Review of Hervé Kempf’s How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth

I started typing this for the Facebook iRead application, but it ended up exceeding the 1000-character limit. So here it is!

How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth

The preface and introduction promised so much, but by the end of the book I was disappointed. Kempf says his intent with this book is to convince environmentalists to care about social justice, and convince the Left to care about the environment. If his book accomplishes this, it is because he expounds on the environmental and poverty crises separately, rather than by showing the connection between the two.

That’s not to say this book is without its merits, though. To say it’s “fact-filled” doesn’t begin to convey the boggling amount of statistics and research tidbits crammed into each page. And there are delightfully snarky quips scattered throughout, for instance, “Like a junkie who can stay standing only by shooting more heroin, the United States, doped up on hyperconsumption, staggers before it drops.”

I’d recommend this book to environmentalists who haven’t quite grasped the horrors of global poverty, or to leftists who echo Marxism’s old line that maximizing exploitation of Mother Nature can help solve social injustices. For those of us who have already realized, as Kempf says, “that the ecological crisis and the social crisis are two faces of the same disaster,” this book has little to offer aside from oodles of statistics and occasional dark humor. But if you, like me, find the title irresistible, reading it isn’t a bad way to spend a few hours–just be sure to pass it on to an oblivious friend or relative when you’re done.

If reading the book leaves you feeling unfulfilled, I recommend Wendell Berry’s essay “In Distrust of Movements.” To me, it feels like the missing last chapter to Kempf’s book.

Boy Meets World continuity issues

And I thought I was just getting confused. Thanks, Wikipedia!

The series features many continuity errors, including:

• In season one, Cory, Shawn and Topanga are in sixth grade and Eric is in tenth grade. Cory, Shawn and Topanga are able to graduate by season five (when they should be in tenth grade). Eric, however, graduates during season three, when he should graduate.

Season	Cory, Shawn, Topanga	Eric
1	Grade 6	Grade 10
2	Grade 7	Grade 11
3	Grades 8-10	Grade 12
4	Grade 11	Year Off
5	Grade 12	1st Year of College
6	1st Year of College	2nd Year of College
7	2nd-3rd Years of College	3rd-4th Year of College

• Shawn has a sister in the first season, Staci, and a half-brother, Eddie, in the third season, but later it is stated that Jack is his only sibling.
• Topanga has a sister, Nebula, during the first season, but later refers to herself as an only child.
• Topanga’s mother’s name is Chloe at the beginning of the series, but Rhiannon at the end of the series.
• The age that Cory and Topanga were when they first met (everywhere from birth to age six) and how they met (parents were friends to meeting at a playground when Cory couldn’t get off of the monkey bars) changes each time the issue is discussed.

Reflection on Farm #1

Chris and I recently spent two and a half weeks on Harmony Hill, a WWOOF (World-Wide Opportunities On Organic Farms) host that was less of a farm than we expected. The place is the home of an attorney and his wife. They have two dressage horses (dressage has got to be the bougiest sport in the world), four Nubian goats for milking, and an incredible amount of chickens that only manage to produce one or two eggs a day. The husband, Allen, has very, very little to do with the farming activities — in fact, he whole-heartedly refuses to consume any home-made dairy product — so it’s really just the wife, Elena, running the show.

Like I said, we expected something more than one woman who produces some of her own animal products — we thought we were going to be farmers! Fortunately, my disappointment faded after the first couple days, when I realized that we were somewhere much cushier than a farm. I kept a log of what I did every day, and most of it was relaxing: napping in the hammock, reading, swimming, cooking, re-watching episodes of Good Eats and Home Movies on my laptop, and more napping. We only had to work for six hours a day, and when you start at 6:30, that means you’re done awfully early.

A lot of the work we did was chores: sweeping miles of pavement, cleaning the common areas, weeding, weeding, weeding, cleaning up cobwebs, and lots of poop-scooping. We milked the goats once a day in the beginning, and upped it to twice a day later on when there were six WWOOFers there and we were going through milk like *that*.

The goat-milking was fun, (goats are pretty fun in general) and I got pretty quick at it, but the best part was the gardening. When we first got into town, we spent part of an afternoon working on a garden they have in Visalia, in the backyard of the house that serves as Allen’s office. We harvested pear tomatoes, chives, parsley, and did a heck of a lot of weeding on the unkempt garden. After that, though, there wasn’t much more to do — there weren’t any gardens on their property. In a walk around one day, Bridget (another WWOOFer who was there for two weeks before we arrived, and is staying through the middle of October) suggested that we turn a large, currently empty goat pen into a nice big vegetable garden, and a few days later, we had begun digging. (And digging. And digging.) We also turned a cracked koi pond in front of the house into a winter garden. The hardest part of that work was building a fence out of odds and ends (every tried to make a door using scrap chicken wire and staples? Ugh) and digging up cement-like dirt from the other side of the house to fill the two-tiered pond. Before Chris and I left, we had started a bunch of broccoli and lettuce seedlings indoors, and sown rows and rows of radish, Swiss chard, bush bean, turnip, spinach, scallion, and lettuce seeds. I’m not sure all of them will survive the last few hot days, and I’m even less sure it was a good idea to start everything at once (man, I hope they feel like eating a million heads of lettuce in a few weeks), but it was fun to research and try to figure out everything with Bridget and Chris.

We’ve spent the last few days doing even more vegging at Chris’s parent’s swanky house in La Qunita, watching their sweet but timid dog. The time off is just making me excited about the next farm we go to. We’re looking for a real farmy farm this time, preferably one that has a CSA program or sells at farmer’s markets. I’m so pumped to learn more!

As far as traveling goes, we’ll be here through the weekend, then out in Riverside till the 20th, and up to Santa Barbara for a few days, maybe a week, maybe more. Then we’ll be off to the Northwest till Christmas, but Chris wants to stop in the Bay Area for a couple days to see some folks, and I suppose I’d like to see some folks too. =D

More photos, if you’re interested, on Facebook. (Erm, for those who aren’t reading this on Facebook.)