Category Archives: Travel

The Land of true believers

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Evangelical Christianity, religion, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, True Believer

 

When we were in Texas, Chris remarked that there the churches are built to look like shopping malls. Is that done to attract and maintain the interest of people? Or is because to the believers of Texas, commerce was sacred and shopping is prayer?

 

Chris let out a bit of rant in a small town in New Mexico where we dined for lunch. A small family at the next table conspicuously prayed before dining. There is nothing wrong with that of course, but she immediately felt they were fanatics! This was not a fair evaluation, but we believe it was her reaction to zealotry.  Zealotry is all around us these days, nowhere more so than America. Often it is in the form of fanaticism. It is often not attractive.

 

Seeing these adherents felt like it we were back in the company of the Convoy protesters back home continually bearing Canadian flags on both side of the hoods of their vehicles. That experience has poisoned the Canadian flag for us. This is an insignificant fact, but it reveals something important. The cost of fanaticism is high. And these feelings came from a woman who not that long ago counted herself as a good Catholic. Zealots can ruin some pretty good stuff.

Religion in America is always interesting, but not always attractive.

 

Food Waste: The Worst is yet to Come

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Food

 

Although we know that Canadians are offenders too, Chris and I could not fail to notice on our trip through the heartland of the country on our way to Arizona, how Americans waste food. We have noticed that for years and many people talk about it. Yet this wastage is getting worse, not better.

As Vaclav Smil noted in his book Numbers Don’t Lie,

“the United States’ per capita food waste increased by 50% between 1974 and 2005 and that problem has gotten worse since then.” He also calculated (he loves numbers remember) that this wasted food in America was enough to provide adequate nutrition to about 230 million people which is slightly more than the entire population of Brazil, the world’s sixth largest country!

Even as Americans waste food at such a horrific pace they still eat too much.  So do wel. I acknowledge my own sins here. We have also noticed that on our journey. We have never asked for so many doggy bags nor shared more meals than we did on this trip. And sad to say, we still eat far too much too. As Smil said,

“Yet even as they waste food, Americans are still eating far more of it than is good for them. The prevalence of obesity—defined as a body mass index of 30 or greater—more than doubled between 1962 and 2010 rising from 13.4 percent among adults over age 20…among adults, 74% of males and 64% of females  have an excessively high weight. Most worrisomely, as obesity is usually a lifelong condition, that proportion is now above 50 percent for children above the age of six as well.”

 

Food loss causes other problems too. For example, it involves a significant waste of labour and energy consumption. We are paying a big price to put food in the landfill or composters.  Indirectly, as a result too much plastic is produced for food containers and even inputs into food production. Extra food production leads to harming the environment by producing too much inputs such as fertilizers. The environmental effects of food wastage, including effects on climate change, water wastage, soil erosion, and unnecessary contamination of rivers and lakes are enormous.

Rich countries such as Canada and the United States, and many others should do much better. We should produce less food and consume it with a lot less wastage. Instead of looking for ways to produce more, we should be looking for ways to consume more smartly waste less. According to the UK Waste and Resources Action Program, a dollar invested in food waste prevention has a 14-fold return in associated benefits.

 

Can’t we use the money?

 

 

Wasting Food is a Sin

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Environment, Food

 

Driving through the United States on the way to Arizona where we hoped to stay for the winter, we were often reminded about how much Americans waste. In particular, they waste a lot of food.  In Texas, we saw signs advertising 72 of steaks?  How many people ate that? Portions in almost all restaurants are absurdly large.  A half-pound burger is standard fare. Does that make sense?

Wasting food is a sin. In a world with such immense poverty and undernourishment to waste food is intolerable. Yet—we tolerate it—all the time!

This is an issue that deeply concerns Vaclav Smil a famous University of Manitoba Professor. Chris and I had the pleasure of hearing him speak live on the subject. Part of Smil’s thesis is found in the title to his recent book Numbers Don’t Lie. And they don’t. Sometimes it is not easy to interpret them correctly, but numbers are important. Life cannot be reduced to numbers, but life should not ignore numbers. This is what Smil wrote ,

“The world is wasting food on a scale that must be described as excessive, inexcusable, and, given all of our other concerns about the state of the global environment and quality of human life, outright incomprehensible.”

 

According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization the world loses (wastes) 40-50% of its root crops, fruits, and vegetables. Let that sink in please. Nearly half of all root crops, fruits and vegetables are wasted!

Of course, that is not all the food that is wasted. We also waste, according to the UN 35% of our fish, 30% of our cereal crops, and 20% of our oilseeds, meat, and dairy products. As Smil pointed out, “This means that, globally at least one-third of all harvest food is wasted.”

That is done while billions of people go hungry each day! And our political leaders don’t want to talk about this. Many of them, especially here in the United States, would rather talk about gendered bathrooms!

I was reading Smil’s  book while I was in the USA and Smil is hard on them in his criticism. But Canada is very bad too. If I recall correctly, he told us at his lecture in Canada that we Canadians waste about 25% of our food. But as Smil said in his book, “Not surprisingly the United States is a leading offender.” In the US about 40% goes to waste.

