Mussels Watching Our Waters

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

Mussels will be watching our waters around the island for the next several months.  As filter feeders, mussels take in whatever is in the water column in which they live, including good things like plankton and bad things like chemicals that have found their way into our nearshore waters.

Bainbridge Island is included in the expanded mussel watch study for the Puget Sound region.  A national program of NOAA, Washington’s mussel watch is coordinated by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.  Previously a small number of sites were included in the study beginning in 2009-10.  In 2012-13, the study is being expanded to 60 sites, including three on Bainbridge Island.  The initial program was not fine-grained enough to provide information that could be used on the local level; the expanded study will enable the identification of sources of regional and local contamination which may provide guidance for adaptive management at the local level.  The study will also provide a baseline against which to measure impacts of possible future oil or chemical spills in the Puget Sound.

The Bainbridge Beach Naturalists are coordinating the placement and retrieval of the mussels for the island sites.  Placement occurs at a low tide in November, the cages are checked in December, and the mussels and cages retrieved in January.  The mussels are transported immediately to a laboratory where they are analyzed for 150 chemicals commonly found in the Puget Sound.

The mussels are adults from Penn Cove on Whidbey Island.  There are 16 mussels in a cage, suspended in bags in the wire cage which is anchored to the substrate or a non-creosoted piling at the selected site.

The long term goal of the study is to establish the status and trends of toxics in Puget Sound nearshore biota.  The program is a managed by a coalition of government agencies, tribal nations, businesses, environmental organizations, agricultural and research interests.

For more information: http://wdfw.wa.gov/conservation/research/projects/marine_toxics/ and http://wdfw.wa.gov/publications/01127/

Posted by Maradel Gale

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Climax of the Season

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

Jon Quitslund

On the eve of our departure for a month-long house-sitting opportunity on the big island of Hawaii, here’s a quick post reviewing some personal pleasures in the last two weeks here on Bainbridge.

The summer, what we’ve had of it, has gone quickly.  Now, for many families, the school year is starting; for some young people that means going off to college.  Several community events are scheduled in September; I’ll mention some at the end of this post.  Let’s hope there’s Indian summer weather stretching into October.

For myself and my wife, the first memorable event in the sequence I’m recalling was a visit by our son Gabriel, up from Portland with his daughter Ava.  Our one grandchild, now a little over 3 ½, Ava hadn’t met many members of the extended family here.  The visit was much anticipated and planned-for, and our gathering at the beach off Sunrise Drive came together beautifully.  Ava charmed the members of three generations; she was at ease with everyone.  She was also prepared to meet a horse for the first time in the flesh, and she had face time with four by the end of the day.

That evening, August 16, was also the scheduled time for a book group meeting at my house: I led a discussion of Wendell Berry’s Remembering, a short novel from the middle of Berry’s long career.  Our group has read several of his books over the years, and they always elicit deep responses.

The next evening, if I recall correctly, was the ‘Farms to Table’ dinner, for the benefit of Friends of the Farms.  It was a wonderful event, and I’m guessing it will become an annual thing.  Chefs and staff from local restaurants prepared the food, mostly from local ingredients; the producers of wine, beer, and spirits were also local.  As were the diners: I saw many people I knew, and met several others for the first time.  The music of Pearl Django added impalpably to the legato swing of the evening.

And then the weekend: it was time for an already established annual event – “Bike for Pie,” at Fort Ward on Sunday.  For some bikers, all the pie you want was the incentive for a strenuous morning-long ride.  I just cruised from Winslow, avoiding the hills, and then relaxed to chat with some new friends and listen to the music, slowly making my way through three pieces of delicious peach and berry pie – no two alike.

On Saturday I had been part of the crew rolling out crusts and assembling pies in the kitchen of Lynwood’s Pane d’Amore bakery, so I felt I had a small stake in the event.  It attracted families, and duffers like myself, along with many movers in the Island’s cycling subculture.  And there was excellent music: Stephen Hubbard made that happen, and he chose well.  In addition to a local folksy, bluesy band, all those who didn’t have to be somewhere else heard Latin jazz by a quartet led by Malo Castro, with Susan Pascal featured on vibes.  I asked if they would play Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘Con Alma,’ and between the first and second set, Susan found the chart in the band’s book!  (I’m so sorry I can’t dance – not in broad daylight, anyway.)

# # #

I expect that my readers all have their own lists of late summer pleasures, and their own perspectives on the many occasions we have to feel the pulse of our community.

More occasions are coming up in September, and I’ll miss them all!  On Friday, the 7th, there’s the Art Walk in Winslow, and if you’re interested in electric cars, stop by the charging station in front of the Blackbird Bakery to learn about the feasibility of this alternative to gas guzzling.  On Sunday, the 9th, Darden Burns’s concert series will not be at the Commons (under renovation for several months) but at the Island Music Center in Rolling Bay, featuring a jazz quartet led by John Hansen on piano, with the saxophonist Alexey Nikolaev.

Other events will be described in the e-news and on the Sustainable Bainbridge calendar.  There’s Jill Bamberg, from B. G. I., at the Public Library on the 14th, 5:30 to 7.  On the 23rd, at IslandWood between 1 and 5:30, the annual Environmental Conference takes place: always a bracing and informative event, focusing this year on the predicament of ‘living downstream.’  At month’s end, the 30th, it would be worth while to take in two events, the Harvest Fair at the Johnson Farm, beginning at 11 a. m. (running until 5 p. m.), and the Frog Rock Forum (the second annual) between 3 and 6 p. m. at IslandWood.

