David Wann

Making Regional Food Webs Work

Old Perspective: Large companies like Kraft, Tyson, Conagra, Cargill, and Nestle have given us so much variety, so many convenient choices in all seasons of the year. Their huge scales of operation have enabled prices to remain affordable. This is the good life!

New Perspective: The food-industrial complex has made a mess of the American diet, which in turn has spread around the world. Corporate control of the growing and marketing of food has resulted in the loss of health, crop and animal diversity, family farms, cultural traditions, soil, and trust. The best way to counter-balance corporate dominance is for communities, counties, and states to strengthen their regional food webs.

The mantra we hear time and again is that consumers vote with their dollars. True, but to express civic convictions in dollars alone is to underestimate our power to create a sustainable food system. We’re far more than consumers, we’re also school board members and concerned parents, farmers, scientists, shareholders and employees in food companies, and voters who influence political decisions. Without any extra effort, our food choices influence our families and friends, creating cultural consensus and market demand. While some might insist that corporate farming is the only efficient way to grow food, they may not be aware that a primary reason why industrial food is so cheap is that it receives heavy subsidies from taxpayers for commodity crops like corn and wheat, while fruit and vegetable growers using sustainable practices get nothing.  Consolidation in the food industry has reached freakish proportions: in the U.S. and globally. Corporations have bought out more than 600,000 U.S. farms since the 1960s, and now just four huge companies pack 84 percent of beef and crush 80 percent of soybeans. Corporations produce 98 percent of poultry; 2 percent of farms produce 50 percent of all agricultural products in the country. As corporate control of the food industry increased, dietary and crop diversity also decreased: Iceberg lettuce, frozen and fried potatoes, potato chips and canned tomatoes now make up almost half of the vegetable consumption in the U.S., and a mere four crops account for two-thirds of what we eat.

Cooperation

When the size and marketing clout of corporate farms threatened Wisconsin’s small family farms, growers banded together to create a market niche for organic food. From its original membership of seven farmers, the cooperative Organic Valley has grown to more than 1,200 family farms across the nation, making it the largest organic farmer-owned cooperative in North America. Recognizing the need for a new generation of farmers to provide locally grown food, some cities sponsor farmer training programs like Bellingham, Washington’s  “Food to Bank On” project, which connects beginning sustainable farms with training, mentors & market support.  Area food banks have received $50,000 in fresh produce from these farmers since the programs’ inception in 2003.

Civic response to the corporate dominance of agriculture has been ineffective, but it has now found its center of gravity: re-localization. Like the organic food movement, local food has quickly come into America’s mainstream, promoted in great detail by the likes of Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food) and Gary Nabhan (Coming Home to Eat). A survey of more than 1,200 chefs, many employed by chain restaurants or large food companies, identified locally grown food to be one of the hottest food trends in the country. Entrepreneurs such as Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, California are stepping into the niche, providing customers with home delivery of gourmet meals crafted with local produce. A company called Edible Communities recently launched a network of thirty-three region-specific “Edible” magazines (e.g., Edible Atlanta) to promote local foods and flavors in the different locations. Clearly, many Americans want flavorful food with a face.

The challenge is finding mechanisms to connect farms directly with markets and people. A small employee- and farmer-owned company in Portland, Oregon brokers food from local farms to supermarkets. This is typically a difficult sell, since supermarkets prefer year-round deliveries of uniform, flawless produce, in large and reliable quantities. Organically Grown Company became a persuasive agent, convincing farmers to stagger crops; purchasing back-up supplies from warmer locations in Oregon and California; and ensuring that all deliveries are attractively presented. So successful have their efforts been that the company now has a staff of 160. Similarly, geographical diversity of the Rainbow Farming Cooperative – about 300 family farms in Wisconsin, Michigan, Northern Illinois, and the South – makes produce available year-round.

Cleveland, Ohio’s revitalization vision is based in part on urban agriculture. The city’s food policy council (FPC), spearheaded by citizen activists, teamed up with city councilor Joe Cimperman, a strong supporter of urban farming because it’s “good for the economy, nutrition, health, and public safety.” The combined efforts of City Council and the FPC are pursuing zoning changes that will permit garden plots of one acre or more and also allow chicken raising and beekeeping.