 

Wasting by Design

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Environment

We did actually get out of Kansas. From my posts people might have thought we were stuck there forever, when actually we just drove right through.

On our way to Arizona, at breakfast in the hotel in Amarillo Texas where we spent the night, we marvelled at the immense waste. Each item came in its own plastic container or wrapping that was used only once. Was this a hangover form Covid? Or was it merely a sign of the wasteful society we lived in? Everything seemed designed to avoid any human contamination.  This is what Philip Roth called “the human stain.” Everything used once was sent to the landfill. We are filling the world with garbage, but no one pays attention to the rising garbage. We all accept it as “normal.” This waste by design.

Vaclav Smil is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba where I was a student years ago and taught a half course at the faculty of law for about a decade. I have had the pleasure of hearing him speak in person. He is brilliant. Perhaps the greatest professor ever at the University. Bill Gates has called him one of the 10 best writers ever. He also said, “There is no other author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.” Smil is frequently asked to speak around the world. If you have not read him, you should.

One of the things he spoke about at the lecture Chris and I attended was food waste. This is something that bugs him. He has written 40 books. One of his more recent ones is Numbers Don’t Lie. In one article about wheat in that book he said, “we would need substantially less wheat if we were to be able—finally—to reduce our indefensibly high food waste.”

I will post more about this.

 

There is a better Way

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Critical thinking, Decline of the west, Extremism, Fear, Polarization, Social democracy, Wisdom

 

I want to end this series on the paranoid elites trying to hunker down in a missile silo on a happier note. It is not all doom.

In the 60s and 70s Stewart Brand, now a Silicon Valley sage, owned the “Whole Earth Catalog.” It attracted a large and loyal cult following as it blended hippie-dippy advice with the technical. I loved their motto: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”. Brand experimented with survivalism but abandoned it.  Ultimately, he found it did not make sense. Things based on unreasonable fears seldom make sense. Evan Osnos described him in his current situation this way,

“At seventy-seven, living on a tugboat in Sausalito, Brand is less impressed by signs of fragility than by examples of resilience. In the past decade, the world survived, without violence, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; Ebola, without cataclysm; and, in Japan, a tsunami and nuclear meltdown, after which the country has persevered. He sees risks in escapism. As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the “larger circle of empathy,” he said, the search for solutions to shared problems. “The easy question is, how do I protect me and mine? The more interesting question is, What if civilization actually manages continuity as well as it has managed it for the past few centuries? What do we do if it just keeps on chugging?”

 

As it has so often in the past, America is being pushed and pulled at the same time particularly by the extremes of left and right.  On the one  hand there are people like survivalists, neo-liberals, and their political puppets who have shredded all of their fellow feeling in order to fill their bags with as much money as possible. On the other hand,  are some genuine whackos on the left as well.  Yet there are the kinder gentler souls who see a better way, but seem to be increasingly crushed by the more vocal and bellicose camps. I don’t know who will win this battle, but I care. I hope that America (and with Canada dragging along behind) comes to its senses and abandons this philosophy of fear. Fear is all right but it must be managed. Don’t let it get unreasonable. When it gives way to panic we have to realize that smart decisions will no longer be made. We must abandon panic; we must embrace critical thinking and fellow feeling. If we can do that then we will survive. If we are unable to do that, we will sink into the mire, or worse. And we will deserve it.

We must remember: there is a better way. We may need to meander to find it, but its there.

 

Gilded Dispair

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Fear, Social democracy

 

A symbol of decline?

Every year a group of scientists, many of whom are Nobel laureates, set a big clock as a symbol of our dire straits. At the time when the Cold War was ending they set it at its lowest (safest) point ever at 17 minutes to midnight.

 

Sadly, since then the clock has been moving back up closer to midnight. In January 2016, after tensions rose between Russia and NATO and after the warmest year on record for the world, they set it at 3 minutes to midnight. After Trump got elected and bellicose relations continued between the US and North Korea it was set at 2 & ½ minutes to midnight.  That was the highest since 1953 when the US first tested the atom bomb. it is even higher now.

There is no doubt that all of this is being driven by fear. Fear of disaster can be a useful thing. When the world realized that a hole was being punched in the Ozone layer because of chlorofluorocarbons (‘CFSs’) in the atmosphere they got together and adopted the Montreal Protocol to do something about it. They phased them out. This was a rational response to fear. That action has been a remarkable success story.

But this is not happening  in Kansas at the missile silos bought by wealthy fearful people. Instead, it is another case of the super wealthy doing nothing to  solve the problem they helped to create. Instead of doing something helpful,  they are using their money to buy an escape. It is illusory, but that is what these rich people want to do with their money. Instead of using it to help solve the problem, they are trying to run away from it.  As Evan Osnos said,

“Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal… Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair. As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. ”

 

Some of the super-rich have a perverted sense of risk.  One of them, a hedge fund manager of course, said this to Osnos “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, said to Osnos, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’ ” Even though he had supported Trump he wanted an escape hatch in case he had made a mistake.