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Individuality vs. Individualism

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

Jon Quitslund

The two terms in my title may look very much alike, but the similarity is only skin deep.  I believe that in our culture today, individuality is best achieved and enjoyed by rejecting the tenets of Individualism as they have evolved in recent decades – since 1980, shall we say?

Individualism has been celebrated in American culture for a long time, to the extent that it may seem inseparable from our national identity.  The problem is that what was once an admirable set of values, emphasizing self-reliance and a ‘live and let live’ attitude to others, has been turned into an ideological stance and put to some dubious uses.

Herbert Hoover fought his losing campaign against F. D. R. as a proponent of “rugged individualism.”  (Millions of Americans qualified as rugged individuals in the Depression years, but it seems that most of them voted for Roosevelt.)  By the end of the 1950’s, Hoover was history, and after an intensive public relations campaign, rugged individualism came to be personified by such icons as John Wayne, Rock Hudson, the ‘Marlboro man,’ and Ayn Rand’s John Galt.

Individualism – authentic in its origins but now reduced to slogans and attitudes – has been marketed like a line of products.  It has been made over to appeal, paradoxically, to people anxious to belong, to conform to a ready-made and backward-looking American ideal.

The cult of individualism lends support to the loneliness that runs deep in our national experience, but does little to promote maturity and a healthy emotional life.  And the impact of individualism on American politics has been devastating: it has promoted a virulent distrust of government, and brought to power politicians whose overriding purpose is to “starve the beast.”

It’s wise to be wary of all “isms.”  In my opinion, doctrinaire individualism is no better than socialism.  If they are taken seriously, both abstractions involve pledging loyalty to an ideology and a set of crude value judgments.  Anything that doesn’t conform to a simple-minded idea becomes suspect; adaptation to changing circumstances and a clear vision of the common good becomes difficult if not impossible.

Can’t we agree that in our uncommonly diverse nation, any workable notion of ‘the common good’ must accommodate the needs and interests of many different groups?

While I deplore the implications of a selfish individualism, I think that the freedom to be oneself is precious – worth working for and even fighting for.  Conscience and creativity are attributes of individuals, not crowds – although sometimes crowds are needed to protect individual interests.

There are admirable individualists in all walks of life.  In our politics, when economic policies are under discussion, entrepreneurs are the exemplary figures: they’re the money-makers and (so we’re told) the job-creators.  Maybe so, but for true prosperity and well-being, we need to foster other expressions of individual initiative.

It’s the individuality of writers, artists, and musicians that interests me most.  Their examples inspire both independence and generous, collaborative efforts.

Take the all-American, and now international, art form of jazz.  Nowhere is it more important to be an individual, to sound like nobody else.  And yet, paradoxically, that creative individual owes his or her existence to a rambunctious procession of elders and contemporaries, and to the intuitive cohesion of motley crews, fluent in the unwritten language of collective improvisation.

Dizzy Gillespie, a rebellious innovator, said of Louis Armstrong (who disliked bebop), “No him, no me.”  And of the innumerable anecdotes about Thelonious Monk, my favorite comes from the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy.  As I heard the story, Monk said, “Your job, Lacy, is to make the drummer sound good.”

I’ve enjoyed pondering what Monk meant: not, I think, that the drummer needs help, but that listening, and adjusting your pulse to that of the group, is inseparable from saying what you have to say.  In Monk’s music and other jazz, there may be some dissonance and tension in the ensemble sound, but it supports rather than stifling the distinctive individual voices.

I just learned from an online archive – (1heckofaguy.com) – that Steve Lacy kept a notebook and recorded some of the things that Monk said to him when they were working together in 1960.  Here are a few excerpts: “A genius is the one most like himself.”  Also, “What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.”  And last on the list, “They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.”

Maybe it’s not obvious what these maxims have to do with sustainability, or with building a more resilient community here on Bainbridge.  If not, let my message be insidious; just pay attention to what’s going on in our community day by day, and find a place where you can make a difference.

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Responding to Global Weirdness & Local Brightness

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

Jon Quitslund

“We are gripped by multiple scleroses, unable to get our arms around any of the problems staring us in the face….Will a catastrophe shake us from our slumber?”  (part of an online comment by ‘Cassandra’ from Colorado)

I’ll begin this post as an aggregator of other people’s opinions, urging my readers to seek out for themselves some reading that I’ve found compelling. Then I’ll come around to some comments on the recent showing of Fixing the Future, co-sponsored by Sustainable Bainbridge, at the Bainbridge Cinemas in Winslow.

An email from my friend Cheryl Hunter prompted me to read a column in the New York Times by Mark Bittman, “The Endless Summer.”  (You’ll find it at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/the-endless-summer/.)

Unlike the classic movie of the same name, Bittman’s piece is not about surfing, although it is, in part, about oceans – and rising sea levels, as an inevitable consequence of rising temperatures.

Bittman starts with the tender topic of ‘American exceptionalism,’ with this comment on what it means now: “on a per-capita basis, we either lead or come close to leading the world in consumption of resources, production of pollutants and a profound unwillingness to do anything about it.”

