This post will be a short one, a kind of continuation of last week’s post, in which I suggested that the government could give companies a good, swift kick in the pants and get them to green their operations.

Then I was brutally beaten down by the free marketers!

Seriously, I think what Sun Microsystems in Broomfield, Colorado (where I live), has done with its new datacenter is a shining example to other companies elsewhere.

And I think I didn’t express myself quite clearly enough last week. I didn’t really mean the government should “[force] companies to buy from recyclers.” I meant the government should set targets for the companies (say, by 2010, 10% of materials or furnishings in each new Hilton Hotel should come from recycled products) and leave Hilton to figure out the details.

I see business as being inherently conservative. I don’t think most companies will go green easily. It’s just too easy to stay with the status quo (and do a little greenwashing on the side).

Am I being unjust to business? Can you give me examples of other businesses that don’t need to be kicked in the pants?

How do we get to “an economy that restores”?

As a continuation of my topic from last week, about the value of recycled products, this week I’m considering the slump in prices for recyclables and how to remedy it.

Via Eco-Cycle’s newsletter, I learned that this Boulder County nonprofit will see its revenues drop by half in 2009. But some recycling authorities are seeing prices drop by 90 percent, so a 50 percent drop seems, well, good. Or at least survivable.

It’s not just happening in the United States. The UK is feeling the pain too. The reason? The enormous markets for recyclables that existed in China have contracted, because China has cut back on manufacturing in response to global economic problems.

So recycling organizations are stockpiling glass, plastic, and aluminum and hoping the markets rebound. And Cobb County recently decided to compost cardboard rather than try to sell it for almost nothing.

What would be a way to drive prices back up?

Last week I said I’d like to see more utilitarian products made from recycled materials.

Suppose that a hotel chain like Hilton Hotels, where I spent the last two weeks, decided (or was required) to build with recycled materials wherever possible. Suppose 50 percent of the construction materials in a Hilton Hotel had to be made from recycled plastic or glass or metal.

Imagine the demand Hilton Hotels could create for used doors (or doors made from recycled plastic, like Trex decking).

Think it’s not possible? Look at this page from the American Chemistry Council. Or go back to last week’s post and look at the list there.

A wide array of products are made from recycled materials nowadays, and it wouldn’t be that difficult to create new products. All that’s required is a market.

If the U.S. government laid down a few rules about this, it could spur the growth of huge new markets, create a lot of jobs, and save energy and resources in the process.

I would prefer, actually, that Hilton Hotels make this decision by itself, but I just don’t think the private sector has the motivation to move quickly in this area. I think prodding is needed.

How do we get to “an economy that restores”?

When I imagined this post, I was hoping I could give y’all the market value of recycled products, as in “Recycled products rake in $32 billion a year” (the approximate contribution to U.S. retail sales of birding, the last time I checked). But I didn’t find any information like that on the Internet. There are plenty of sites devoted to selling various products made from recycled materials (here and here) or to listing the benefits of recycling, but nothing solid about the revenues these products earn.

Probably one of the first things made from recycled materials was paper, whether newsprint or office paper. And then glass. And then perhaps cotton.

In the past year, I’ve bought a Christmas ornament (recycled paper and metal, from Momentum in Boulder), plastic edging for my lawn (Ace Hardware), a hat (recycled fabrics, from REI), printer paper, a notebook (Talulah Jones, Denver, though I think the notebook was made in Canada), a wallet (recycled bike tires, from Ahimsa Footwear, Denver), and coffee from Starbucks (the cups and holders are made from some small percentage of recycled paper). That’s all I can remember off the top of my head.

What I see most of these days is artsy-fartsy stuff made from recycled materials, like the jewelry and artworks made with acupuncture needles that I found at Bixa in Denver. I enjoy the way recycled materials seem to inspire creativity in the artists who use them, but I’d like to see more utilitarian items made from recycled materials. For example, in Europe, they’re going for cars. The EU wants 85 percent of cars recycled by 2015.

In California, you can buy auto parts incorporating recyclables. And, of course, there is always the junkyard.

Just imagine what could happen if the United States decided to give companies economic incentives to develop products incorporating recycled materials, or just to buy them. It would probably start slowly (the companies buying them might even have to recruit people to design the products), but I can see it becoming a huge thing.

How do we get to “an economy that restores”?

Go over to the Woohoo Report and read this post about Kiva.

I think this kind of collaboration may be the future of restoration. Why? Because it restores human capital—or creates some where there was none—and it’s done by ordinary people lending and borrowing. It doesn’t require too much government intervention.

I give a little bit of money to charity. But this way I could give and give again. I could interact with different people, maybe even go meet them someday.

And while you’re there, give some money to those Central American butchers.

