The Horseshoe Nail

One grim irony – and there are many – of the international debt crisis, aside from the obvious problems of limitless growth within finite resources, is that despite global attempts at austerity, waste continues to occur at unimaginable levels. Italy, for example, whose debt mountain is the second largest in Europe, wastes over 30 per cent of its food, which works out at about $53 million. Reducing waste certainly won’t be the dynamite that blows a hole through that mountain of debt, which is a mind-boggling €240bn this year alone, but it will make a small dent, and surely save as much as some other individual austerity measures already suggested or implemented. It is not just Italy where this happens.  The US wastes the equivalent of 350 million barrels of oil a year in uneaten food.  In the UK, half the food produced on farms is thrown away, amounting to an eye-watering £20bn food mountain.

So why does such waste happen? Firstly, consumers are led by omnipotent advertisers to believe that appearance is an indicator of quality. The UN Food & Agriculture Organisation advises people to consider safety, nutrition and taste of food rather than the way it looks. An outrageous amount of perfectly edible produce gets discarded daily because it looks ‘off’, or in other words, not the technicolour stuff we’ve become accustomed to seeing in ads (and on the shelves). That freegans can survive almost solely on the contents of skips outside supermarkets is testament to the senseless waste that occurs in the name of aesthetics. In addition, consumers are urged to buy much more than they need, whether it be larger portion sizes in restaurants or two-for-one offers in shops.  Financial efficiency has been so misaligned that it actually became, in many cases, cheaper to waste food than to just buy what was needed.

In the end, of course, just as with homes, loans and everything else, there comes a point when the bubble bursts. The sudden gaping hole, never invisible but until now ignored,  between the abstract ‘market’ and concrete reality threatens to swallow us all. We can no longer afford to waste. Food, money, resources, time are all precious and we must use them wisely.  This is arguably more important right now than ever before.

Instead of amending or fixing the system that got us into this mess, it seems like those in charge are building it up again identically, brick by brick; taking back their abusive but irresistible lover, hoping this time things’ll be different.   The waste that uncapped capitalism encourages continues, as does environmental degradation and widening social inequality.  That people in Somalia (and across the developing world, for that matter) starve to death in droves while Italy alone wastes  food that could produce 580 million meals a year is nothing short of obscene. “Try asking those people trekking across the Somali wastelands what austerity looks like.” Dan Hodges movingly blogged yesterday, asking why, in 2011,  people can still starve to death. It’s certainly not for moral or logistical reasons, he points out, and if we can fund humanitarian intervention in Libya and other Middle Eastern countries, then why not Africa?

Sadly, I’d argue that it’s because we’re rebuilding a broken machine, one that is self-interested and self-governing.  There is undoubtedly aid ready to go into Somalia, but without governments providing security in this volatile region, there is no way to safely get it to those who need it. The bottomless pockets of cash that were available for Iraq and Afghanistan have mysteriously dried up. Is it too cynical to assume that this is because Somalia, unlike the Middle East, has few natural resources worth exploiting?

This article was reposted on Next Starfish.

Unnatural Woman

The notion of Mother Nature lulls us into a false sense of security,  where we can behave less responsibly than in other areas of our lives.

The idea of a link between women and nature goes back a long way, and probably predates that sneaky biblical implication of fruit-robbing feminine guilt. These days, although we may not notice it, this female-nature, male-culture division endures. Maybe it’s because there’s something comforting about a woman being more connected to the earth, like a spiritual mother figure who has an innate intuition. It implies fate without directly referring to it.

This isn’t just an out-dated, hippie ideal. Recently at the TED Women conference, a female CEO of a successful financial company, talked about applying ‘feminine values’ to the investment banking sector. Apparently, such values include honesty, sustainability and emotion.

In the same way, an entire strain of the green movement has been dedicated to exploiting this concept of women being empathetic protectors of the earth and better placed to deal with environmental issues. Time and time again, we mistakenly go back to this idea. But what harm can it do? Apart from the obvious implication that women are everything that men aren’t, and vice versa, the women-nature link basically justifies inequality by suggesting that it’s grounded in the natural order of things. It’s counterproductive and, frankly, embarrassing.

What’s more, popular phrases such as Mother Nature are now commonplace. We’re all guilty of it, but it’s not just gender inequality we’re encouraging with such blasé associations, it’s the very world we live in. Everyone loves their Mum. But when you stay at your Mum’s do you make the bed, cook the breakfast, wash the dishes…? Typically, no. Instead, we let our guard down. We relax in that haven of diminished responsibility, basking in temporary relief from the world of adult obligations.The idea of Mother Earth represents ultimate respect but also an unconditional love, one where we can behave less responsibly than in other areas of our lives.

As the natural world reaches a critical moment in its history, never before have we had to be more responsible for the impact of our actions on the environment. Maybe if we could change the way we conceptalise nature, drop the ‘Mother Earth’, it’d be that little bit easier to stop treating this place, our only home, like a hotel.