karinoyo

While researching the question of what to use in the kitchen — cork, sealed concrete, vinyl, tile, etc — I kept coming back to cork as a warm comfortable standing surface. (With the added benefit, unlike concrete or tile, that things falling on it wouldn’t chip the floor nor automatically break the object, err, depending on object and trajectory, but hey.)

That said, I’ve been noticing that more and more of the wine we buy either comes with a screw-top — which I hate, because I feel like I’m drinking a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 but with a prettier label, because, hello, screw-top — or that the cork in the bottle is clearly a synthetic. Now, in some ways, I do like the fact that synthetic corks don’t crumble or fall apart if you mess up when you’re corkscrewing them out — but at the same time, it’s… I dunno. Cork just has a scent to it, and screw-tops and synthetics always make me think of that scene in The Muppet Movie when Steve Martin asks Kermit if he’d like to “sniff the cap”. Regardless, I’d considered alternatives to cork (like lineoleum) thanks to hearing friends say that the increase in screw-tops and synthetic corks is because cork is an endangered, must-be-conserved, material.

Then I came across this article from Audubon Magazine, and if there’s anyone out there that I’d consider an authority on conservation issues, it’d be Audubon (and no small part because they don’t seem to get as politically-intense as some other conservation NGOs). The gist of the article is this: that in reducing our consumption of cork, we actually put the cork trees — and the entire ecosystem and economy surrounding them — at risk. It’s a rather intriguing notion, one that I think may go without consideration since many of us have this “to conserve, you must not consume” mindset. But what if that’s not always automatically so?

Laws of one kind or another have protected Portuguese cork oaks since the year 1259. As a result, montado still covers 1.7 million acres here, mostly in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. But it would be a dangerous mistake to assume that abundance today assures the montados’ safety in years to come, conservationists say. The slow-growing cork oaks are the “gold of Portugal,” a tirador told me. They’ve been preserved because they provide an invaluable source of income for the farmers who own them. But 70 percent of cork revenues come from the wine industry; flooring, insulation, and cork’s myriad other uses barely pay their way. And now, increasingly, the wine industry is turning to alternatives to cork.

It works like this: development is encroaching on these long-managed areas (imagine, essentially managed forestation for eight hundred years!) but laws protect these farms because the resources have a value-add to the economy. If the rate of consumption drops, so does the incoming money, and that reduces the local/national interest in protecting the resources — it’s not like these are being treated like national parks. They’re farms; in the United States, for instance, if a farmer grew corn and no one was buying it, we’d say, raise something else, do something else with the land, that’s more economically profitable… right?

But in this case, the farms come with a contingent feature of also being, ecocologically, extremely valuable. It’s almost ironic that to preserve such environments, we must use those environments, simply because money does make things move, and everyone does have to pay bills. if there’s a way to do that — to make money — and at the same time protect/conserve an ecosystem — all the better, right?

It’s a well-written article, and highly informative, and definitely thought-provoking. It makes me wonder what else we may be overlooking that could be approached the same way, or that should be but isn’t. What other resources do we have that, thanks to the economy of consumption, are in turn providing the side-benefit of ecosystem protection?

One that springs to mind is that of ski resorts; my brother & his family live on a skiing mountain, and from what I know of skiers and snowboarders, much of the lure of that winter pasttime is the experience of being “out in the wilderness”. I wonder if skiing would have half the pleasure if you were doing it down a mountain banked by surburban homes and gas stations on either side. It could well be that the ski resort’s existence, and its economic contribution to the locality, create a valid justification for protecting the forests and wild areas that surround so many ski resorts.

I wonder if there’s a way, or an instance or example, in which such consumption-makes-protection could be applied to a city environment, instead? Granted, in any decent-sized urban area, there are green spaces — New York’s Central Park, DC’s Rock Creek — but that’s not quite the same. Those protected spaces continue to exist, I think, because on a fundamental level the economic impact is due to people with money who prefer to live in or near that less-urban environment, while remaining urban. That’s not really a resource of consumption, though, because it’s not resource-consumption that’s creating the income so much as people willing to pay extra to enjoy the conservation half. That’s an internal kind of consume/conserve, a limited sphere, where the ecosystem — in and of itself — does not produce a consumable resource (and I don’t count “making money by charging people to look at it” as a consumable resource).

I’ve always pretty much gone along with the reduced-consumption thought process of conservation, like disliking logging in national parks, or the coal-mining that turned the Appalachians into miles of scarified and eroded hillsides. I grew up spending alternate summers on the Gulf Coast (with the sad observation that much of my childhood is gone, now, thanks to Katrina), and I recall long arguments amongst the adults about how the beds were being decimated by overshrimping. The long-running shrimping families, often Catholic, had an almost stringent calendar regulated by a combination of good sense and an adherence to Catholic holidays that set when you began to shrimp, when you didn’t, and when you took time off. Like the cork industry, there was a sense that both shrimp, and people, required time off to regrow and recharge; the Catholic/xtian holidays (no shrimping on Easter, a week off before the blessing of the fleet, that kind of thing) were a sort of religiously-created, or at least religiously-justified, self-protection against overshrimping.

The advent of immigrants who lacked this external calendar of enforced time off — who, the old-timers admitted, certainly were hard workers if a bit, erm, “over-enthusiastic” — the day-in, day-out, and no time off was destroying the shrimp beds and that meant fewer shrimp for everyone. In turn, the locals had to then shrimp even more to get half what they’d managed previously, and that just wrecked more damage on the ecosystem, and the cycle went on. What to me, as a kid, had seemed somewhat laissez-faire about work — you just take a week off, every year, to repaint your ship and decorate it with flowers and ribbons, and then sail it past a priest who waves his arms and sprinkles salt water or something, that doesn’t seem very productive — does, actually, have a value (outside the traditional community-bonding element). That to consume will protect the ecosystem — of which shrimp are definitely an important part, in the Gulf — but that one must consume intelligently.

Contemplating this question, I find I don’t — ethically or logically — have an issue with logging, or any other resource-use in national parks. I do have a problem with unintelligent resource-gathering, though, and I think that’s the real issue. I’ve seen too much of the Appalachians after strip mines have come through and destroyed the moutainside, eroded the land, caused mudslides, wrecked the air, and left the ecosystem a tattered ruin that takes decades to recover. A lot of corporations don’t take the cork-producer, or the shrimper, mindset of careful consumption; most businesses are in it for the business (of course) and don’t look far enough ahead, aren’t caring about the locale or the environment or their own long-term profits, to see the line that must be drawn. Consume now, certainly, but not so much that there’s nothing to consume a year from now. That’s where — in my opinion — regulation is crucial; a business, left to its own devices, will seek to make a profit, and if there’s no cultural/social force (such as the Catholic calendar and community holidays worked upon the old-timer fishermen) in place to force a business to set/accept limits, then it’s up to the government — local or national — to set those in place.

Tagged: conservation, kitchen, materials, research