Whimsley

Pig Shit

Environmental Economics points us to Boss Hog by Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone. It is an article about Smithfield foods, the biggest pork processor in the world, and -- well, let's just say it makes me glad I'm a vegetarian. Here are the first few paragraphs, but really you should print off the whole article (8 pages). Just don't read it close to dinner.

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

Continued here.

Oh yes. Happy New Year.

 

Worth Reading: On Suburbia

Saturday's Grope & Flail has a fine article by architect Jack Diamond on the whole suburbia and sprawl thing. It's behind the subscription wall, but here are a few excerpts:

                                          

Most new urban growth occurs on the perimeter of urban centres, and does so at densities that render residents of those areas automobile-dependent — such low densities make public transit uneconomic. Paradoxically, this also means that significant sectors of the population are rendered immobile. Those who don't own cars, or who are too young or old to drive, have no alternative means of transportation. Automobile dependency also acts as a social centrifuge, segregating land use and socio-economic groupings into discernibly distinct areas. Indeed, urban poverty is now centred in suburban growth, where it is largely invisible, distant from inaccessible, but desperately needed jobs, social services and retail facilities. The rioting in Paris suburbs is an instance of the results of this festering, but unrecognized, problem.

                        

... Retail concentration in shopping malls does little to encourage small, start-up enterprises that the more mixed and individually owned Main Streets foster.

Most significantly, the cost of providing services to such areas exceeds the tax revenue derived from low-density development. In an analysis of one such area in Southwestern Ontario, it was found that for every dollar received in real-estate tax, $1.40 was needed to service such low-density development.

This form of urban development has been made possible, and indeed encouraged, by ... what amounts to subsidies that land speculators and low-density developers receive from provincial and federal governments in the form of highway construction, and the provision of trunk-line sewers, water supply and other services. The burden of this cost is not borne by the beneficiaries, but by all taxpayers.

So, what can be done to change current development trends? And will those who have the power to initiate such change do so before it is too late?

The means to make these changes is first to institute full-cost pricing. Let the market forces exert their logic: If each increment of suburban growth were to bear the full unit-cost of expressways, trunk water supply and other services, the market would adjust to more appropriate urban forms. That this would create densities capable of supporting public transit, creating a richer mix of land uses, would be an added benefit to affordable development.

Nowadays, development occurs at the extremes of density — either vast expanses of single or semi-detached housing (and low-density commercial uses), or high rise/high density condominiums. There is a wide variety of satisfying housing in between these two extremes, from town houses and duplex dwelling to low-rise apartment buildings of about six to eight storeys. Ingenuity, when confronted with necessity, will out.

A.J. Diamond is a principal of Diamond and Schmitt Architects Inc. He was a commissioner of the Greater Toronto Task Force that made recommendations on governance, taxation, land use and transportation for the GTA.  

Jane Jacobs: 1916 - 2006

Author of one of my favourite books of all time, and one of the clearest and most original thinkers I've ever read. A real loss.

Link: CBC News: Urban thinker Jane Jacobs dies.

Toronto-based urban critic and author Jane Jacobs died Tuesday morning.

• RELATED: Remembering Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, shown in 2004, influenced a generation of urban planners with her critiques about North American urban renewal policies. (Adrian Wyld/CP)

Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and most recently, Dark Age Ahead, was 89.

Her powerful critiques about the urban renewal policies of North American cities have influenced thinking about urban planning for a generation.

Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Penn., Jacobs had made her home in Canada since the late 1960s.

Educated at Columbia University, she met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs, at the Office of War Information in New York, where she began writing during the war.

Known for protesting sprawl

The strong themes of her writing and activism included opposition to expressways, including the Spadina Expressway in Toronto, and the support of neighbourhoods. Jacobs has been arrested twice while protesting urban plans she believed to be destructive.

She also explored these ideas in books such as The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations and Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, questioned the sprawling suburbs that characterized urban planning, saying they were killing inner cities and discouraging the economic vitality that springs organically from neighbourhoods.

Inspired 'Ideas That Matter' gathering

Jacobs settled in Toronto in 1969. There she supported developments such as the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, an inner-city development for people of all income levels.

In 1997, the City of Toronto sponsored a conference entitled Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter, which led to a book of the same name.