Farmers Markets and Farm to School programs are two of the most visible examples of how regional food webs can be woven.  In just three decades, close to 5,000 farmers markets have become local traditions in America’s towns and cities. The Greenmarket system in New York City has the country’s largest network, with a centerpiece market in Union Square and about sixty others in the city, including Harlem, the South Bronx, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where blight has often left residents in urban food deserts that have no supermarkets and shops. A pilot project gives food stamp users greater access to healthy food, because they use food stamps at farmers markets.

Several variables have converged to bring Farm-to-School projects into the mainstream:  new federal and state regulations with nutritional requirements for schools, an epidemic of obesity among students, generous grants from various foundations, and pioneering efforts in cities like Berkeley, California. Berkeley’s Unified School District approved a school lunch program that delivers  “farm to fork” education about planting, growing, and biology – in addition to instilling healthy eating habits that can last a lifetime. Students in over 2,000 school districts in forty states are eating farm-fresh food for school lunch or breakfast.  Overall, schools report a 3 to 16 percent increase in participation in school meals when farm-fresh food is served.  Many benefits besides better health for the students result from programs like these: teachers learn to incorporate food and agriculture into their curricula; parents change their shopping and cooking patterns; and food service staff gain knowledge and interest in local food preparation.

A local food web is more resilient, and able to prevent large- scale catastrophe. “When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions,” writes Michael Pollan. “Such a system is even more susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is to decentralize it.”

Benefits of a Regional Food Web

• Helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy use. (A typical food item travels up to 2,500 miles from farm to plate—25 percent farther than most food traveled in 1980.)

• Reduces the need for packaging and processing.

• Provides healthy produce that can be picked at its peak, providing much better flavor.

• Reconnects people with their communities and the land their food comes from.

• Eating local keeps 90 percent to 100 percent of the money you spend in your town.

• Provides accountability – the closer you are to where your food comes from, the more control you will have over how it is grown.

How can individuals help weave a local food web?

• Shop at local farmers markets
• Support farm-to-school programs, crop gleaning programs, and municipal composting to reuse local nutrients
• Reduce food waste in households, restaurants, and supermarkets
• Organize or participate in a food policy council, in which citizens help direct local food decisions
• Join a Community supported Agriculture (CSA) program, in which participants “subscribe” to produce grown by a local farmer
• Start a community garden, or put in a garden in your yard.

Shopping for Change or More of the Same?

At the supermarket we make choices based not just on price, but relationships, associations, emotions, memories, identity, and values. Using multi-focus lenses, we fill our shopping carts with choices we hope are trustworthy, safe, comfortable, unique, healthy, green, and cheap – but not too cheap. (Wouldn’t hunting and gathering be easier?) We make many of these decisions quickly as we nervously consult our watches, and unfortunately, the food Americans bring home often results in obesity and diet-related diseases such as diabetes and heart failure. The processed foods that now fill supermarket shelves are low in water and fiber (making them easier to ship) but packed with added fat and sugar, making them less filling, more fattening. Author and activist Bill McKibben observes, “The supermarket crammed with its thousands of brightly packaged offerings is a mirage: if you could wave a magic wand and break everything down into its constituent ingredients, a pool of high-fructose corn syrup would fill half the store.”

In the book “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy,” marketing expert Martin Lindstrom’s research sheds much light on the convoluted, interconnected thoughts that perc in our brains as we make choices. Standing in front of the peanut butter display,  Lindstrom’s shopper thinks,

“I associate Skippy with childhood…it’s been around forever, so I  feel it’s trustworthy…but isn’t it laden with sugar and other preservatives I shouldn’t be eating…Same goes for Peter Pan, plus the name is so childish. And I’m not buying that generic brand. It costs 30 cents less, which makes me suspicious. In my experience, you get what you pay for…The organic stuff? Tasteless, the few times I had it… always needs salt, too… Jif…what’s that old advertising slogan of theirs: “Choosy Mothers Choose Jif”…Well I am a fairly discriminating person…”

How can we escape this brightly-packaged parade of industrial food that makes that makes our minds chatter?  The only thing that will really work is a cultural movement that demands changes in what the food industry provides and how they provide it. Processed food is artificially cheap right now because energy has been cheap, and because our tax dollars subsidize the growing of crops like wheat, corn and soybeans – primary ingredients in “industrial” food. As a society, we don’t charge ourselves for the many environmental and health side effects of food. We allocate less of our household budget to food than we ever have before, and we don’t, as a nation, allocate enough capital to mentor new farmers.

