Ramblings on Sustainability, Economy and Pricey Shoes

While hunched over sick with the flu on the train ride home last week, I overheard this nugget from a fashionably-dressed, middle-aged woman talking to another:

“I don’t care what they’re made of, a pair of $16,000 shoes cannot be called ‘sustainable.’”

Both ladies were dressed in a style I would call, Green Green – that is, costly, yet fashionable “natural” clothing.

I’ve long wrestled with the idea of maintaining a “sustainable” lifestyle. During my 11 years in Arizona, I tried biking to my job. Considering that my work day started at 2 p.m. and ended at midnight – I had a four-day workweek back then – it didn’t work well.

Biking in when it was 110 degrees left me sticky with salt and I didn’t like how my shirt would stick for the rest of the day. Biking home at midnight left me unable to fall asleep for hours. Sustainability is a great concept, but it is a lot tougher to execute than is sometimes practical.

Worse, there are often those pesky unintended consequences. None is more obvious than skyrocketing food prices, caused in part by the need to use corn and other plant material to make biofuels, reports Paul Krugman of The New York Times.

Here’s a sample:

The subsidized conversion of crops into fuel was supposed to promote energy independence and help limit global warming. But this promise was, as Time magazine bluntly put it, a “scam.”

This is especially true of corn ethanol: even on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains. But it turns out that even seemingly “good” biofuel policies, like Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation.

As food prices go up, farmers get to work. This is a good thing, except when it isn’t. In America’s case, it means pulling conservation land back into production, reports another New York Times story:

Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

And there really is not much choice when people are hungry:

“We’re in a crisis here. Do we want to eat, or do we want to worry about the birds?” asked JR Paterakis, a Baltimore baker who said he was so distressed at a meeting last month with Edward T. Schafer, the agriculture secretary, that he stood up and started speaking “vehemently.”

The baker warns that it’s not just price that is the problem: he can’t find rye flour, period.

My concern is that support for sustainability is going to go right out the window as food and other prices skyrocket and the recession deepens. And yeah, I think it’s safe to say we’re in a recession.

Already, huge inflationary pressures in Asia are being passed on to Americans, reports a third New York Times story:

The free ride for American consumers is ending. For two generations, Americans have imported goods produced ever more cheaply from a succession of low-wage countries – first Japan and Korea, then China, and now increasingly places like Vietnam and India.

But mounting inflation in the developing world, especially Asia, is threatening that arrangement, and not just in China, where rising energy and labor costs have already made exports to the United States more expensive, but in the lower-cost alternatives to China, too.

When things start to go wrong, survival instincts kick in; practicality trumps over fancy. Heck, even the smiles of Beverly Hills famed Botox doctors start to sag, reports Slate and the Los Angeles Times. It seems vain real estate agents no longer have the money to see their plastic surgeons for their weekly pin striping.

Gadzooks! What’s next? Will the woman who bought the $16,000 shoes pawn them for bread money?

Will the sustainability movement be imperiled by a slowing economy? That would be ironic: the need for fuel forces food prices up, contributes to inflation, slows the economy and damages environmentalism.

Talk about unintended consequences.

Comments

[Jay Andrew Allen]

Brett, have you read McKibben's DEEP ECONOMY? He addresses just this subject - maintaining sustainable economies without jettisoning those who are still dirt-poor, and for whom a sharp increase in living *does* bring a sharp increase in happiness and the quality of life. Your average American has so much, by contrast, that he/she can afford to cut back - in some cases, drastically.

As for biofuels, most people in the sustainability movement recognize that they're a Bad Thing unless they can be culled from renewable non-food resources, such as algae.

I think the slowdown is actually an opportunity to pitch ideas about making local economies more robust. E.g., McKibben talks about local currencies ("dollars" that are only good within a local community), which has been an idea slow to take off. With the dollar in such a weak state, and prices of trucked goods steadily rising thanks to oil topping $110 a barrel, you may see such "weird" ideas get more of a rational hearing.

[brettdl]

Hey Jay,

Glad to hear you're still around and about. I haven't read Deep Economy. My reading list is woefully incomplete.

I hope your right that a slowdown helps people around the world calm down a bit to something more sustainable.