***

I also like the idea behind InvestBX, a local stock exchange in England. Or, I guess I should say, a “local-virtual stock exchange.”

Local-virtual is a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?

I can’t remember where I read about InvestBX, but the article said there used to be lots of local stock exchanges. According to the article, the purpose of InvestBX “is to help small to medium businesses raise capital for growth, in exchange for shares.”

(Is there a difference between a stock market and a stock exchange? If so, would someone please explain it to me?)

How do we move restoration into the private sector, creating “an economy that restores”?

I felt the need for a little levity today, right before Christmas, what with my aunt dying on December 9 and my mother’s death-day coming up on December 21. In fact, I thought I was going to be depressed about that all month, even though it’s been sixteen years since she died. I thought the fog was going to descend, but so far it’s been light.

So I bring you Mr. Ellie Pooh.

Otherwise known as “recycled elephant poo paper products.”

Now I know this post is titled “Restoration Nation,” not “Sewage Nation” or some such. But with more people in the world bumping up more often against fewer animals (at least, fewer animals that require a lot of space to roam), I believe we must get creative.

Making elephant dung into paper was a response to the increasing number of unpleasant interactions between farmers and elephants in Sri Lanka. The little brochure I found says, “Since 1950, it is likely that more than 4,000 elephants have been destroyed as a direct consequence of the conflict between humans and elephants.”

My first reaction was, 4,000 elephants in 58 years? Is that a lot? That’s 69 elephants killed by farmers every year. How many elephants would die naturally? I don’t know the answer to the last question, but I do know that elephants take a while to get to the reproductive stage. So taking 69 potential parents out of the gene pool every year is probably not a good thing.

So how is all this a form of restoration?

1. It’s treating elephants as an economic resource. Right now the animal is an economic liability for farmers.
2. Something is being sold—paper—though as far as I can tell, it’s being sold only in North America, not in Sri Lanka. The farmers in Sri Lanka get a cut, but I couldn’t tell if they go out and collect the poo, and I don’t think they are the ones making it into paper. So it sounds like the paper is made—somewhere—and the farmers get money and are told that the source of that money is paper made from elephant poo.

In short, Mr. Ellie Pooh’s website needs a little work.

But hey, the paper is acid-free.

In the first post about Restoration Nation, I asked, “How can we move restoration into the private sector?”

Today, as part IV of my Farmer in Chief series (considering Michael Pollan’s article “Farmer in Chief”), I give you the Land Institute, a nonprofit research and education organization in Salina, Kansas.

Pollan mentions the Land Institute in his article and suggest the government back research to “perennialize” agriculture, as he puts it. I like the way the Land Institute website puts it: “Our purpose is to develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops.”

They call what they’re researching Natural Systems Agriculture, and they’ve been at it for 20 years. Pollan says it is “probably a 50-year project.”

When I think of my tiny plot of buffalograss (see Farmer in Chief III), which I doubt will ever produce much that is edible or marketable, and then I think about the Land Institute’s goals, I feel both excitement and frustration. What they’re doing is very forward-thinking, but after 20 years of research and publishing in scientific journals, they’ve just reached the point at which they’re ready to set up a research institute.

“The tendency of all natural ecosystems is to increase their ecological wealth. For instance, all prairie, left alone, recycles materials, sponsors its own fertility, runs on contemporary sunlight, and increases biodiversity. Agricultural systems tend otherwise. They erode and degrade ecological capital as they provide for human needs. We call this the ‘problem of agriculture, introduced when our ancestors made the transition to agriculture millennia ago.’ Our research results suggest that it is now possible, over the next quarter century, to solve this 10,000-year-old problem.” (From the Land Institute’s History page)

Might as well have big dreams. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Check out their website, and let me know what you think. In his article, Pollan mentions Argentina, where “farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer.” And I think one could find many other examples from around the world in which farmers strive to balance production with natural capital. But do those farming methods lead to “conservation as a consequence of agricultural production”? That’s what the Land Institute’s History page says their methods will produce.

***

As I noted last week, I’m reading The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Here is a quote I like from “Of the Origin and Use of Money.”

“Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.”

In the first post about Restoration Nation, I asked, “How can we move restoration into the private sector?”

Today, as part III of my Farmer in Chief series (considering Michael Pollan’s article “Farmer in Chief”), I was wondering whether turning parts of a suburban yard into a small farm qualify as the kind of restoration I’m considering here. Certainly, a vegetable garden will promote diversity more than a suburban lawn treated with chemical fertilizers and herbicides. The chemicals tend to diminish biodiversity by killing beneficial as well as harmful insects. (Though I certainly do appreciate Roundup when I’m trying to get rid of Canada thistle and field bindweed.) But even a conventional garden treated with herbicides and pesticides should have more diversity than a lawn, simply because there are more kinds of plants.