The truth is that we need to spend more of our household budget for food, not less.  By rearranging both our household and national expenditures, we should give a higher priority to fresh, healthy food and a lower priority to electronic gadgets, mall booty, cars, lawns, and vacations. Our overall expenses don’t have to go up, they just need to be realigned with our changing values. By choosing higher quality food and better ways of growing it, we also begin to reshape the American culture.

In the meantime, here we are in the supermarket aisles, making the best choices we can. Though brightly colored promises on the boxes and packages (“all natural!” “low-fat!” “high in Omega 3!”) seem a little overwhelming, with patience and peer support, we can learn what these slogans really mean, step by step. For example, “free-range” egg-laying hens are typically out of cages but inside barns or warehouses. They have some outdoor access, but how much is not specified, and there is no third-party quality control. A higher level of quality assurance for eggs is “USDA Certified Organic,” which guarantees not only outdoor access, but also an organic, all-vegetarian diet free of antibiotics and pesticides.

Food labels like these are an agreement, an understanding, between producer and consumer, for a certain level of quality; a certain set of core values. The labels not only help the buyer but also guide the grower, holding production standards higher. Rather than remaining Lone Rangers for truth, justice and quality in food, many Americans are now opting to let Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s or the local food co-op prescreen food products for key traits like fair trade, organic, local, and ecological sensitivity. After learning what brands they prefer, smart shoppers also learn which conventional supermarkets carry those products, often at slightly lower prices. (And they learn to request those products from conventional store managers.) Step by step, they are changing not only the household diet, but also America’s diet.

“You shouldn’t need a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry to go supermarket shopping,” says David Katz of the Yale Prevention Research Center, who wants to bring “traffic light” labeling system to the U.S. “The index, with green, yellow, or red labels, should take into account the quantity of calories, beneficial nutrients, and potentially harmful nutrients such as trans fat, in a serving of any given food.  Why shouldn’t even dummies wind up with a shopping cart filled with the good stuff?”

The eatingwell.com website concurs with Katz that label reading should be easier, but maintains that a lot of important nutritional information is already on the labels, if you know how to scan them. Keeping it simple, they suggest:

Limit Products With:

Saturated fat:  As low as possible; less than five grams per serving.

Trans fat: should be zero. (Hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” oils means trans fats).

Sodium: As low as possible. The FDA allows a “healthy” label on foods with less than 480 mg/serving for entrees, less than 360 mg for all other foods.

High fructose corn syrup: A cheap form of highly concentrated sugar (words ending in “ose” are pseudonyms for sugar).

“Enriched” or “wheat” flour (aliases for “white”) Choose whole-wheat flour instead.

Choose Products With:

The shortest possible ingredient list.

Fiber: Three or more grams per serving.

Whole grains: Preferably first or second in the ingredients list.

“Liquid” or “high-oleic” vegetable oils: Heart-healthy unsaturated fats

Fruits and vegetables: Dried or fresh, in whole form.

Food is the most universal symbol of America’s age of excess. The average American’s dinner comes from five different countries, with a combined airfreight and ocean freight mileage tab that often exceeds 10,000 miles. At least three-fourths of that typical meal is processed and packaged, its nutrients stripped away and replaced by texturizers, sweeteners, and flavor “enhancers.”

Let’s visit Homer Simpson for a few minutes as our “average American” proxy watches TV and snacks. From the research of people like Dr. Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating, we know that Homer is thinking – in his colorfully primitive way – that if he has the chips n’ dip, he’ll also have the friends, the laughter, the adrenalin rushes, the companionship that he sees in the commercials and sitcoms. We know that unlike many Europeans and Asians – whose body wisdom directs them to stop eating when they’re full, Homer’s cue to stop will be when his beer is gone, the big bowl is empty, or the TV show is over.

Homer will eat more M & Ms if they are different colors rather than just one color; more chips if they come in transparent packages so he can preview and crave them; and more fruit if it’s pre-sliced, even if it was sliced weeks ago and preserved in space-age packaging. In an age of excess, Homer forms a perception of how much food is “normal” to eat, then eats a little more because he feels he deserves it.

This email is Part 1 in a short series about the trap we’ve set in our food system. A convergence of food, water, and climate challenges makes technical and behavioral changes inevitable, and URGENT.

To see the full article please visit the blog post at Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and watch for the next installment. To read more about the anthropology of sustainability, stop by my website, davewann.com.

