The gist of it: approximately half of Detroit is sitting empty. It’s a food desert in perhaps the bleakest sense of the term: there is not a single chain grocery store left within the city limits. Given the obvious economic depression of the city, I suspect that locally-owned grocers are few and far between; most residents don’t have many options besides convenience stores for food.

Really, the answer is obvious, and both entrepreneurs and local food activists are proposing to turn the empty property into productive farms. (The bafflement of the sub-heading is that the article only very obliquely, if at all, covers conflict between activists and entrepreneurs. One presumes that the entrepreneurs are interested in factory farms?)

I, not surprisingly, am on the side of turning the empty land into community garden-style farms:

His D-Town Farm spans two acres of city parkland on Detroit’s western edge, where little bungalows with rusted awnings still line wide streets and a faded ice cream truck does laps of the yellowing boulevard. The volunteer team running it sells its leafy greens and radishes to local restaurants and farmers markets. Next year, it plans to hire two permanent employees.

“We’re trying to create an economic model, to show how agriculture could contribute to the economic recovery of Detroit,” Malini says, pushing into the brush to reveal a plastic greenhouse where oyster mushrooms will soon grow.

That model doesn’t include agribusiness. Replacing General Motors with Cargill isn’t the answer, he says.

“We’re activists. We’re concerned with the health, vitality and well-being of the black community generally. This is one part of a larger picture. So any proposal that brings in the corporate sector and disempowers community is problematic for us,” says Yakini, who spearheaded the just-formed Detroit Food Policy Council. “We’re much more in favour of smaller scale community-operated projects where people themselves have a vested interest and profit from the sale of the produce.”

Right on. No reason the farms shouldn’t be profitable to the people who operate them – but the profits should stay in the community, and the people who are working the farm should have control over what they grow and where it goes. And it should be accessible to them. Seems to me that the benefits would be much more immediate and tangible, and there would be benefits like this:

A woman up the street started sending her foster kids to help, and a movement was born. Covington erected four white boards to show movies on Saturday nights. He brought in chairs for reading sessions. He started a backpack program and hosted a harvest dinner for 90 neighbours.

Last year, he bought his old teacher’s home and the derelict store next door for $1 from the city, and $4,000 in back taxes. He plans to refurbish it into a community centre.

Looks at least some of the people in Detroit have a fantastic idea for how to rebuild their communities and their city as a whole. The article talks about the idea of planning for shrinking cities in recognition that nothing lasts (or grows) forever, and notes that North America really has no tradition of that kind of planning. I hope that Detroit’s municipal government is willing to get behind this plan.

I haven’t been writing here much (okay, at all) because – as noted in March – I’ve been concentrating on the writing that somebody else is expected to read and then assign me a letter to indicate the quality of my work. Writing, I believe, is one of those things that one gets out of practice in; so is reading books with a bit more meat to them than, say, Honor Harrington novels. Besides, I’d rather write the literature review for my thesis in the next three months, when I don’t have to do anything else. So, the summer project for Sammy’s Dot will be an ongoing series of reflection on a self-directed reading program.

I just finished Michael Mayerfield Bell’s An Invitation to Environmental Sociology, Andrew Dobson’s Green Political Thought, and Desfor and Keil’s Nature and the City. I’ve still got The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy (Neil Carter) and Mario Diani’s Green Networks to go. Up next, there’s a number of topics I want to explore in more detail.

Environment and Philosophy

Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Paul Taylor)

Environmental Philosophy (R. Elliot and A. Gare)

Food and Food Politics

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Marion Nestle)

Development and Economics

Development as Freedom (Amartya Sen)

Inequality Reexamined (Amartya Sen)

Managing Without Growth (Peter Victor)

Political Science/Political Philosophy

A Theory of Justice (John Rawls)

Political Liberalism (John Rawls)

Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (Ulrich Beck)

Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk (Ulrich Beck)

The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (Ulrich Beck)

World Risk Society (Ulrich Beck)

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Bruno Latour)

Environmental Citizenship (Andrew Dobson and David Bell)

Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Robyn Eckersley)

Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge (Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley)

Environmental Justice

Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Robert Bullard)

Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice (J. Agyeman)

The Environmentalism of the Poor: A study of ecological conflicts and valuation (J. Martinez-Alier)

Staying Alive (Vandana Shiva)

Social Movements

Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (R. Dalton and M. Kuechler)

Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (R. Eyerman and A. Jamison)

Studying Collective Action (M. Diani and R. Eyerman)

Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (A. Morris and C. Muller)

Organizing Dissent: Contemporary Social Movements in Theory and Practice (William Carroll)

Geography and Urban Studies

Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (David Harvey)

Special Places: The Changing Ecosystems of the Toronto Region (B. Roots, D. Chant, C. Heidenreich)

I’m pretty sure that this list will be getting longer, and I think thatI’ll really have to make a separate page to keep track of everything, but the plan, obviously, is to do some serious educatin’ this summer.

Sachs’ ideas are strongest when they explore ways to reorganize human society to improve living standards. For example, he provides a fairly clear outline of why improved access to health care and strategies to create jobs through infrastructure spending will help to stabilize population growth and improve individual well-being. In a later chapter, Sachs also compares different social insurance models, including the relatively free market North American economies, mixed European economies, and the Scandinavian social welfare states, and concludes that high levels of social spending by states is beneficial. This form of spending, according to Sachs’ evidence, leads to less poverty and inequality compared to the other two systems, and also may lead to greater prosperity; Sachs cites evidence that the social welfare countries actually have much higher levels of innovation and mobilization of new information technologies, and they spend higher portions of their GDP on research and development.