Which of these three items troubles you the most?  I’ll pick the third.  At the individual level we aren’t all unwilling, of course, but like ‘Cassandra,’ quoted above, we feel handicapped and powerless.  And to make matters worse, many in positions of power (including our well-informed and conscientious President) have been unwilling to speak the truth to their powerful opponents.

It is so dangerous, these days, to lay oneself open to the charge of being ‘un-American,’ and that accusation is semi-automatic when anyone in public office proposes regulation or taxation that might limit the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

If you consult his column, Bittman will lead you to something more weighty than his own words: a long article by Bill McKibben in the current issue of Rolling Stone.  “The Reckoning” is a fact-based, passionate piece, connecting all the dots you need on climate change and its consequences, and the dangers posed by the world’s out-of-control dependence on carbon-based fuels.

If you can’t find a copy of Rolling Stone, go to 350.org for a link to McKibben’s piece, along with much more information on global warming.  And you could also google ‘Climate Central’ for information on Global Weirdness (another tip from Mark Bittman): the book has now been published.

It has become critically important to reduce – drastically – the rate at which carbon is being loaded into our atmosphere.  Bill McKibben explains why, and he stresses the importance of getting beyond apathy, and also beyond aimless anger at self-serving corporations and feckless politicians.

I can report, gratefully, that the crowd on Wednesday night, July 18th, gathered in one of the Pavilion’s theaters to watch David Brancaccio’s film, Fixing the Future, had gotten beyond apathy and reactionary attitudes.  The theater’s seats were filled and there were people standing and sitting in the aisles.  And most of them moved upstairs afterwards into OfficeXpats’ spacious rooms, to enjoy refreshments and share their experience with other local ‘fixers.’

Fixing the Future dealt only in passing with climate change and its consequences, although Bill McKibben was one of the three panelists who discussed Brancaccio’s odyssey in a coda to the film (I’ll come back to that in my conclusion).  Appropriately for its audience, the focus of the evening’s program was not on stopping the sky from falling, but on small-scale fixes and opportunities for local activism.

As in any issue of Yes! Magazine, or on any visit to the magazine’s constantly changing website, the crowd on Wednesday night was enabled to imagine a positive future by encounters with people and projects that already exist, achieving successes that are spreading virally.

The kinds of fixes celebrated in the film have already been undertaken here on Bainbridge: a local currency, a time bank, permaculture, farming on public land, chicken coops to supply families and friends, teamwork to promote energy conservation and recycling of waste, and business alliances that make cooperation more important than competition – I could go on.

All of the initiatives of Sustainable Bainbridge and allied organizations welcome more participants.

Back in 2007, Bill McKibben published a great book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.  The developments celebrated in Fixing the Future were already proving their value back then, and McKibben offered a comprehensive account of the health, happiness, and security to be found, not through the pursuit of wealth and consumer goods, but through hard work and simple pleasures within friendly communities.

It was in 2008, I believe, that I went to Town Hall in Seattle to receive Bill McKibben’s message in person.  He was serious and modest; he was filled to the brim with an infectious energy.  The prospects for a durable, enjoyable future seemed clear to him.

Seeing him on the screen in the panel discussion at the end of Fixing the Future, I was struck by a dramatic change in McKibben’s outlook and tone of voice.  He was grave and terse.  He spoke not of crisp apples from a farm near his home, or of canning a bumper crop of tomatoes to make sauce through the winter, but of the compelling reasons for imposing a tax on carbon pollution.

The gravitas that I heard in McKibben’s voice, a quality that’s more emphatic in his Rolling Stone piece, is not all new.  Here are two sentences from the last paragraph of Deep Economy: “It’s extremely hard to imagine a world substantially different from the one we know. But our current economies are changing the physical world in horrifying ways.”

Those horrifying ways should be more familiar to us now, and more objectionable, than they were a few years ago.  The progressive orientation and the communitarian initiatives celebrated in Fixing the Future are necessary, but not sufficient.  It will take more than locally based activism to confront the big dragons whose profits depend on slowly, inexorably, ruining the physical world.

Posted in Activism, Books, Climate Change, Community, Cooperation, Economy, Environment, Farms, Films, Place, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Metaphors for Economic Activity

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

Jon Quitslund

“An economy isn’t a machine; it’s a garden.”

The quotation at the head of this post comes from an op-ed piece by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer in the New York Times for July 11th: “The Machine and the Garden.”  Reading it this morning deflected my attention from another subject that I had planned to write about today.

The name Eric Liu sounded familiar, and I realized after a brief Google search that it had come up in conversations within the Sustainable Bainbridge board.  Liu teaches at the U of W, as I expect some of my readers already know.  They may also be familiar with a book by Liu and Hanauer, The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government, published toward the end of 2011.  (I had heard of the book but until today its title was only a seed on the dry ground of my brain.)

The Gardens of Democracy is, as I gather from a string of 5-star reviews on Amazon.com, a slim book that deals adroitly with the big topics named in its subtitle.  The authors’ brief piece in the newspaper focuses on our economy and economic policy issues, and in a few paragraphs it succeeds in analyzing and reframing how we think about economics.  (Which is, quite rightly, just about everyone’s preoccupation these days.)

