By Beth Oppenheim

Eating Animals by one of my favorite fellow Jews, Jonathan Safran Foer. He is the author of such works as Everything is Illuminated which was ultimately turned into a type of dark comedy starring Elijah Wood. His works have always been unique, and from a distinct perspective. He rights as who he is, even in his fiction. He is a Jewish American descended from Holocaust survivors. Same as me, actually.

These are probably reasons why I like his writing so much. He doesn’t hide behind a facade of objectivity, and he writes what he knows. In this nonfiction work, he crosses the line from writer to full-blown activist, and I am really glad he did.

I first learned about his book because of the New York Times magazine Food Issue, where Foer wrote about his experience in abridged form. The article simply got my juices flowing for what was to come: an expose about the food industry, as it relates to Foer’s vegetarianism, and his choice to raise his son as a vegetarian.

From the beginning, it is clear that Foer has spent much of this process being extremely conflicted. He visits farms undercover, recounts much of the gruesome detail of factory farming reality, all the while leading the reader towards a bigger and more intellectual argument.

He shares stories of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor that ate whatever she could find in order to survive. She recounts to him a time where a Russian fighter (“God bless him!”) offered her meat in her most desperate state. She declined. “But why?!” Foer wants to know. She teaches us all a lesson that because it was pork, a meat forbidden in the Jewish faith, she was unable to eat it. She shows us that if there is nothing to distinguish a person, there is nothing worth saving.

I guess I should come clean and say that this is BY FAR not the first book I have read on farming, sustainable food, food safety, the agro-business industry, or any other related topics. I have read many – and Foer has too. His discussion of some of the modern day heroes of the local food movement is, in fact, where Foer makes his most compelling points. We all can hear about electrocuting turkeys and be horrified, but disagreeing with Michael Pollan? This I gotta hear!

Foer doesn’t disagree entirely with many of the people who have exposed factory farming for what it legitimately is: disgusting. It can be a lot of other things too – but the descriptions written in this text are evocative of disgust first and foremost. He explains that Pollan falls short in the work The Omnivore’s Dilemma of telling people to flat out make a decision: Are you going to eat meat, or aren’t you? This is true. Pollan suggests a dilemma of proportions that he is not able to solve alone.

Is it better to eat meat that is sustainably farmed, or is it better not to eat it at all? In the end, Foer pushes for the latter. I am still debating whether I loved or was confused by his conclusions, but ultimately his work is a really accessible way to show others what issues are at stake, and what we can ultimately decide about them.

by Beth Oppenheim

This morning, I finished The Zookeeper’s Wife, a book by nature writer Diane Ackerman. The book itself was actually an accidental read. My mother had purchased it at the bookstore, and was trying to figure out what book to read next when I suddenly picked it up and started reading it.

The work takes place during World War 2 in Warsaw, Poland. It is based on Ackerman’s research of two main characters, Jan and Antonina that run the Warsaw Zoo and use it as a front to save Jews during the war. The context is powerful, and therefore could either be an extremely depressing or uplifting read – as most Holocaust books are.

I have been to Warsaw, and have walked the streets where many nations have made their stand. I have sat inside the Ghetto walls and looked at the many cement buildings that have many stories to tell. It was the dead of February when I was in Poland, and that added all the more to the feeling of gloom. Ackerman conveys a different feel about everything related to Warsaw, which is the one thing I appreciated the most about the book.

She portrays it as a thriving city full of culture, stories, and history – NOT some forgotten communist haunt, and a place where many Poles turned against their fellow Jew. Many did, I’m sure – and nearly two thirds of the Warsaw population died in the war. However, her concentration on the human nature and salvation of many of these people makes it an uplifting read.

It also reads more like a memoir than a historical account, which I absolutely loved and attributed to Ackerman’s thoughtful research of the subject. Antonina was a complex woman who felt very deeply for the fate of the animals in her zoo. Many were killed in 1939, when the Germans first invaded Poland. She describes with horror the killing of elephants, wild cats, and many other exotic and well-cared-for animals.

