Putting a value on the human effort in our stuff

Picking up on the urban migration thread, I’ve been researching what’s been driving that mass exodus from the world’s rural areas. In my travels, I came across The Story of Stuff, which I highly recommend. I love it for giving such a succinct explanation of such a huge and complex subject, for the wonderful way in which it’s presented (I wish more corporate presentations looked like this), and for the way it’s promoting grass-roots distribution of the message. In it, Annie Leonard explains the linear processes which determine where the stuff in our lives comes from and where it goes: extraction > production > distribution > consumption > disposal.

Our rate of consumption of Earth’s natural resources (in the past three decades, we consumed one-third of the planet’s resource base) is clearly unsustainable. And as multinational mining companies start moving into undeveloped and developing countries to exploit their resources, we’re now subjecting the inhabitants of those countries, in a much deeper and more significant way, to globalised economics. It’s no longer viable for them to sustain themselves off the land, and they are forced to work in mines and to move on to factories in urban centres to manufacture the products.

In developed countries, the economics of food production mean that the land simply cannot support small, specialist farms any longer. Instead, agriculture is an industry, the vast majority of it conducted on a terrifyingly huge industrial scale. (If you haven’t heard of Concentrated Animal-Feeding Operations or CAFOs, read this horrifying article by Raj Patel from The Observer Food Monthly, which explains them from about half-way down.) And so, even in developed countries, people are still emigrating from rural areas to urban conurbations.

As Leonard points out, the problem with this chain is that it’s not a cycle – it’s linear. We keep on taking good clean stuff out of the ground, but only putting toxic stuff back. (Even in agriculture, we’re taking the nutrients out of the ground and putting synthetic chemical fertilisers in, instead.) It’s totally unsustainable. And until we break the way that most consumers in developed (and increasingly in developing) countries see consumption as a means of fulfilment, we’ll never break the chain. We need to get back to valuing the human effort in the things we surround ourselves with. Good old artisan-crafted, high-skill, low-intensity local production.

Feeding our supercities

Have you seen 19.20.21.org? If not, take a look.



It’s an interesting, and well-presented, exposition of what it calls the “defining megatrend of the 21st century”: that by 2050 more than two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, up from 50% of the global population right now. And in 1900, it was only 3% of the global population. Have a look at the timeline provided on 19.20.21.org.

Aside from the fact that it’s a fairly staggering rate of growth, why does it matter? I’ve recently been learning the answer to that, in Carolyn Steel’s outstanding book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, in which she explores the historical relationship between cities and their sources of food, and projects an increasingly despairing future. As she says, there is an inherent contradiction in cities because they “shelter us but can’t sustain us”.

It was manageable when the scale of cities meant that the peripheral farming belt was able to produce sufficient quantities of food, distributed quickly enough, to feed the cities. But as cities have grown, their inhabitants have become reliant on an increasingly fragile distribution network to move food fast enough to get to us. And in the process, we’ve been put at the mercy of the global economics of supply chain management, and just-in-time processes.

These processes are the reason why when you or I go to Sainsbury’s or Choices or Wal-Mart, and find that there’s no more of our preferred brand of washing powder on the shelves, the sales assistants always answer that there’s no more in the back. Supermarkets don’t keep stocks in the backs of their stores any longer; they use those areas for cargo unloading. Instead, when their Point-of-Sales machines register that they’ve sold x items, they trigger an automatic stock re-fill request to the nearest distribution centre (probably somewhere between 50 and 100 miles away if you’re in the UK), and that item will be sent on a truck with whatever else is low in stock.

That might sound fairly reasonable, until you imagine the impact of some disruption to the distribution chain. It actually happened in Britain during the fuel strike in the summer of 2000. Those hauliers didn’t know how close they were to winning that battle; in fact they were only a matter of two or three days away: Britain was on the verge of nationwide food shortages precisely because supermarkets keep no stock. The huge quantities of food backed up in the distribution centres and simply could not get to the supermarkets – the points of sale. You can terrify yourself some more about what almost happened in 2000, and the other uncomfortable processes that supermarkets run in Felicity Lawrence’s excellent book, Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate.

So now, with an even greater exodus to cities, how secure is the future for city inhabitants and the food that they eat? The answer is: not very. Government no longer has any control over it. So unless you feel comfortable with putting Lee Scott (President and CEO of Wal-Mart) in charge of your food security, you might want to start informing yourself.

Food production, distribution and security seems a pretty glaring oversight on the list of things the 19.20.21.org project is going to consider.

