super bowl 2008

It's that time of year again. You know the time of year where the most avocados are sold.

Ok so that's false according to: Super Bowl Urban Legends .

Anyway, speaking of avocados, Bill McKibben's article, A Deeper Shade of Green, outlines his idea for a new cultural environmentalism practice. He begs the question, "What would it take to get us back to eating more locally, to accepting what the seasons and smaller scale local farmers provide?" In his search for answers, he wondered if he could survive the cold months eating just the food grown in his county? He says:

As it turned out, I didn't simply survive; I thrived. There were plenty of potatoes and onions and beets and beef and cider and beer and wheat and eggs, and just enough tomatoes canned in the heat of summer, to see me through. I'm sure I saved lots of energy, though I can't calculate just how much. What I can list, though, are the new friends I made, and they numbered in the dozens. My food cost more in terms of time; it wasn't as convenient to go to the farmers market as to the Shop 'n Save. But that cost, thought of differently, was actually the biggest benefit of the whole experiment.

Another famous argument he makes involves a head iceberg lettuce. In A Special Moment in History, he quotes Cornell biologist David Pimentel:

"A nice head of iceberg lettuce is 95 percent water and contains just fifty calories of energy, but it takes 400 calories of energy to grow that head of lettuce in California's Central Valley, and another 1,800 to ship it east. 'There's practically no nutrition in the damn stuff anyway,' Pimentel says."

So, what does this mean? In my opinion, we should move toward a free market. This includes everything from produce to energy to medicine. A return to a free market will encourage development as well as conservation. "In a free market, conservation occurs naturally when property rights are strictly enforced and resources become more costly as they become scarcer."


A Deeper Shade of Green

A Special Moment in History