“We are prisoners of the metaphors we use, even when they are wildly misleading.”  For example, the world is a marketplace, and everything is for sale: not only food and the essentials of daily life, but ideas, reputations, votes, even the future that our children and grandchildren will inhabit after we die.

As Liu and Hanauer point out, economists, politicians, and ordinary citizens tend to think of “the economy” as a great big system, in metaphors derived from modern (i. e., 19th- and 20th-century) industry.  The economy is an engine – preferably, an efficient one.  If it’s efficient, like a perpetual motion machine, any regulation will be counter-productive.  If it stalls, we’re in trouble.  What will jump-start it?  Will tax cuts fuel a recovery, producing more jobs and more products for consumers?  Or is fiscal stimulus (from the government, not from private wealth) necessary to expand the economy?  (Bigger is better, but of course inflation is bad, so we can’t let the economy overheat.)

Will we ever escape the 19th-century phenomena of boom and bust?  A more appropriate set of metaphors might help.

I agree with Liu and Hanauer that economic activity (both micro- and macro-economics) is misbegotten when we use metaphors from the world of machines.  I’m not fond, as they are, of the terms “Machinebrain” and “Gardenbrain,” but I’d rather be in a garden than in a machine.  Everything we can do to ground our thoughts and actions in the natural world is good, for individuals and society.  Machine language obscures the fact that the global economy’s potential for growth (i. e., “creative destruction”) is limited by the world’s finite natural resources.

Farmers, and even people who garden on the weekends, know the value of living in harmony with organic processes, and the value that can be added by careful attention to an abundance that includes many weeds.

Artifice comes naturally to human beings; without it, how could we communicate?  We make tools, and we use tools to do things and make things.  Without technology, and without techniques such as writing, the human race couldn’t advance far beyond the Neolithic phase in our cultural evolution, and the hunting and gathering stage of social organization.

In the “developed” world, however, we are at risk of losing touch with our cultural roots in an authentic agrarian economy.  One result, as Liu and Hanauer point out, is a misguided hostility to regulation.  “An economy cannot self-correct any more than a garden can self-tend.  And regulation – the creation of standards to raise the quality of economic life – is the work of seeding useful activity and weeding harmful activity.”

Liu and Hanauer are far from the first in our time to think of local and national economies as gardens, not machines.  Wendell Berry has been cultivating that plot for decades: see, for example, the essays collected in What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (2010).  His writings are deeply considered and more eloquent, but in the good cause of renewal – of our language, our daily habits, and our governing institutions – we need all sorts of allies.  Liu and Hanauer have much to offer, local and readily accessible.

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“Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth”

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

My title for this piece is the subtitle of the book I’ll be discussing here: HOT, by Mark Hertsgaard, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2011 and now available in paperback.

Throughout my work on this piece and in all the time wasted along the way, I’ve been nagged by a feeling that climate change, with all its consequences, is a topic too big for me.  Among my readers, who cares what I think on this subject?  But like it or not, I’m in the grip of what Yeats called ‘the fascination of what’s difficult.’

Does the subject bear thinking about?  What is to be done?  I can’t dismiss these questions and move on; I know that lots of other people are at least as uneasy as I am about our future.  In spite of the efforts of climate-change deniers, news reports and commentary confirming the reality of its effects are unavoidable these days, even in the mainstream press.

It’s neither healthy nor practical to run away from real problems, whether they are out in the world or deep in our moody minds.  Efforts to understand and adapt to the consequences of global warming can strengthen our resolve to build a resilient community and accomplish the near-term goals of our sustainability agenda.

In Hot, Mark Hertsgaard confronts his troubling subject honestly and constructively.  His one-word title identifies the most fundamental feature of the climate and weather that’s in store for us.  The book itself is not simple and sensational, though.  The author’s voice is emotionally engaged with his subject, but he has a great deal of information to convey, and he does so in a carefully constructed narrative, based on travels to many parts of the world and conversations with both scientists and policy-makers.

Hertsgaard describes some of the impacts of global warming already evident throughout the systems that shape the world’s weather.  Then he adds that, given the long-term effects of the greenhouse gases already loaded into the atmosphere, “climate change [is] guaranteed to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it [gets] better.”

In other words: even if we could, in the near future, slow and then stop the overloading of our atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane, we will have to adapt to at least twenty-five years of a continued warming trend that will produce extreme weather events (heat waves, storms, droughts, flooding), habitat destruction, impacts on agriculture, and rising sea levels.

Sea-Level Rise: As you may have heard, the National Academy of Sciences just released a report on rising sea levels along the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington.  Here’s a passage from the summary of its findings: “Tide gages show that global sea level has risen about 7 inches during the 20th century, and recent satellite data shows that the rate of sea-level rise is accelerating. . . . Sea-level rise poses enormous risks to the valuable infrastructure, development, and wetlands that line much of the 1,600 mile shoreline of California, Oregon, and Washington”  (http://dels.nas.edu/Report/Level-Rise-Coasts/13389).

We will have to adapt: Hertsgaard didn’t travel around the world just to talk to prophets of doom or tour disaster sites.  He wanted to learn from scientists, engineers, and people in government what can be done to prepare for likely developments in the not-too-distant future.  In many places, contingency plans are complete or under way; in relatively few, pro-active policies are in place and expensive public works have been undertaken.  There’s much to be learned from the spectrum of actions and reasons for inaction described in Hot.

