Reasons for Hope...or How To Shop!

Believe it or not, I am actually a fun loving person...but I read a lot of depressing things. I say things like how we live is ridicuous and counter-productive, stressful, we eat crap, and the planet is all going to hell in a handbasket...and I keep following blogs that are quite depressing...I happen to believe that people who don't read are happier folks than people who do read, heh heh. Unfortunately, I am a bookworm. And reading for me includes blogs. Apparently I am attracted to wise but depressing blogs.

But I don't believe in apocalypse or an endgame scenario. Maybe I am in denial...no I don't think so.

I am a big fan of Jared Diamond and often link him here or plead with friends to read his stuff...at the end of his book...depressingly titled COLLAPSE...he closes with why he has reason for hope for our societies to survive their immediately pressing challenges...

He says...

My remaining cause for hope is another consequence of the globalized modern world's interconnectedness. Past societies lacked archaeologists and television. While the Easter Islanders were busy deforesting the highlands of their overpopulated island for agricultural plantations of the 1400s, they had no way of knowing that, thousands of miles to the east and west at the same time, Greenland Norse society and the Khmer Empire were simultaneously in terminal decline, while the Anasazi had collapsed a few centuries earlier, Classic Maya society a few more centuries before that, and Mycenean Greece, 2,000 years before that. Today, though, we turn on our television sets or radios or pick up newspapers, and we see, hear, or read about what happened in Somalia or Afghanistan a few hours earlier. Our television documentaries and books show us in graphic detail why the Easter islanders, Classic Maya, and other past societies collapsed. Thus, we have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples and past peoples. That's an opportunity that no past society enjoyed to such a degree. My hope in writing this book has been that enough people will choose to profit from that opportunity to make a difference.



And instead of listing the 12 environmental pressing issues that Diamond maps out...I thought I would post here instead his advice for consumers and their power...

(I think you can guess and find the 12 most pressing environmental issues online, or in the news, orlikely, you already know waht they entail.)

I think one of his most compelling suggestions for change is in our consummer personal power.

Diamond writes...


Next, you can reconsider what you, as a consumer, do or don't buy. Big businesses aim to make money. They are likely to discontinue products that the public doesn't buy, and to manufacture and promote products that the public does buy. The reason that increasing numbers of logging companies are adopting sustainable logging practices is that consumer demand for wood products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council exceeds supply. Of course, it is easiest to influence companies in your own country, but in today's globalized world the consumer has increasing ability to influence overseas companies and policy-makers as well. A prime example is the collapse of white-minority government and apartheid policies in South Africa between 1989-1994, as the result of the economic boycott of South Africa by individual consumers and investors overseas, leading to an unprecedented economic divestiture by overseas corporations, public pension funds, and governments. During my several visits to South Africa in the 1980's, the South African state seemed to me irrevocably commited to apartheid that I never imagined it would back down, but it did.

Another way in which consumers can influence policies of big companies, beside buying or refusing to buy their products, is by drawing public attention to the company's policies and products. One set of examples is the campaigns against animal cruelty that led major fashion houses, such as Bill Blass, Calvin Klein, and Oleg Cassini, to publicly renounce their use of fur. Another example involves the public activists who helped convince the world's largest wood products company, Home Depot, to commit to ending its purchases of wood from endangered forest regions and to give preference to certified forest products. Home Depot's policy shift greatly surprised me: I had supposed consumer activists to be hopelessly outgunned in trying to influence such a powerful company.

Most examples of consumer activism have involved trying to embarass a company for doing bad things, and that one-sideness is unfortunate , because it has given environmentalists a reputation for being monotonously shrill, depressing, boring and negative. Consumer activists could also be influential by taking the initiative to praise companies whose policies they do like. ...Big businesses adopting environmental policies know that they are unlikely to be believed if they praise their own policies to a cynical public; the businesses need outside help in becoming recognized for their efforts. Among the many big companies that have benefited recently from favorable public comment are Chevron-Texaco and Boise Cascade, praised for their environmental management of their Kutubu oil field and for their decision to phase out products of unsustainably managed forests, respectively. In addition to activists castigating "the dirty dozen," they could also praise "the terrific ten."

Consumers who wish to influence big businesses by either buying or refusing to buy their products, or by embarassing or praising them, need to go to the trouble of learning which links in a business chain are most sensitive to public influence, and also which links are in the strongest position to influence other links. Businesses that sell directly to the consumer, or whose brands are on sale to the consumer, are much more sensitive than businesses that sell only to other businesses and whose products reach the public without a label of origin. Retail businesses that, by themselves or as part of a large buyer's group, buy much or all of the output of some particular producing business are in a much stronger position to influence that producer than is a member of the public.

For instance, if you do or don't approve of how some big international oil company manages its oil feilds, it does make sense to buy at, or boycott, praise or picket that company's gas stations. If you admire Australian titanium mining practices and dislike Lihir Island gold mining practices, don't waste your time fantasizing that you could have any influence on those mining companies yourself; turn your attention instead to DuPont, and to Tiffany and Wal-Mart, which are major retailers of titanium-based paints and of gold jewlery, respectively. Don't praise or blame logging companies without readily traceable retail products; leave it instead to Home Depot, Lowe's, B and Q, and the other retail giants to influence the loggers. Similarily, seafood retailers like Unilever (through its various brands) and Whole Foods are the ones who care about whether you buy seafood from them; they, not you, can influence the fishing industry itself. Wal-Mart is the world's largest grocery retailer; they and other such retailers can virtually dictate agricultural practices to farmers; you can't dictate to farmers, but you do have clout with Wal-Mart. If you want to know where in the business chain you as a consummer have influence...

Check here...

Mineral Policy Center/Earthworks

Forest Stewardship Council

Marine Stewardship Council

From Discover magazine by Diamond, 1995...

Eventually Easter's growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses-and, of course, for lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more uncomfortable-springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires.

People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving.

With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society running. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to living in caves for protection against their enemies. Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other's statues, breaking the heads off. By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down and desecrated.

As we try to imagine the decline of Easter's civilization, we ask ourselves, "Why didn't they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?

I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn't simply disappear one day-it vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the latest in a long line of loggers to cry, "Jobs over trees!" The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes, this year we cleared those woods over there, but trees are starting to grow back again on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Their children could no more have comprehended their parents' tales than my eight-year-old sons today can comprehend my wife's and my tales of what Los Angeles was like 30 years ago."