Whatever Happened to Now?

February 4, 2007
Whatever Happened to Now?
By GUY TREBAY

When did today become such an impossible idea? What cabal was put in place to decide that the most interesting way to make culture relevant — or the fashionable part of it at least — would be to constantly dredge up the recycled past or, even sadder, the “future.” By this I am referring not to the actual fact of tomorrow (assuming it is a fact). I mean that dust-covered, capital-F version retailed by prognosticating fantasists since Jules Verne.

Futurism was so rampant at the spring collections shown in Paris and Milan last fall that you might have thought everyone was planning to bypass 2007 altogether and head straight for 2525. It was futurism of a particular sort, the B-movie kind. There were bubbly-beaded dresses at Lanvin that seemed to allude to molecular division. There were sequined tubes at Dolce & Gabbana that would have been just the thing for a fembot to pack on Zsa Zsa Gabor’s epochal 1958 trip to Venus (“The Female Planet!” as the tag line called it) in “The Queen of Outer Space.” There were designers who showed boiler suits or shiny stuff that looked like armor or else like panels from a solar desalination plant.

But where the heady perfume of jet fuel and nylon grew strongest was at Balenciaga, the show that inspired more excited noise that week than any other. The future that Nicolas Ghesquière, the Balenciaga designer, put forth was taken up by the fashion pack with such fervor that you would have thought he had single-handedly revitalized a business that has seemed in danger of running out of ways to mimic the sartorial habits of Sofia Coppola. Maybe he had.

It did not trouble many, when the collection was shown, that Ghesquière’s futurism could be easily traced to a few camp cinematic artifacts of the 1980s or that quite a lot of it resembled stuff from the closet of C-3PO. People seemed relieved to encounter a designer whose ideas derived from a past that was, let’s say, vaguely recent — or at least way closer to our own time than to the era of Edward VII. There were two camps clearly doing battle over the way women will look this spring during that week in Paris — the light-saber futurists versus the silk-rosette romantics. Most prominent among the latter was Marc Jacobs, whose often-noted gritty downtown street style has been burnished into something flossier and more Gallic since he moved to Paris. But even the Japanese designer Junya Watanabe found a way to pay homage to Marie Antoinette, everyone’s favorite historical cupcake, albeit in a typically androgynous way.

It was Alexander McQueen, however, who gave romanticism its most aggressive spin, presenting gorgeously severe corset dresses that had tiny wasp waists, hobble skirts and also trains and bustles. Some of the models’ hips had even been padded to the point where you had to wonder how a woman dressed that way might manage to wedge through a turnstile. But what a funny notion. Women don’t wear this stuff to work, of course. Everybody knows that. McQueen’s designs were fantasias, mainly, idealizations, and yet a question continually nagged at this particular viewer as the shows wore on: Of what?

Fashion holds no monopoly at this point on a general cultural unease with the present. Nor is fashion the only one of the fine or applied arts with a tendency to solve strategic problems by taking a stroll down memory lane. But unlike huge chunks of the professional music and art worlds, or the countless millions of amateurs playfully using cyberspace to torque art and music and narrative into novel forms, fashion feels behind the curve. It has gotten clunky. It is stuck in a reference loop. How “modern,” after all, can a collection that draws its inspiration from “Tron” be?

To a certain extent the problem may be a practical one, as the former Gucci designer Tom Ford once pointed out. There are the formal constraints of the object itself, he said, whether it is a dress or a suit or a coat or a hat. There is the coded history of costume and not-altogether-welcome back stories to deal with, extending more or less unchanged, as the art historian Anne Hollander has often said of the suit, two centuries or more. And there is the fundamental fact of the human body, not, as Ford is also fond of asserting, a very beautiful design. A lot of animals have more graceful anatomies than we do, Ford has also said. A lot tend to be better dressed. Yet, as the designer Miuccia Prada pronounced recently, during an impassioned conversation about the meanings of the metastasizing cultural contagion that fashion has become, the banality of much contemporary design starts from some deep and truly contemporary misunderstandings.

“People are losing the human dimension of fashion,” Prada said. (People are losing the human dimension of most everything.) “I don’t want to sound pretentious,” she added, “but they are forgetting the importance of adornment and clothing, which is profound. They forget that even when people don’t have anything, a way to express themselves is with their bodies and their clothing.”