Olympic cynicism

Friday's Beijing Olympics opening ceremony seemed to herald a slew of cynical comment in the press. For example, there was this from James Donaghy in the Guardian's Guide on Saturday August 9th:

"Compelling and beautiful, [the BBC's Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett-produced trailer is] everything the Olympics is not. It seems logical now for the Olympics itself to be animated. Given that the Olympian ideal of a drug-free tournament of plucky amateurs is total fantasy anyway it would merely be two fictions competing against each other with the animated version being infinitely more entertaining."

To be fair, I understand and agree with some of the arguments. The opening ceremony and the expense of running the Games, force one to consider some pretty tough questions about how best to use that much money. Arguments that sport shouldn't be used as a platform for politics, in relation to protest over China hosting the Games, are clearly overly simplistic. The well documented corruption and cronyism of Jacques Rogge's International Olympic Committee, are a disgrace from an organisation theoretically dedicated to promoting fair sportsmanship. And perhaps most of all, the inequitability of a self-funded amateur athlete competing on an apparently level playing field with a sportswoman with the backing of the full state machinery of a country like China, or the sheer financial might of a USA athlete, are galling.

Yet, that last reason, more than anything else is the reason why I, and so many others, still find the Olympics probably the most moving and inspirational of events. No matter who you are, funded superstar athlete or homegrown hopeful, the Olympics are still as important, as terrifying, and as much the pinnacle of your career. The Olympics represent stress, sacrifice, hard work and dreams for each athlete, and I find it both compelling and beautiful.

The state of the femi-nation

I've been musing recently on the state of feminism among women today, and it strikes me it's in a pretty bad place. I can't think of any other grassroots cause that is so hated and so abhorrent to so many of the people that it aims to serve. Most young women today not only feel that they owe nothing to the feminist movement, they also seem to reject the very idea and ideals of feminism and see it as totally outmoded in today's society. Balkan Witch talks about it very interestingly here.

Now clearly, part of the problem is the name, and the backlash against it, and most importantly the lack of accessibility of the more academic understandings of the political philosophy of feminism. But let's face it, the basic principles of feminism aren't hard to grasp, and the concept of equality for the sexes can't be argued with by anyone who isn't prepared to be seen as a total misogynist. So what's the problem?

Well, for a start, it isn't being taught at school and it isn't really discussed in the mainstream media agenda. Sure, you can listen to Women's Hour on Radio 4 - but that's a very limited target audience, and I'd argue that it's preaching to the converted. And yes, there's the women's section in the Guardian, but it faces much the same problem: one of reaching those very people who could most benefit from understanding the issues.

And that seems to me to be symptomatic of most of what feminism now seems to be achieveing in the world: lip service. Sure, some things are better, and significantly so. But look at what's not: remuneration and packages for women are still consistently lower than for men; employers and the government in the UK continue to discriminate against working mothers (preferring to identify the issues of childcare and how we handle the balance between parenting and work responsibilities as a problem for women, rather than one for society generally. Why are work creches and childcare vouchers considered benefits for women?); women are vastly under-represented in almost all walks of both public and corporate life. The fact that issues of gender equality are, as a rule, not in the accessible mainstream debate are both a cause and an effect of the clear need for feminism in our society right now.

And it's not just women who stand to benefit: look at the numbers of men now suffering eating disorders, obsessing over the latest beauty products full of faux-scientific ingredients and paying for cosmetic surgery. We could have told them it was all a bloody airbrushed con ...

De-skilling the human

I was thinking about why it is that life in call centre society is so frustrating. It occurred to me that aside from the endless time spent listening to dreadful hold music, it's because it's rare that speaking to anyone actually resolves the situation.

Those working in call centres frequently follow dreadful scripts, or are constrained by endless policies that prevent them from actually having to assess and respond to the situation they are dealing with. Even when they sympathise with your situation and want to do something about it, policies, procedures and systems often mean they can't.

What used to be simple and efficient transactions in which humans spoke to each other and between them (usually) managed to come to some mutually satisfactory resolution now have totally different dynamics - the individual pitted against the monolithic set of policies and systems. And even when the policies and systems are patently at fault, or have failed to account for a particular situation, or are simply unreasonable, the onus is now on individuals to try to mount an assault that will give them fair treatment. Anyone who's tried to mount the endless layers of (so-called) customer service to achieve this will know how resolute one has to be and how painful the process is.

The worst thing about this trend is de-skilling of individuals representing companies. Instead of being trained and trusted to act in their employers' best interests and to make judgements appropriately, their working processes are based on the opposite: an assumption that they can't be trusted to make good decisions or act in their employers' best interests. The experience for the consumer is concomitantly worsened - this is a company that clearly doesn't trust its representatives to do a satisfactory job. How encouraging.

As systems become more sophisticated and better connected to other systems and sources of data, I suspect that this situation will only get worse.