DrawDown Book Club #1: First Reading 'Why Bother' Was a Wise Choice

Minutes of the DrawDown bookclub were supposed to post every Thursday.

A day late, we admit we dragged our feet and considered disbanding the club altogether. With rebuilding of properties damaged by hurricanes, floods and fires of last summer and fall, and response prep for upcoming a) fire-flood-hurricane season, plus b) land-sinking events dotting the headlines now, isn't a DrawDown bookclub "too little, too late"?

Luckily we chose for this week's reading the essay on page 52 penned by Michael Pollan way back in 2008 titled "Why Bother?" which addresses exactly these 2018 hesitations.

I. Why Bother? page 52
II. The Hidden Half of Nature, page 70

I. Why Bother?

Even author and food revolutionary Michael Pollan concedes his own hopelessness after viewing Al Gore's movie Inconvenient Truth in his essay on page 52, "Why Bother?":

"No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to ... change our light bulbs. That's when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart."

The above quote validates (what a millenial word) our reservations toward stopping the day-to-day long enough to read a two-page essay from the book DrawDown in this year 2018. (Pollan's essay on page 52 was excerpted and adapted from his full piece of the same name that ran in the New York Times April 20 2008 for blookclub members who didn't get a library copy like they promised to last week.)

(As an aside, we hope to talk more in future posts about the most upbeat naturalist in our corass the Scotsman Mr. John Muir. Muir, according to our high school Yosemite backpack leader, would respond to the site of a Yosemite Valley rockfall by jumping on rocks and surfing them to place. Which is the attitude regarding climate change we hope to infect ourselves with.)

After Pollan neutralizes our fear of appearing environmentally virtuous, which some associate with liberal soft-headedness thereby earning "the Ed Begley Jr. treatment" he addresses the hopelessness of any practice at all:

"There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists' projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared."

And Pollan said that in 2008. "So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?" Pollan imagines reader asking him - he still does. But would he answer the same today? We bet he would.

"The act I want to talk about is growing some -- even just a little -- of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don't -- if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade -- look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it's one of the most powerful things an individual can do -- to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind."

Before we go further: it's unlikely we're going to land a spot on our community garden anytime soon - the waiting list is 12 months. Nor are we too worried. We can't shake from our mind the New York magazine piece by the Brooklyn executive who double-dared himself to survive strictly on the yields from his new backyard garden for an entire month. He was out eleven grand after 30 days. Ed Begley-esque virtue aside, reading it will leave you very entertained, and changed from the cheap-energy mindset for a long time.

As we say in other posts, reading (saying this to ourselves, for re-training our twitter attention span) begins with pushing oneself -- which is required since the format of DrawDown is a coffee table book, paperback yes, but large dimensions make harder to read at night in bed -- and soon the text pulls us; pulling picks up just before the will to push would wane. The essay describes scientific (technocratic) virtues of food growing, "during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate," as well as social ones.

From push goes to pull and we read another "The Hidden Half of Nature" on page 70 but exercise the discipline to stop after two chapters.


II. The Hidden Half of Nature, page 70
Another sprawling burdensome two-page essay, "The Hidden Half of Nature" which we'll just bullet point here since it was not assigned reading, drives home something more concrete about the carbon sequestrating power of plants this bookclub host hadn't realized.

• In 1634 a church-condemned scientist Jan Baptist van Helmont was unconvinced by the "prevailing idea that plants ate soil."
• While under house arrest for the "crime of studying plants" he weighed a five-pound tree and planted it in a 200-pound pot of soil.
• After five years
• he dug up the tree, weighed it, found it had gained 164 pounds
• the soil had only lost two pounds
• He concluded the plant had taken on water, not soil.

He was closer. Plants do not eat much soil. They do take on water. And something else:

• Baptist van Hemont then burned sixty-two pounds of oak charcoal
• he weighed the remains carefully, finding
• one pound of ash
• sixty-one pounds of gas (carbon dioxide)
• Then "the production of gas, let alone so much of it, was a new discovery."
• "Before this, the idea that most of a plant was fashioned from an invisible gas would have been laughable."

A tree pulls a little from the soil much from the water and quite a bit of CO2 from the air.

Not until 1804 did another scientist assemble Baptist van Helmont's dots to "discover" photosynthesis.

We'll leave book club members wanting more with a teaser found at the end of the beginning of this two page essay:

"This reversal challenged the centuries-old notion that plants grew through absorbing humus (decaying organic matter.) Still, de Saussure's work remained counterintuitive. After all, generations of farmers knew full well that manure helped their plants grow."

The chapter explains fertilizer (which also was eventually made by fossil fuel) and more.

For next week let's push ourselves and actually read the first piece in section #2: Plant-Rich Diet. This will be slightly more of a chore, it's not listed in italics in the DrawDown table of contents (toc), which tells us its not an essay. Two pages of drudgery but we can do it.

And no we would never preach vegetarianism. Especially for moral reasons. Our initial hunch vegetarianism would lend compassion fatigue and invite burnout has been proved correct this month: Do Trees Talk to Each Other? A controversal German forester says yes, and his ideas are shaking up the scientific world in Smithsonian's March issue says a German forester says trees, too, have feelings. Our violin plays for them but we remain at TOR human supremacists. Even Muir killed his own food as a boy.

Let's also read since we're tree fans "Multistrata Agrofestry" on page 46.

See you next week.


Meatlover's DrawDown Bookclub #2: Can We At Least Have Fish? -> ----
Further Reading: My Empire of Dirt in New York magazine, Sep 10 2007 issue.


Catch up:

• March 01 DrawDown Bookclub is Here!