Is this the place to point out that far from preening ourselves lovingly, with a kind of Biblical forgiveness, our body anxieties are now pitched so high that they emit a terrible, strange whine? Or they would were people still able to mobilize faces paralyzed by Botox or stiffened into alien doll shapes by sutures and Restylane. That the nip-and-tuck culture is symptomatic of some troubling social pathology can hardly be called a secret. The wonder, though, is why you hear so little about the breakdown of futurism’s great promise, that in technology lies the true path.

It might be straining the point to say so, but fashion, too, seems to have gotten caught up in the shortcomings of technology. It is seductive to romanticize the future as it was supposed to turn out, the way Ghesquière did: people wearing articulated armor suggestive of intergalactic samurai, happy chic robot slaves that, in the “Jetsons” scenario of your childhood, cooked and cleaned and zipped around doing the vacuuming on little wheels.

In that charming vision of what lies ahead, the notion still held that it was people who would tell machines what to do and not the other way around. Humans would give the voice prompts. That isn’t precisely how it turned out. Who, after all, has not had the experience of having to distort diction and talk like a robot in order to become intelligible to a computer remote?

These overall cultural jitters seemed to be at least partly what Hussein Chalayan, the designer inevitably referred to as fashion’s resident intellectual, was referencing at his show, where a large numberless clock that spun out of time sat at the head of the runway. Models paraded onto a stage and then stood stock still in ethereal classical frocks that, one by one, mechanically morphed or peeled apart or flew up like curtains or lifted away from the models’ bodies altogether. Chalayan’s particular brand of technological wizardry was poetic in the setting (an arena) and charmingly clunky (“smart” fabrics were used as well as microprocessor technology, not so different from the kind that pilots toy boats on ponds). But it was also weirdly disquieting, and the reason was that, as a finale, a young woman was sent out and made to stand as a remote control stripped off her clothes and left her naked onstage. Cupping her sex with her hands, the woman stood there for what felt like some very long minutes, trembling, vulnerable, dehumanized.

“What has happened is that we are all consuming so relentlessly that we are losing sight of basic human values,” the designer Vivienne Westwood remarked last month in Milan, where she was showing her new fall men’s-wear collection, oddly enough titled Peep Show. Westwood was talking in a general way about the image glut and the way consumers have grown mentally fat from ingesting such a constant stream of images that they have ceded, or even lost, the ability to do anything other than react. The cultural effronteries Westwood built her career on, in the days when she and Malcolm McLaren more or less invented the look of punk, have no contemporary analogy. The culture is passive, she said. The visual arts are dominated by pastiche. The context of no context, an idea that George W. S. Trow wrote about in 1980, anticipated with surprising precision the state in which we find ourselves now.

“My own definition of culture is the cultivation and export of humanity through art,” said Westwood, aware that the view she was voicing might seem quaint to those who prefer a certain coolness in their cultural engagement. How many other designers, after all, would go on record proclaiming the innocence of the American Indian movement leader Leonard Peltier at a fashion show. (Actually, one: Anna Sui printed a line supporting Peltier in the program of one of her shows, right after the credits for makeup artists and models.) “If we are not careful,” Westwood said, “we won’t know how to see the world in a human way anymore.”

In other words, we may be so caught up in the solipsism of consuming and in the virtual that we miss the now altogether. Long Nguyen, the Vietnamese-born editor of the cult fashion magazine Flaunt, said as much recently in Milan. “Most designers have lost the now completely,” Nguyen added. “The gap is getting further and further between what designers are putting out, what they’re doing and how people are actually living and what they wear,” he said. Designers, Nguyen added, understating the case perhaps, “seem to have a different vision of how to live life and what to live life for.”

Not only that, a number of them (or the entities that employ them) seem to be moving aggressively away from the limiting physical dimensions of real life to produce “collections” like the one that is being promoted by the British label Boudicca, elements of which exist only online, or the Dior line called High Jewelry, which made its debut last month on the island Belladone, a Second Life destination in cyberspace. If there was a single buzz word being used to describe designers’ offerings during the Milanese men’s shows, which offer clothes for next fall, the word was “futurism.” It was same sort of backward futurism that you could have seen just a few months earlier at the women’s shows for spring.