Her most recent book, Dark Age Ahead is "a grave warning to a society losing its memory," jurists said in awarding her the $15,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2005.

"In spare, exquisite prose, Jane Jacobs alerts us to the dangers facing the family, higher education, science and technology, the professions, and fiscal accountability. Drawing on history, geography, and anthropology, this book reflects a lifetime of study and observation, offering us lessons to avoid decline," the jury said.

Dark Age Ahead finds comparisons between our current North American culture and European culture before the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent Dark Ages.

Interviewed by Canadian Press when she won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, Jacobs said, "People really know themselves that the dark age is ahead. They're worried, and they haven't articulated it, but they feel it."

"I think it's late but we don't need to go down the drain," she said. "But we will if we aren't aware. It's a cautionary book."

Stalkerazzi

Russell Smith in The Globe and Mail writes about California's new law in California puts lens rangers on notice. Here's what the new law says

The statute forbids two types of invasion of private space: one literal, one virtual. It makes it an offence to take pictures or sound recordings of anyone "engaging in a personal or familial activity and the physical invasion occurs in a manner that is offensive to a reasonable person," and it also forbids doing so to a person "engaging in a personal or familial activity under circumstances in which the plaintiff had a reasonable expectation of privacy, through the use of a visual or auditory enhancing device, regardless of whether there is a physical trespass."

In other words, not only is standing in the subject's way or pushing your camera into her car window unacceptable, but so is using a zoom lens 50 metres away from her bedroom.

Smith notes that "U.S. public reaction to the law is overwhelmingly positive" and is sympathetic himself. But he has reservations...

And yet, and yet . . . the people who are thrilled to see their icons protected from the scum are exactly the same people who gobble up the tabloids. They must be; the numbers don't lie. The only way a magazine can offer $400,000 (U.S.) for the first photo of Madonna's baby is to have millions of eager readers.

Those readers -- that type of reader -- seem to form the bulk of the American population right now. It's the same population that elects Hollywood celebrities to positions in government, the same population that has grown to know or think it knows Lindsay Lohan through her pictures in magazines, and feels sympathy for her when she is assaulted or threatened or humiliated.

It's a bit like being an animal-lover and eating chicken: We're not opposed to consuming the final product, we just don't want to know how it's produced.

Smith is right, but it reads like he thinks there is a contradiction here and there is none (see previous post for another example). There are two separate choices - one is whether to read the Enquirer (given that it is available) and the other is whether to approve of its methods. Given most people can only actually act on one of the choices -- whether to read the Enquirer -- it is hardly surprising that the market reflects that preference but not the other.  That's why the whole idea that the market responds to our preferences is a half-truth at best -- it can only respond to a few of those preferences: those that can be expressed by an exchange of money.

Not that I read the tabloids of course. I've just heard about them, that's all.

The Commons Blog

I have spent some time this afternoon at The Commons Blog, subtitled "Markets Protecting the Environment". It is a group blog run by proponents of Free-Market Environmentalism (FME). This is not something that I would expect to agree with, but not a strand of thought I have looked at much, so I read over their "About Free-Market Environmentalism" page and a book review of David Roodman (of the Worldwatch Institute)'s "The Natural Wealth of Nations".

(the trackback is to the latest post on their blog, because I can't trackback to the home page).

It is not news that, in the search for ways to control environmental damage, one of the routes that is being tried is that of markets. Emissions trading schemes for greenhouse gases and sulphur dioxide are prominent examples. Fine, I say -- whatever works in cutting down pollution. I have no particular axe to grind for or against the use of markets in this way. I imagine they will work well in some cases (easily tracked gases that become widely distributed), and not in others (difficult to track pollutants, or pollutants that are local (such as mercury) for which a market may lead to very polluted "hot spots".

But this is not what FME is about. They argue that using markets "simply as tools for the fficient delivery of environmental goals... [while] the goals themselves remain collectively determined" is simple market socialism.  Instead, they want to use markets as a way of "determining what is to be done" as well as how it should be accomplished.

The basic premise is that private ownership provides the incentive needed for conservation: "The record of private owners in conserving resources is superior to that of government agencies". And there are certainly cases of well-preserved or conserved resources that you can find. The beautiful picture on the commons blog front page of the Natural Bridge of Virginia is an example. But a bridge is one thing, and not perhaps typical. To extrapolate these concrete, easily identified objects to "property rights" in such things as dioxins and blue whales is a big step, and not one they convince me can be made.