BUT Ackerman proudly makes Antonina into a complex character that sees the pain of animals, and doesn’t equate it to that of human suffering. The author plays with the idea of who the animal really is, and what they have endured. Are the Germans animals, because of how they treated their fellow man? Are the Jews animals, because they were hunted? Or are we all really animals, vulnerable and looking for someone like Antonina to take care of us?

Her tone is impeccably descriptive, and at the same time not dense. The New York Times book review in 2007 described it difficult for the reader to switch back and forth between the atmosphere of the zoo and of the war story. I however found this to be precisely the point. The zoo and the saving of 300 or more Jews was something separate from the terror erupting outside, and I believe Ackerman made her point well.

This was  a surprising read that left me more curious about many of the other untold stories that exist from 1939-1945.

by Mihai Stoica.

In his article published in Science in 1968, Garret Hardin argues that when a user of the common is faced with a choice that will bring him large individual gain at a small collective cost, i.e. adding a cow to one’s herd versus the impact on the common, the herdsman will always act in his own self interest and put more and more cattle on the pasture, thus the pasture will inevitably deteriorate.

In his theory, Hardin fails to account for that the very existence of the commons implies cooperative management and ownership. Cooperative management tries to achieve more effective and equitable systems of resource management. It works on the basis of joint decisions within the community and as long as community management is in place it cannot be privatized. Thus, Hardin’s herdsman would not have been able to decide by himself how many cattle to put on the pasture.

If we stop to take a look at the self-regulation process that was known in England as “stinting”, which meant establishing limits for the number of cows, sheep or pigs that each commoner could graze on the common pasture, we notice that experienced farmers knew how to protect their land from being overused (the notion of carrying capacity) and allowed the community to allocate resources accordingly.

A similar case, but involving a different type of resource is the qanat (irrigation system) in an oasis environment in Ghardaia, Algeria. Water is a very scarce resource in the M’zab Valley in the Sahara. The inhabitants – the Ibadites – settled here close to a millennium ago and built a system of canals which is in use to this day. The access to water is regulated according to the number of date trees on each plantation belonging to a household, but the maximum number of allowed date trees is also regulated. This system of equitable water distribution and self-governance has ensured not only their survival, but has also made them thrive in the harshest of the environments.

The system of the commons has many advantages, but it also has to be clearly defined. What is meant by that is:
territorial boundaries must be clear in order to allocate resources effectively;
it works best in small-scale and homogenous communities (e.g. the community in Ghardaia is threatened nowadays by a modern phenomenon – urban sprawl – which threatens its water supply);
local knowledge is used in decision making.

The advantages that it brings are clear: it can improve education, empowers local communities and emphasizes long-term sustainability.

Garret Hardin’s thesis on the tragedy of the commons fails to account for the fact that competition has not always been a driving force in human societies. He builds his model according to a neoliberal capitalist ideology based on competition and profit, contrary to the very notion of the common where the poor could not have survived if they did not participate in the economies of cooperation and mutuality. Also, his approach founded on the model of the English commons is not based on a review of the economic history of the commons.

For centuries, land has been managed successfully by communities. This system is still in place today in countries like Algeria or India, especially in the former where the limited access to water is best managed by such a system. In conclusion, we cannot talk about a “tragedy of the commons”, but a triumph ensuring sustainability on the long term.

Bibliography:
Angela D. (2003) Saving the Oasis, Beaver County Times (March 2)
G. Hardin (1968) The tragedy of the commons, Science, vol. 162, no. 3859 (December 13)
F. Berkes, D. Feeny, B.J. McCay, and J.M. Acheson (1989) The benefits of the commons, Nature, no. 340 (July 13)
V. Shiva (2005) Earth Democracy – Justice, Sustainability and Peace, Cambridge, MA: South End Press
Susan S. Hanna (1990) The Eighteenth Century English Commons: A Model for Ocean Management

By Beth Oppenheim.

Well, I finally made it through another book. This time it was some serious non-fiction, in the tune of Van Jones’ The Green Collar Economy. The book has been made even more famous by the fact that Jones resigned from the post of Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation for the White House. It finally came out in paperback, and I can genuinely say I am glad that I bought it.