And if there was a unifying sense during a week in which an awful lot of the stuff those self-same designers put out resembled uniforms designed for male slaves in an Ed Wood schlockfest, it was of stubbornly willed isolation from what some of us think of as current affairs.

If you don’t count the momentary blip that Corporate Social Responsibility made on fashion’s screen, there is not much around to suggest a new climate of engagement. At the fashion shows in Milan, everyone seemed so mesmerized by the image in the cultural rearview or else the shimmering demands of their BlackBerry screens (and aren’t most messages received on these P.D.A.’s basically about the fact of their own occurrence?) that you would hardly imagine that there existed a world outside.

Will this have changed by the time the fashion migration settles in New York this week to appraise the fall 2007 season — a heel-clacking herd of chic wild beasts descending on the Bryant Park tents? I myself tend to doubt it, but there are those in the business who think otherwise. “I sound like an activist, but I truly believe that there’s the beginning of an awakening going on in the business,” said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, “a feeling that we’ve all lost our values a bit, and we need to start operating with more consciousness.”

Barneys, to that end, plans to inaugurate a line of “organic” clothing with the denim designer Rogan and to establish some new rules of engagement for designers who want to sign on to the company’s enlightened goals, perhaps as a way of enabling us to dress for the future by helping to ensure that there may actually be one. Fashion, Gilhart added, has allowed itself to become so besotted with image abstractions that people have forgotten about “the basic political issues of consuming: who made this, under what circumstances, of what materials? I’m not saying some huge shift in consciousness will be everywhere. But I can definitely feel a shift.”

Occupationally, Gilhart is an early adopter, of course. She was quick to get on board when Ghesquière’s futurist spaceship hovered into view in Paris. Recently, her focus has tightened, as she adjusts to what she calls a “whole level of consciousness I see coming into the industry.” If it seems wishful, not to say at some level delusional, when Gilhart talks about linking fashion to global politics, the shift in direction at least makes a welcome detour from intergalactic travel in someone’s remakes of space tunics by Pierre Cardin.

Why not, after all, try the present? “One thing that I hate is selling dreams,” Miuccia Prada said one day when we met during a trip she had made to New York. “If you really want beauty in your life, do something with your ideas, but in a real way. Don’t hide in some luxury fantasy, some idea of fashion. Live with some sense that there is a larger world around.”

Halfway Humanity

May 6, 2007
On Language
Halfway Humanity
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

“In your discussion of the term age-appropriate,” writes Prof. Erik Smith of Concordia University, Montreal, “you identified Harrison Ford as ‘middle-aged.’ Mr. Ford is 64. If he were literally middle-aged, then he could expect to live to 128. By describing themselves as middle-aged, are not those in their 60s and even 70s guilty of some rather overoptimistic math?”

This was one splash in the responsive deluge that followed my mild observation that it was “age-appropriate” for a middle-aged actor like Ford to play opposite a female actor (formerly “actress”) of about 35 or 40. “That may be age-appropriate for Hollywood,” Hank Walker e-snorted, “but around here that age gap only shows up in second-marriage husbands with first-marriage wives.” J. R. Taylor of Washington offers good advice: “It may be time for On Language to address the parallel to academic ‘grade inflation’ that now infests the language of aging.”

O.K.: thinking linguistically and not statistically, how old is middle age? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “between young adulthood and old age, now usually regarded as between about 45 and 60.” Other lexicographers stretch the period down to 40, which — if you take middle as the halfway point of life — presumes we think we’ll live to 100. Longevity trends suggest that happy day is on its way, but we’re not there yet.

The 40th year, however, keeps popping up as the start of life’s transition from youth to age. “Life Begins at Forty” was Walter Pitkin’s 1932 book, and the upbeat phrase remains part of the language no matter how old the population gets. At the same time, that number has long been a reminder of realism: in an 1808 letter to his consort, the Empress Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte reported: “I have been to a ball at Weimar. The Emperor Alexander dances, but I don’t.” Then he added this reverberating subjective truth: “Forty is forty.”