Another super-wealthy CEO had a much better approach. This is what he said,

 “There are other ways to absorb the anxieties of our time. “If I had a billion dollars, I wouldn’t buy a bunker,” Elli Kaplan, the C.E.O. of the digital health startup Neurotrack, told me. “I would reinvest in civil society and civil innovation. My view is you figure out even smarter ways to make sure that something terrible doesn’t happen.” Kaplan, who worked in the White House under Bill Clinton, was appalled by Trump’s victory, but said that it galvanized her in a different way: “Even in my deepest fear, I say, ‘Our union is stronger than this.’ ”

 

Osnos understands this well. The panicky approach of rich people trying to escape reality is just plain dumb. It is dumb and counter-productive as it is likely to make the problem worse, not better. Super-rich people are purchasing their own doom with these mad schemes.  Osnos understands that the CEO who believes the political union in America is stronger than the survivalists think is “in the end, an article of faith—a conviction that even degraded political institutions are the best instruments of common will, the tools for fashioning and sustaining our fragile consensus. Believing that is a choice.”

Yes there really is a better way.

Facilities of Doom

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Climate change, Decline of the west, Fear

 

Evan Osnos had the benefit of a tour of the Kansas facility. I wish I could have seen it, It had many amenities. $20 million buys a lot of amenities. It has a 75- foot- long pool, a rock-climbing wall, an Astro-Turf “pet park,” a classroom with a line of computers, a gym, a movie theatre and a library. According to Osnos “It felt compact but not claustrophobic.”

 

Osnos also described the armory and related facilities:

“We visited an armory packed with guns and ammo in case of an attack by non-members, and then a bare-walled room with a toilet. “We can lock people up and give them an adult time-out,” he said. In general, the rules are set by a condo association, which can vote to amend them. During a crisis, a “life-or-death situation,” Hall said, each adult would be required to work for four hours a day, and would not be allowed to leave without permission. “There’s controlled access in and out, and it’s governed by the board,” he said.”

 

The facility also contained a hospital bed, operating table, dentist’s chair and food storage area. 2 doctors will be residents and 1 dentist. I guess they are wealthy enough.

Many Americans don’t think Kansas is isolated enough. Many of them are choosing a New Zealand option instead. One American told Osnos this,

“I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.” As someone who views American politics from a distance, he said, “The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”

 

There they don’t need bunkers. They are thousands of miles from Australia. They think they will be safe there. Amazingly some of them like New Zealand because it is mountainous and remote. They think there they can avoid rising sea levels. So these rich Americans who likely publicly supported all government inaction on the issue of climate change are actually privately worried about climate change. Worried enough to buy property in New Zealand.

Even people who claim not to believe in climate change actually fear the consequences of climate change!

 

Doom Boom

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Fear

 

Fear was not invented recently in America. Long before people bought condos in missile silos, fear was a profitable business. It has always been there. It always has been profitable.  There were ample fears earlier in the United States too. The Cold War was brimming with fear.  Many thought there were communists under every bed. Many feared nuclear annihilation. Of course, as always, politicians ensured that the most important people had the most protection. That meant, of course, they were protected. As Evan Osnos said,

 

“During the Cold War, Armageddon became a matter for government policymakers. The Federal Civil Defense Administration, created by Harry Truman, issued crisp instructions for surviving a nuclear strike, including “Jump in any handy ditch or gutter” and “Never lose your head.” In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower broke ground on Project Greek Island, a secret shelter, in the mountains of West Virginia, large enough for every member of Congress. Hidden beneath the Greenbrier Resort, in White Sulphur Springs, for more than thirty years, it maintained separate chambers-in-waiting for the House and the Senate. (Congress now plans to shelter at undisclosed locations.) There was also a secret plan to whisk away the Gettysburg Address, from the Library of Congress, and the Declaration of Independence, from the National Archives.”

 

Frankly, I would have felt better if the political leaders were the last to be put into bunkers, so that their conduct would not be overly reckless. In 1961 John F. Kennedy encouraged “every citizen” to help build fall-out shelters.  Thousands of Americans complied. Back home I knew someone a block away who had one in his house. Now that seems crazy.  Few people would have survived a nuclear attack in those shelters. But this advice played on American and Canadian fears. Many people felt better doing something.

This was part of a cherished American tradition of fear mongering–one of the most popular sports in America. Right next to NASCAR racing, wrestling, and NFL football.

Osnos described the American fear movement this way,

 “In 1976, tapping into fear of inflation and the Arab oil embargo, a far-right publisher named Kurt Saxon launched The Survivor, an influential newsletter that celebrated forgotten pioneer skills. (Saxon claimed to have coined the term “survivalist.”) The growing literature on decline and self-protection included “How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years,” a 1979 best-seller, which advised collecting gold in the form of South African Krugerrands. The “doom boom,” as it became known, expanded under Ronald Reagan. The sociologist Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”

 

I doubt that anyone ever lost money overestimating American fears.  Doom is always booming.

 

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