Let me give a few reasons why they fail to convince me.

One issue is that they have a cavalier attitude to the nature of environmental problems.

• Resources? "There is little reason to fear running out of oil or mineral resources, for prices will rise well before stocks expire". 
• Sulphur dioxide and acid rain? "But was a sulfur oxide emission reduction plan needed at all? The most extensive US study of acid rain to date suggests that acid rain was not a substantial threat to forests and streams, despite environmentalist claims to the contrary."
• Climate change? A whole series of articles on the blog suggests that the position of FME is that this too is not much of a problem.

There is a collective action problem to be overcome when it comes to collecting the information on which environmental action is predicated. Groups that help to overcome this problem seem to me to be either government sponsored or to be enthusiasts (bird watchers, for example, who track bird numbers over time) -- neither of which is a market-based approach.  So the fact that they are dubious about a whole raft of environmental assessments makes me think that their "leave it to the market" approach to establishing environmental goals -- which ignores this collective action problem -- is not one they are particularly concerned with, because when it comes to it they don't think the problems are that big.

A second reason is an impression that the FME outlook is, in the end, more about getting rid of government activity than about the environment per se.  Their worldview is one in which the only two players are government bureaucracies and markets. And they rule out government point blank: "It was the fatal conceit of socialism, in Hayek's famous phrase, that wise government bureaucrats could guide society to a better future. Substituting red aspirations with green ones does not change the undertaking's essential nature - or its likelihood of success." This leads to odd judgement calls. On the one hand, designing a (Pigouvian) tax code "that fully and accurately internalizes negative environmental externalities (forget the positive) is a fool's errand. It requires "impossibly detailed knowledge". On the other hand, when it comes to establishing property rights "the technical requirements of property rights definition and enforcement are also substantial" - and yet they are optimistic that the market can deal with them, even though they require the same "impossibly detailed knowledge" that the tax approach does.

A third reason that they don't convince me is that their tone is too often smug. They are preaching to the converted. The pervasive use of "government bureaucrats" serves only to emphasize their lack of efficiency. The suggestion that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc demonstrates the failure of any role for the state once and for all ("Central planning has clearly failed.")  In the book review (see top of this post) they start off by saying "We are all free-market environmentalists now" before going on to claim that Worldwatch is merely "faux-market". Or categorizing Worldwatch as being "like so many others that mouth adherence to market strategies". Such digs are everywhere, and they don't help.

A fourth reason, they slide by some of the problems of private ownership, while overestimating the problems of public ownership. It is easy to say that "behind every tree should stand an owner who can act as its protector" but you can't really say the same about a salmon that swims thousands of miles. And while they like to quote Garrett Hardin about the failure of collective ownership they seem to neglect the well-know fact that many instances of collective ownership have succeeded well (Elinor Ostrom and others having catalogued lots of these).  And they don't pay attention to the argument by CW Clarke that it may make perfect economic sense for a single fishing body to drive whale populations to extinction even in the absence of a commons.

Finally, they use the passive voice trick a lot to mask some real difficulties with their program. That is, they slip into the passive voice and so obscure just who is meant to be the active role in an activity. I suspect this is not deliberate, but it is revealing anyway. For example: "In a true market system the involuntary imposition of waste streams by one party onto others would be forbidden". By whom? I suspect they know it must be the state, but can't get themselves to say so. The  drive (of private industry) to reduce costs results in pollution only "when property rights are insufficiently protected". But who is to do the protection? And when it comes to automobile air pollution "An owner would be assessed a fee proportional to the amout of pollution his auto generated". Who is to assess the fee? and who is to determine the amount of pollution generated?

These slips do suggest that in some ways FME has more overlap with other environmentalists than they would like to admit. Activities such as purchasing of wildlife reserves by the Audubon Society in the USA or compensating farmers to ease the reintroduction of wolves into Montana are apparently part of the free market, but I suspect there are few environmentalists who would argue against them. And to lump the activities of volunteer groups into the "private" realm is itself problematice -- such collective groups are typically neither of the state nor of the market, and the FME attempt to claim them is unfounded. If that's what FME is really arguing for, OK, but it's not that big an intellectual deal.