Throughout the book, Hertsgaard refers to his daughter Chiara, who was an infant when he began his travels in 2005.  He imagines with a mixture of dread and hope the world she will face as an adult.  From the book’s dedication to its ‘Epilogue: Chiara in the Year 2020,’ these references provide a vital thread and a focal point for any reader’s imagination.  All of us have personal reasons to care about the lives, and the quality of life, of individuals in the generations beyond our own.

The reader also encounters reiterated principles and advisory maxims.  The most important and insistent maxim is “Avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable.”  This is the basis for programs that are already in place in Europe.

Hertsgaard cites Madelene Helmer, a Dutch environmentalist, who explains that avoiding the unmanageable does not mean steering clear of the big problems – letting someone else deal with them.  Helmer and many others are concerned that at some point global warming will become unmanageable.  “To keep from crossing that threshold, if we haven’t crossed it already, we must cut emissions dramatically.”

Efforts to manage the unavoidable involve a strategy of adaptation, and Hertsgaard is most cheerful when he’s describing exemplary adaptive strategies.  In Chapter 4, “Ask the Climate Question,” he praises the steps taken by Ron Sims, during his years as King County chief executive, and Greg Nickels, as Seattle’s mayor.  In the years before our economy tanked, Sims and Nickels took some giant steps in recognition of the current and future effects of climate change.

One of the legacies of those years is a manual, Preparing for Climate Change, written with scientists at the UW, offering guidance to citizen activists, business owners, planners, engineers, and elected officials anywhere.  (It’s available at http://www.icleiusa.org.)

Hertsgaard’s chapter devoted to the Netherlands contains many lessons applicable to our circumstances.  The Dutch are way ahead of us, of course.  Given their history and geography, they have to be: storms and sea level rise have threatened them for centuries.  Their current planning looks two hundred years into the future.  At the local and national levels, their government is efficient, and progressive policies are supported by business interests.  And they recognize, Hertsgaard says, “that adaptation is fundamentally a local activity. National and regional involvement is helpful, but real progress comes from ‘mobilizing local constituencies’.”  (He quotes the leading Dutch climate scientist, Pier Vellinga.)

In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Frances Beinecke (president of the Natural Resources Defense Council) and Trip Van Noppen (president of Earthjustice), also stress the importance of local constituencies.  They had attended the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where the representatives of governments from around the world produced “a document that ended up being watered down almost to the point of worthlessness.”

Meanwhile, independent of the government negotiators, many forward-looking commitments were made by countries, communities, and companies around the globe, and many passionate young people spoke out “— sometimes through tears and with cracking voices – about the fears they have for the world we’re leaving for them.”

We live here on Bainbridge with various concerns and uncertainties, but we are far more fortunate than most people.  I expect that in many respects, things will get worse before they get better, yet we will still be blessed.  Let’s also be wise, or at least prudent, living within our means and preparing, “with all deliberate speed,” for the problems we’ll face in the future.

 

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I Love Cheesecake

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

Jon Quitslund

For several weeks now, I’ve been planning to write about a huge and scary subject, and I haven’t found a way to make it manageable.  The big topic is climate change and its impacts on weather, food supplies, the world’s oceans, and coastal communities around the globe that may be devastated as sea levels rise.

I’m not comfortable in the robes of a prophet of doom; instead, I want to offer some useful thoughts about the adaptations that will be necessary, sooner or later, however difficult and costly they may be, if we want to hold on to what’s most durable and essential in our culture and its political / economic foundation.

Locally and globally, for different but interrelated reasons, sensible people are anxious, even panicky, as they peer toward the future.  And we are restless, impatient, and angry within the political and economic status quo.  People act on these emotions in many different ways: some shy away from any discussion of problems that appear to be without solutions, while others have a voracious appetite for information, opinions, and problem-solving on a grand scale.

In keeping with the principles of Sustainable Bainbridge, my writing for this blog has sought relevance to our local community, but I have also tried to place local issues in big-picture contexts.  (Several decades ago, on a summer visit here I encountered the slogan “Think globally, act locally,” and I’ve marched under that banner ever since.)

My piece on global climate change and its impact on our lives in the middle of Puget Sound will take the form of an ungainly book review, responding to Mark Hertsgaard’s HOT: Living through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, published in 2011 and now available in paperback.  I’ll post that piece within the next two weeks.

So much by way of prologue and promise – now to the topic announced in my title.  I find comfort in the maxim, “Life is uncertain; eat dessert first.”  What follows is a recipe for simple pleasure – a pleasure to be shared.  It comes from Pepolino, an Italian restaurant in the West Village, via an article in the New York Times some years ago.

I took this dessert to a recent meeting of Sustainable Bainbridge board members, which was planned as a potluck dinner at Sallie Maron’s home, in lieu of our usual all-business monthly meeting in the Marge Williams Center.

I think this ricotta tart suits the spring and summer seasons better than a cheesecake made with cream cheese, which would be more dense, rich, and sweet.  It would adorn the end of a lunch with friends, or any sort of dinner.  Add some grated lemon peel to the filling if you want a piquant flavor; if you have some fresh berries, serve a big spoonful on the side.