Set aside all the individualistic assertions about being only as old as you feel and accept that to most people, the meaning of middle age is “40-ish, 50, pushing 60.” The question to quiescent boomers then becomes: Are you willing to be described as middle-aged? If you’re 40-ish, your answer is “not yet”; if you’re over 50, your answer is a shrug, sheepish or defiant; if you’re into your 60s with people smarmily telling you how well you look, you’ll readily settle for the description “middle-aged.”

A few intrepid souls embrace both the phrase and the period of life. Mary Karr, for example, the perceptive poet and professor of English at Syracuse University, has published best-selling memoirs of her childhood (“The Liars’ Club”) and her youth (“Cherry”); she recently invited friends to her birthday party with a card that proudly announced, “Fifty Is the New Thirty.”

In their heart of hearts, however, most people in their middle years — in the fourth of Shakespeare’s “seven ages,” when those ambitiously soldiering on in that halfway age seek “the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth” — wish there were some less pejorative phrase than middle age. That’s because the noun, by virtue of its use as a hyphenated compound adjective in middle-age spread, creates nail-nibbling self-doubt amid visions of muffin-top midriffs and the realization that paunchiness precludes raunchiness. Here is where the urge to euphemize begins.

Old people, let us remember, have blazed an age-euphemism trail. By endowing decrepitude with attitude, the nation’s set-set have insisted upon a venerable vocabulary, a soothing avoidance of reminders of retirement reality. They have much to teach their uncomfortable generational followers in the art of label-escape; let’s see if any of their alternative monikers can be modified and transferred.

Senior citizen, alliterative and vaguely patriotic, pepped up a lot of graybeards for decades before it was derided by whippersnappers who are now edging toward such seniority themselves and wish they never hooted at the phrase. Unfortunately, neither sophomore citizen nor junior citizen fits the middle-agers.

Nor does the golden years offer a ready paradigm for the pre-goldens. The silver years is unsuitable because it symbolizes gray hair, anathema to the middies, and the balding years, though surely age-appropriate, seems unnecessarily self-flagellating.

Prefixes don’t work; the aforesaid pre-golden as well as pre-elderly is flat, (though pre-geezer has an insouciant quality). A better possibility is built on oldster, which was coined on the analogy of youngster; that suggests the future development of midster, though its confusion with mister would pose a pronunciation problem.

The answer, I think, is a word that has an impeccable coinage source, John Keats, in his 1818 poem “Endymion”: “Then up he rose, like one … / Who had not from mid-life to utmost age/ Eas’d in one accent his o’er-burden’d soul.” It pops up in poetic citations from Tennyson to Dylan Thomas, but really made it into the language in 1965, when Elliot Jacques wrote “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis,” about “the crises which occur around the age of 35 — which I shall term the mid-life crisis — and at full maturity around the age of 65.” This male sense of impending doom and need for thrashing about has given mid-life a bad name.

Euphemism? Nay, a usefulism. Midlife (forget the hyphen) without the crisis attached is an accurate, untainted word for the midlifer’s generational sojourn between youth and age. Depressed by the term middle-aged? Toss it out. As a vigorous, mature midlifer, you own your vocabulary; it doesn’t own you.

I’m 77 and a half; to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Ah, to be midlife again.”

Farmer, Cookie Maker, Ecologist and, Yes, the Future King

April 25, 2007
Farmer, Cookie Maker, Ecologist and, Yes, the Future King
By KIM SEVERSON

Tetbury, England

WHEN Prince Charles gazes from the upstairs windows at Highgrove, his home near this tiny town in the English countryside, he can see a tree planted by the Dalai Lama. It grows near a field of rare British wildflowers, which fade into a row of box hedges trimmed to frame four small busts of the prince’s head. Tigga, his late, beloved Jack Russell terrier, is immortalized in a relief sculpture on a nearby garden wall, behind which a longtime gardener prepares the ground for the prince’s favorite vegetables, potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

Prince Charles, whose hobbies have included both polo and the peculiarly English rural craft called hedge laying, cherishes tradition. In his world, it seems, not much good can come of change. He has waged war against modernity, both in faceless urban architecture and in the erosion of the rural British way of life.

At home, the royal perspective has been criticized as conservative, stodgy and elitist. But to some of the generals of the American food revolution, the prince qualifies as downright progressive.

