Sarah Henry has a nice article in the Atlantic that follows up on my post earlier this week about failure of the American diet and why people just don’t seem to eat enough healthy food.

I argued that it’s no surprise people don’t eat well despite (1) decades worth of top-down, government nutrition campaigns and (2) the increased availability of affordable, healthy food through venues like farmer’s markets.  Rather, nutrition literacy should be complimented by bottom-up approaches, including active engagement of people learning how to grow and cook healthy food, starting with elementary school kids.

Henry’s piece provides evidence supporting these kinds of approaches, building on the successful work of Alice Waters:

Finally, some scientific support for what those of us who have watched kids pick spinach, cook kale, and chew on chard have known all along: Children who grow their own food (and prepare and eat it too) make healthier food choices.

For the past five years I’ve been a volunteer in the kitchen at the Edible Schoolyard, the much-admired organic garden and kitchen program founded by Alice Waters at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California. I’ve also taught afterschool cooking classes to elementary-age kids (and their parents) in Berkeley public schools.

Over the years I’ve witnessed many wonderful things take place in cooking classrooms and out in the field when children are exposed to an edible education. A child discovers kiwi fruit. A student asks for sprouts at the farmers’ market. Leafy greens are dished up and chowed down with gusto.

But until now, school cooking and gardening advocates haven’t had hard data to back up this soft science. A report released today reveals a victory for the vegetables (particularly those of the leafy green variety). “We realized we needed to present numbers and facts to support what is so clear to us from our experience working in the Edible Schoolyard and through the transformation of school lunch in Berkeley,” Waters says. “We knew validation of the work was important in order to reach a wider public. This is one of our first steps in reaching new audiences—particularly the scientific and academic community—and of course we hope it has implications for public policy.”

…Among the key findings of the research, which was commissioned by the Chez Panisse Foundation and is one of the first such studies to evaluate an integrated approach to food education:

• Increased nutritional knowledge among 4th and 7th graders who were fed a steady stream of gardening and cooking curriculum.

• Higher fruit and vegetable consumption among elementary-age students in schools with more SLI [School Lunch Initiative] components than in students at schools with less-developed SLI offerings, including a preference for leafy greens like kale, spinach, and chard.

• Vegetable intake was almost one serving per day greater in the schools with a beefed-up food curriculum, and combined fruit and vegetable consumption increased by 1.5 servings. About 80 percent of this increase came from in-season produce. In comparison, researchers found a nearly quarter-serving drop in produce intake among other students.

• More positive attitudes about the taste and health value of school lunch in students in more highly developed SLI programs than those in lesser-developed SLI schools.

• Small increases in produce consumption occurred among middle-schoolers with higher exposure to nutrition education as opposed to a drop in fruit and vegetable intake by about one serving a day among students in the other group.

Read the rest of Henry’s article here.

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Photo credit:  whirlekid

Earth First.  Greenpeace.  Sierra Club.  Apollo Alliance.  The Nature Conservancy.  The Wilderness Society.  National Resources Defense Council.  Sustainable South Bronx.  350.org— Organizations that share a common interest in the environment but with fundamental philosophical differences.

In an earlier post, Can’t we all just get along?, we looked at a paper by Clare Saunders, who suggested that social movements like environmentalism are comprised of many different organizations, each fostering a collective identity that is often incompatible with other organizations in the same movement.  Ordinarily, we think of the overall movement goals as having a binding effect among these subgroups.  Apparently not.  Her work suggested that people form identities with other individuals cut from the same ideological cloth rather than the identity of the social movement itself.

In a recent issue^1,2 of Organization and Environment, Debra Salazar designed a study that lets us look at this problem in more detail.  Specifically, to what extent are environmentalists identifying with different flavors of environmentalism, and to what extent are beliefs shared across individuals?   Where disputes arise, what’s driving them? How can coalitions be built, and why might certain groups be better positioned to lead, given the circumstances of particular environmental problems?

