Bringing Our Lives Back Home - to the Beach
Linda Sheehan
San Francisco Chronicle
06/24/2010
With the latest setbacks in the containment of the Gulf spill, our frustration over the continually unfolding tragedy mounts. We comb the papers, scan hopeful government websites, review the nightly broadcasts - but feel there is little for us to do. Unfortunately, this is just one example of what can happen when we outsource nearly all of the most important elements of our daily lives - our energy, governance, media, food and water, jobs - far enough away to rein in our feedback and control. The Gulf tragedy raises the question: how much day-to-day, local control and accountability do we really have over the fundamentals of our lives?
The Gulf is bleeding oil in large part because we let our governance system slip away from us, and because we don't feel the real impacts of our energy use. For example, we don't understand how our society's ubiquitous plastic bags and plastic water bottles depend upon the oil soiling our shores. The 19 billion plastic bags Californians use annually translates to over 135 million driving miles of fossil fuel every year. If we had to find this energy ourselves locally, would we choose to continue to use plastic bags? Or would we ban them, as AB 1998, a bill co-sponsored by Senator Mark Leno, is trying to do?
The same is true of our water, the treatment and transport of which consumes almost 20% of the state's energy use annually. In California, our lawns mimic a lush green English countryside rather than reflect our natural California climate, because we don't feel the impacts of that choice. To us, our water comes conveniently and abundantly from a quickly-disappearing, expensive-to-reach place called "somewhere else." The largest urban water users by far in the state are our lawns and landscaping, while in other areas people literally do not have clean water to drink. Why do we incentivize energy-consuming water practices, rather than - for instance - help homeowners install water-friendly landscaping and move the saved water to people who truly need it?
We also are outsourcing our own governance. Corporations increasingly control our media, our elected officials, and even the elections themselves. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission grants corporations almost unfettered access to the human electoral process - power that corporations apparently have begun exercising here in California. PG&E most recently used $46 million in ratepayer funds to bankroll its misleading Proposition 16 campaign, which would have essentially stripped away community energy choices. Fortunately, the measure failed and has been met with swift rebukes from Senator Leno and other state legislators, but the way has been paved for more such attempts.
In the Gulf in particular, our federal decisionmakers too often are relying on sound bites and feel-good imagery that belies the truth of what is happening, reducing accountability overall. The federal government spill response website shows little to nothing of the real impacts of the spill. The imagery linked on this "Deepwater Horizon" response website instead consists of U.S. Coast Guard photos that depict energetic-looking meetings, brisk activity by people in crisp uniforms, and shining boats whisking toward unseen destinations. Impacted coastlines and oiled wildlife are shown as pristine beaches being cleaned and spotless birds being bathed. One would almost wonder from the official images if there was an oil spill at all.
The problems and solutions seem, for the most part, simply too distant to tackle. We humans are wired to deal with immediate issues in our vicinity. With our life elements increasingly outsourced away from us, the nagging feeling of helplessness swirls about us like a soiled plume.
Fortunately, we are not helpless. If we choose, we can take immediate steps to bring the fundamental elements of our lives back home to our communities. We can create feedback mechanisms that allow us to understand and react to the true impacts of our behavior. Holding ourselves accountable is a necessary step to holding our elected officials accountable - to achieving our vision of healthy, prosperous lives, and a clean, thriving environment in which to live them.
Bringing our lives back home involves actions as simple as planting our own garden, supporting a ban on plastic bags, contributing our voices (and subscriptions) to local media outlets, and swearing off bottled water, which simply drains another community's supply. With a little more time, energy and the strength of numbers, we can take actions to develop better community energy choices, reform our state governance system, and even mount a campaign to support the rights of people and ecosystems over corporations.