Some of my friends tell me they have “black thumbs,” and that each ill-fated horticultural effort results in the botanical equivalent of assisted suicide (“Away with plants!”). But let these black thumbs experience one proud success — a philodendron that vines up the office wall, or a Type A tomato plant that yields half a bushel of juicy beefsteaks — and they’ll start to notice slight changes in the appearance of their thumbs. At the bank or grocery store, clerks will begin to ask what happened. “Oh, nothing,” the born-agains will reply, modestly. “I guess I just have a way with plants.”

And the more transformations they witness, for example, of barren soil to organic black humus, the greener those modest thumbs will become. The more bright little seedlings they transfer meticulously from rickety wooden flat to rich earth, and the more abundant their humus-rich potato patches become, the more hopelessly lost they’ll be. They’ll begin waking up at five in the morning to chase deer out of the melons, and start turning down free trips to Costa Rica because they need to be home with their germinating seeds.

Ah, my friends, such a fate befell me. From one skimpy row of peas planted next to our foothills garage, I descended into an obsession with plants. I read everything I could get my hands on, from Farmers of Forty Centuries and The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening to Biodynamic Gardening and How to Grow More Vegetables. From Rudolph Steiner to Sir Albert Howard to Michael Pollan and back again.  It paid off, because after ten years of hands-on education in a high altitude garden, I became a complete addict, going into withdrawal in winter months when the garden was sleeping.

Health, Wholeness, a Source of Delight

I’d become hooked on being the broker between a plant’s genetic potential and a garden’s assets – one of which was a growing bank of knowledge in my head. Since I worked swing shift during those early gardening years, I’d spend hours each morning making compost and transplanting seedlings.  I began to be a nut about what I ate, feeling the cycle of energy that flowed through the garden.  Reading a pivotal book by Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, I knew exactly what Berry meant when he wrote, “In gardening one works with the body to feed the body.  The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food.  And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight.”

I must have loved the work, or else the slugs would have beaten me back. In the early years, I’d watch for the emergence of the peas or carrots, and assume I’d screwed something up, because seedlings would only come up here and there, if at all.  Then I visited the garden after hours one evening to close a cold frame, and guess who I discovered, happy as clams without shells, feasting on tender, delectable pea sprouts?

You could drive by that garden on a damp evening in late May and make out my dim outline, with a miner’s helmet flashlight strapped on my head, illuminating the battlefield. I don’t know how many thousand slimy slugs I sent to mollusk heaven, but I do know that if slugs had been nickels rather than chicken feed, my coffee cans full of them would have been a down payment for a small farm in Tuscany.

In the throes of a passion teetering on fanaticism, I began to experiment with esoteric practices like those found in biodynamic literature. Among other things, I was instructed to place deer guts in the compost pile. When you think about it, it does make intuitive sense that there would be microbes in deer innards that specialize in decomposing cellulose and other organic leftovers, but where do you get a good, fresh deer bladder these days? Instead of having to explain my need to deer hunters (which I may do, ultimately) I incorporated a list of basic ingredients reputed to stimulate a compost pile – I think it was dandelion, chamomile, yarrow, stinging nettles, valerian, and oak bark – and I have to admit, my compost pile was legendary that year. (But was it because I fanatically turned the pile about every 15 minutes, or was it the herbs?)

Every spring, as snow melted enthusiastically off the roof of our log cabin, my life would begin again as the sap rose back into my limbs and brain cells. I’d offer (no, insist on) interminable tours to family members, pointing out the miraculous resurgence of perennials, the newly planted rows of peas and radishes. I wrote garden columns for the local paper, and became a Master Gardener by taking the required intensive course and serving as a volunteer at the extension office.  When people would bring in dead plants and ask what had killed them, or call and ask what flowers would thrive in their shady backyards, I tried to access the crammed information like a college student in a final.

What I’m saying, reader, is that somewhere around 1980, I applied for and was accepted into the society of plant nuts.  I began to be an agricultural activist, passionately researching not only what happened in my own garden, but also in the collective, planetary garden. I discovered that pesticide use had increased at least thirteen fold since mid-century, yet pest damage remained about the same. That American society was spending $4 billion for those pesticides, but twice that in hidden costs like fishery losses, groundwater contamination, bird losses, and pesticide resistance. That bees, called “flying $50 bills” by grateful farmers, were routinely being poisoned by farm chemicals.