Although many of the ideas and suggestions that Sachs raises concerning social organization and sustainability are not new, they are clearly explained for those of us who are adamantly not economists, and the discussion is fairly nuanced. I appreciate that Sachs spends some time on the fact that the Scandinavian states are ethnically homogenous, and that this impacts the willingness of citizens to invest in their society, so a wholesale adoption of this model by a country like Canada or the US requires major effort to combat racism and other forms of intolerance and discrimination. Sachs’ suggestions for how to do so are extremely vague, but I’ll forgive him for that: it’s really not within the scope of the book.

That said, I find it much harder to accept Sachs’ discussion of the technological responses that can be made to pressing environmental problems. My previous post already outlined one of my main complaints, which is the focus on reducing carbon emissions through improved efficiency and carbon sequestration. In addition, Sachs argues that peak oil is not going to be a serious issue because of the many other varieties of energy available for humans to exploit. Sachs has a PhD and worlds of experience in international development, and I don’t, so perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to challenge his ideas, but I think he’s wrong.

For example, Sachs points to non-conventional fossil fuel sources, such as the Alberta tar sands, but fails to note that oil extraction from some, if not all, of these sources is resource-intensive and ecologically devastating. Extraction from the tar sands has become economically viable because of improved technology, but also because there is less available oil from conventional sources. I think that Sachs feels that technological improvements will allow us to exploit resources such as the tar sands, coal, and nuclear power without risk of environmental damage, but the recent revelations of the impact of the tar sands tailings on local water supplies suggest to me that that’s wishful thinking. After all, the problem of sequestering mine tailings has been discussed in many countries and in many eras. Perhaps it is simply not possible to store a pile of toxic waste in a way that prevents it from leaking away into its surroundings. (See here for some of the recent attempts to improve carbon sequestration; here for the effects of acid from the Alberta oilsands; the impact of oil sands exploitation on birds; a report on leakage from the tailing ponds; and more on the oilsands. On the topic of coal-mining, see this paper on mountain-top removal mining in the US from the Union of Concerned Scientists, and here for some recent and worrisome developments.)

What about solar, wind, and geothermal? I firmly believe that all of these will be major energy sources in the future, and require substantial public and private investment. (They also tap a social issue, at least in the developed world where we have the luxury of worrying about the impact of wind generators on the view from our houses. This will require some public relations effort from those of us who feel that wind power is essential and that wind generators have their own kind of beauty.) However, all of these sources are a long way from general deployment, and though I think we can improve our technology relatively quickly, it does take time to build the infrastructure. It will also take us time to decide on the best ways to proceed with alternative energy, if we want to avoid potential tragedies of unintended consequences.

Sachs assumes, in other words, that at least in the developed world, we will never again be faced with an energy shortage and all the consequences that would entail – including, I strongly suspect, a food shortage. Thus, even if we need to shift our energy sources and improve efficiency, there is no need to change our consumption patterns. I think that assumption is, at best, unwarranted by the evidence.

Common Wealth is, I think, a useful primer on some of the things that make some human societies unsustainable, and discusses some of the things that those of us in the developed world can support to improve well-being in the (so-called) developing world. It offers some solutions to environmental justice issues, though it does not address causes such as racism, gender inequality, and poverty to any great extent. However, the book is marred by the lack of consideration of the lifestyle of the developed world and whether or not this lifestyle can in fact be sustainable at all. The focus on technical solutions to what may be a social problem is a serious flaw in an otherwise interesting book.

Perhaps the foremost thought I had in reading this article was about what will happen next to this neighbourhood, and others like it.

Many people (at least on the Toronto Star’s somewhat regrettable comments pages) have responded to the request of the big North American auto makers for government help to get through the current recession (depression? slowdown?) with variants of “let them fail, they’re not producing what people want”, “it’s all the fault of the unions and their greed”, and so on. I like to think that I’ve avoided the union-bashing response, but I know I’ve had the occasional Schadenfreude moment at the thought that big, gas-guzzling, noisy cars might someday stop running.

I certainly don’t think that an open-ended handout to the auto industry is an appropriate response, but at the same time, I don’t want to see Oshawa or London or Windsor look like Detroit, as depicted in the photos of an abandoned school. These cities may need to change – they do need to change – but as a society, Ontario and Canada as a whole need to ensure that change happens in a controlled way.

Between the Jeffrey Sachs book reviewed in my previous post, Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, and Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading and thinking about creative destruction, and I think that the upshot is, to get the creativity out of the destruction you need resilience. (Jared Diamond makes a similar point in Collapse, by looking at societies that didn’t have that kind of in-built resilience needed to cope with massive change.)

Resilience, in the case of the auto industry workers, means having some kind of alternative employment to fall back on, employment that will allow them to live and save much as they did working for GM, Ford, and Chrysler, but building things that people in our society need – for some that might be work on infrastructure projects (like more rail!), or solar panels, or wind farms; for others, vast numbers of buses and subways.

I am positive that allowing the big automakers to fail without a robust policy to ensure that their workers do not lose their livelihoods will be the kind of catastrophe that society – or at least a subset of Canadian society – does not recover from. The loss of one hundred thousand jobs, the addition of one hundred thousand people to a tight labour market, and the effects of sudden poverty on every institution that has to serve those workers will be considerable.

I don’t have any personal experience with auto workers, or with poverty. But I do work in financial services, and I’ve seen what people are expected to live on according to the welfare people or Employment Insurance, and it isn’t very much. It certainly isn’t enough to expect people to start up new businesses – particularly if credit is unavailable – and if there isn’t enough of that money now, what will things look like if thousands and thousands more people need it?

In parts of Ontario, it could start to look like the desolation evident in Jim’s Detroit photos. Any action we take needs to consider how best to avoid that outcome.