50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America by Michael Huttner and Jason Salzman is a handbook for American citizens who want to do their part to make sure the president’s promise of hope comes to fruition. Each chapter opens with a quote from Barack Obama. Here’s a sampling:

Continuing the Fight to Change America

This Victory alone is not the change we seek—it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.

—President-elect Barack Obama, election night victory speech, November 4, 2008, Grant Park, Chicago, IL

Climate Change and a New Green Revolution

At a time when our ice caps are melting and our oceans are rising, we need you to help lead a green revolution. We still have time to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change if we get serious about investing in renewable sources of energy, and if we get a generation of volunteers to work on renewable energy projects, and teach folks about conservation, and help clean up polluted areas; and if we send talented engineers and scientists abroad to help developing countries promote clean energy.

—Senator Barack Obama,  Wesleyan University Commencement,  May 25, 2008, Middletown, CT

Healthcare Reform

I want to wake up and know that every single American has health care when they need it, that every senior has prescription drugs they can afford, and that no parents are going to bed at night worrying about how they’ll afford medicine for a sick child. That’s the future we can build together.

—Senator Barack Obama,  Town Hall, June 5, 2008, Bristol, VA

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[Posted by Sarah Silbert]

New York City — the greenest community in the United States? New York City?

That’s the counterintuitive argument at the heart of Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About Sustainability, by New Yorker staff writer David Owen.  It all comes down to population density. New Yorkers — particularly residents of Manhattan — live closer to each other (because, living on an island, they have no choice), which means they drive less and walk more; they have fewer cars (because running a car in Manhattan is an expensive, endlessly stress-inducing proposition; and anyway, New York has decent public transit); and they live in smaller spaces (location, location, location), which cost less to heat.

Of course, as a matter of raw numbers, New York City is an almost unparalleled energy hog; but on a per capita basis, New Yorkers consume far less energy and emit far less greenhouse gases than the residents of any place, big or small, rural or urban, in the nation. The implication of which is clear: if we want to get serious about conserving energy and addressing global warming, we need to start building communities that look more like New York and less like, well, most other sprawling American towns and cities.

Consider the evidence and Owen’s argument seems commonsensical. That it seems absurd at first blush is the consequence of what Owen calls “a deep antipathy to urban life which has been close to the heart of American environmentalism since the beginning.” He way of illustration he cites numerous examples of city-bashing down the ages. Here’s a sampling:

• Thomas Jefferson described cities as “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.”
• Outbreaks of diseases such as yellow fever in Philadelphia (1793) and cholera in New York City (1832), combined with rudimentary waste management systems, contributed to both widespread illness and death and a backlash against urban living. Jefferson wrote, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, that “most evils are the means of producing some good. The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation.”
• Henry David Thoreau, who lived in a cabin in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, between 1845 and 1847, represented an image, still potent today, of the sensitive nature lover living in harmony with the environment. This idea was largely popularized through Thoreau’s book Walden, which discussed his experiences living close to nature.
• The National Park Service, established by Congress in 1916, “was conceived as an increasingly necessary corrective to urban life, and national parks were treated in large measure as sanctuaries from urban depravity.”
• The Sierra Club, founded in 1892 by environmentalist John Muir, continues to promote an anti-city ethos while simultaneously protesting suburban sprawl.
• Henry Ford referred to cities as “pestiferous growth” and viewed his cars as tools for liberating humanity.
• The birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a growing sense of ecological crisis that blamed many of the United States’ problems on urbanism.
• That anti-urbanism still animates American environmentalism, writes Owen, is still evident in the term that’s widely used for sprawl: “urbanization” (Urbanization, at least on the New York model, is in fact the polar opposite of sprawl.)

In his introduction to Wendell Berry’s anthology of essays Bringing It To the Table: Wendell Berry on Farming and Food, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, writes, “To read these essays is to feel that way over and over again, to be somehow stopped in your tracks by the plainly self-evident.” By way of illustration, and as a taste of things to come, Pollan offers the excerpts below.

“We have been winning, to our inestimable loss, a competition against our own land and our own people. At present, what we have to show for this “victory” is a surplus of food. But this is a surplus achieved by the ruin of its sources.” (“Nature as Measure,” 1989)

“‘Sustainable agriculture’ …refers to a way of farming that can be continued indefinitely because it conforms to the terms imposed upon it by the nature of places and the nature of people.” (“Stupidity in Concentration,” 2002)

“Here we come to the heart of the matter—the absolute divorce that the industrial economy has achieved between itself and all ideals and standards outside itself.” (“A Defense of the Family Farm,” 1986)

“This old sun-based agriculture was fundamentally alien to the industrial economy; industrial corporations could make relatively little profit from it…[But] as farmers became more and more dependant on fossil fuel energy, a radical change occurred in their minds. Once focused on biology, the life and health of living things, their thinking now began to focus on technology and economics. Credit, for example, became as pressing an issue as the weather.” (“Energy in Agriculture,” 1979)

