Sustainable Living and the Abandonment of the Dollar: Food

After air and water, the third most basic necessity for living is food. In today’s service economy in the US, alienation from land and the growing of food is common. Only a small percentage of the population grows any of their own food, with the supermajority relying on purchasing food with dollars at stores, where most of the food (processed and fresh) has been shipped over 1,000 miles before arriving on the shelves.

This is far from a sustainable method of living. Such large-scale distribution of food uses up a lot of oil, both in terms of the gasoline required for trucking and the plastics used in most processed/packaged foods.

In addition, this system has several serious flaws. The “just-in-time” method of inventory management used by most stores means large scale disruptions of the food supply to one’s local area is possible should any disaster occur, as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the recent earthquakes and tsunami in Japan have demonstrated. And, longer term, rising oil prices (and the likelihood of continued increase in prices over the long term as the days of cheap fuel are probably over for good, absent highly short-term gluts of supply) mean inflation in the cost of food in the current distribution system is a given even before factoring in Ben Bernanke’s inflationary monetary policies.

And I haven’t begun to calculate the ancillary costs of damage to the environment in general and arable land in particular from centralized distribution practices of moving mass-produced food across long distances. Shortages of food due to droughts, the ongoing loss of arable land, and new crop diseases thanks to genetic modification of crops certainly won’t help to keep food prices low.

In other words, the cost of the current food production and distribution system will at some point become prohibitive, assuming the unsustainable practices of big agribusiness even produce enough food over the long term for the current distribution system to function.

TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY

Given the above scenario, as well as my goal of abandoning the dollar, I decided that there is no better time than the present to look for and/or start building alternative systems of sustainable food production and distribution. I also look at taking steps toward sustainable living as an effective anti-poverty measure, as food, after housing, tends to be one of the most costly budgetary items in household finances in the US.

Taking on the project of sustainable living has certainly involved a making a number of significant changes in how I live my life, but perhaps not quite as many as one might think. I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and since then have lived entirely in big cities. A lot of writing about sustainable living focuses on farm life. But I have no desire to simply follow the plans of others. I love cities and have no desire to give them up, and I do not believe that I have to buy a farm and move out to a rural location to live a sustainable life. Instead, I try to focus on what I have to work with and seek creative solutions when faced with a problem of urban dwelling. Everyone has different needs, circumstances, resources, etc. I am working with what I have got.

So, while for some moving to a more rural location might be what works for them, I moved from one big city to another, on the same continent, but from west to east, and to another country. One big part of my goal to abandon the dollar was leaving the US, but that is certainly not a necessity, nor does simply moving to another country with a different currency solve the problem. Every currency in the world is tied in some way to the dollar. So when I speak of abandoning the dollar, I don’t just mean US dollars, I mean all currencies.

Living in a large city and having to pay rent on a flat, I am not yet able to fully abandon the dollar. I think of it as a process. But one of the easiest changes I can make in my life, I have found, is to makes changes regarding how I produce and acquire the food that I eat. Thus far, my partner and I have taken the following steps:

* Get involved in a nearby community garden

* Start growing food in the backyard

* Bartering food with friends and neighbors who also grow their own food
* Avoid purchasing packaged food as much as possible

* When purchasing food, buy local

I want to talk in detail about each of these options, but this post is already getting long, so I will address them in new posts in the near future.

But for now, suffice it to say that when fruits and vegetables don’t have to travel thousands of miles before we can buy it at the store, they are very fresh, taste better, provide greater nutritional value, and also last longer before going bad (leading to less waste). Such approaches are also helping us to foster local economies and provide us with significantly better quality of food.

In addition, these simple steps allow us reduce our dependency on the dollar, all the while keeping us well fed on a significantly smaller budget than we had while living unsustainably in the US. When we do go to the store, local, organic foods are largely priced less than conventional foods shipped from far away, and buying bulk goods (stored in jars we bring from home) reduces dollar costs and use of plastic as well. Of course, eating food from the backyard or community garden costs very little in dollar terms, with only minor increases in labor.

All of this has also enormously reduced our trash output. With less packaged food due to gardening and bulk purchases, we have noticed a significant reduction in both our trash and recycling. I'd love to get to the point where we produce zero trash and recycling, either reusing or composting (which can go right bank into the gardens) all of our waste, but this is a process and we aren't there yet.

Just a few years ago I never would have even considered spending a significant amount of time thinking about or putting into practice steps towards sustainable living. This is one bonus in our lives that has come from the decline of the US economy. My partner and I never considered trying to do without the dollar before, and felt trapped in almost manic, fearful, career-focused lives. Our first step was determining that we actually didn't want to live our lives around work; we wanted work to supplement our lives.

