Photos by Yeondo Jung, in Seoul, South Korea

 Last weekend I watched Contagion, a recent Hollywood rendition of what would happen to the planet and its people if there was a massive, contagious disease that wreaked devastation and death, spreading so quickly and aggressively that its MO was “figuring us out faster than we can figure it out.” Characters race against time in the film, doctors at the CDC (including Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard), and other health institutes around the world, traveling and researching to find out what caused this outbreak and how to solve it, immunize against it.

And what do we learn about humanity? We are not nearly as orderly and respective to each other during crisis as the model Japanese refugees were during last year’s triple-crisis earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. In fact, we panic, we flee, we become violent and kill each other to find food, to secure our own families. The scenes that play out as the epidemic spreads (and as fear spreads even more quickly) are terrifying and thought-provoking. What if this actually happened? Would many of us fall not by the hand of the disease that threatens, but by the hands of our own neighbors, in the spirit of the outrageous moment in which we find ourselves?

It’s not Oscar-worthy, per se, but I found the theoretical situation enthralling–precisely because it was also horrifying. I would not want to live through this kind of awful moment for humanity. Us at our very worst.

It also made me think about the structure of our world, and a recent article in National Geographic about the future of our planet, and how cities can save us. I agree wholeheartedly, that, rather than the festering dirty urban spaces they have often been perceived as (and actualized as) in history, cities offer us a sustainable option for the survival of seven billion people (and an estimated nine billion by 2050), as people living in cities tread lightly on the earth: “Their roads, sewers, and power lines are shorter. Their apartments take less energy to heat and cool. Most important: they drive less.” Denser populations in cities have the added effect of lessening our use of remaining green space, forests, and natural areas and reservations. Humans and the earth alike need these green spaces an essential survival components–for our human psyche, and for the earth, literal survival.

As cities become more and more the agent of our sustainable survival, they should not all expand as Atlanta did. Sprawl and the massive expansion of suburbs have not helped or lowered our dependency on large amounts of energy. James Howard Kunstler, a critic of suburbia, called Atlanta “a pulsating slime mold,” a quotation that did manage to be included in the Nat Geo article, luckily for us Atlantans. But Atlanta is a perfect example of terrible teamwork among metropolitan counties, who could not agree on a transit system that stretched throughout the area, and so we are heavily, begrudgingly, seemingly irreversibly dependent on our clogged highways.

Theorists have had ideas and arguments for and against how we should design our cities for hundreds of years. Greenbelts surrounding cities were one proposed plan for stopping city growth, when it was perceived that urban centers that were too big would eat up all remaining space outside their centers. But as this set definitive borders to what would be considered the city, “greenbelts had the effect of pushing people farther out, sometimes absurdly far,” says Peter Hall in the article, a planner and historian at University College London.

Brisilia, the planned capital of Brazil, was designed for 500,000 people; two million more now live beyond the lake and park that were supposed to block the city’s expansion. When you  try to stop urban growth, it seems, you just amplify sprawl.

…Other government policies, such as subsidies for highways and home ownership, have [also] coaxed the suburbs outward.

The argument then, and the solution as well, is that you don’t try to stop city growth. You try to stop the suburban sprawl, and have your citizens living closer to where they work and play. What has been happening with more and more use and dependency on oil to fuel our cars and big, suburban houses in the United States is happening on an ever-greater level as China and India develop, and their citizens want the same ideas of the affluent, consumer life. As this trend quickens its pace, a solution becomes more important than ever. History has not always favored the teeming urban center. It has been seen as corrupting of the mind, dirty, disease-ridden, and a slew of other things. Which are valid claims, especially, rightfully, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But there’s a valid twenty-first century reevaluation and outlook:

Developing cities will inevitably expand, says [Shlomo Angel, an urban planning professor at New York University and Princeton]. Somewhere between the anarchy that prevails in many today and the utopianism that has often characterized urban planning lies a modest kind of planning that could make a big difference. It requires looking ahead decades, Angel says, and reserving land, before the city grows over it, for parks and a dense grid of public transit corridors. It starts with looking at growing cities in a positive way–not as diseases, but as concentrations of human energy to be organized and tapped. 