Here’s how she approached this challenge and what she found…

She interviewed 42 environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest, USA.  Her goal was to understand how individuals identify (or not) with a set of political claims, allowing her to define groups emerging from these responses and to identify where commonalities and differences lie.  Note that this approach is different than asking questions like, “Do you agree with environmental group x, y, or z on this issue” because that predetermines what kinds of categories exist, and it doesn’t allow us to see if there are commonalities or exactly why differences show up.

She chose several hundred political claims that spanned four broad themes, including

• democracy and citizenship (DC)
• political economic institutions and processes (PEIP)
• social justice (SJ)
• environment or nature (EN)

When presented with each claim, people ranked themselves from -5 (most unlike my view) to + 5 (most like my view).  Based on the responses, Salazar was then able to group the 42 individuals into clusters defined by similar views.

Her results:

Four environmental types emerged, each with the following general opinions about the themes (excerpted and paraphrased from Table 3):

(1) Civic republican

Mantra:

civic engagement seeking consensus around common good

Values:

• (DC) valued public deliberation with a view that common good will emerge; work within existing political institutions
• (PEIP) need bioregional institutions; policies are moving in the right direction so stick with them
• (SJ) protect both economic livelihood and environment; we don’t owe landowners compensation for protecting the environment
• (EN) nature and people are part of spiritual whole

Representative perspectives (excerpts):

Being pro-business is a way to educate people and bring them around to responsible behavior…We need to be responsive to how people can have a livelihood, to create economies that are tailored to local ecological circumstances…I rarely go to church anymore but I do need to get out regularly in God’s creation.

(2) Liberal ecocentric

Mantra:

Scientific enlightenment and liberal democracy in the protection of nature against  human forces of destruction

Values:

• (DC) activism is essential to reclaim democracy; compromise can undermine goals
• (PEIP) political system is broken; corporations have taken over; science has priority over politics and culture
• (SJ) humans must adapt to protect the environment; we don’t owe landowners compensation for protecting the environment
• (EN) protect other species; people have lost touch with nature; population is a central problem

Representative perspectives (excerpts):

Businesses have control over politics. I see it getting a lot worse before politicians will make the necessary changes…Until a broad cross section of the public is willing to take on responsibilities of citizenship, we will be in trouble…I would like to believe that indigenous people have a right to carry on cultural traditions. But their desire to do so does not supersede environmental interest . . . I’m a meat-is-murder kind of person. We all need to make sacrifices….I’m ticked off at the loggers for siding with the corporations . . . Big union guys bought the corporate line and they should have known better…Yeah, people lost their jobs and . . . nobody makes buggy whips anymore either…I see no racism in the environmental movement. If you walk into a room of environmentalists they’ll be mostly white, but not because they’re racist. It’s because they have the money, time, and vision into what is wrong…We’re in trouble because of corporate power that dominates the globe, not because of racism.

(3) Green justice

Mantra:

environment is embedded in race/class hierarchies in the political economy

Values:

• (DC) we have a right to a healthy environment; activism is essential to achieve goals
• (PEIP) political institutions are too responsive to corporations; experts don’t have all the answers
• (SJ) address race-based inequalities; respect autonomy of indigenous cultures; find ways to protect livelihood and environment
• (EN) environment is more than wilderness; protect a balance of nature

Representative perspectives (excerpts):

A lot of people in the environmental community see civilization as bad.
Concentration of people is good and not unnatural. To distance ourselves from cities is to distance ourselves from society, to distance ourselves from our selves…Environmentalists who think this is not important are ignorant about the political viability of their movement. Look at smart growth—most environmentalists support this and it makes a lot of sense environmentally. [But] it is politically vulnerable—why will smart growth fail? If it is only supported by environmentalists. Why would people of color and working class White people not support this? Because they don’t see that they will get any benefits; instead they fear they will be displaced…In advocating for a specific change, are we willing to support the people who will undergo the changes?

