Alan Thein Durning

The Why. Interview

This had, I suppose, been a lifelong ambition. I come from a line that reveres wanderers. My family has moved to a new place with each generation, and sometimes with each decade. In this way, we have been typical Americans. We have been migratory, pursuing profit, knowledge, and ideals always to new locales.

But then, a few years ago, I was in the Philippines, interviewing members of indigenous tribes about their land and livelihood. I saw ancestral farms and forests that these tribes insisted they would defend with their lives. Late one day, a barefoot old woman who was revered by the others as a traditional priestess, said to me. "Tell me about your place. What is your homeland like?" I was speechless. I had no idea what to say. Should I tell her about one of various neighborhoods where I'd had an apartment in and near Washington, D.C.? Neighborhoods where I didn't know my neighborhoods and felt no connections? In the end, I admitted "In America, we have careers, not places." She looked at me with pity in her eyes, and it ruined me for the life of a globe-trotting eco-evangelist.

A year later, after failed attempts to shake the burn of her pity, I quit my job and moved my family back to the city where I grew up.

Why is "place" so important? Is finding our "place" more than "thinking globally, acting locally"? How does it help us to "attack global problems"?

History shows us that people are willing to make great sacrifices for their communities, their places. But so far people seem unwilling to sacrifice for the planet in its entirety or humanity in general. It may be that the only viable solutions to wrenching global problems are ones motivated by the powerful human motive of love for home. It may be that there aren't any ways to save the world that aren't, first and foremost, ways for people to save their own homes. "Place" may be an escape hatch for a society hurtling toward the environmental brink.

Your place, your "bioregion," is the Pacific Northwest. Tell us what a bioregion is, and what the Pacific Northwest covers.

A bioregion is a natural unit of place - a unit that is manifest on the landscape. It is a geographical unit that would continue to exist if current political boundaries vanished. The Pacific Northwest bioregion covers the watersheds of all the rivers that flow into the Pacific through the temperate rainforests of North America. These rain forests, the largest outside the tropics, stretch from Prince William Sound Alaska to San Francisco Bay, California. The rivers that flow through them stretch inland to headwaters at the continental divide.

This bioregion is home to 14 million people - in British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and parts of Alaska, California, and Montana. It also contains more intact ecosystems than any other part of the industrial world. As such, it is a global proving ground for sustainability. If Northwesterners cannot create a lasting way of life, it probably cannot be done. If they can, they will set an example for the world.

In your earlier book, How Much Is Enough?: The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth, you describe three "world consumption classes": the 1.1 billion consumer class, the 3.3 billion in the middle who live more sustainably, and the 1.1 billion marginalized poor. Tell us how these differ from each other.

In ecological terms, the world has three classes. Those of us at the top are the consumers. We travel in cars and airplanes, live in a throwaway materials economy, and dine on lots of meat and packaged, processed foods. Those in the middle - call them the "sustainers," - travel by bicycle and bus, use resources frugally, and eat a diet of local grains and produce. Those at the bottom are the poor. They travel by foot, lack sufficient material possessions for productive life, and eat an insufficient diet of grains and dirty water. Interestingly, environmental degradation increases when people consume too much, or too little. The consumers do the lion's share of damage to the earth, but the poor are the ones who put rainforests to the torch and steep slopes to the plow. Out of desperation, they sacrifice the future for the sake of the present.

You write in How Much Is Enough? about global food consumption. Describe the differences between the three consumption classes, and the impact on health and the environment. Is one group more to blame than another?

The healthiest diet for people and the planet is the low-fat, low-on-the-food-chain diet of the sustainers. Consumers ruin their health, and habitat, with high-fat, high-impact foods such as grain-fed meat and packaged junk food. They drink too much water carbonated as soda pop (Americans now drink more soda pop than water). And, of course, the least healthy diet - for people and planet - is the hunger diet. So the needs of our personal environments (our bodies) and our public environment (our land and water) coincide. If we walk more softly on the earth, we'll also walk longer on it.

Looking back on How Much Is Enough? from today, would you change how you described the "overconsumers"? What do you mean in your new book by saying, with Wendell Berry, that we are "not too materialistic - we are not materialistic enough"?

How Much Is Enough? remains an accurate description of the essential challenge of this generation. This Place on Earth picks up where How Much Is Enough? left off, seeking real, on-the-ground solutions in the greenest part of the richest society in history. Both books actually allude to Berry's comment that we are not materialistic enough. Our materialism means caring about things, not caring for them. A true materialism cares for things - it emphasizes elegant functionality, durability, repair. It values materials because they are, to quote Berry, "the stuff of creation."

