Watching the recent events on Wall Street and in Washington DC has me thinking about the relationship between profit, sustainability, and greed. Iíll leave my thoughts about greed until later and Iíll resist my knee-jerk reaction to the relationship between profit and sustainability. Maybe profit and sustainability are not mutually exclusive. Let me try a metaphor: Profit and sustainability are like water and land, they are more similar that different.
Who knows how long it took for humans to recognize that the long prairie wind and the waving grass have a maritime equivalent? Certainly it was well established by the time Europeans began settling the Great Plains. Accounts of women being driven to madness by “oceanic” winds and descriptions of “prairie schooners” sailing the sea of grass were common in diaries and newspaper accounts of the late nineteenth century. But I like to think that the magic of the metaphor ñ ocean of grass – came much earlier than what is recorded.
I like to think of the first Paleo American Indian coming to a vantage point above the virgin plains still surrounded by ice and recalling a grandparent telling stories of skirting the ocean as they crossed the Bering land bridge. Such an Indian might recall the sense of awe in the grandparentís voice, the hundred-mile stare in their eyes. His pulse would quicken as he looked out over the Great Plains and remembered the accounts of fertility and the plentiful bounty of the sea.
I have not spent much time on the sea but when I have had occasion to be on an ocean-going ship, or a skiff on tidal flats, I have marveled at what the seamen know about the water and what they see that is invisible to me. Iím fascinated by saltwater fishermen and pay close attention when I get the chance to spend time with them. Many times I have sighted down their tattooed arms to where they point out fish feeding under the water. I can rarely see the fish, or the tiny wakes they push ahead of them. The color of the water does not tell me where the shoals, currents, or beds of seaweed lay. If I did not know better, I might say that the ocean is a featureless expanse. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, some of the most observant guests to our ranch have been the few saltwater fishing guides who have visited. It might take a short explanation of the precious nature of pooling rainfall for them to begin seeing the dips and rolls of the land. It might take them a day or so to sort out the sunflower heads from the grouse heads. They all have to kneel and touch the different grasses, the forbs, and sedges. Sometimes they need to taste the vegetation and stare out across the rolling miles before they see the similarities of this landscape and theirs.
Recently, Jill and I spent a week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium where literally thousands of people gathered to attend a conference and exhibition called Cooking for Solutions. It was three days of panel discussions and demonstrations meant to underscore the idea that informed choices of what we eat can go a long way toward sustainability of the sea. The vast majority of the participants were concerned most directly with wise choices in seafood. But, to the organizers great credit, they invited a few terrestrial food suppliers and Wild Idea Buffalo Company was one of them. There was a great deal of discussion about the superiority of certain wild caught fish with regard to taste, health, and environmental impact. It turns out that with rare exceptions, those fish that are allowed to move freely, eating what they evolved to thrive on, dealing with only the stresses their genes are familiar with, were judged to be sustainable food sources and those raised in confinement turned out to be problematic in the extreme.
I thought about all I had learned as I sat on the hotel deck overlooking Monterey Bay. To that day I had only known the bay and the town of the same name through John Steinbeckís book Cannery Row. I was pleased to see that the squalor and waste were gone. In Steinbeckís day the bay had been polluted by industry, the sea lions and otters shot, the abalone fished to extinction. As I looked out I could see several seals, a pod of dolphins, and sea otters lolling in the upper reaches of the kelp forest ñ cracking abalone on their chests. I looked out on what is now a National Marine Sanctuary that had once been denuded of nearly all its sea life. I was reminded that restoration of all landscapes (or seascapes) begins with knowledge like the sort Jill and I were receiving at the conference. It occurred to me that if the Great Plains is indeed like the sea then the buffalo is something akin to the codfish, halibut, and tuna.