“Does the concentration of production in the hands of fewer and fewer big operators really serve the ends of cleanliness and health? Or does it make easier and more lucrative the possibility of collusion between irresponsible producers and corrupt inspectors?” (“Sanitation and the Small Farm,” 1977)

“There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else…One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. (“The Pleasures of Eating,” 1989)

“Mortality is the ultimate democracy,” writes Garrison Keillor in his book Homegrown Democrat. Keillor grew up in St. Paul Minnesota, where the fire department will dispatch a crew to your doorstep in under four minutes. His vision of America as true and decent, a country in which people look out for one another, work hard, and value free thought is a place we should all be so lucky to live in. Here are some thoughts from his book relating to the current health care debate:

“Republicans have perfectly nice manners, normal hair, pleasant smiles, good deodorants, but when it comes down to it, you don’t want them monitoring your oxygen flow.”

“Go to any inner-city emergency room and see suffering people filling out forms about their finances and waiting hour after hour after hour, a primitive caste system of medicine in a Christian country.”

“We are all equal in our dread of the end of this delightful life and our disbelief in our own mortality. It will be a great day in America when we finally see that everybody can come see the doctor as needed, not be shunted to the back door and the charity ward.”

“In this nation where tax-supported research propelled [great] advances, our denial of benefits to so many is downright stone-hearted.”

“You drive out of St. Paul and into the Republican suburbs and you see what the New Deal and Fair Deal and Great Society accomplished: they enabled people of modest means to get a leg up in the world and eventually become right-wing reactionaries and pretend that they sprang fully formed from their own ambitions with no help from anybody. And vote to deny others what they themselves were freely given.”

“Most Americans are not willing to let people die in the ditch or go hungry. Democrats aren’t, that’s for sure.”

[Posted by Elena Sytcheva]

Where Underpants Come From chronicles author Joe Bennett’s to find out — you guessed it — where his underpants come from (and why they’re so cheap). This quest leads him eventually to the Kingstar Light Industrial Products Ltd. factory in Quanzhou, in the Fujian Province, a 2-hour flight south of Shanghai. Here are some of his impressions:

“The factory makes 60,000 dozen pieces of men’s underwear a month, 100,000 dozen pieces of ladies’ underwear and 200,000 dozen pieces of lingerie…That’s over 4 million garments a month. Most of them go to Europe. None goes to China. Not a single bra. While the corporate west salivates over the Chinese market with its billion potential customers, the corporate Chinese salivate over the Western market with its billion actual customers.”

“Kingstar Light Industrial Products Ltd. Was founded by a local couple in 1994. It now employs 600 workers, most of whom live on site in dormitories behind the admin block. Manufacturing happens in the twin buildings that face each other across the courtyard. One makes knickers for both sexes. The other makes bras.”

“The sewing room on the floor is pure factory. Perhaps 150 girls and a dozen or so boys are sitting at machines under bright fluorescent lighting.”

“They live in two purpose-built blocks behind the factory, one for the boys and one for the girls. The blocks resemble the offspring of a school boarding house and an army barracks, with communal ablutions, dorms of four to six beds each, thin mattresses, a refectory on the ground with formica tables and fixed stools, an unlovely recreation room, a small shop for staples and balconies running the length of each floor overlooking an outdoor basketball court.”

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell is a sharp and entertaining examination of the economic, political, and psychic cost of our mania for low price. We’ll be posting on it throughout the week. Meanwhile, here’s a mini-quiz: can you put a name to the quotes listed here (they’re taken from the book)? Answers below.

1. “I do not prize the word “cheap.” It is not a badge of honor.”

2. “If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.”

3. “Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure—attractively packaged but inferior in content.”

4. “We must have cheap labor or we cannot sell cheap goods. When a clerk gets so good she can earn better wages elsewhere, let her go.”

5. “Cheap Merchandise means cheap men, and cheap men mean a cheap country, and that is not the kind of Government our fathers founded, and that is not the kind their sons mean to maintain.”

6. “Having a sale every day is a bad idea, but retailers are afraid to stop.”

7. “Despite his resolute belief in progress, des Pereires had always detested standardization…From the very start he was bitterly opposed to it…He foresaw that the death of craftsmanship would inevitably shrink the human personality.”

8. “No One Will Bother You.”

9. “I’m not convinced you’re going to have the same immediate desire to go back to consumption and debt. A lot of young people have learned what it’s like when you’re living on the edge and bad times come. Their appetite is now towards more about living things differently.”

10. “I’m going to eat too much, but I’m never going to pay too much.”

11. “Look, I know that Americans have a hard time accepting that sweatshops can help people.”

12. “A cheap price is a shortcut to being cheated.”

13. “The frugal man has the advantage over the man of pleasure in facilities for self-improvement, for doing his duty to his country, and for securing general happiness.”
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