And that the average age of the American farmer is 60-something.  Who’s learning the trade well enough to feed the rest of us?

According to industrial ecologist Robert Ayres, humans now annually produce more fertilizer synthetically than nature herself. But the truth is that the father of synthetic fertilizer, German Justis von Liebig, died feeling very queasy about his historic “discovery” that plants needed three basic nutrients – nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. He realized too late that plants need dozens of micronutrients, just like people do. The soil had been supplying these trace elements naturally, but was being mined out, eroded, and left as spoil. In 1843, in his twilight years, the father of modern agriculture wrote, “I had sinned against the wisdom of our creator. I wanted to improve his handiwork, and in my blindness, I believed that in this wonderful chain of laws, which ties life to the surface of the earth and always keeps it rejuvenated, there might be a link missing that had to be replaced by me – this weak powerless nothing.” Oops.

But the wheels were already in motion.  Most farmers were already addicted.

from The Zen of Gardening

Investors and venture capitalists are increasingly taking notice of new indicators of opportunity. For example, 2009 was the first year that the average size of a new American house actually went down. The number of farms in the U.S. went up in 2010 and the number of golf courses went down. Solar and wind installations are way up, coal is plummeting. The sale of garden seeds shot up in recession years, indicating several key trends: Americans are indeed financially pinched, but more importantly, we crave hands-on connection with living things, and we want to develop new skills and pastimes that include nature.

Beneath cultural data like these lie deeper patterns that express who and what we are as a culture. Says neighborhood developer Peter Calthorpe, “It’s time to redefine the American Dream. Certain traditional values – diversity, community, frugality, and human scale — should be the foundation of a new direction in designing.”  A recent Zogby poll reflected that redefinition: while thirty–four percent emphasize the familiar rags- to-riches aspect of the American Dream, an equal percentage go much deeper. To them, the American Dream is about the opportunity to participate in decision-making, human rights, fairness, and community.

Beneath the media’s radar screen – so focused on political scandals, crimes, and movie stars – Americans are exploring whether to give a higher priority to discretionary time, which would necessarily mean working and spending less; whether we truly want convenience or a more satisfying self-reliance; and whether we want to democratically shape technology rather than passively letting it shape us. Americans are internally on the move. We question the mismatch between the world we’ve created and a higher order -our DNA. To give a few examples, suburban development often isolates us from each other, yet we thrive with meaningful social connections. Processed foods packed with various kinds of sugar fool our taste buds into thinking we’ve found a whole hillside of blueberries when really all we’ve found is 40 pounds of excess weight. We build doomsday bombs that are only useful if we don’t use them, and conduct wars to teach other people how not to kill – by killing them. Our best choice is to change the rules of a game whose endpoint is collapse.

Our challenges are not just technical; they are social, biological, political, and psychological. There are several basic truths that will necessitate and require teamwork at the national scale:

1.  Technology is no longer the limiting factor of productivity – resources are. Deeper wells can’t pump water that’s no longer there; larger boats and nets can’t harvest more fish when fish populations have been wiped out.

2.  As a global civilization, we are using more and more of what we have less of – resources – and less and less of what we have more and more of – humans. For this reason and others, the new normal will include far more human engagement in crafts and skilled professions – not because we have to – but because we want to. We’ll inevitably run our economy on a richer mix of carbohydrate energy and a leaner mix of hydrocarbon energy.

3.   New systems of accounting track not only productivity but also “destructivity.” Not just efficiency of labor and investment but efficiency of resource inputs; integrity and renewability of the source. Similarly, to evaluate the overall productivity of farming, the new metrics are tracking the nutritional value of the food and the health of the farms it came from, not simply bushels of grain or pounds of beef.

Here’s the takeaway message, beneath the bottom lines of profit and loss: the free market is moving away from deadlines and dying species, toward lifelines and living wealth.

The biggest threat to America is the American way of life, yet we cling to it like a sweaty pillow on a sleepless night. How can we become a sustainable and affordable society when long-held routines, rituals, regulations and recipes remain largely unchallenged? It’s our social software that needs to change, since so many of our challenges are deeply embedded in our collective value system.

To create a clean and green new normal, let’s use a collective strategy proven to break addictions at the individual level:

• Admit we have a problem.
• Seek support, cooperation and cultural consensus.
• Create a new national identity, as other nations already have.
• Design and maintain more equitable policies, greener technologies, and the social structures to preserve them.

