Sustaining Us

One of my more hopeful pursuits is a place in the minds of my (few) readers; to facilitate our ability to challenge the unconscious, the status quo, and lift the veil hovering over the wealth of unknown possibilities. Water conservation is a good choice for such a goal. Water is unique in its own right.

First, water has a slightly negative, slightly positive charge making it versatile. Water’s allure includes its dirt busting abilities in the kitchen sink and it’s ever so fragile surface-tension, allowing water to rise over the lip of a glass or an insect to walk across a pond. Second, water’s density decreases as it gets cooler, a peculiar trait in the word of physics. Ice is genius! If ever anyone had a reason to believe in divine intervention ice is evidence. Ice floats in our beverages combatting the heat conveyor (heat rises, see convection). Water’s quirkiness is nothing short of miraculous. Without such an abundance we wouldn’t be here.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote, “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” Singularly, this quote embodies the dilemma we face in the near future, a water conundrum. We’ve polluted our fresh water sources and drained the remaining potable reserves. In most municipalities, our water use is beyond what is naturally replaced. Seven states reached a landmark agreement to split what’s left of the Colorado River and its dam-born reservoirs. Once a river that stretched from the Rockeis to the Pacific, the river no longer reaches the ocean shore.

I have tremendous faith in America’s ingenuity, ingenuity that will be forced to unlock the secrets of desalinization (removing salt) if we wish to solve our water demand without compromise. In the near term, it’s important to live within our means. We mustn’t depend on tomorrow’s discoveries to save our butts today. Water conservation is a sore subject for many. We envision shorter showers(at least I do), annoying water-saving sinks, and drought-induced prohibitions. Although those measures are often most tangible and easily captured, they aren’t the only ones. Bottled water is an excellent example. Wikipedia mentions that in order to manufacture one liter of bottled water, three to five liters are used in processing (much less is used to clean it every few days in a dishwasher). A standard reusable water bottle can save plenty of water in the long term. Using recycled paper anyone? Synthesizing new paper requires more water than recylced, think 7,000 gallons more per ton. By reducing your waste, you can limit the amount of water needed to move the manufacturing process. There are even more interesting solutions like dual flush and flushless urinals aimed(pun intended) to reduce waste, water waste that is. So challenge the way you consume and you’ll find that you can reduce your water use.

I’ve maintained a long radio silence while reading Michael Pollan’s, Omnivore’s Dilemma, probably because I dedicate so much more thought to what I read then to what I would like to write.

The book is profound in its application. The best part of his writing by far is the appreciation he has for our animalistic tendency. We are part of a massive chain of events in nature, and the way we behave and experience the world is in large part a manifestation of our evolution. No matter how much we’ve civilized ourselves over the past millennia, we cannot escape some of the hardwiring we already have. Imagine trying to run Windows XP on a PC from ’93. Our civilized software can only run on our hardwired circuitry. The analogy is supposed to imply that we reach for a higher moral order from a ladder built on survival in a larger food chain.

Removing ourselves from the animal world without recognizing how the two area inextricably related isn’t right.

Pollan’s book is largely about the choices we must make as people everyday. Do we opt out of the industrial food chain? Do we choose organic, or do we choose sustainable? The latter in the last question is a harder more cumbersome question, because it seems near impossible to sustainably feed 6 billion people. Have we passed the point of no return or do we have to start looking at the human population as we would a population of wild animal? Can the ecosystem support an overabundance of lion? Will they thin the gazelle population to a point where lion begin to die of hunger? Human beings are remarkably adaptable and can show to be unforgiving in their survival. When does the ecosystem reject us?

The questions and insights posed by the book are more than moral, they appeal to our survival and deep seeded tendencies.

I can’t help but keep thinking that our mind works on a different plane than our hard wired unconscious. We as the “civilized and superior” are predisposed to certain self-damaging behavior that the “natural and inferior” world cannot keep in check.

Can we really be sustainable?