My husband the beekeeper spent yesterday at Union Square with his bees (some of them, anyhow), promoting bees and beekeeping. He'd been invited by the New York City Parks Department, which was sponsoring the event, and at least while I was there, his table was the most popular of all. People really love to look at bees.

There's a serious irony to this invitation, though. Whether the Parks Department knew this and ignored it, or didn't even know, they were inviting a law-breaker to their event. Beekeeping is illegal in New York City.

When John first took up beekeeping, that fact made both of us very nervous. Early in his career, his bees swarmed, landing on a lamppost a block away. We could see them clearly out of our back windows; we could also see the police looking up at our house as bystanders pointed us out as the people with bees. We expected the cops to come knocking at our door any minute. But nothing happened. Nothing ever has happened, even though John has been actively and very publicly promoting beekeeping - and getting a lot of press coverage - for several years now. This has got to be the least taken-seriously law in the entire New York City legal code.

It's a pretty recent law, passed - as I understand it, (and I'm not entirely sure of my facts here, so this may be an urban legend) - under the anti-nuisance regime of Rudy Giuliani, whose recognition of the importance of bees to just about every plant in the city was, I would guess, limited if not entirely non-existent. But times have changed, and now just about everyone knows not only that we need bees, but that we're losing them. A while back, Haagen-Dazs launched a public-service campaign to help the bees, as a result of which John ended up with several thousand packets of wildflower seeds to give away and a Flip video camera to memorialize it all.

More usefully, from our perspective at least, Just Food, a marvelous organization devoted to making sure New Yorkers have as many opportunities as possible to get food grown as locally as possible - is spearheading a campaign to make beekeeping legal. (Just Food also helps people learn to keep chickens - but not roosters. They're illegal in New York too.)

As a result of all this political activity, John and his still-illegal hobby are getting even more attention. He and his bees will be at the Brooklyn Food Conference this Saturday, entertaining kids, informing adults, and giving everyone a chance to play Find the Queen (it ain't easy). The conference is food-star studded (Anna Lappe, Dan Barber, Nina Planck, Raj Patel) and free, so if you are in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello.

Labels: beekeeping, Brooklyn Food Conference, John Howe, Just Food, New York City, sustainability

I've been reading Bill McKibben's Hope, Human and Wild - in particular the chapter about Curitiba, a city in Brazil that seems to have about as low a carbon footprint and as vibrant a community life as a city could hope to have. It sounds wondrous.

But, I thought to myself regretfully as I closed the book, it is in no way a model. Why? Because all the wonderful things the city has done seem to be the brainchild of its mayor, Jaime Lerner, and the band of young and enthusiastic architects and planners he's assembled. Turning a street into a pedestrian mall over a weekend (and against the fierce opposition of the street's merchants), getting people in the slums to collect garbage by paying them with bags of food - it all looks - from afar, anyhow - like redesign from the top down.

I think there's a limit to just how far top-down can get us. And to how long its changes can last.

Start with the practicality. In a city like, say, New York, there's no way those kinds of programs could be instituted just on the mayor's say-so. Frankly, Mike Bloomberg doesn't have much of a say-so. Any major initiative requires state approval; it also requires him to successfully navigate an intricate web of political pressure groups inside the city, all of them empowered by a regulatory process that's designed to give just about anybody a chance to have their say and - in many cases - to gum up the works. Just look at the fate of congestion pricing, or the ability - currently on depressing display - of a couple of state legislators to block a plan to bail out the transit system.

But I think the problem with the top-down approach goes deeper than the bureaucratic gridlock that afflicts long-established cities. Maybe I've been hanging out too much with Transition Town folks (I just spent two weeks in Totnes and had a chance to talk with Rob Hopkins, founder of the movement, a conversation I'll report on as soon as I've transcribed the tape). But I am skeptical that changes directed from the top can, by their very nature, be sustainable.

As McKibben describes it, governing Curitiba seems to involve a constant struggle to keep on top of the next manifestation of human nature or economic pressure that could destroy the town's carefully created culture. While the public transportation system is astoundingly efficient - and very heavily used - lots of people are still wedded to their cars (and delighted by the relative lack of traffic). McKibben quotes one resident as saying, "In some ways we remain spectators of the town." It sounds as though the town's culture is - so far at least - the creation of its mayor, more than of its citizens.

Top-down is a tempting model. A lot of us long for someone - President Obama, Mike Bloomberg, anyone - to impose sanity on us and our maladjusted, carbon-dependent, super-individualistic lifestyle. Take away our cars, take away our fast food, stop us - because we don't seem to be able to stop ourselves.

But if changes are really to take hold, there's no escape from the slow work of bringing people onboard. It is frustrating and maddening; I often feel like taking the whole population of the United States and just shaking them awake somehow.

Unfortunately, when you shake people awake, most of the time the only thing they really want is to be allowed to go back to sleep again.

Labels: Curitiba, Rob Hopkins, sustainability, Transition Towns, transportation, urban planning

The more I read about how to jump-start the economy, the more I think most of the ideas (even the Obama administration's) are as unsustainable as the busted economy they're trying to fix.

Here's the problem. Growth that's funded by debt - as US economic growth has been for years now - is, by definition, unsustainable, because there is a limit to how much debt anyone can take on (and pay off). It's my suspicion that one of the reasons the collapse cascaded through the economy so quickly is that in our hearts, all of us knew that we were on shaky ground; that our debt was climbing when our incomes weren't, and that our financial situations were getting more and more precarious. So it didn't take a whole lot of economic bad news to get us to stop in our tracks.

But what we keep hearing now is that we have to get the banks lending again. Really? Do our financial experts really believe that if we can only get the debt spigots open, people will start loading up their credit cards and the economy will come roaring back?

I know lending is important, especially the day-to-day lending that companies need to finance their inventories. But what's really battering the economy is that even people who have money (which, after all, is most of us) are afraid to spend it. And we're afraid, I think, because we have finally grasped the fragility of our own personal financial situations. We're doing, ironically, just what economic advisers and even economists have been urging us to do for decades now: trying to live off current income and - if we can - pay down debt and save for a rainy day.

Isn't it kind of stupid to discourage this new-found financial sanity by trying to get the credit spigot gushing again? Shouldn't we, maybe, be trying to find a way to fuel economic growth by increasing incomes, not spending? And shouldn't we consider the possibility that there really, really are limits to growth?

Years ago, for Sojourners Magazine, I reviewed a TV show called Affluenza. One scene from the show has been in my head a lot lately. You can read the whole review here ("I Shop, Therefore I Am") but here's what makes that bit stick in my head:

"Perhaps the hour's strangest moment is a clip showing Nike employees eagerly participating in a workshop on voluntary simplicity. I couldn't help wondering if any of them had thought about what might happen to their jobs if this movement became widespread. Exactly where did they think they'd be, if teen-agers all over the world started wearing their Nikes until they developed holes? And that, of course, is the rub. Yeah, we'd be better off if we simplified our lives. But we live in a Ponzi-scheme economy where not just corporate fortunes, but peoples' jobs, from the United States to Poland to Thailand, depend on the ever-increasing appetite for things that the advertising industry so skillfully fuels. Getting enough folks off that treadmill to avert the environmental disasters Affluenza threatens is likely to be not the uncomplicated blessing the show promises, but a messy and possibly ugly process."

And so it is. Sadly, so it is.

Labels: affluenza, economy, Sojourners Magazine, sustainability