Failure in Copenhagen and the Ratcheting Burger King Sickness

I had lunch from Burger King yesterday. Heading back from the feed store I was overcome with a powerful, irrational fast food craving, so I hit a drive-through that was approximately on the way home and bought a sack of the stuff. You know what? It was terrible: flaccid, bland, salty, and it made my entire body feel poisoned and sick, in exactly the way I would have predicted if I had spent three seconds in honest thought before taking the plunge. It was a well-deserved misery.


So I took my gut full of roiling muck out back to clean out the chicken coop and finish building the long sheet mulch where next year's blueberry bushes will go. I like catching up on the news while working in the garden, so I took the opportunity to listen to Democracy Now's coverage of the miasmic obscenity currently unfolding in Copenhagen, and realized, again, the essential hypocrisy of my position. On a very superficial level, I was adhering to my values around sustainability and low-impact living in the act of caring for our hens and recycling their nitrogen-rich, dropping-laden bedding to build out the new blueberry beds. Fine. But I was doing this while some untold number of largely empty calories were rotting in my stomach, calories derived from a key symbol of everything that is wrong with America's approach to the environment, to food, to health, to life itself.


The sins of the fast food industry and its products are numerous and well-documented. They're a key factor in the American (and increasingly global) obesity pandemic. They entrench the worst of corporate agriculture and feed-lot food production. They muscle into every conceivable market, ranging from poor neighborhoods to schools to global markets where they're largely unwelcome, wrecking health, local economies and cuisine every step of the way, leaving a swath of sickness, environmental damage, cultural decay and who knows what else in their path. And as a final bonus, the food itself is disgusting.


Meanwhile at the COP15 conference, Africa has just been consigned to the bin. The wealthy nations--of which the U.S. is among the guiltiest of the guilty parties--are busily scuttling any agreement that doesn't allow a 2C global temperature increase or that includes any serious global enforcement or monitoring framework. A secret document from the U.N. Secretariat was leaked yesterday, concluding that all the pledges and targets submitted thus far from the COP15 participants are together insufficient to meet even the pointlessly high 2C constraint, so even the gutless agreement currently taking shape is a sham. And then finally President Obama descends from the heavens and tells the world that the time for talk is over, that the U.S. is committed to fighting climate change, and so on and so forth, to an fairly unimpressed audience. Nobody who has been paying attention to this circus believes him in these matters, and if you watch the video of the address, you get the impression that he doesn't really believe it either. So with global disaster staring us in the face, our leaders have, again and as expected, completely blown it. Combine this with the stories of how previously accredited NGOs have been run out of the conference by the Danish police and U.N. security officials while oil company officials roam the halls unimpeded, and it's clear that any chance for serious work on the climate change issue is dead in the water, and probably always was. I've been saying for years that we as a people were never going to do anything about climate change, not really. And the results of COP15 bear me out. There's nothing further discuss on that point.


Which brings me back to my lunch. Personally, I can't fix the environment. I can't take any single action or collection of actions to cut carbon emissions to a point that will reduce atmospheric carbon to a sufficient degree to avoid the damage heading our way. I can't convince our leaders to do the right thing. I can't change our culture to push back the intrusion of corporate interests and the gross consumerism that largely created these problems in the first place.


But at the same time, I don't have the right to be angry about any of this if I don't take personal accountability for my actions that contribute to the problem. When I drive the truck to the post office instead of walking, I'm vomiting carbon into the air for no good reason other than sheer laziness. When I buy hybrid seed developed under a Monsanto patent I'm working to destroy the livelihoods of organic and subsistence farmers here and abroad. When I stuff my gob with a lousy whopper and a bucket of sugar water, I'm personally participating in the final elimination of everything that I want to see preserved, and that is my duty to pass onto my children. So as much as I am disgusted with the short-sighted, self-absorbed fools that have worked so hard to preserve the status quo, protect corporate wealth and enshrine the principles of short-term profit over long-term environmental viability, I really can't complain about them too vociferously. Because today I am one of them.