First, prepare the pastry to line a 9-inch springform pan. Combine 3/8 cup sugar and 1 & 3/8 sticks (11 tablespoons) of soft unsalted butter in a stand mixer. Add 1 egg yolk, reserving the white for inclusion in the filling. Add 2 cups of cake flour, ½ cup at a time: use the mixer for the first cup, and a broad spoon or spatula toward the end. You’ll have a soft, smooth dough that can be gathered into a ball.

Flatten the ball into a disk, wrap it in waxed paper or plastic, and chill it for 40 minutes to an hour.

Assemble ingredients for the filling (see below), putting the ricotta in a mixing bowl so you can pour off any liquid that separates from the curds before adding the other ingredients. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.

Roll out the dough on a piece of waxed or parchment paper, making a circle that extends two inches or more beyond the circumference of your pan. The dough will soften as you roll it out; dust with flour if it gets sticky. Cut the circle into six or more pie-shaped wedges and fit them one by one in the pan, bringing the dough up the sides at least 2 inches. (In pieces, the dough will be easy to handle and assemble into a seamless shell.) Refrigerate the shell while you make the filling.

Ingredients: 1 & ¼ pounds of whole milk ricotta (the Organic Valley brand comes in 15 oz. containers, so you’ll have some leftover for another purpose), ½ cup of granulated sugar, 3 whole eggs and the reserved egg white, ½ teaspoon vanilla, and 1 cup of heavy cream.

With the mixer on a low speed, combine the ingredients one item at a time, until everything is smooth and creamy. Pour the liquid carefully into the shell, and place the pan on a cookie sheet to catch any seepage during baking.

Bake 10 minutes at 500, then reduce the heat to 300 and continue baking for 1 hour and 10 minutes or more: the top should be puffed and golden, and a knife inserted in the center should come out clean.

Cool for 10 or 15 minutes on a rack, then remove the outer ring from the pan; cool to room temperature or refrigerate.

Dust with powdered sugar just before serving.

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Notes on My Reading: Connect the Dots

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

Jon Quitslund

I don’t have time to prepare a typical ‘think piece,’ so as a placeholder I’m putting out a few quotations that have captured my attention, together with comments and a description of the piece I will post before the end of May. The quotations come from Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, two writers I have admired for many years. I’ll close by calling attention to the round-the-world activities planned for May 5.

Gary Snyder is a poet with a unique and influential voice; he’s also an activist, a sage figure in American Buddhism and environmentalism, and a fine essayist. In the latest issue of the journal Inquiring Mind, I came across an interview with Gary Snyder conducted by the editors, Barbara Gates and Wes Nisker.

When asked, “What are the issues that are most important to you right now?” he replied, “Aside from my long-term concern for biodiversity, I find myself wrestling with the linked issues of energy and population.” He observes, “Renewable energy would only be adequate if we had ten percent of the world’s present population,” and adds that trying to imagine how that reduction might come about is “repugnant.”

Here’s the end of his answer to the question about the issues most on his mind: “I also don’t think we will see a great change until there is more of a sense of crisis than exists now, more of a collapse of the current system. The best we can do is live our lives as a model for what’s to come, making good arguments for voluntary simplicity and a sustainable society.”

I have read a lot of Wendell Berry – novels, shorter fiction, and poetry – and I seize avidly on anything new.  Two things came to my attention in a single day recently: a fine story in the latest issue of Orion, and his contribution, delivered recently in Washington, D. C., to the distinguished series of Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Berry’s lecture is titled ‘It All Turns On Affection,’ and you’ll find the full text on the NEH website, accompanied by a long interview with Mr. Berry at his home in Kentucky. I can’t do justice to the full scope of the lecture; I’ll quote just two paragraphs, which develop, in a different key, themes similar to Gary Snyder’s.

“The losses and damages characteristic of our present economy cannot be stopped, let alone restored, by ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ tweakings of corporate industrialism, against which the ancient imperatives of good care, homemaking, and frugality can have no standing. The possibility of authentic correction comes, I think, from two already-evident causes. The first is scarcity and other serious problems arising from industrial abuses of the land-community. The goods of nature so far have been taken for granted and, especially in America, assumed to be limitless, but their diminishment, sooner or later unignorable, will enforce change.

“A positive cause, still little noticed by high officials and the media, is the by now well-established effort to build or rebuild local economies, starting with economies of food. This effort to connect cities with their surrounding rural landscapes has the advantage of being both attractive and necessary. It rests exactly upon the recognition of human limits and the necessity of human scale. Its purpose, to the extent possible, is to bring producers and consumers, causes and effects, back within the bounds of neighborhood, which is to say the effective reach of imagination, sympathy, affection, and all else that neighborhood implies. An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.”

There is a tragic disjunction, noticed by both Snyder and Berry, between what is necessary on the national and global level, but impossible for political reasons, and the smaller-scale efforts that are incrementally changing households and communities, building or rebuilding the integrity of neighborhoods, locales, and even broader regions.

How do you respond to this disjunction? On the federal level in our beloved and bedeviled country, can anything be done to work around the entrenched power of those who reap enormous benefits from continuing business as usual?

Among the Sustainable Bainbridge board members and in the several programs and activist organizations allied with us, the focus of our energy has been local: working “within the bounds of neighborhood,” as Wendell Berry says, and trying to “live our lives as a model for what’s to come,” in Gary Snyder’s words.