But is a small garden more of a restoration than the part of my yard I’ve seeded in buffalograss, for instance? That grass is native to the Denver area. My little buffalograss 1/8 acre (or however big it is) has a lot of weeds, but it also has some native plants appearing in it, like curly cup gum weed. I was pleased to see that; it made me feel I’d encouraged a little bit of the native community to come back.

Perhaps, as this book indicates, if you garden with dual goals (to produce food and to improve habitat for wildlife), putting in a garden can be called restoration.

But it isn’t necessarily a private sector activity until you’ve actually sold some of the food to someone. If you’re just giving food to your neighbors, that’s more of a gift economy or barter economy. It’s certainly useful for building relationships or even for helping out people who have trouble putting food on their tables, but I don’t see it as commerce. Is that too narrow-minded?

And if you’re doing what I’m doing with my buffalograss restoration area, I don’t see how that’s “an economy that restores” at all.

Perhaps “an economy that restores” will have at least two tiers: one in which some money can actually be made through restoration, and one in which restoration is done just because it’s good to get rid of noxious weeds, for instance. The first would have to pay for much of the second.

Well, I never thought Restoration Nation would be easy to figure out. I do hope, however, that someday soon I’ll feel as if I’ve got onto a path that leads toward “an economy that restores.”

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Late in his article “Farmer in Chief,” Michael Pollan repeats the chestnut that the average American farmer is 55 years old.

Sounds like American farmers are just a couple of decades from becoming extinct, doesn’t it?

But maybe it’s not quite as bad as it sounds.

This article, from the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, indicates that the census of farmers may underestimate their numbers because only one “operator” is counted per farm, and that is usually the oldest person. The article lists several reasons why farmers are older than other types of workers in the labor force.

What may be more troubling is the small percentage of farmers under the age of 35: 8 percent in 1997. That doesn’t seem like enough of a base on which to build a viable future farming community. Even though the article quotes more favorable Department of Labor stats about farming, there are definitely fewer young people going into farming.

I’m going to assert baldly here that getting more people to take up farming would be a good thing. The question is, how can that be achieved?

I think the first step is to address the issue of land. I was reading somewhere last week that even as the housing market has tanked, the price of farmland has risen. If that is the case, then it would be difficult for a young farmer to purchase land.

Would a twenty-first-century Homestead Act be an appropriate response?

Of course, that’s government intervention, and the idea behind Restoration Nation is to turn restoration into some kind of profit-making activity. So how can Americans encourage more people to take up farming if land is out of reach for beginning farmers?

Here’s one answer: SPIN farming.

SPIN farming stands for “Small Plot Intensive” farming. This website claims that people doing SPIN farming can make $50,000/year on farms under an acre in size. Sound incredible? Well, maybe those numbers are suspect. I know some farmers who told me once they weren’t so sure that that kind of income is as easy to reach as the website says. But SPIN farming would be an easier way to get into farming than trying to buy a bunch of land.

Another idea is to incorporate gardens into our lives in new (old?) and unusual ways. For example, we could add gardens to rooftops, which would provide food and help reduce cities’ heat island effect (that would likely require some rezoning, however). Pollan suggests converting golf courses to farms, but somehow I can’t see the people living around golf courses going for that.

Here’s Boulder County Going Local’s assessment of the county’s ability to feed its residents. And here’s a page for Transition Colorado. I’m not sure how these groups are related, if indeed they are.

What do you think? Would you be willing to plant a large garden? Would you be willing to cobble together a 1-acre farm by combining plots from your yard and your neighbors’ yards?

(To find Michael Pollan’s article, search for “Farmer in Chief.” The original article was published in the New York Times.)

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Ever heard of Michael Pollan? He’s probably best known for the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I notice he has a couple of plant/gardening books on Amazon. Look’s like he right up my alley.

The other day I came across his article “Farmer in Chief,” directed to President-Elect Barack Obama. I’m going to write about it on Fridays for a while, not just because it was actually 12 pages long when I printed it out, but because there are so many points in it to explore that seem to express the ideas of Restoration Nation.

(The best way to find the article is to search for “Farmer in Chief.” The article was originally published in the New York Times, but at some point they’ll start charging for it.)

In my first Restoration Nation post, I asked this question: How do we move restoration into the private sector without “privatizing” it? That is, without turning it into an activity that enriches the few?

In a way, American agriculture has been “privatized” as I define it: there are fewer people farming now than at the turn of the twentieth century, and the number of farms has decreased as they have become larger. But according to Pollan, all that was a result of government subsidies for monocropping, for converting the munitions industry into a fertilizer/herbicides/pesticides industry after World War II, and for making agriculture dependent on fossil fuels.