Alice Waters, who drove the organic movement in the United States, is smitten. “He is, in private, really one of the most forward-thinking, radical humanitarians I have ever talked to,” she said.

The left-leaning food elite of the United States has prince fever, and it has nothing to do with an underlying fascination with the monarchy, Diana and Helen Mirren notwithstanding. To Ms. Waters and her troops, no one else of the prince’s stature has spoken out on the issues they hold dear: responsible stewardship of the land, preservation of rural life and the need for good food grown without chemicals or worker exploitation.

“Can you think of any American political figure who has spoken eloquently or bravely about these issues?” asked Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation,” who has become a friend of the prince.

Ms. Waters agreed. “Al Gore doesn’t even talk about food,” she said.

(That’s not to say Mr. Gore doesn’t have prince fever, too. He has visited Highgrove to discuss the environment with the prince, and the two happily trade shout-outs to each other in speeches.)

Eleanor Bertino, Ms. Waters’s former college roommate at Berkeley in the 1960s and a food and restaurant publicist, is so impressed that she recently took on the job of promoting Duchy Originals, the prince’s line of organic food and beauty products, as it makes a new push this spring into the United States.

Like the prince, Nell Newman, the actor Paul Newman’s daughter, runs an organic food company whose profits go to charity. She said she is aching to visit his farm. The prince was even a hit among the farmers in Marin County, the hub of the nation’s organic movement, when he visited two years ago.

“The prince was treated like a hero when he showed up in Marin,” Mr. Schlosser said. “Think about how unlikely that is.”

Prince Charles sets forth a practical example of his agenda in the gardens of Highgrove and the neighboring fields of Duchy Home Farm, about 1,100 acres of farmland in Gloucestershire, about a two-hour drive west of London.

When Prince Charles bought the Highgrove house and farm property in the early 1980s, he wrote, he was appalled by the loss of his country’s wildflower meadows, hedgerows and chalk grasslands to “agri-industry.” So he began to turn the farm and gardens into organic showplaces that might help inspire others to preserve England’s rural landscape.

“I can only say that for some reason I felt in my bones that if you abuse nature unnecessarily and fail to maintain a balance, then she will probably abuse you in return,” he wrote in his new book, “The Elements of Organic Gardening,” written with Stephanie Donaldson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

The prince watches over every detail in the 15-acre garden at Highgrove. It thrives on compost and natural fertilizers brewed from comfrey or seaweed and uses only rain, natural groundwater or wastewater purified through a system of reed beds.

At the entrance to Home Farm, a short drive from his house, rustic signs proclaim the land free of genetically modified organisms. Rare breeds of British cattle eat red clover. Heirloom ginger Tamworth pigs roll in royal mud. The prince (actually, the prince’s people) grow vegetables from heirloom seeds, and raise organic oats that are baked into the thin, crisp crackers that are the flagship of the Duchy Originals line.

“Given another life, I think he’d have been a farmer,” said David Wilson, the manager of Home Farm.

When all of this started in the 1980s, the British press ground His Royal Highness down to a nub, branding him the prince who talked to plants. (Granted, he did say things like, “To get the best results, you must talk to your vegetables.”)

He’s still a little sensitive about it. “One of the great difficulties” of converting to organic farming, he wrote in his book, “turned out to be convincing others that you had not taken complete leave of your senses.”

The fact that he rode out that early criticism has made him a visionary to some in the United States. “It took some real courage and backbone to keep championing the organic movement in the face of all that abuse,” Mr. Schlosser said.

It was Mr. Schlosser who played matchmaker between the American food elite and the prince. The prince is the royal patron of the Soil Association, the English organic certification and advocacy group that rose up with the advent of the organic movement in the 1940s.

Mr. Schlosser had met Patrick Holden, a carrot farmer who is the director of the group and is considered a good friend of the prince. One thing led to another, and soon Mr. Schlosser was having tea with the prince and acting as Soil Association ambassador in the United States.

Ms. Waters, meanwhile, was hearing more and more about the prince’s devotion to the issues she holds dear. In 2004, she was casting about for a marquee speaker to address the 5,000 vegetable farmers, cheesemakers and goat ranchers from around the world who would gather that year in Turin for the Slow Food conference called Terra Madre. Naturally, she wanted the prince.