In your new book, This Place On Earth, you suggest that we are living in a "suicidal economy: an economy whose success ensures its failure." Tell us what that means.

Our economy operates on the idea that increasing the flow of resources is always good. That's self-destructive. It's suicidal.

You write that "sustainability" means achieving a "factor-ten economy," i.e., "an economy that extracts a better quality of life from a daily resource diet of just 11 - rather than 115 - pounds per person." Do you think the United States can achieve such a reduction in consumption? How long will it take to get there?

I know the United States can achieve a quantum leap in conservation. I know it because of the countless examples of people who are doing just that - examples described in This Place on Earth and elsewhere. Sometimes, we make progress by improving technologies, other times by better understanding our needs and therefore avoiding misguided purchases.

You suggest that everything has an "ecological wake" - everything we use has additional direct and indirect costs to it. How do you measure an item's ecological wake and how can we, as individuals and communities, help to reduce it?

Everything we touch - from our morning coffee to our evening video - comes from somewhere. It's manufacture involves a line of production with various ecological impacts. These impacts are like wakes rippling outward across the planet. Some wakes are large (say, the car). Some are small (say, the clothes line). But every product has a wake. The next book I'm working on, coauthored with John Ryan, research director at Northwest Environment Watch, describes the ecological wakes of a dozen everyday things. It also offers help in leaving a smaller wake. It"s called Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things.

How has agriculture changed the Pacific Northwest? What are farmers doing to make farming there more sustainable in terms of soil and land?

Sustainable agriculture is, of course, a minority practice. But it is a growing minority. All over the region, farmers are substituting biological methods of pest control for chemical ones. They are boosting irrigation efficiency with new technologies and new crops. They are protecting soil with new crop rotations. And some of them are leaping boldly to organic production.

You describe a "transformation all the way down the region's food chain" - from farm field to packing plant to grocery to kitchen, even to toilets and sewage. Give us some examples of this.

Wheat farmers in Idaho are experimenting with old-fashioned crop rotations of up to twenty year cycles as an antidote to chemical dependence and soil erosion. Apple packers in Washington are slashing their chemical use. Groceries are offering more organic produce, and less-packaged options. Toilet makers are devising ways to flush that require far less water. And the small town of Arcata, California, now treats its sewage with an artificial wetland, rather than an expensive and resource-gobbling tertiary treatment plant.

You describe how people are reforging connections to local farmers, buying local food and developing farmers markets. How is that happening in the Pacific Northwest?

There are Community-Supported Agriculture groups popping up, through which city dwellers buy a share of a local farm's produce, and become closely acquainted with the farmers. Farmers markets are spreading - from the venerable old Pike Place Market in Seattle to new ones in Vancouver, B.C. Some seafood restaurants have started to advocate for protection of salmon habitat.

You write about the need for greater "access" over the need for "mobility." Does this also mean - if we are living in a manner that is regional - that there are times when we might not have access to the things we want or need (such as strawberries in December)?

In a sustainable economy, prices would tell the ecological truth, because we would tax pollution rather than paycheck. Strawberries might still be available in December, but they would cost an awful lot.

You note that "more Northwesterners now recycle than vote; indeed, more Northwesterners play the lottery than vote." What are the implications of these facts for the creation of "permanence" and for the creation of a "politics of sustainability" which requires people to change - as you suggest - their "worldviews"?

In the end, This Place on Earth comes to the failure of politics and the failure of community. And in the end, only the revival of place-based, community-centered methods of governance can reinvigorate the political process overall. The most promising examples are dozens of watershed councils that now pepper the bioregion's map. These councils include disparate and often diametrically opposed representatives. But through a consensus-based decision-making process, they sometimes reach breakthroughs. And the breakthroughs happen when they learn together. When the stale and static myths that pervade our politics (such as jobs versus environment) give way to new understanding (such as, "jobs and environment, or neither").

At the end of your new book you describe how community can be built around a basketball hoop. In what ways can people build community today?

In my neighborhood, putting up a basketball hoop helped get people out of their homes and into conversation. It got people to stop and chat. To just be together. In the past two decades, Americans have been spending more time driving, shopping, watching television, and working. But we've been spending less time in conversation.

In the long run, I think that stronger communities are the main alternative to consumerist lifestyles. The words conservation and conversation, after all, are spelled with the exact same letters.

Alan Thein Durning is the Founder and Executive Director of Northwest Environment Watch, 1402 Third Ave., Suite 1127, Seattle, WA 98101-2118, phone (206) 447-1880, fax (206) 447-2270, Email: nwwatch@igc.apc.org, web: http://www.speakeasy.org/new. His latest book is This Place on Earth - Home and the Practice of Permanence, Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 1996, 312 pp., $22.95.