I can understand why: the United States had just begun to recover from a Depression and had won a war, and the government wanted prosperity to continue, especially for the soldiers returning home. And food was cheap when it was produced on farms that emphasized one crop and supported it with fertilizer and other chemical products.

So it would be incorrect to say that the process of making agriculture in the United States “industrial” was a process that enriched the few. There are gigantic food corporations, yes, but the people as a whole benefited from cheap food—at least in their wallets.

One of Pollan’s first conclusions is that cheap food has made us sick.

“Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. . . . There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount—from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. . . . You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.”

I’ll stop there for today. I was planning to talk about “restoring” agriculture to be more regional, but I see now it’s going to take me a while to get there.

Today for Restoration Nation, I decided to look online for some information about basic economics. I found this course online and read the first lecture, “Ten Principles of Economics.”

Principle #6: Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity.

Adam Smith made the observation that households and firms interacting in markets act as if guided by an “invisible hand.”

Because households and firms look at prices when deciding what to buy and sell, they unknowingly take into account the social costs of their actions.

As a result, prices guide decision makers to reach outcomes that tend to maximize the welfare of society as a whole.

I see some problems with these statements, which I’ll elaborate on below.

After I got my hair cut in the Uptown Denver neighborhood the other day, I sat on a bench and took notes. Across the street two men were cleaning up the leaves that covered the sidewalks and curbs. One of them wore a mask and was pushing what looked like a large vacuum cleaner.

Later that afternoon, I was about to leave D Bar Desserts when the waitress knocked over a glass. The owner came over with a broom and dustpan and carefully cleaned up the shards of glass.

In what different ways do these two methods of cleanup “organize economic activity”?

In the first case, what’s being provided is a service, which is probably paid for as part of rent or homeowner’s association dues.

The goal is to do it in the most efficient way possible, hence the massive leaf-sucking machines.

The second is part of the day-to-day efforts of running a restaurant. Because that particular restaurant is so small, the owner is more likely to come out and clean up a mess. Maybe that restaurant doesn’t even use a vacuum to clean up—maybe it just uses mops and brooms. I’ve never worked in the restaurant business, so I don’t know.

It seems to me that I witnessed economic activity that afternoon, but in the case of the leaf cleaners it is indirect. It’s more direct in the case of the restaurant. I was impressed that the staff worked so well together. It made me want to go back.

The first activity is negative—you notice it only when it is neglected. The second activity is positive.

I want to take this discussion in a certain direction. I want to say that for the purposes of Restoration Nation, brooms are better than vacuum cleaners.

But I don’t know how to get there from here.

I also don’t think the quote listed above accurately captures the “social costs” of using motorized equipment to clean up leaves. For example, making the vacuums requires resources (plastics, metals) and energy, and powering them requires more energy. A broom, in contrast, might be made of wood, or of leftover materials, such as wood chips or wood dust. The energy is human, which is powered by food.

Of course, the vacuums could also be made of recycled materials. Even the fuel could be (if the vacuums used biodiesel).

If we got rid of the vacuums, and made the brooms from something we would otherwise throw away, would we save enough “money” (in the form of fuel costs and resource costs) to employ enough people to get the job done as quickly with the brooms?

I believe that simplicity reduces social costs.

But can simplicity get us to Restoration Nation?

Feel free to comment on the “logic” of this post. I don’t think it’s very logical. It’s stuck between my ignorance of economics and my desire for a certain kind of society.

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For years now, I’ve had this idea in the back of my head that I thought could be world-changing, or at least nation-changing: Restoration Nation.

I even made a one-page website about it, just to hold the idea, here.

The tagline is “An Economy That Restores.”

If we are ever going to move away from an economy based on consumption, we need something inspiring to replace it.

So why not restoration, broadly conceived?

The kind of restoration I’ve been doing as a volunteer (here), that returns too-much-loved public lands to something closer to their natural state (and here on an international level).

But also restoration of rivers, farmland, ranchland, brownfields, parking lots, crumbling factories, landfills, dying first-ring suburbs, run-down schools…the list is endless.

And so is the process of answering these questions: How do we base on economy on restoration? What would that transition require?

Right now, most restoration is funded by governments. Private-sector environmental restoration companies do exist, but I would bet most of their money comes from the government (in other words, from you and me).

Here’s what I want to discover: How do we move restoration into the private sector without “privatizing” it? That is, without turning it into an activity that enriches the few?

On Fridays, I’ll post about my efforts to answer the questions I asked today.

I’d appreciate any advice you have on where to find answers to these questions. I have never studied economics, so good websites about basic economic theory might be useful too.