We left that conference armed with nifty little Seafood Watch Cards, printed and distributed free by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The information necessary for making sound, sustainable, landscape saving choices when ordering seafood in restaurants is clearly printed on the cards. Ordering a certain fish caught in a certain way can have far reaching advantages over another fish procured in another way. What we learned at the conference was to ask our waiters if the fish we were ordering was wild caught or farm-raised before we made our choice and Jill and I vowed we would do just that. From the day we left the conference I have carried the card in my billfold and I do my best. But oddly, in all but the least informed restaurants the waiters always answer properly. Almost always they answer wild caught. But I have a friend who is a fine food purveyor and he shrugged when I mentioned my Seafood Watch Card. He leaned into my ear and whispered, “A lot of restaurants have no idea where the fish comes from but they have those cards memorized and they are instructed to sell fish.” Enter the dynamic of greed.
I was deflated and surprised to think that a decent restaurant would misrepresent the origin of their fish when so much is at stake, when a sustainable alternative is available. But of course I am naÔve. I didnít believe banks would lean money to people that they were pretty sure they could not pay it back. After all, in how many restaurants have I shook my head and passed over the buffalo steak because I knew it came from a Canadian feedlot? How many times have I seen the nutritional information for grass-fed buffalo helping to advertise buffalo that spent the last months of their lives forced to eat grain in confinement?
It is not healthy for me to dwell on the greed so I try not to ignore it. I keep my Seafood Watch Card in my billfold and I try to be patient. I try to believe that cynical entrepreneurs will be slowly worn down by the rest of us. I try to find good information and I try to hold people to high standards. But it is difficult and often I have to resort to simply sitting on the deck of our house the same way I sat on the deck of the hotel in Monterey. I look out over that the rolling dry grass and I am transported to the ocean. It bolsters my spirits to think that such landscapes are truly similar. Iím heartened by my belief that they will likely outlast the forces of hubris, ignorance, and yes, greed. Iím aware that all metaphors limp, but I know sustainability is indeed like profit in at least one vital way. In real terms, neither can be temporary.
Comments 1
I was born and raised near the Chesapeake Bay, and am drawn to water, in spite of my choice to go to college on the northern edge of the Great Plains. When I studied abroad in Madagascar this fall, not surprisingly, for my independent study, I selected a project that got me near the sea. There, halfway around the world, I saw a situation that I think represents another face of very much the same problems you see on the Great Plains. In Madagascar, with help from the local royalty, I secured permission to visit a “sustainable,” organic shrimp farm, Les Gambas de l’Ankarana (http://www.madagascar-gambas.com/en/index_en.htm). Shrimp farming globally has had some really awful ecological and social effects, so I was curious to see this example of shrimp farming done right, sustainably, in a way that would benefit the local human and wild community, and maybe help pull the country from extreme poverty. I was deeply hopeful, in other words. My original plans for an ecology study of the place fell apart, and instead I found myself just hanging out with the local villagers. I even spent a week simply learning to catch shrimp from a wooden, outrigger, sailing canoe. The fishermen tried to teach me to find shrimp by the color of the water and the day’s winds; in exchange I taught them to float. Just being able to laugh with these people, to slip, at least for moments, into an easy camaraderie of being human together, in spite of our differences, together with the admirable way these men and their families keep working to improve their situations under hardship I could scarcely fathom, always keeping smiles on their faces and their families close and foremost in their cares, did much for my faith in the human race.
That said, I soon realized that the villages around the shrimp farm had more problems than even the readily apparent ones which accompany poverty. The farm, les Gambas de l’Ankarana, called LGA for short, had helped out some of the villages considerably, with fresh water, aid to a school, a medical dispensary, waste disposal, and more, especially in the new village of company employees where I lived. I am quite sure the company has put millions of dollars into local development and community aid. However, LGA had distributed the benefits unevenly, concentrating on the village of company workers mostly not from the region, which was occasionally seen by outsiders, and the village of the local royal family. Even in another village of company workers from the outside, in a remote part of the farm to which no foreign observer or government entity pays attention, children were malnourished and had to risk highwaymen in their ten kilometer walk to a sporadically open school to get an education, and people had little access to water or medical care. LGA had almost entirely reneged on its promise to employ local workers. After reading about LGA’s commitment to valuing diversity and traditional culture, I was appalled to hear one of the directors of the farm trash the culture of the islanders, to condemn his own three-year-old half-Malagasy daughter to a future of helpless immorality because of her race. The man was half-mad from self-imposed loneliness, I guess, and went wild at the opportunity to air his troubles upon a fellow westerner. He had lived in the United States for a few years, spoke English as well as I do, and had I met him here, I think I would have genuinely liked him. As was, he terrified me, and the idea that a man would say things like that about people over whom he had essentially complete economic power made me heartsick. He said I will understand when I get older.