(4) Global ecocentric

Mantra:

global wilderness is central to the good life, and connection to nature is essential

Values:

• (DC) too much at stake to rely on conventional politics; need a global environmental movement
• (PEIP) corporations control politics; public lands should not be managed for profit
• (SJ) Humans must adapt to protect the environment; experts don’t have all the answers
• (EN) No right to destroy other species; nature and people are part of a spiritual whole

Representative perspectives (excerpts):

[I]t’s beyond racism. It’s sexism; it’s classism. . . speciesism…I don’t think that corporations are the only problem. People are still people even if we get rid of corporations…The root of any environmental problem—a person thinking they own something means other people don’t…the mentality around here—‘it’s my property, I’ll do what I want with it….You can find another job, but you can’t find another extinct species.

Summary:

If you compare the four groups, there are several spots where the boundaries are permeable, and there is more agreement than disagreement (potential opportunities for inter-group coalition building):

• All shared a strong sense of democratic commitment
• Most were skeptical of the ties between government and corporate America.
• None shared an instrumental view of nature (nature’s value lies in it’s usefulness to humans).
• The notion of equal consideration for all species shared broad support.
• There was a shared value of nature protection.
• Public concerns take precedent over private property claims.

Nevertheless, there were often sharp distinctions around the familiar issues of jobs and race/class:

• Although most groups believed in democratic participation, how groups handled this differed.  Civic republicans and green justice folks tend more towards coalition building, whereas the liberal and global ecocentrics believe that coalition building and seeking consensus compromises principles.
• How race gets handled in environmental discourses differed strongly between green justice and liberal ecocentrism.  Ecocentrists tend to emphasize human population growth and its threats to other species, whereas green justice folks see race and class as key antecedents to engaging people in the environment.
• How jobs get handled in environmental discourses differed strongly among groups.  Here, liberal ecocentrism and global ecocentrics join forces in opposition to protecting workers from job loss caused by environmental protection.  Instead, people and cultures have to change to adapt to environmental protection.  In contrast, green justice folks made economic concerns a necessary precondition for engaging environment.

Bottom line:

Although some commonalities exist, the major philosophical differences among environmental groups remains a challenge for coalition building.  But just because there’s disagreement, does that mean it’s hard to get things done?  Not always.  Focusing specifically on the Northwest, Salazar suggests that green justice might offer the best approach for dealing with many of the difficult challenges of past decades, such as logging, agricultural pesticides, and gentrification, which also matter to people of color and the working class.  This approach may also be the best for unifying multiple fronts of progressive politics that include environment, labor, and race/class/gender.

Related post:  Cant we all just get along?

¹Salazar, D.J. (2009) Saving Nature and Seeking Justice: Environmental Activists in the Pacific Northwest. Organization and Environment 22(2): 230-254.

²Bowdoin people can access the article here.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Excerpts:

In dangerous, clangorous times, the idea of America rings like a bell (see King, M. L., Jr., and Dylan, Bob). It hits a high note and sustains it without wearing on your nerves. (If only we all could.) This was the melody line of the Marshall Plan and it’s resonating again. Why? Because the world sees that America might just hold the keys to solving the three greatest threats we face on this planet: extreme poverty, extreme ideology and extreme climate change. The world senses that America, with renewed global support, might be better placed to defeat this axis of extremism with a new model of foreign policy…

Americans are like singers — we just a little bit, kind of like to be loved. The British want to be admired; the Russians, feared; the French, envied. (The Irish, we just want to be listened to.) But the idea of America, from the very start, was supposed to be contagious enough to sweep up and enthrall the world.

And it is. The world wants to believe in America again because the world needs to believe in America again. We need your ideas — your idea — at a time when the rest of the world is running out of them.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/u2005/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

MSNBC is running a story on the family’s reflection on the past year, highlighting the lifestyle changes they will sustain and the behaviors and consumption to which they will return.  It’s one family’s take on striving for middle ground between the status quo and radical lifestyle alteration.

