a merely utilitarian relationship with nature. Suzuki’s hope is to recall us to our proper relationship with the ecosphere so that the “sacred balance” can be restored.
24 March
Kalle Lasn
24 March 1942—
Culture Jammer
There are many forms of violence, but one of the most recent—and most insidious—is the phenomenon known as consumerism, the mania to buy and consume more and more and more. Americans are particularly prone to consumerism, a malady sometimes referred to as “affluenza,” but most other so-called developed nations suffer from it too. Alarmingly, less developed regions around the world also feel its allure. Many of them suffer from what might be called consumer envy.
But why is consumerism a form of violence? It harms the environment because the frenetic production of goods to meet demand is unsustainable, and so exploits and pollutes earth and atmosphere. It harms people because it siphons off goods and natural resources from poor regions of the world to fuel the feeding frenzy of the richer ones. And it harms consumers themselves because, like all addictions, it increases craving without offering anything that ultimately satisfies it.
The Estonian-born Canadian social critic Kalle Lasn has declared war on consumerism, but it’s a war fought with “memes,” or units of meaning, rather than physical weapons. According to Lasn, “America is no longer a country. It’s a multitrillion-dollar brand.” What he means is that the average citizen is so surrounded by marketing memes—print and electronic ads, jingles, slogans, images, and sounds, all aimed solely at pushing products—that the default position for most of us from infancy to old age is buy. We’re so drugged by the market-memed culture in which we live that we rarely come out of our daze long enough to get a bit of perspective.
What Lasn suggests as a form of resistance to the culture of consumerism is clogging up its works—“culture jamming”—by manipulating marketing memes in ways that make them convey messages contrary to their original intent. Lasn and his fellow culture jammers tweek ads for high-end jeans featuring body-perfect models by insinuating that our cultural fixation with slimness encourages eating disorders. Similarly, they jam full-page glossy ads for hard liquor by juxtaposing photos of drunks bent double spewing in alleyways. The purpose in their ad “rewriting” is to counteract the marketing memes that are such integral parts of our cultural scene that they just seem natural. Culture jamming uses the “element of surprise” to “stop the flow” of conventional memes. It shocks us in the hope that the ensuing moment of clarity will break us free from our addiction to the “consumerist script.”
The point, says Lasn, is to practice an “ecology of the mind.” We’re pretty aware of the importance of cleaning up the environment or city hall, but much less conscious of the “infotoxins” that pollute our inner landscape. But just as physical and moral contamination violates the earth and politics, meme contamination commits violence against clear thinking and wise decisions. Lasn wants to do something about that.
25 March
Norman Borlaug
25 March 1914—21 September 2009
Feeding the World
Most of us will never save the life of a single person. Norman Borlaug, the “Father of the Green Revolution,” is credited with saving one billion lives by introducing agricultural methods which immensely increased the world’s food supply.
Borlaug, an agronomist who grew up on a family farm in Minnesota, tackled the problem of world hunger in the 1960s. At the time, impoverished nations like India, the Philippines, and Mexico were in danger of widespread famine because of soil depletion, low-yielding crops, and arid conditions. Borlaug brought modern science to the table in order to do something about the problem. He focused on the hybridization of food crops, especially wheat and rice, to enhance their yield; encouraged the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides to stimulate growth and minimize disease and infestation; and stressed the vital importance of adequate irrigation.
One of Borlaug’s greatest successes was coming up with a variety of high-yielding short-stalked wheat. Wheat is one of the world’s most widely used grains. But older strains of it tended to produce relatively low yields and were easily damaged by bad weather or blight. Borlaug created new varieties that produced more abundant heads of grain on shorter stalks, which meant that the top-heavy wheat was less likely to collapse before harvest from its own weight or from high winds and heavy rains. The new strain also was more disease resistant than earlier ones. In just a few years, Borlaug’s wheat, coupled with increased uses of chemical fertilizers and irrigation, rescued famine-endangered nations. Yields doubled in India, which was the most at-risk country, and by the mid-1960s Mexico was actually exporting grain. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, the Nobel Committee wisely recognizing that making sure people around the world have enough to eat goes a long way towards reducing violence.
Since the heyday of the explosion in food production, quickly dubbed the “Green Revolution,” Borlaug’s farming methods have come under critical scrutiny. Environmentalists worry that the sustained use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides is slowly poisoning the earth, and that increased irrigation is both depleting aquifers and salinating the soil. Public policy makers and human rights activists are concerned that the intensive farming promoted by the Green Revolution tends to focus on exportable cash crops rather than locally consumed food crops, and that this too often encourages already poor countries to neglect feeding their own hungry. Finally, biologists and food activists warn against the trend towards genetically modified food crops that Borlaug especially championed during the last two decades of his life.
These reservations about the Green Revolution deserve to be taken seriously. But the fact remains that the extent of world hunger was so calamitous in the 1960s that something had to be done, and done quickly, to save millions of people from starvation. Borlaug fed them.
26 March
Kate Richards O’Hare
26 March 1877—10 January 1948
Women Pay the Price of War
The passage of the 1917 Espionage Act is one of the lowest points in U.S. history. Enacted after the country entered World War I, the law prescribed a $10,000 fine and up to twenty years imprisonment for anyone who interfered with the recruiting of soldiers. The act was deliberately written in such general terms that merely speaking out against the war could be interpreted as a violation of the law. So it quickly became a legal opportunity for rounding up people whom the authorities considered to be troublemakers. Before the war was over, nearly one thousand U.S. residents were convicted of breaking the Espionage Act. They included well-known left-leaning war resisters such as perennial presidential candidate Eugene Debs, anarchist Emma Goldman, and union organizer “Big” Bill Haywood.
Among those arrested and imprisoned was the socialist activist and author Kate Richards O’Hare. As early as 1914, three years before the United States went to war, she passionately condemned militaristic adventurism and pointed out that the victims of war include the mothers whose sons are devoured by it. “It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages,” she wrote, “and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plough and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook.”
Such declarations, not to mention her 1904 socialist novel What Happened to