The failure of people to recognize the exquisite resource present in other people in this situation represented a shocking waste in my opinion, but that problem may become moot if their environmental situation is as bad as I fear. In Madagascar, unlike here in Minnesota, the presence of grasslands is typically viewed as an environmental problem, the result of deforestation and very regular burning to provide fresh forage for cattle, which the Malagasy hold sacred. On the coastline where I lived for a month, the anthropogenically maintained grasslands just inland provided relatively little support for the people. Instead, for almost all wood, some medicine, and most of their protein, the villagers used their mangroves. LGA avoided cutting mangroves in constructing the basins in which it raises shrimp, but it apparently paid to cut them abundantly by the time I arrived, for posts to prop up the sides of the basins. The villagers cut significantly for their own use as well, especially with the influx of LGA workers and inevitable accidents resulting from their extensive use of fire, but each side simply blamed the other for the problem. This mangrove deforestation, allegedly together with other, more direct impacts by LGA, contributed to the local decline of a very stressed fishery. The island-wide phenomenon of the collapse of large employers like LGA under governmental instability, here mainly in the sugar industry, had already driven many people to flee all the way to the coast to try to win a living from the Earth as fishermen. These men compete with industrial fishing operations who actually manage to make money in Madagascar, selling their catches abroad. Just like the Great Plains under the fundamentally unsustainable attempts of its European settlers to live off their land, and under the subsequent industrial agriculture, the seas of Madagascar stand poised to lose their ability to support much life at all. For the villagers who shared their lives with me, all this means that they may soon be completely out of luck, living where they do. Parents, eyes on their children, told me repeatedly that these kids would be the last generation to know mangroves. In one village, which had suffered, among other problems to which LGA contributed, the loss of their water source to pollution that LGA tried to hide from me, people told me that the village will last no more than five years, at this rate. If so, what then? Where will those people go?
All this occurs at this shrimp farm that has received good press for its deeds in European environmentalist publications by journalists who do LGA’s tour, a farm that assures its first-world customers, on its website and in its sales brochure, that by buying LGA products, they “actively contribute to the ‘Sustainable Development of Madagascar.’” Since I came home, Madagascar has undergone a coup, and its future, especially the future of conservation, has become more tenuous than ever.
So, I too recognize that the problematic behaviors in our use of our planet to sustain ourselves, and our dishonest treatment of each other in pursuit of money, are not restricted to any particular geographic locale. We humans have a bad habit of thinking in the short term only, and of forgetting that this planet, each species, and every individual living thing will only exist once, that if we keep destroying and moving on, eventually we shall simply not have that option any more, and we will perish. However, it isn’t hopeless, even though I think so sometimes. My experience in Madagascar disillusioned me in some ways; I’m not sure I will ever again trust a source that hasn’t really lived in the situation about which they write, for instance. At the same time, I experienced such sheer power of human spirit in Madagascar that I can’t help but think, wistfully, that if we humans could just put aside our differences enough to work together to direct our strength towards our common goals, which surely include the preservation of the quality human life we have known as inhabitants of a bountiful Earth, then the whole planet would surely be better off. Here in America, we have a stable government, and much greater scientific and economic ability to recognize our environmental problems and do something about them than my friends in Madagascar. It seems like we have the potential to fix the problems you have posed here. The prairie, and all the local nature, has greatly enriched my few years in Minnesota. I feel most alive here at Carleton College outside in our conservation project, the Cowling Arboretum, just as I did in my marsh back home. So, I recognize that Great Plains conservation can make a big difference in people’s lives. I hope that I am right that we could really take on that project, and that soon, we really try. If we can save the Great Plains, maybe we can save ourselves, and the fish as well.