And in case you missed it, Beavan challenged Stephen Colbert to go no impact.

Update (10/22): Elizabeth Kolbert critically analyzes Beavan’s approach in The New Yorker: Green Like Me: Living without a fridge and other experiments in environmentalism.

A few excerpts:

A more honest title for Beavan’s book would have been “Low Impact Man,” and a truly honest title would have been “Not Quite So High Impact Man.” Even during the year that Beavan spent drinking out of a Mason jar, more than two billion people were, quite inadvertently, living lives of lower impact than his. Most of them were struggling to get by in the slums of Delhi or Rio or scratching out a living in rural Africa or South America. A few were sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street not far from Beavan’s Fifth Avenue apartment.

What makes Beavan’s experiment noteworthy is that it is just that—a voluntary exercise conducted for a limited time only by a middle-class family. Beavan justifies writing about it on the ground that it will inspire others to examine their wasteful ways. On the last page, he observes:

Throughout this book I’ve tried to show how saving the world is up to me. I’ve tried hard not to lecture. Yes, it’s up to me. But after living for a year without toilet paper, I’ve earned the right to say one thing: It’s also up to you.
So, what are you going to do?

If wiping were the issue, this would be a reasonable place to end. But, sadly—or perhaps happily—it isn’t. The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.

What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

She suggests that the social movements like environmentalism are comprised of many different organizations, each fostering a collective identity that is often incompatible with other organizations in the same movement.  Ordinarily, we think of the overall movement goals as having a binding effect among these subgroups.  Apparently not.  People are forming identities with other individuals cut from the same ideological cloth rather than the identity of the social movement itself.

This may not be surprising given the radically different approaches of groups like Earth First, Sierra Club, the Apollo Alliance, 350.org, and Shellenberger and Nordhaus.  It’s also apparent with all of the lines drawn in the sand regarding

• cap and trade vs. carbon tax and dividend (make carbon expensive)
• either of the above approaches vs. subsidizing and making renewable energy cheap (Shellenberger and Nordhaus)
• strict and immediate reduction (350.org) vs. slower emissions reduction trajectories

The bad news is that this kind of animosity can be paralyzing to the social movement, leading to little being accomplished, especially when polarizing debate turns off the public.

Some excerpts:

• Given that different organizations within a movement cannot and need not share a collective identity, it then becomes possible to conceive of collective identity as something with the potential to lead to hostility between groups that are each competing to have their own views universally accepted.
• Unlike in radical environmentalism and to a lesser extent in reform environmentalism, it is possible to be a conservationist without developing an ideology that involves becoming immersed in movement culture. The cognitive praxis of conservationists is highly biased towards conservation issues, rather than broader environmentalism. In contrast, reform and radical environmentalism have more encompassing movement organization identities, require an attribution of the source of a problem and the choosing of a course of action based on opportunities and constraints, and are more often called upon to defend their beliefs to adversaries and mainstream culture.
• The existence of organizations within a movement that have strong solidarity presents a challenge to the wider movement in terms of communication, mutual understanding and tolerance of alternative strategies. It is an aim for both more and less solidary groups to avoid sectarian animosity as it could reduce the flexibility of the movement, mislead the public over strategies, make campaigns less effective, spread misunderstandings about other organizations and create unnecessary tensions.
• We should therefore challenge the assumption that collective identity
  always has a binding effect on movements. To the contrary, it has the potential to dangerously factionalize movements. A similar conflict dynamic between radical and reformist SMOs has been reported to occur in other social movements The process of creating ‘sectarian solidarity’ via the formation of encompassing collective identities could be a convincing explanation of its cause.

¹Saunders, C. (2008) Double-edged swords? Collective identity and solidarity in the environment movement. The British Journal of Sociology 59(2):227-253.

²Bowdoin people can link to the article here.