Metamorphose

What do you see?

Trash, yes? 

What if you could turn the plastic back into crude oil? What do you see now?

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Today was a big day for big food. 

Judge Naomi Buchwald ruled that farmers could not sue seed giant Monsanto for the threat of transgenic seed contamination. At the same time, people from all over the world gathered to protest the consolidation of our food system. This growing movement represents a sea change in people’s relationship with food, our most intimate commodity. From guerilla gardens to home-cooked feasts for strangers to today’s seed exchange at the New York Stock Exchange (poster above), people are finding creative ways to connect to food and to each other. 

Creative expression is a critical part of this - and many - grassroots revolutions. It can make something distant feel close.  

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Metamorphose comes from the Greek μεταμόρφωσις meaning ”transformation, transforming.”

The Triumph of the Commons is a thoughtful collaboration of 55 artists challenging conventional wisdom on prosperity, consumption and the role of creativity and play in problem-solving. 

“If the previous centuries were about protecting society from the tragedy of the commons,” the authors posit, “Then this century will be about redesigning society to promote their triumph.” 

We see this emerging worldview in crowdsourced entrepreneurship, global grassroots organizing, shared services and revolutionary potlucks.

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“The only way to get consumers to choose cheaper, more efficient transportation is to make it the cool option.”

Skibsted Ideation

“Central to our ability to solve a problem is how we perceive the challenge, how we frame it - that “seeing” determines our capacity for doing, and certainly our capacity for effective doing. So I asked myself, is there a way of perceiving the environmental challenge that is at once hardheaded, evidenced based, and invigorating - one that welcomes us to become engaged problem solvers? Might it be possible to transform something that can feel so frightening as to make us go numb into a challenge so compelling that billions of us will eagerly embrace it?

…We don’t have to keep telling ourselves a story that robs us of the energy we need now, more than ever. We can each make the “leaps of mind” that move us from discouragement to an empowering stance. We can each reframe our thinking and seeing in ways that give us energy to engage.

Get ready.”

Francis Moore Lappe, EcoMind 

it would not surprise me one bit if it turned out we are machines sent here wrapped in pretty skins after denuding some other planet that we inhabitraided.  but in the meantime, if this is really our one and only home, we might want to think about whether we care more about satisfying our ego or laying the groundwork for our future.

“Everyone thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in fact the principal thing to it is the seed.”     Friedrich Nietzsche

One company now controls the genetics of nearly 90 percent of corn, soybeans, cotton, canola and sugar beets. That same company owns 70 percent of traditional seeds.

Seeds. The building blocks of our food system.

For most of us, seeds are refuse. They are what we caution our kids not to choke on. The parts we scoop out, cut out and spit out. When we think of the origins of our food, our thoughts float from pigs packed into confined feedlots to cows grazing on grass, from undocumented workers picking grapes to grandfathers casting fishing lines. We think of top chefs, iron chefs and master chefs; slow food and fast. But, rarely, do we think of the seed.

That has to change.

Of the roughly 2,600 calories Americans consume each day, 1,700 of them come directly from seeds. Nearly one-fourth of these calories show up on our plates (not to mention our thighs and bellies) in the form of grains at rates that are 30-50 percent higher than USDA federal dietary recommendations. Fats and sugars—from the butter on our bread to the icing on our cake—are our next greatest caloric hurdles, followed by vegetables, nuts and fruit. Our remaining 900 calories come from seeds buried a bit deeper into our food chain: the animals that comprise our meat, poultry, eggs, dairy products and additional fats that are raised on grains, legumes (soy) and grasses. Our fish, the most popular varieties of which are now raised on farms instead of caught in the ocean, are fattened up and made Omega-6 rich on corn and soy meal.

We focus on what we see on our plate—the bread, the bacon, the eggs, and the side of fruit—but it is the seed, no bigger than a dot on the page, that is the buried foundation of our food system and the critical building block of every meal we eat.

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“Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.”  Jonathan Safran Foer

I stole this book from someone I know, and devoured it.  Don’t worry, I gave it back (not necessarily willfully, after some intense questioning).  There are a lot of famous quotes that point in this general direction.  Silence in the face of injustice is complicity.  Along these lines.  But reading this one, in this book, about the implications of eating animals, at the time in my life I read it, transformed me, in small but significant ways.  It made me ride the bus or my bike, bring my own bag, cup, plate and utensils, it made me more active in the process of helping clients plan events so that my name would have less opportunity to be associated with disposable stuff, but more so that maybe others would regain the permission necessary to eat without plastic and styrofoam, to eat the way we did just 30 years ago, but were starting to waver from then.  And while it did not stop me from eating animals completely, I will not eat just any animal - I know the two people who raise the animals I eat because I look at them in the eye at the farmer’s markets every week.  I will not eat animals at restaurants if I don’t know where they came from.  And if given the choice at home between animal or no animal, I push myself to cook the no-animal option and have it taste amazing, to build my cadre of cravings for plant-based food.  And I don’t even have kids to answer to later in life, like in the case of the author’s motivation.  But apparently I have my brothers and sisters to answer to, now, because that is the world I want to live in.  One where we are all responsible for each other.

At 28 minutes in: Fritz Haber breaks apart nitrogen from thin air, for the common good of feeding Germany and the world, and makes it possible to sustain 7 billion+ people with “bread-from-the-air” agriculture. 

Then he breaks apart nitrogen, to annihilate enemy lines in WWI, for the common good of Germany. 

Then Hitler uses Haber’s technology to annihilate Haber’s own Jewish family and friends in the gas chambers, in WWII, for the common good of Germany. 

We are a powerful force whether we think we are or we think we are not.  We make change when we realize this.  We can choose to use our power to give life or to make death.  What comes around will go around, because we are all one.  We all want the best for The Common Good.  Our paths diverge because we have different definitions of The Common Good.

This is a placeholder for a much longer, deeper commentary…

I was sitting in a nice cushy chair at the University of British Columbia attending the International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability and it hit me like a ton of bricks. The reason sustainability has not taken off is because our three-legged stool - the common sustainability paradigm of caring for people, planet and profits - is wobbly and unstable. It has left out a critical component that would actually help activate the imagination and engage people in what they care about: cultural sustainability.

My dear colleagues Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken wrote with Amory Lovins the book Natural Capitalism - a seminal text about new business models and the need to value the incredible resources our ecosystems provide.

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