I’ve been thinking lately that the local focus, while it’s at the heart of our mission and the sustainability agenda, needs to be framed, explicitly, within a larger context. Many people are anxious now about our future, not only on Bainbridge Island and in the Puget Sound region, but on the national and global level.

The next piece I plan to write will be a review of Mark Hertsgaard’s book, published last year: Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. Hertsgaard provides an engaging account of what has been done, and is being done, in our region and around the world, to begin adapting to the drastic changes that are already in store for us.

I’ll close with a brief mention of things that will be happening a few days from now, locally and all over the globe, to increase awareness of the effects of climate change and extreme weather. “Climate Impacts Day” is May 5th, and plans have been made to link together isolated events in a huge pattern – to “connect the dots.” For more information, go to climatedots.org or 350.org.

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Is Altruism Sustainable?

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

Jon Quitslund

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” (Prov. 6:6)

“Kin and Kind,” an article by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker for March 5, set me thinking about the contest in our culture between selfishness and generosity.  Mr. Lehrer explains recent contributions by mathematicians and biologists to our understanding of altruism, and his essay prompted me to seek out more information about the contested scientific discipline of sociobiology.

It is well known that according to Darwin, evolution favors selfish and assertive individuals.  In order to thrive and evolve, a species needs to maintain control over its territory and any competing organisms, and selfish individuals are more successful in the struggle to survive and propagate their kind.  Within a species, genetically determined traits that increase competitiveness and adaptation will prevail in successive generations and the carriers of inferior genes will die out.

We also know that in human societies and in many other species, selfish and aggressive behavior coexists in some kind of balance with nurturing and generous behavior.  How did altruism (selflessness and self-sacrifice for the sake of others) emerge in the struggle for existence and become encoded genetically?  In the history of the human race, how did altruism find a place in most of the world’s cultures?

The field of sociobiology, founded by Edward O. Wilson in the 1970’s, has sought answers to these questions and others pertaining to evolutionary processes.  Through Jonah Lehrer’s article, and through a more technical journal article, I was introduced to recent developments in sociobiology, and given a foundation for some thoughts about adaptations that will be advantageous, if and when we shift from unsustainable to truly sustainable ways of life on planet Earth.

[Note: the technical article, by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, is “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology,” in the Quarterly Review of Biology, 82 (2007): 327-48; it’s available online.]

My thoughts here pertain to our long-term prospects, but I also envision some application to the way we live now, in a time when aggressive competition and self-interest are pushing generosity and cooperation to the margins of our politics.

To most readers of this post, it will be obvious that egotism, aggressive exploitation of advantages, and winner-take-all competition may be successful strategies for individuals and their descendants, but they create huge problems for society.  If practiced on a massive scale, as we see here in the U. S. and in other nations that have followed our example, such behavior is not sustainable.  We see proof of this bitter truth all around us.

Will we have to wait for more obvious collapses in our economy and the natural resources it depends upon before we stand up and face the music?  Or are there steps to be taken now that will enable us to adapt, survive, and even prosper?  If exploitation and selfishness are not sustainable, what human traits can bring such behavior under control and direct it toward living within reasonable limits?

[Note: Of the many recent books that examine the unsustainable trends in our world and its culture, two of the best are Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, and Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth; Adapting to Our New Economic Reality.  I plan to review both books in the near future.]

By studying ants and other social insects, E. O. Wilson and his fellow sociobiologists have sought to understand how both selfish and selfless traits have evolved and been preserved, over thousands of years, in many species.  Both E. O. Wilson and D. S. Wilson (no relation) have extended their scientific inquiry to include human nature and the evolution of culture.  (Culture, of course, is not genetically transmitted, but it has much to do with which groups and nations prosper while others lose ground.)

In their application of lessons from sociobiology to the study of human nature and society, Wilson and Wilson are elaborating on a statement by Charles Darwin: “It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, . . . an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another” (Descent of Man, quoted in “Rethinking,” 327-28).

The authors of “Rethinking” show how evolution works on more than one level.  At the level of individuals in a species, altruism is not rewarded, but they argue that selection by survival of the fittest also operates at the level of groups, where altruism, along with other forms of unselfish behavior, is apt to give the group advantages over a disorganized band of individuals out for themselves.

It seems to me that neither Darwin nor his followers in our day have paid enough heed to the advantages sometimes enjoyed by an organized band of individuals out for themselves.  It’s on this account that wars are fought and all those classic Western movies got made.  The influence of ‘the better angels of our nature’ is all too easily deflected, which is why we need the rule of law and governmental institutions.

I am more interested, however, in the vitality and positive influence of volunteerism, acting for the good of the public, often quite apart from the machinery of government.  Can we evolve to become less individualistic, more creative in our cooperation with others, toward goals that may require some selfless sacrifice and the loss of familiar comforts and conveniences?

A trend toward altruistic activism is apparent in our culture, locally and nationally.  It’s far from being the dominant trend, yet it has encountered all sorts of fierce resistance, often framed as a patriotic defense of freedom and individual rights.  Take just one instance: the furor that has developed around the ‘individual mandate’ in the Affordable Care Act.  A large percentage of individuals with adequate health care coverage believe, mistakenly, that ‘Obamacare’ will force them out of their current arrangements and into a government-sponsored plan.

In Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd show how a ‘cultural mutation’ can modify a group’s behavior in such a way that natural selection fundamentally transforms the group.  In their paper, Wilson and Wilson cite Richerson and Boyd to support their claim that “If a new behavior arises by a cultural mutation, it can quickly become the most common behavior within the group and provide the decisive edge in between-group competition” (“Rethinking,” 343).

In both nature (in the global systems that shape our climate and weather, for example) and in culture (in our creation and consumption of energy for heat, light, and transportation, for example), there seem to be ‘tipping points.’  Somehow, we need to align changes in our culture with the constraints being imposed by accumulating changes in our natural environment.

 

Posted in Activism, Altruism, Climate Change, Community, Cooperation, Cultural Change, Environment, Evolution, Sociobiology | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Adapting to the Future

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Sustainable Bainbridge

Jon Quitslund

Architecture is a social art. It becomes an instrument of human fate, because it … shapes and conditions our responses…. It modifies and often breaks earlier established habit. (Richard Neutra, 1958)

On February 9th, the proponents of the Grow Community development finally had their chance to present the project to the Planning Commission, and a three-hour meeting was devoted to the formal presentation, Q & A with Commission members, and public comment.

It was a lively evening, with none of the droning explanation and passive listening that sometimes settles over the Council chambers for long intervals.  There was a good audience for the proceedings.  I was present with other citizens who had contributed to the project’s ‘Sustainability Action Plan,’ a book-length document that provides the rationale for a somewhat utopian community.

Several aspects of the project were given a good going-over by members of the Planning Commission and concerned citizens.  Impacts on traffic, characteristics of the faces that the buildings on Wyatt will turn toward Wyatt Ave., plans for handling surface water, and the adequacy of pathways through the open spaces between Wyatt Ave. on the north and Madison Ave. on the east were all discussed. And the need for adequate parking came up, of course: more on that later.

These were all legitimate concerns, touching on problems of first importance to the architect and other contributors to the project.  From the beginning, it has been crucial to provide for dynamic relationships of the residents and the built environment of the new community with its near neighbors and the Island as a whole.

Several people expressed a hope that as this innovative project takes shape, with the developer assuming responsibility for its boundaries, the City and various citizen groups will coordinate efforts to improve the infrastructure of roads, trails, and sidewalks beyond those boundaries.

Just maybe, we can break free of a tendency toward reactive, piecemeal, and contentious responses to our problems and opportunities, and commit to projects that fit into long-range plans.  We could, simultaneously, increase vitality in neighborhoods and provide attractive connections of each place with others.

When I had an opportunity to comment, I started with the quotation from the architect Richard Neutra that appears at the beginning of this post.  “Architecture is a social art.”  The Grow Community project is a bold instance of architecture as a social art.  Many people – both professionals and amateurs – have contributed to the project, and many more will be involved in its unfolding.

When it is imaginative and original, architecure “becomes an instrument of human fate.”  Richard Neutra’s thoughts about the architect’s social role, shaping behavior and breaking established habits, emerged against the backdrop of 20th-century modernism in the International Style.

The two decades after the end of WW II were an epochal time for architecture in the United States, and for the planning and building of cities and suburbs, with all the infrastructure needed to provide people and commerce with a mobility to match the era’s prosperity and its newfound need for convenience, efficiency, and freedom.  Real progress in the quality of life for the great majority of Americans was achieved in those decades, but in recent years it has become clear that some Faustian bargains were made.

Now the devil’s at the door.  Cheap energy and the other non-renewable resources that made the American dream possible aren’t so cheap any more, and efforts to keep fossil fuels cheap are wrecking our environment.  Land isn’t cheap either, except in places where cities, towns, and suburbs are blighted and jobs are scarce.

Mobility is still important, but sometimes it’s problematic.  People love to travel, but long commutes by car are less and less feasible.  We’re getting more aware of mpg ratios, more interested in carpooling and the availability (or not) of public transportation.  Those who are fit and brave enough to commute by bike or scooter are envied; likewise, those who can walk to work or work at home.

Which is more important: high speed internet access, or hassle-free driving, anywhere, any time?  I think our culture is already redefining mobility, and reexamining the priorities that shape how we spend our time, how much stuff we need to own, what big-ticket purchases our incomes must support, and what we can do without.

Concern for the environmental impacts of an acquisitive lifestyle isn’t the only factor that’s driving these cultural changes, nor is the current economic downturn and the dim prospects for a return to go-go growth.  Thoughtful people are considering in fresh ways what choices and activities make them happy, and what circumstances really contribute to their security.

These changes, and others related to them, are already shaping our future, regionally and right here on Bainbridge.  Which brings me back to the Grow Community, and to the proposition that the architects who build a community can modify and even break established habits.

Marja Preston acknowledged that the prices for units in the new neighborhood are not “affordable” by conventional measures, but she pointed out that if the community’s emphasis on teamwork, common property, and cost-sharing means that you won’t need a car of your own, or a washer and dryer, and if much of your food comes from community gardens, then the total cost of living there won’t be so high after all.

Members of the Planning Commission asked the designers to find room for more parking spaces before the project is fully built out.  I seriously doubt that they will be needed.  We don’t know what the future will hold, so things have to be done step by step, adapting positively to contingencies and possibilities.  I hope this process won’t be hindered by outdated assumptions.

Posted in Climate Change, Community, Environment, Farms, Housing, Mobiity, Parking, Place, Transportation | 5 Comments