By focusing on meeting our basic needs rather than an endless black hole of consumerism and wealth accumulation, we began radically changing the way we live day to day. My partner has even changed "careers" and now works in local, organic food distribution, which has obviously become one of our greater interests. Until we can abandon the dollar all together, at least we are working to support local economies and food networks. As well, after rent and other basic necessities, we are looking for every opportunity to convert dollars in to goods that help us toward living a renewable and sustainable lifestyle. For example, rather than saving toward a new iPad (which I know I would love), I prefer instead to save for solar panels.

Sustainable living doesn't have to require moving to the countryside, nor does it have to involve some sort of anti-technology fantasy of living like long-dead ancestors. It is about living within our means with the resources in our immediate vicinity: finanancially, energy efficiently, in a way that helps rather than hurts those around us, and without endless damage to the earth itself. Sustainable living literally feeds us, the 99% percent, and, in our eschewing of the dollar as we meet our basic needs, we starve the rich of the very same dollars they endlessly desire to accumulate from our former patterns of consumption.

Abandon the Dollar Through Sustainable Living

In my last piece, I argued that the most effective way to counter globalization and the dominance of the ultra-rich/banking elite over western politics and economic policies is to abandon the dollar. Today I want to talk about how I am working towards this goal in my own life.

I start with the premise that most of the people in the US and the so-called "developed" world - where "developed" refers not to industrialized-turned-service economies, but rather to imperial regions that use wealth and power to foster unconstrained consumption of goods and resources - live an almost entirely unsustainable lifestyle that has enormous hidden costs, of which said people are largely unaware. The emergence of modern colonialism and imperialism that began over 500 years ago set the stage for the contemporary abuse of global labor and resources that is necessary to sustain a "normal" way of life in the "developed world."

One of the legacies of colonialism that still persists today is the former colonizers' exploitation of the labor and resources of the former colonies, which often depends on racist exploitation of the white/colonizer of people of color/colonized, and that continues to hide the true cost of the electricity, oil/gas, food production, and consumer goods necessary for so-called "first world" lifestyles. By "true cost," I refer to both the reduced dollar costs of goods that stems from the exploitation of cheap labor and the transfer of resources in certain parts of the world (former colonies) to others (the former colonizers, who command the resources with less than adequate compensation, or with outright harm, to the locals), as well as the cost to the earth itself, such as global warming, toxic waste, disappearing non-renewable resources. I also describe it as the cost to younger and future generations of the entire world who will suffer (are suffering?) from the consequences of the rabid consumerism of the "developed" parts of the globe over the previous decades.


THE UNSUSTAINABILITY OF MODERN USAGE OF NATURAL RESOURCES

Reflecting back on my childhood, I have come to the inevitable conclusion that I was born and raised in a place in the world that should never have existed, and that this place is emblematic of the structural problems and failures of the entire so-called "developed" world. Where was I raised? The suburbs of Los Angeles.

As a high school athlete, almost every day I ran down the wide, grassy median of a large boulevard (4 lanes in each direction) where long ago the old cable car rails, the original public transportation option of the greater Los Angeles area, had long ago been torn up at the behest of the US auto companies, essentially forcing car ownership on the large population. By ripping up the extensive cable car lines decades ago and encouraging car use, Los Angeles has a tremendous dependency on cheap oil and suffers from toxic environmental conditions because of the cars (like smog), despite more recent initiatives to increase public transportation options, such as the metro subway.

In essence, Los Angeles is like most of the US where urban sprawl has become the norm and lower population density of suburbs combined with poor public transportation options leaves much of the region highly dependent on cars and thus on gasoline. But that is not the only way that the region consumes oil. Most fertilizers used by the big agribusinesses are produced from oil, as are plastics in cars and other consumer items. In other words, Los Angelinos, along with most of the "developed" world, cannot function and nor can its people live without oil. Cheap oil.

But oil is a finite natural resource, even thought it has yet to be priced as one, especially in the US which both subsidizes the production of oil and fights seemingly endless wars to establish control over what is left of the world's oil supply, in order to ensure the very cheap availablity of oil in the US. And yes, I do mean to say that, even with the recent large increase in the price of gasoline, oil still sells at a vastly reduced price to its true value in terms of the amount of the resources that remains, as well as the actual increasing costs of production as most of the easily acquired, high quality oil that was originally in the ground is now virtually non-existent. In other words, oil is and has always been priced based on short-term supply and demand, and not on the very high, long-term demand and its very low, long-term ability to be supplied. We can currently see some of this price distortion in the market prices of "Brent crude," which supplies most of the world and today trades at $108, and "West Texas Intermediate," which mostly supplies the US and today trades at $86, a $22 per barrel difference.

