Even Velveeta is ultimately derived from nature.
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| pierre pouliquin/Flickr |
When American aid
worker-turned essayist William Powers went to Bolivia, he found the Chiquitano
indigenous people didn’t share our concept of “the environment.” How could a
people living in one of the most pristine tropical forests in the world fail to
grasp this?
To us, the environment
stands in contrast with the manmade, built world. There are homes and offices,
roads and bridges, cars, trucks, warehouses — all manmade — and then there’s
“the environment.”
For many people in
other countries, there’s no such contrast. Everything needed for life — food,
building materials, cordage, thatching, and even toys and musical instruments —
come directly from nature. They would no sooner destroy “the environment” than
an American would bulldoze her local grocery store or drive his car into a
lake.
For them, an abstract
concept of an environment distinct from the manmade world makes no sense.
When I first began
traveling to far-flung places like the Amazon, the intimate knowledge the
locals possessed about how to use everything around them struck me. Here in
America, I go hiking all the time, yet I could not even name any of the plants
I walked past, let alone find any use for them.
On the shore of Lake
Titicaca, I got sick from my malaria medicine one morning. My host, an Aymara
man, grabbed a local plant and promptly made me a cup of tea with it. In
western Kenya, the friends I stayed with were busy gathering materials to
thatch their new house, which they were making from wood and mud.
If nature provided
such incredible bounty all over the world, I thought, perhaps the environment
in my home did so too. And, it turns out, it does.
To find out, I asked
the best experts I could think of: Native Americans. With their guidance, I
learned that the scrubby vegetation of arid California provides for food,
medicine, basketry, and more.
In truth, everything
in our lives comes from “the environment” too — only our system is set up to
obscure that fact. Look at the items around you. Your computer, your clothes, the
carpet on the floor, the paint on your walls — where are they from? And if
there was an environmental catastrophe, would you still have them?
Despite the occasional
hiccups to the market, like the looming Velveeta
Shortage of 2014, we’re pretty well equipped to get what we want,
when we want it. If a hurricane takes out the banana crop in one country, we’ll
get our bananas from somewhere else.
Have you ever seen an
ingredient label list something like “soybean oil or canola oil or sunflower
oil”? You don’t even know which one was used to make your tortilla chips, but
the chips taste the same anyway.
If soybean prices go
up, then the manufacturer uses a different oil instead. As the consumer, you’re
none the wiser.
But somehow,
somewhere, everything in our lives comes from nature, including Velveeta.
Despite all appearances to the contrary, we’re hardly different from the
Amazonians or rural Kenyans, who live so close to nature that they instantly
feel the impact of one dry season or one flood.
We’d do well to
realize that there is no such thing as “the environment” as a separate and
distinct realm. We live in it and we owe everything in our lives to it. If we
squander it, we’ll feel the impact sooner or later — and it won’t be pretty.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is
the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and
What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org