In case you are unfamiliar with Van Jones as an activist, I need only direct you to his bio to give you an accurate portrayal of his career. He served as a forerunner in dealing with racially charged violence in California, and has a particular knack for finding solutions with measurabilty- something that does not always come easy to those in the nonprofit world.

Unfortunately, his resignation is really shadowed in mystery – but he essentially resigned due to the relentless harassment from the conservative right over some of his personal views. This included activism surrounding the death penalty, and questioning of many issues surrounding 9/11.

His is one of those books that tells the tale of global warming and climate change with intensity, and, yes, catastrophic language. BUT unlike others that I have read in this category, it offers some of the most interesting, well-thought out solutions that I have ever come across.

Jones’ book begins with the problem. Melting ice caps, an economy in the toilet, and many more different awful things that are transpiring around the world. He is U.S. -centric in the sense that he focuses even more on the role that U.S. politics plays in the lack of momentum surrounding climate change. And he is absolutely passionate about this.

The words resonate an anger as well as a commitment to solving the problem. Additionally, Jones’ personal experience with Katrina survivors makes a clear linkage between the urban poor and the global warming debate. It cannot be simply an elitist fight.

The book then addresses the very solutions needed to solve this problem:

* Concrete government action
* An engagement with underprivileged, and specifically urban, communities
* Utilizing sectors of the society, such as former convicts, to benefit from the new Green Job revolution. This will be both economically and socially uplifting.
* Support by government of private sector innovation. This includes funding for projects and support of inventors working for sustainable technology.

The list that Jones creates is very long. And somewhat daunting for the average reader. My only qualm with the book (and it doesn’t really apply to me since this book is not the first I have read on the subject) is that if it were slightly more anecdotal, it would be incredibly effective.

The story that Jones tells about the people of Katrina is extremely moving. We all remember the helpless feeling many of us had, as well as the haunting reality that our country just didn’t care about our people.

I specifically want to address my feeling of sadness at Jones’ decision to resign. His book made me so excited ab

out his capacity as a person, to move this country in the right direction.

I hope he recognizes that there are far more of us that appreciate his work, and that the Glen Beck’s of the world are not the only voice.

Following science, the human machine is not more efficient than  typical gasoline engine. Each one of them converts less than a quarter of its intake of fuel energy into work while the rest is wasted. However, the bicycle-and-rider is the unsurpassed star among transport modes, says Robert Hurst in his “Cyclist’s Manifesto”.

The cyclists need a little animal and plant matter for fuel. But not much more than a sedentary person. Petroleum, oil based energy is highly concentrated , but still derived from animal and plant matter. Both can be measured in the same units: kilocalories.

Comparing the number of kilocalories that a cyclists uses to those burnt in the gasoline engine (or alas, even in electric eco-friendly feel-good-about-myself going-green uh-la-la-la-mr.-environmental responsibility such as the ultra-praised Prius) is 20 to 30 times smaller.

The fatal energy flop of any car is its weight. Even the Prius has to haul an extra-ton of metals and plastics that surround the poor driver.

“Nothing (…) can approach the efficiency of the bicycle. Cycling stands completely above other transportation modes in that regard. We can see that we promote these modes of transportation (commuter rail, biofuel buses, Prii or pedestrians) while trumpeting the critical importance of increasing efficiency, in inverse proportion to their efficiency. That would seem to be, a bit, inefficient”.

Hurst wrote an excellent book. In its last part he is advocating the bicycle from a multitude of perspectives, however the efficiency approach is simply groundbreaking.

If the reader does not mind diving into some diachronic analysis of the bicycle in America starting with mid 19th century, the book will take you to the most interesting and seductive corners of the history of mentalities related to transport. if you wanna read about how Americans wanted to import camels in their Dromedaries’ Plan in a crazy attempt to replace inefficient oxen and mules before the civil war, about Ford’s first quadrocycle that will bring about the automobile pest  in the US, about how reckless the first cyclists were in the times of “Gangs of New York”, about gender difference regarding cycling and so many other issues, do read the Cyclist’s Manifesto. You shall also enjoy an easy-to-read straight from the pen style.