Europe is ahead of us, you could say. Many areas there were fairly densely
populated, experiencing the good and bad of economic, social and environmental
hustle and bustle, before the Mayflower reached Plymouth Rock, and long before
native peoples watched the first prairie schooners bounce into Oregon. Is Europe
a preview of where we may be heading?
Recently I spent three weeks in western Europe. I was concerned with agricultural
and forestry matters, but I had opportunities to see how
Europeans live, including passing through a German city that has won awards
for sustainability.
The following is not meant to carefully document points about sustainability.
It is based on observations I put in a green and brown spiral notebook, a makeshift
diary:
The British government’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology is near Banchory
in east-central Scotland, between the North Sea and the Grampian Mountains.
There Allan Watts, who has studied insect pests of forests for most of his career,
has refocused. One of the projects he is coordinating is called BioForum.
BioForum is funded through the European Union, the organization overseeing the
economic unification of western European countries. The project is an ongoing
conversation through electronic mail and the World Wide Web. It pairs scientists
from various disciplines with land managers like farmers and foresters. The
goal, Watts told me, is to find practices good for nature and natural resource-based
industries.
Leaving the center after talking with Watts, I noticed remnants of a recent
snow in the surrounding forests of birch, scotch pine and larch trees. It was
cold. Warming up in the shower at the house where I’d rented a room sounded
good.
The shower was small and the water pressure was low compared to back in Oregon.
Water was heated on demand, rather than stored that way, so I had to flip a
switch to get hot water.
Figuring out the set-up seemed intimidating, but it didn’t take long and
the shower worked fine. Later I wondered how much water and energy I’d
saved compared to showering at home.
A few days later I visited Ron Steenblik, across the English Channel in a white,
governmental-looking building. On the walk there, I spotted a poodle swaggering
down the street and heard the "au revoirs" of children getting out
of school. The building is in southwest Paris. It is the headquarters of the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), made up of countries
around the globe, including the United States.
Steenblik, an American, is a senior policy analyst with the OECD. He was working
on a 400-page report about "sustainable development."
Europe may be ahead of the United States in areas such as city planning, mass
transportation and land management concepts like multiple-use "living parks"
in France, he told me, but not in sorting out sustainability issues linked to
natural resource industries like agriculture.
In many European countries, he explained, 50 years of subsidies to help such
industries has created a confusing web of economic policies with far-reaching
implications for the environment and for social and economic stability.
"There are some Europeans—including academics and members of environmental
NGOs (non-governmental organizations)," said Steenblik, "who like
to characterize farming in the United States and in other food-exporting nations
as huge monocultures, devoid of people and wildlife. European agriculture, in
their eyes, is typified by ‘boutique’ (small-scale), environmentally
friendly farms oriented to local markets.
"The reality is that the European Union is also a major exporter—ask
an African who has had to compete with subsidized European beef—and many
of its farms are as industrial as those in the United States. The main difference
is that average farm sizes in Europe are smaller (therefore often more input-intensive),
and they don’t have a huge region dominated by prairie."
When I left the white building, it was hard to tell if the leaden sky looked
that way because of the weather or pollution. People were darting into an entryway
for Paris’s underground transit system. There were lots of motorbikes and
buses, and the cars seemed tiny compared to cars back home in Oregon (not surprising
in a place where gasoline costs about $5 a gallon).
A few hours by train north of Paris is the world’s most populated country
per square mile. The Netherlands has more than 15 million people living in an
area not much bigger than Harney County, Ore. (population 7,609). Holland is
the home of intensive agriculture, including crops like tomatoes and flowers
grown in glass houses totally cut off from the outside environment.
I visited Arend and Ineke Voortman, who live in a red brick farmhouse on the
outskirts of Ruurlo, a village about 90 minutes by train southeast of Amsterdam
near the German border. It’s a dairy-farming area.
Ineke is a retired teacher and a leader in the local arts community. Arend,
for many years a member of the lower house of Holland’s two-chambered government,
is the editor of a magazine that covers agricultural policies. He grew up near
Ruurlo.
Conversation over dinner revealed that Arend, a scholarly man of wit and humor,
was disturbed by a lack of appreciation in urban areas for the importance of
agriculture to his country’s economy, culture and history. I’d heard
similar comments from farmers and ranchers in Oregon.
The Voortmans kept their home cold by my standards. I anticipated a shivery
night under the comforter in my second-story bedroom, but the comforter kept
me toasty. I was sleeping when the alarm rang. After a breakfast that included
locally produced foods, Ineke showed me the winter vegetables in her garden.
My next stop was Erlangen, Germany, a city of about 100,000 near the much larger
city of Nuremburg in northern Bavaria. Call me weird, but on the way I thought
about the hot air hand dryers that seem to be in pretty much all the public
bathrooms of Europe. If you’re in a hurry, your hands don’t get dry.
That hadn’t caused any real problems, as far as I could remember. Was I
getting used to them?
In Erlangen I checked into the modest Hotel Luise. The room was small but comfortable.
There was a card on a stand by the bed:
"Your toilet is flushed with rainwater," it said. "Your shower
is heated by solar energy. Be pleasantly surprised by our breakfast buffet which
provides a blend of local foods including many organic food varieties. Our wallpaper
consists of recycled paper and beeswax. You can be sure that your room is cleaned
in an environmentally friendly manner." The list went on.
Early the next morning I met Dietmar Hahlweg,
Erlangen’s mayor for 24 years. Though retired, he’s active in civic
affairs and showed me why the city has received international recognition for
sustainable development and protecting the environment.
Hahlweg was proud of the forests that surround the city, green spaces within
the city, bicycle paths estimated to carry about 30 percent of Erlangen’s
residential traffic, and the residential and commercial rebirth of an historic
section of downtown.
Also, he was proud of the planning workshops and the architectural competition—the
public process—that led to the recycling of a U.S. army base shut down
in 1994, rather than a tear-it-down-and-start-over process.
Barracks became low-income apartments and a kindergarten, a tank training area
became a children’s playground, the commissary became a shopping center,
the officer’s club a restaurant, the military church a high-tech facility,
administrative offices became townhouses, and about a third of the base became
a natural area.
"The goal was to have a mixture of working, living and recreating,"
said Hahlweg. "You have to have a vision in order to take advantage of
opportunities."
Leaving Germany, I snaked back west into France, traveled south to the ocean,
then east again. After almost three weeks winding from Scotland to England,
France, The Netherlands, Germany and back to France I found in a remote coastal
area of northwestern Italy what struck me as the most curious sight I’d
seen:
Generations from toddlers to great-grandparents working and living together
happily, it appeared, in villages clinging to a sheer southern edge of the continent.
The villages had been there for centuries. Besides a few tourist shops, businesses
seemed geared mostly to the necessities of life. There were bank machines and
cell phones, but people still tended vegetables, grapes and olives by hand on
narrow terraces crisscrossing slopes so steep it made me wonder if we could
farm on Mount Hood.
Is this what sustainability looks like, I wondered? Why hasn’t it all fallen
into the Mediterranean? How much longer will it last?