So we need to begin thinking about our cities as our saviors, and thinking about it seriously, even if, as I began this cheery post, we also risk the same things that have always been risky about cities: we’re all really close together, sharing buses, subways, hallways, all manner of public spaces. An event like the one in Contagion isn’t impossible, and cities are not the best places to stay if that did occur, as I was brutally reminded during the film. But Hollywood has not convinced me that the argument for cities isn’t worth our investment of time, thought, money, and lifestyle.

If you’re like me, i.e. NOT a nuclear physicist, all the coverage of the quickly-deteriorating nuclear situation in Fukushima has gone a bit over your head. Not that you’re not a compassionate, intelligent person, but man, can those experts on the radio and television talk fast and loose with terms like “partial-meltdown”–which it turns out has no actual definition and is a terrible way to describe anything, especially because it’s probably way milder than an actual meltdown would and could be. Not to mention the other terms that scientists use that I can’t even recall. Words I don’t use a lot.

So what is the deal, and what are the dangers, and what do all the diagnoses really add up to? Those are all really hard for anyone to say right now. But more importantly for my understanding, how does it all work in the first place? How does it function under regular circumstances? I have looked at a few helpful diagrams of nuclear electricity plants, and how they function, which basically looks very confusing even in simple-colored-coded-drawing form. Every one I’ve seen has been a bit overwhelming.

There have also been at least three (by my count according to news via NPR and  Twitter news reports from a couple sources) explosions, which no one has really explained–at least that I had come across. Hydrogen was involved, but it’s been awhile since I studied anything along the lines of nuclear chemistry, or regular chemistry, and all I could remember was that you could potentially have an enormous explosion from hydrogen too. But since no one was saying this, there had to be more to it than I knew or could comprehend.

POPSCI’s article “How Nuclear Reactors Work, and How They Fail” (by Dan Nosowitz) gets all my kudos, for basically explaining in an approachable and even conversational way how the reactors work, whether they have an “off switch” (they do! it’s just not your momma’s off-switch), why and how they do all these double- and triple-back ups for power and cooling, and what a “dreaded meltdown” means–in real terms, like damage and that irksome “partial meltdown” that has been used by Japanese officials to describe the situation thus far.

Definitely read it; it’s the most helpful ten minutes I’ve spent thus far learning about a situation that has lots of people all over the world curious, cautious, and downright worried about the whole issue of nuclear energy. I am a more informed citizen of the world now. But, no, no plans to work further on my nuclear physics.

In case you did not click on the link yet, here’s a taste. Full disclosure: a nuclear meltdown sounds horrifying, even in raw chemical talk. This is the scariest bit of the article. The rest is far milder.

What people mean when they say “meltdown” can refer to several different things, all likely coming after a hydrogen explosion. A “full meltdown” has a more generally accepted definition than, say, a “partial meltdown.” A full meltdown is a worst-case scenario: The zirconium alloy fuel rods and the fuel itself, along with whatever machinery is left in the nuclear core, will melt into a lava-like material known as corium. Corium is deeply nasty stuff, capable of burning right through the concrete containment vessel thanks to its prodigious heat and chemical force, and when all that supercharged nuclear matter gets together, it can actually restart the fission process, except at a totally uncontrollable rate. A breach of the containment vessel could lead to the release of all the awful radioactive junk the containment vessel was built to contain in the first place, which could lead to your basic Chernobyl-style destruction.

In a very significant way, much of the discipline of history focuses on the human story: human relationships, triumphs, failures, innovations, war, spirit, and, occasionally, growth. It becomes quite easy to forget the very scene on which this all takes place; but as it likes to remind us from time to time, nature trumps human power when it wants to. Man wields great machines to change the shape of it, but he cannot invent enough devices to fully manipulate the land as he wants.

Rice cultivation in the Ogeechee River low country

The most striking and significant fact to take away from Stewart’s work on low country history is that there were three main characters in the drama of the low country: the natural landscape, which had been there thousands of years prior and forced its inhabitants to cooperate and adapt, African American slaves, who worked the land to the point that they developed an immensely intimate connection to it, and the white men, who tried in earnest to manipulate and coerce these other players, both of which were in fact much too powerful to ever completely defer to the European plan.

The importance of place in understanding history cannot be diminished; landscape–that is, latitude, weather, soil, water, tide, flora and fauna–is inextricably entangled with every cultural era and social episode in our past. Yet it rarely plays as large a role in the history of a region, beyond a brief geography lesson as a primer. I risk sounding hyperbolic in my description, but it was a profound thought, for many of us in my class, and one that we discussed in earnest earlier tonight. Let us not separate the very material that creates our world from the existence it has allowed us to assemble. Let us begin with the weather, indeed.