We kept hoping that our familiar, comfortable lifestyle could continue without significant changes. If we just screwed in some compact fluorescent and LED bulbs and remembered to take cloth bags to the grocery, maybe we could avoid rethinking our relationship with the earth? If we brought new technologies on line – such as plug-in hybrid vehicles, super-efficient buildings, and huge wind farms – we’d be there, right?

Not exactly. Until we change the direction of our plug-and-play lifestyle, we’ll continue to generate lethal levels of carbon dioxide as we plunder rich climax ecosystems to have powerful vehicles, must-have gadgets and nutrition-free, processed food. For example, although mandated upgrades in automobile efficiency held transportation’s share of oil consumption steady from 1980 to 1990, the pampered American psyche demanded larger and more powerful vehicles and we drove them more – erasing efficiency gains, increasing oil demand, and literally driving up the price of gas. http://www.pewenvironment.org/uploadedFiles/PEG/Publications/Fact_Sheet/History%20of%20Fuel%20Economy.pdf

The Obama administration has called for fuel efficiency standards like Europe’s – more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025 – and American carmakers admit it’s technically feasible. Yet the social question remains: can Americans adapt to smaller vehicles driven as few miles a year as the average European (about 4,500)? This will require better design of cities and communities, stimulated by changes in what we value and demand as citizens.

Two-thirds of Americans say they’d choose to live in a small town if possible, and a similar number would trade their trophy home for a mid-sized home in a great neighborhood, but there aren’t enough small towns and great neighborhoods to go around. In fact, many zoning and building codes effectively make the design of walkable, diverse neighborhoods illegal, partly because they don’t accommodate cars well enough or fit the “normal” pattern.

How can we accelerate the transition to a bright new normal? Social factors such as advertising, TV, and widespread adoption of the “good life” got us into this mess, and social factors will get us out. We’ll create a more sensible way of living by telling and retelling a story that promotes a more moderate, less stressful lifestyle. We’ll build a new civilization the way we built the current one: with incentives, social rewards, changing styles and designs, new kinds of technologies and new ways of meeting our needs. The big picture is that production and consumption will no longer be the defining characteristics of the next era – cultural richness, efficiency, cooperation, expression, ecological design, and biological restoration will be.

Old Normal: Carefree, car-dependent consumption as a way of life. What defines “the good life” is mindless consumption – having anything and everything we want. The suburbs are ideal units of consumption, retreat from a chaotic world, and the sense of playing the game successfully.

New Normal: Conservation, care, and cooperation as a way of life. Although suburbs at their best do offer a world of wonderful benefits, there are also many social, economic, and environmental impacts. Since we have finite supplies of energy, water, land, raw materials, and social stamina, we won’t be able to finance suburbia for much longer in its current form.  Simply put, the suburbs — where houses have on average doubled in size since the 1950s, and where driving per capita has tripled in the same time period – are the best possible invention for mindless consumption. They may well be the largest single environmental impact the world has ever known.

The existing suburbs need to be remodeled, and since they are already occupied, this effort needs to be resident-driven with the blessing and support of municipalities.  Even in the land of private, green-lawn luxury, we can rediscover our cooperative nature with a grassroots effort to find and establish strategic centers among the sprawl.

The problem is that few people fully perceive the costs of their flawless suburban kingdoms, and besides, they are too busy to consider making changes. A typical reaction to the idea of “extra” activities seems intimidating. But suburban makeover activities can be fun, and can ultimately give more than they take. Some of these actions can replace unproductive, current activities in our lifestyles – they are substitutes rather than “add-on” activities, so they won’t take up additional time.

Another typical reaction from suburban residents reflects the mythology of the American  Dream. “I’ve worked hard to get where I am,” goes the myth, “and it’s okay for me to do whatever I want.”  One of the primary reasons we wrote this book was to help establish an everyday ethic that challenges that myth. In the context of a family, when a rebellious teenager has the “whatever I want” attitude, isn’t he or she requested to think again? The care and feeding of a one-third-acre lawn, for example, typically costs $600 or more a year, requiring lawn equipment, 10 pounds of pesticides, 20 pounds of fertilizer, 170,000 gallons of water, and 40 hours of mowing labor. According to the Audubon Society, the pollution generated by an inefficient gas-powered lawn mower for that mowing is equivalent to driving a car 14,000 miles—more than halfway around the world.