Now, on the internet there are endless numbers of articles on "Peak Oil" - the idea that the pinnacle of discovery of new oil reserves has passed and that levels of oil production have already peaked and are now on the decline - and I have no desire to repeat them (or the debates about whether peak oil theories are correct). The bottom line is that no matter how much oil currently exists, we have been using it up rapidly and at some point there will either be none left, or what is left will be so expensive as to render its use untenable for most of the vast and common consumption of today.

Whether or not this occurs in my lifetime (very possible), or in the next hundred years, this day is coming sometime in the not so distant future.

The way most of the people in the US and other "developed" economies live is utterly unsustainable and far from renewable. From consumer goods to electricity supplies to food production to cars to (in many places) water supplies, most of us are living way beyond our means, both economically and sustainably.


SUSTAINABLE LIVING AND THE ABANDONMENT OF THE DOLLAR

I have focused on oil thus far because it is so essential to modern life. But it is certainly not the only resource we are squandering, it is just the most obvious. It is also an easy resource to use as an example to illustrate the way the dollar is central to unsustainable living practices and the ways the ultra-rich/oligarchs maintain global power by control of the dollar.

The US dollar is also sometimes referred to as the "petrol dollar" because of its convertability into oil. As the world reserve currency, the dollar is the medium of exchange through which essential commodities like oil are traded. In other words, what has traditionally been the case is that if a country wished to purchase oil in the global marketplace, that country needed to do so with dollars. This ties virtually every currency in the world into the dollar and assures the dominance of the dollar over most other currencies.

As long as dollars are required to purchase essential goods and services, much of the world is virtually held hostage by the dollar. The pursuit of life becomes the pursuit of the dollar. Now, challenges to the dominance of the dollar are happening globally in many ways (such as Russia and China making a deal do to all trade in their respective currencies). But if a new currency, like the Chinese yuan, simply replaces the dollar as the world reserve currency, the system won't really change, it will just have slightly new masters (or, really, many of the same masters who will be sure to position themselves in the "right" way during a transition to a new currency regime).

It is through the dollar and the oil that it buys that we consume virtually everything in our lives. Oil powers cars, buses, planes, and everything else with motors. It is used in the form of plastic in a lot of what we buy. It provides fertilizers to agribusinesses that grow most of the food supply and, without which, a large percent of the world's food would disappear. It also fuels the transportation of most food and goods over vast distances nationally and internationally, as very little of the food on the shelves of most grocery stores contain locally produced products, with fresh and packaged foods alike often travelling thousands of miles before we pick them up at the grocery.

Thus it became obvious to me that the first step in abandoning the dollar is reducing and then eliminating my dependence on oil and its byproducts, and that living my life with the consumption of only sustainable and renewable food, goods, services and resources is necessary to achieving my goal.


WHERE TO START?

The most obvious initial move to make to reduce my dependency on oil is to give up any idea I may have of owning a car again (I haven't owned one for almost six years now). Cars, in their current form, are just outright unsustainable products. If one day the solar car, or some other entirely renewable-powered automobile, becomes a reality, I may reconsider. But for now, cars are out and walking and bicycles are in. Buses are also a great harm-reduction tool for transportation.

I have also started by trying to learn everything I can about where the the goods and services that I need to live come from. I am beginning with the basic necessities: food, water, electricity, gas, and transportation.

It is important to emphasize though that there is no simple or fast way to go about this. I have only really just begun.

But as I argued in my previous post, if I am hoping to truly change the system in which I live, mere protesting will not be enough. I have to completely change the way I live, and work to make it possible and simpler for others to change the way they live as well.

The crony, corrupt capitalism of the contemporary US thrives on unsustainabilty. Through planned obsolescence, cheaply made products, and perhaps especially genetically modified crops, capitalism depends on unsustainabilty and the necessity of replacements to operate. Food crops should be one of our best and most easily sustainable/renewable resources. So many foods contain the very seeds that should be able to produce the next crop, and the one after, etc, etc. But companies like Monsanto, which now provide the seeds for much of the world's food, have specifically modified the seeds to produce foods whose seeds cannot be used for planting the next season's crops.

Like Monsanto, every capitalist corporation doesn't want to sell to us just once. They want to sell to us for a lifetime, and they don't care what finite resources they consume, or the ecosystems they disrupt, in the near term to sell as much as much of their products as possible.

By abandoning the dollar and living sustainably, we can disrupt the capitalist system by removing our dependency on the dollar to purchase all our necessities, as well as our dependency on the goods and services the capitalist system produces from non-renewable resources. Living sustainably could even help us leave the system altogether.