach it to my gutter system,” and I give them a blank stare, my utility in the conversation is limited.

Against Requiring That You Become the Change First

Why might we not need to practice what we preach? What could possibly justify this seeming lack of integrity?

For one, we might have a sense of urgency about the changes that we’re suggesting, and the overwhelming number of things that need to be changed, such that we don’t think we have enough time to really become the change we wish to see. If it takes me three years to figure out how to be an expert on growing my own food, should I really wait that long to start talking to others about how they grow their own food? If I know that a community tool shed might benefit a friend’s community but I haven’t had time to start one up in mine, should I wait to suggest it? I’m not sure that there’s enough time for such delays.

Another big one for me: if the positive impact you can have by being a hypocrite is greater than the positive impact you can have by demonstrating total integrity, why stand on principle? Doesn’t the practical nature of the need for changes in our culture dictate an imperative to act, even as hypocrites?

Former Vice President Al Gore is a great example of this question in action: the lifestyle choices that are implied in his “Inconvenient Truth” talks would probably suggest that flying around the world using fossil fuels to visit hundreds or thousands of audiences every year is not sustainable. But, if Al Gore didn’t do those things, awareness about climate change would be much lower than it is now. Some have criticized other parts of Gore’s lifestyle – where he lives, what he drives, etc. – but I think it would be hard to deny that he’s significantly reduced the collective carbon footprint of so many people that those concerns fade away, from a purely quantitative standpoint.

I think about this with some the historically environmentally harmful processes that are involved in the production of the high-tech equipment that powers our Internet connected existence. Lots of people, myself included, use that Internet every day to lobby for more sustainable production processes (or name your other favorite social justice/environmental concern), and the irony can sometimes be hard to swallow.

There are myriad precedents for flawed human beings creating significant and lasting positive change, sometimes even in the areas where they were flawed. There are the pastors who guide families of their congregations through moral crises while quietly abusing their own spouses or children. There are the civil rights advocates who changed the world but struggled with inner demons, the political leaders who spread messages of hope and peace while ignoring their own pessimism and violence. It’s hard to suggest that any of the figures who have shaped our lives for the better while failing in some other area should have withdrawn from their messages of change, though perhaps they should have been more transparent about and aware of their failings.

Lastly, living out a certain model of change or personal transformation sometimes requires being surrounded by others who are doing the same, perhaps even in such quantities as to trigger a tripping point before the actual transformation is possible. If I want to get around town by bike more instead of car, I might encourage others to do the same, but I might not actually live that desire out until my community becomes more bike friendly. As much as we can desire change, speak about change, advocate change, sometimes we have to be a part of a movement of others changing at the same time to actually live it out.

Tricky Areas

Some especially tricky areas to think about:

• What kind of a model do we present for our children? Do we encourage them to favor practicality over integrity or vice versa? Will they know where to draw the line?
• The question of the use of violence often brings up these dilemmas. Can I harm or kill one person in order to heal or save the life of another? If I seek peace and abhor war, how do I respond when corporations and governments and polluters conduct war on my community, my water supply, my environment? What does practicing peace look like then?
• We must be careful not to construct such duality in our lives that we can justify any lapse of integrity. Our sense of self and the values we stand for does seem to matter quite a bit in terms of happiness, ability to connect and love others, and more. There may be some joy in preaching successfully, but it’s hard to imagine a fulfilling existence that is only about spreading the word and not benefiting from it.

Conclusions

So, those are some thoughts that fly around in my head when I try to answer that question about practicing what I preach. My conclusions? I don’t have any solid ones to offer, but here’s where I’m at right now:

• I think we can educate and create change from a position of aspiration, without achieving personal perfection in a given area.
• We must be transparent about and vulnerable to our hypocrisy and its impacts, sometimes asking for forgiveness.
• We must respect those who do want to stand on principle and only speak out from a place of successful personal transformation, and they will hopefully reciprocate.

The change I wish to see is bigger than me and my personal struggles with integrity, but all we really have is what we do with our time here…I’ll be content to be remembered as one who struggled, but acted anyway.

You can view highlights from the event, which was sponsored by ProgressiveWayneCounty.org, in this YouTube video:

Perhaps you’ll join us for our next potluck?

• Smaller Indiana, a social networking site for Indiana people, with an apparent trend toward IT/design professionals. It’s built on Ning, which I’m considering as a platform for a few projects. But mostly I’m just excited to see social networking applied at a more regional/local level – a great trend.
• If you enjoyed Thought to Exist in the Wild, you’ll enjoy this bit of satire: San Diego Zoo, Prison Merge. Yeah.
• The Emergency Party Button – oh yes, I will build this some day soon. They even got the music right.
• What You Do Counts – National Geographic selected this film by an Earlham College student as a finalist
• Someone took the time – a lot of time – to create an interesting map of humanity.
• Wired says you can keep your SUV, don’t bother paying for organic food, forget about the spotted owl, etc. because reducing carbon emissions is the only real battle that matters. Hmm.

For now I won’t try to record the conference proceedings here (they’ll be on DVD soon), but I have a number of blog entries in the works. If you’re interested in hearing about some of what I learned, I’ll also be covering it in a talk on Thursday, November 15th at 12 PM in a session called “Going Local: Building a Self-Reliant Richmond, Indiana.” Join us if you can.