The consumption of products also results in public environmental impacts, as resources are stripped to meet the demands of the Suburban Dream. But we don’t see the slash piles or mine tailings, and truthfully, they rarely occur to us. Private mobility cascades into public congestion and public expenditures for new highway lanes. The demand to live on large lots, closer to nature, often destroys the nature we hoped to be near. But we don’t notice when a chorus of cricket chirps is reduced to a sparse, desperate quartet.  A handful of species now dominates our backyards and parks—bluegrass, robins, English sparrows, nursery-grown trees and shrubs, squirrels, mice, sometimes a deer or fox—because insensitive development and uninspired landscaping smother diversity and wipe out natural vistas.

What, specifically, can be done to begin the Extreme Makeover of the suburbs described in depth in the book Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods? This massive grassroots effort begins with a very simple first step: saying hello to a neighbor you’ve never spoken to. Then a “what if?” dialog begins on sidewalks, decks, and living rooms across America. Said poet Carl Sandburg, “Nothing happens unless first a dream. “  In this case the dream is a reshaping of the suburbs as well as formless, forgotten urban areas into a new American Dream.

Superbia! Checklist

Easy Steps

Sponsor community dinners.

Establish a community newsletter, bulletin board, and community roster.

Establish a neighborhood watch program.

Start neighborhood investment clubs, community sports activities and restoration projects.

Form weekly discussion groups.

Establish neighborhood baby-sitting coop.

Form an organic food co-op.

Create car or van pools for commuting to and from work.

Create a neighborhood work-share program.

Create a mission statement.

Create an asset inventory.

Bolder Steps

Tear down fences: opening back yards to create communal play space and a space for neighbors to mingle and a community garden.

Plant a community garden and orchard.

Establish a neighborhood composting and recycling facility.

Plant shade trees and windbreaks to create a more favorable microclimate.

Replace asphalt and concrete with porous pavers and greenery.

Establish a more edible landscape—incrementally remove grass in front lawns and replace with vegetables and fruit trees.

Start a community-supported agriculture program in which neighbors “subscribe” to local organic farm’s produce.

Create a car-share program–purchasing a van or truck for rent to community members.

Begin community-wide retrofitting of homes and yards for energy  and water efficiency.

Solarize residents’ homes.

Boldest Steps

Create a community energy system.

Establish alternative water and wastewater systems.

Establish a more environmentally friendly transportation strategy.

Create a common house.

Create a community-shared office.

Establish weekly entertainment for the community.

Narrow or eliminate streets, converting more space to park and edible landscape, walkways and picnic areas.

Retrofit garages and rooms in your homes into apartments or add granny flats to house students or others in need of housing.

Establish a mixed-use neighborhood by opening a coffee shop, convenience store, and garden market.

Promote a more diverse neighborhood with multi-family dwellings.

It’s inevitable that our society will move back to an affordable, sustainable set point. We’ll give higher priority to belonging, and lower priority to belongings. The reason is simple: our current way of life often leaves us feeling used-up, and lonely. In that emotional state, it doesn’t matter what we own or don’t own – we’re not thriving. On the way to becoming world-class, gold medal consumers, many assumed that social connections were so basic they didn’t require much effort. After all, relationship challenges on TV usually resolve themselves in 23 minutes or less, and we expect the same in our own lives. We buy into a richly advertised paradigm that says products are socially advantageous — we smell sexier, or have that distinctive sparkle * of success.  But the sparkle is fading from a lifestyle that vacuums so much time and human energy out of our lives — leaving fewer opportunities for genuine connection and taking care of things. Now we see that many of the products we work so hard to buy actually isolate us from other people — for example, the iPhones, video games and Visa-funded fantasy vacations; houses so large we sometimes can’t find family members; and automobiles that carry us on solo journeys in which we can’t stop dialing numbers on our cell phones.

According to a study conducted by the National Science Foundation, summarized in American Sociological Review, one fourth of Americans say they have no one they can discuss personal problems with – more than twice the number in the lonely hearts club in 1985. The typical American has lost one of his closest friends, it seems, since even the average number of confidants has fallen from about three to about two.