“I just immediately try to figure out what the biggest doors are we can open, and that seemed like a door to me,” she said.

The Slow Food rank and file thought she was out of her mind. What would the future king of England have to say to an Ethiopian wheat grower?

Plenty, it turned out. The prince had them from the moment he said: “We no more want to live in anonymous concrete blocks that are just like anywhere else in the world than we want to eat anonymous junk food that can be bought anywhere.”

By the end, if the honey gatherers and yak cheese makers had been carrying disposable lighters, they would have been lit and aloft.

A year later came the trip to Marin County, a stop at Ms. Waters’s Edible Schoolyard at a middle school in Berkeley to eat goat cheese pizza baked by the students, and a stroll through the Ferry Plaza farmer’s market in San Francisco, where he worked the stalls like President Bill Clinton on the stump.

The prince has recently embarked on a project to bring more of his organic products to the United States. His Duchy Originals products, made from classic ingredients like damson plums as well as crops from his own farm to help preserve British ways of farming and eating, first appeared in this country in the early 1990s.

In Britain, some 250 Duchy products are available, including bacon; hand-crimped Yorkshire pies; and humbugs, old-fashioned boiled sugar mint candies made by a family in Yorkshire. The products are almost uniformly delicious, and their prices reflect the quality of their ingredients. Last year, Duchy Originals had almost $80 million in sales; profits, about $2.4 million, went to the prince’s charities.

“It’s odd that the prince has such a big brand because the royal family historically never muddied themselves with such commercial things,” said Simon Darling, a marketing executive in London. “However, it is an act of brilliance because the execution of the proposition has been flawless. Given Prince Charles can be accused of being a privileged rich man, it’s surprising that he’s managed to produce something so good.”

The company is frequently scrutinized by the British press. For example, its Scottish smoked salmon is imported from wild stocks in Alaska, which, aside from annoying Scottish fishermen, leaves the prince open to complaints about the size of his carbon footprint.

Americans who want to sample the products can find a small selection of biscuits, jams, teas, body lotions and Highgrove-brand gardening tools online at duchyusa.com or at stores like Zabar’s and Whole Foods. The savory oaten biscuit, which in the United States would be called a cracker, is a good place to start. Often, these staples of the British cheese plate can be stale and leaden. The Duchy Originals versions have a light crunch and just a hint of sweetness.

But the prince does not need biscuits and lemon curd to work his way into American hearts. Just being a prince who talks about the value of sustainable farming is enough, as Dan Barber of the Blue Hill restaurants in Manhattan and Pocantico Hills, N.Y., can tell you.

Mr. Barber was one of five chefs selected to cook for Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, when they came to New York in January to receive the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment. Mr. Gore and the actress Meryl Streep were presenters.

Mr. Barber is usually a composed, focused guy. But cooking for the prince made him weak in the knees. He created tiny, perfect vegetarian hamburgers from his best Stone Barns beets and goat cheese, and personally arranged almost every pickled baby turnip that was passed to the crowd at the Harvard Club in Manhattan. When it came his turn to explain his offerings to the prince, Mr. Barber was so nervous he couldn’t even get the honorific right.

“Your sirness,” he began, before launching into a stammering story about organic food being something like leather to a shoemaker, which he now regrets.

“I honestly don’t know what happened,” he said.

It was prince fever.

Foie Gras Makers Struggle to Please Critics and Chefs

April 25, 2007
Foie Gras Makers Struggle to Please Critics and Chefs
By JULIET GLASS

TOM BROCK produces foie gras at a Southern California farm, but even he used to feel squeamish when he had to force-feed the geese with an 8- to 10-inch steel tube to fatten their livers.

“I used the traditional tube, and force-fed the traditional way,” Mr. Brock said, “and it was the single most unpleasant experience of my life.”

So he bought a feeding machine that a Hungarian goose farmer had recently invented in his garage workshop. It has a soft rubber tube that Mr. Brock says has been much gentler on his animals.

It may make the birds, and Mr. Brock, feel better. But yet to be seen is whether it will please the animal rights activists who helped California enact a law that will ban foie gras starting in 2012, got Chicago to outlaw the sale of foie gras last year and are threatening similar action in other parts of the country.