Food for thought:

“Since researchers started trying to measure such things in the years after World War II, the percentage of Americans who consider themselves ‘very happy’ with their lives has remained the steady, even though the material standard of living has tripled in the same period. More stuff is not making us happier– but we can’t break out of the cycle that offers more stuff as the only real goal.”

Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and extraordinary writer from Vermont, reported that in his article “A Deeper Shade of Green,” published in National Geographic in August 2006.  After reading his pragmatic and applicable advice and the hard-hitting facts he reports about society and happiness, I decided to read his book Deep Economy, which was a thought-provoking and startling account of the things we are doing to ourselves and our planet, and several ways we can work on repairing the damage. His main thesis is that community is key. While is something of an anti-globalization flag-waver, he doesn’t just ramble about how we are doomed, and how Walmart is ruining the world. Now, he does present the case against Walmart very well, but he also stresses other, smaller things within a community that could create a more reasonable balance between local and international communities.

I have since become more aware of the foods I am putting in my body. McKibben dedicates an entire section of his book to the idea of “eating locally,” and not only presents his theory but attempts it himself, eating foods only produced in and around his state for an entire year. That means no grocery stores, making his own bread, canning his own vegetables and making his own preservatives for the winter season. It meant, for him, eating things that were currently growing in his region at that time, and not going to the local grocery metropolis for strawberries and oranges in February. Admirable as his case is, it would, granted, be quite difficult for us all to apply to the same system.

But on a smaller scale, farmer’s markets and organic foods present healthier choices, and better conditions for everyone involved. Organic foods are made with no additives, which are bad for both you and any animals that were used. Eggs, for example, are much better organic (and also cage-free). Foods found in farmer’s markets also give a huge margin of the profits to the actual farmers, making sure enough of them stay in their business and keep us fed, and also allowing for the eventual return to more localized farming (which is better for you AND the environment, what with less fossil fuel used to transport foods and items that simply taste better and come fresher). Most important for a healthy diet and life, organic and natural foods (i.e. sans the corn syrups, chemicals, and preservatives) simple ensure that you are putting better things into your body. Isn’t that worth it?

I used to be reluctant to believe that organic was anything besides a more-expensive version of what I could buy at Walmart, that it was a trend for elitists. I would make fun of my roommate (in a kind way) for buying cage-free eggs, organic milk and baked beans, and sodas made with pure cane sugar. The fact is though, the eggs come from chickens that received no growth hormones (which are passed to you), your milk will be chemical-free, your beans will not have been sprayed with the heaviest pesticides, and your soda pop will be void of the competitors high-fructose corn syrup.

One thing that I used to use against the case for local and organic food was that it is more expensive, and not visibly worth the difference. But as I have illustrated the more long-term and less outwardly visible benefits, let me report something I learned in McKibben’s book:

“The deepest problem that local-food efforts face, however, is that we’ve gotten used to paying so little for food. It may be expensive in terms of how much oil it requires, and how much greenhouse gas it pours into the atmosphere, and how much tax subsidy it receives, and how much damage it does to local communities, and how many migrant workers it maims, and how much sewage it piles up, and how many miles of highway it requires– but boy, when you pull your cart up to the register, it’s pretty cheap.

“In the 1930s a family might have spent a third of its income on food; middle-class Americans now spend more like a tenth. And food is cheap not just in terms of money, but time. Mostly we eat processed food; cooking is something that happens on the Food Network.”

He goes on to quip about the quality of grocery store lettuce, asking how you might feel after making a trip across country: “A little tired and limp and warm… well, that’s how the lettuce feels.”

I cannot provide every point, example, and answer that McKibben does. All I can do is claim my own conversion to the case for locally grown foods and organic products. I have been cooking much more, using Harry’s Farmer’s Market, and buying all the fresh vegetables and ingredients to make the things I used to make from boxes or frozen items. I avoid processed foods, corn syrups, and chemically altered dairy items. What difference it makes is nearly immeasurable, but the impact in my own life feels great.

I highly recommend McKibben’s book, if you want to learn a little more about some of the practical means of going local and going organic, and also if you want to learn more about some of his awesome proposals for sustainable and community living.