A wealth of scientific evidence now supports what we’ve known in our hearts all along: without strong social and spiritual connections, we wither. We need to elevate love and connection to a higher priority even if that means we make less money and spend less time worrying about it. Researchers say it’s a matter of life and death. Dr. Dean Ornish, author of Love and Survival, says, “Study after study has shown that people who feel lonely, depressed and isolated are 3 to 7 times more likely to get sick and die prematurely than those who have a sense of love, connection, and community in their lives.” (6) One study looked at men and women who were about to have open-heart surgery. “The researchers asked two questions: ‘Do you draw strength from your religious faith?’ and, “Are you a member of a group of people who get together on a regular basis?” Those who said no to both questions were dead within 6 months, compared to only 3 percent of those who said yes to both questions.

Our health is even boosted by the unconditional love of pets. In a study of heart attack victims who now had irregular heartbeats, six times as many people died if they didn’t have a pet. Many other studies show similar results. Says Dean Ornish, “If some new drug showed a six-fold decrease in deaths, you can be sure that just about every doctor in the country would be prescribing it. Yet when was the last time your doctor prescribed a pet or supportive friend for you?”

After many years of hands-on medical work, Ornish concludes that the real epidemic is not just physical heart disease but also emotional and spiritual heart disease. Social support makes us feel valued and loved, feelings that enhance our health; but conversely, “Anything that promotes a sense of isolation can lead to illness and suffering.” The reasons why are tangible: for one thing, isolation increases the likelihood we’ll smoke, overeat, or fail to exercise. Furthermore, says Ornish, “Bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms must penetrate through our immune, neuroendocrine and other defense systems, and these defenses are measurably enhanced by love and relationships.” Social connections also reduce stress, the universal Grim Reaper. For example, when you’re low on cash, one of the most stressful things going, it sure helps to have a friend throw you a lifeline. When you’re sick, maybe another friend will take care of your kids for a few days until you feel better. Ornish has observed an especially strong correlation between the love of parents and good health, in part because parental relationships have such a long span: nutrition before and after birth; coping styles developed when young — such as anxiety, anger, and optimism — spiritual values and practices, and parental support and love in one’s adult life.

What sociologists call “social capital” is a renewable resource – the more we spend, the more we have.  Social capital is the glue that binds communities together, creating cultural norms, energetic networks, and reservoirs of trust. When freely and wisely spent, social capital lowers crime rates, makes schools more productive, and helps economies function better. Contracts, leases, and schedules operate more smoothly. In socially abundant communities and nations, individuals don’t have to earn as much money to be comfortable, because quality of life is partly provided by the strength of social bonds. For example, two farmers who share machinery with each other avoid having two combines on adjoining farms; credit union members and insurance carriers can share pools of financial capital; and jobseekers can find work more easily — substituting networking for possible bankruptcy. (More jobs are found by word of mouth than by reading the classifieds). The wealth of social capital also becomes apparent when we share information about resource efficiency in our houses; about which computers are more reliable; or which friend of a friend is looking for a partner.

Philosopher Martin Buber’s work distinguishes between two kinds of social connection.  In the I-You relationship, an unwavering, holistic bond of trust exists between and an individual and key aspects of his life, including other people, other living beings, and whatever a person perceives God to be. In Buber’s view, when we experience life from a perspective if I-You, we enter a sacred realm of authenticity and oneness. We make and keep commitments to “be there” without pretense or judgment, on a playing field of mutual caring, respect, and responsibility. In this way, we create the priceless relationships that make life worth living.

On the other hand, in I-It relationships, people are misperceived as objects, valued only for what we can get from them. The ego is in the center, surrounded by things and people it tries to manipulate. Instead of being at one with the world, we become detached and isolated from it. If people or other living beings are no longer of use, we just throw them away. For example, when a huge school of fish is perceived as huge profits, it doesn’t matter if that particular species is an endangered species – the fish are just objects that exist for our benefit. We assume there are always more objects or more people  to exploit.

The analytic I-It approach to life makes us strangers in our own world, and is a primary reason why many feel a sense of emptiness. We strive to connect with a Higher Power we can sanctify rather than objectify — a being who won’t let us down, and to whom we are devoted. I believe we can and must bring sanctity to our everyday lives by creating I-You relationships; treating even the food we eat or a masterpiece painting with great respect, wonder, and connection, because the people who grew healthy food or created the painting “speak” through it.  By changing the way we regard the world, the “me” in each of us becomes a much wider we, and we feel interconnected and complete. Even in a world filled with contradiction and superficiality, we find True North.