Guest Contribution By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact

The 20th Bioneers, a three day conference celebrating breakthrough sustainability solutions, kicked off on last Friday in Marin. The agenda is chock full of speakers on a wide range of topics, from the arts, indigenous knowledge and restoring our ecosystems to youth and women’s leadership.

I was excited to hear Michael Pollan speak, a leading critic of our industrial food system and author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire (you can listen to his talk here). For those of you who aren’t attending, you can catch some of the keynotes via live webcast.

Strolled On Stage With a Burger

He strolled onto the stage to present a keynote on the growing national movement to redesign the food system with a McDonalds takeout bag in his hands and proceeded to unpack a double quarter-pounder with cheese.

The gist of his message:  the food system is broken and we can’t address the important national issues of health care, climate change and energy independence without address the food system, which contributes up to 33 percent of our carbon footprint.

He illustrated his point by asking the audience to guess,

How much oil are we eating?

Next to the burger, he began to pour oil from a bottle into small glasses.  He filled the first glass, then the second, then the third and needed a fourth to hold the 26 ounces of oil it takes to make a conventional burger. “A disgusting way to eat,” he commented as he licked his oil laden fingers. As the audience moaned, he confessed it was actually chocolate syrup!

For each hamburger made, thirteen pounds of carbon are emitted into the atmosphere, the equivalent of driving 13 miles, in part from the fertilizers needed to grow the corn and soy that farm raised cows eat and the pesticides used on these crops.

And while of course we are not directly eating this oil, as a nation we are eating way too much junk food. According to Pollan, $500 billion of our annual health costs are linked to diet.

Articulating a Framework

He spent the remainder of his time articulating an overarching framework for weaning the American food system off of fossil fuels.  While it is difficult to do his eloquent talk justice in a few bullet points, here are a few key points of the framework:

• Farms:  We need to start providing farmers incentives to diversify their crops and we need more farmers.
• Marketplace: There is a need to create more local foodsheds and rebuild distribution.
• Edible Education: We need to teach kids to grow food, cook food  and take time for lunch in schools.

Then They Fight You

In his opening remarks he stressed we have come a long way in the past few years, but still have a long way to go.  And he concluded by reminding the audience not to underestimate the level of pushback we are going to see from industry. He called up Gandhi’s wisdom on the steps of a revolution,

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. –Gandhi

For some details on how the industry is fighting back, see BC Upham’s post from last week.

To Learn More

PBS just launched a beautiful web site on the Botany of Desire with lots of great information and resources. Mark your calendar for the October 28th, 8pm to watch their 2-hour documentary.

And for readers interested in how to bring some of these concepts alive in food service contracts, check out The Low Carbon Diet, a program offered by Bon Appétit Management Company.  According to Bon Appétit, “The typical American diet consisting of a high percentage of red meat may contribute more to global warming than driving a typical sedan.”

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Deborah Fleischer is founder and president of Green Impact, a strategic environmental consulting practice that helps companies strengthen their relationships with stakeholders, develop profitable green initiatives and communicate their successes and challenges. She is a LEED AP with a Master in Environmental Studies from Yale University and over 20-years of direct experience working on sustainability-related challenges in both the public and private sectors. She brings deep expertise in sustainability strategy, stakeholder engagement, program development and written communications. You can follow her on Twitter @GreenImpact.

I became a city planner because I wanted to marry my love for cities and my love for the environment.  I am not your typical “environmentalist.”  I am petrified of most animals and the only tree I hug is my Christmas tree before we send it to the curb.  Yes I do recycle and use a tote bag for groceries, but these token gestures do not equate to sustainability.  I want, like most people, to live a luxurious life.  The key is in figuring out how to live luxuriously and sustainably at the same time and on a middle class budget.

The parts of our cities designed post World War II are designed for the automobile and are thus innately unsustainable.  This is where most of us live and herein leys the problem.  Even if we put solar panels on our roofs and drive a Prius, we are still not living sustainably.  We still have to drive everywhere, which leads to more pavement, stormwater runoff, and water contamination; more gas used and air contamination; and more roads and parking lots, the loss of nature, and thus land contamination.  These things lead to other horrible things like the dependence on oil and thus national security issues and our overweight, over driven kids…but I’ll leave that for another day.  The topic of discussion here is that our modern cities and suburbs are not designed to be sustainable.

Building a green LEED certified house or building is important, but the framework of the neighborhood where we build that building is much more important.  Neighborhoods and cities that are connected and compact promote sustainable living allowing alternative transportation options – places where you can live, work and play without having to get into your car.  Now I’m not a car hater, I just think that a car should not be my only option to get from A to B.

In a car dominated society, your daily commute resembles photo group A.  You leave your house, drive to work on Anywhere, USA collector streets and a crowded interstate, to an office park, where you park and walk through a sea of parking to your building. This is definitely not sustainable, and I would argue not a preferable lifestyle either.

In a connected well designed society, your daily commute could look like photo group B.  You leave your house, drive, walk, ride or bike on networked streets to an urban mixed use area, where you can park your bike next to your building or disembark from your train nearby, and walk down an interesting sidewalk to your building or any other destination that may strike you.  This is where the luxurious lifestyle I prefer and the sustainable lifestyle I should lead are one in the same.

I plan to use this blog to highlight good and bad examples of urbanism.  I’ll use photographs to explain where a place went wrong or what they are doing right.  I look forward to everyone’s opinions, ideas and comments.  Thank you Yahya for the opportunity.