[“Today Americans assume living in a bigger personal space to be evidence of progress...” F. M. Lappe]
I recently read in the book
Little House on a Small Planet that “the Union of Concerned Scientists ranks housing third among destructive human enterprises, just after transportation and agriculture.” (Foreword)
Anyone looking for evidence that we North Americans are making a retreat from the culture of big would likely find scant clues.
Cars rule supreme and small vehicles certainly don’t crowd our packed streets.
Monoculture agribusiness - with its dependence upon fossil-fuel based chemicals and fertilizers for high production - still fills our stores and bellies with its degraded produce, leaving local and organic little room to nourish.
‘House porn’ dominates our newspapers and magazines. ‘Home’ sections outweigh environmental news 20 to 1, I’m sure.
While reading the introduction to Little House (LHSP) I came across the following:
“Construction has some alarming effects on the environment. Forty per cent of all the raw materials humans consume, we use in construction. Most of the trees we cut down become buildings. Half of the copper we mine becomes wire and pipe inside these buildings. Building an average house adds seven tons of waste to the landfill.”
[“House porn? The ultimate backyard? Really?”: photo by Sue Reeve, London Free Press]
Is it any wonder that some cities, including my own (London, Ontario; often referred to as Deforest City in this blog), sponsor or encourage reforestation projects or organizations, e.g., Reforest London, to help tidy up the mess and fill in the wide empty spaces that sprawling, careless house construction leaves in its wake?
When reading ‘most of the trees we cut down become buildings,’ I was reminded of four paragraphs from A. T. Durning’s paper entitled “Saving the Forests: What Will It Take?” that was included in a book I was reading earlier this week (The Sacred Balance by David Suzuki).
The paragraphs describe an imaginary 10-minute time-lapse film about Earth’s last 10,000 years, with each minute covering 1,000 of those years.
“For more than seven of the ten minutes, the screen displays what looks like a still photograph: the blue planet earth, its land swathed in a mantle of trees. Forests cover 34 percent of the land...after seven and a half minutes, the lands around Athens and the tiny islands of the Aegean Sea lose their forest. This is the flowering of classical Greece. Little else changes.”
Notice how ‘flowering’ and ‘lose their forest’ are juxtaposed.
“At nine minutes - 1,000 years ago - the mantle grows threadbare in scattered parts of Europe, Central America, China and India. Then, 12 seconds from the end, two centuries ago, the thinning spreads, leaving parts of Europe and China bare.”
Most North Americans, I’m sure, are now sitting on the edges of their seats, wondering what happened in their neck of the woods.
“Six seconds from the end, one century ago, eastern North America is deforested. This is the Industrial Revolution. Little else appears to have changed. Forests cover 32 percent of the land.”
The last few seconds of film prove that a lot can happen, a life can be turned upside down, in the blink of an eye.
“In the last three seconds - after 1950 - the change accelerates explosively. Vast tracts of forest vanish from Japan, the Philippines” and many other corners of the world.
“Fires rage in the Amazon basin...”
“Central Europe’s forests die...”
“Southeast Asia resembles a dog with mange.”
“In the final fractions of a second, the clearing spreads to Siberia and the Canadian north.”
“Forests disappear so suddenly from so many places that it looks like a plague of locusts has descended on the planet.”
The fourth and final paragraph reveals the present day.
“The film freezes on the last frame. Trees cover 26 percent of the land. Three-fourths of the original forest still bears some tree cover. But just 12 percent of the Earth’s surface - one-third of the initial total - consists of intact forest ecosystems. The rest holds biologically impoverished stands of commercial timber and fragmented regrowth. This is the present: a globe profoundly altered by the workings - or failings - of the human economy.”
While the film fades to black I wonder if the culture of big will be the end of us all?
Can it can be slowly reversed to the culture of medium, then small?
Well, I’m more an optimist than pessimist, so continue to hope for changes to our patterns of behaviour before too long.
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the culture of big..