Mr. Brock and other producers in the United States and Europe have been trying to find ways to make foie gras that will overcome the objections of those who see their work as an act of cruelty while still pleasing chefs and connoisseurs.

But unlike producers of beef, pork and chicken, who can respond to criticism of their practices by returning to kinder, preindustrial methods of raising cattle, pigs and chickens, foie gras producers have no such bucolic past to fall back on. Since the time of ancient Egyptians, making foie gras has involved doing something unnatural to ducks or geese: fattening their livers by force-feeding them, typically, nowadays, for the last 12 to 21 days of their lives.

Opponents say the procedure using feeding tubes is painful and sickens the birds. Foie gras advocates say the birds do not mind because their gullets are naturally expandable, to let them gorge before migrating.

Some foie gras makers have tried to take advantage of that gorging instinct and eliminate the feeding tubes.

A Spanish company’s canned pâté, made entirely from livers of geese that it said had not been force-fed, won the Coup de Coeur for innovation in October at the Paris International Food Salon, a culinary trade show.

The company, Patería de Sousa, says it lets geese roam freely and gorge on grass, acorns, figs and lupines in the Extremadura region of Spain. It says it processes the birds once a year before natural migration, harvesting livers weighing 450 to 500 grams. (French law defines foie gras as fattened liver from a force-fed bird weighing at least 300 grams for ducks and 400 grams for geese.)

But some in the industry doubt Patería’s claims. Ariane Daguin, owner of D’Artagnan, a Newark company that was the first to sell fresh foie gras in the United States, said she was skeptical after visiting the company’s booth at the food fair.

“I don’t want to know their secrets, but there was no confirmation of their claims,” Ms. Daguin said. “If there is a secret diet, fine, but then show me something to confirm you are in the business.”

France’s National Institute of Agronomic Research conducted experiments, in 2002 and between 2005 and 2006, controlling geese’s and ducks’ access to food for a set period and then granting unlimited access to encourage self-gorging. According to Daniel Guémené, the agency’s director of research, the livers enlarge to two or three times the normal size, but in terms of fat content and weight “we’ve been unsuccessful at getting a product that can be marketable as foie gras.” He added: “Concerning the Spanish story, I don’t say he didn’t succeed, but I want to know how he made it. I don’t understand it.”

In an e-mail message in Spanish, Eduardo Sousa, director of Patería de Sousa, said that the French researchers “have not taken measures to keep the animals in a truly natural setting, which is the case with our pastures in Extremadura.” He added, “Keep in mind that our animals are raised completely free.”

He responded dismissively to the skepticism. “To people who say that they don’t believe in our system of rearing, tell them that makes no difference to us; I believe what they are after is to copy us, ” he wrote. “If they do not achieve it, well, the secret is in our fields and in the respect given to the animal.”

In Lindsborg, Kan., Frank R. Reese Jr. of the Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch let his French Dewlap Toulouse geese and Rouen ducks, heritage breeds that were once used for foie gras production, eat as much as they wanted, but he ended up getting only very rich livers.

“We’ve made no promises,” Mr. Reese said. “This is not foie gras. ‘’

Likewise, Schiltz Foods, which runs a large goose farm in Sisseton, S.D., produced what it described on its Web site as “natural fatty goose livers: the foie gras alternative” in a pilot program last fall.

The owner, Jim Schiltz, would not describe his process, but said the birds were not force-fed. The livers were meaty in taste and texture, however, and would probably not be a widely accepted substitute for foie gras.

When California passed its law on foie gras in 2004, there seemed to be hope that in the grace period until the law went into effect producers could create methods that would satisfy critics.

“This bill provides seven and a half years for agricultural husbandry practices to evolve and perfect a humane way for a duck to consume grain to increase the size of its liver through natural processes,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in his signing statement. “If agricultural producers are successful in this endeavor, the ban on foie gras sales and production in California will not occur.”

But it was clear that those practices could not include force-feeding.

“A person may not force-feed a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond normal size,” the law says.

Still, Mr. Brock said that his Hungarian device did not harm the birds and that it might show that force-feeding need not be considered cruel.

The machine has a rubber tube that can be as short as six inches long and that is flexible enough to wrap around a finger. It has a mechanism to prevent the bird from getting more feed than its gizzard can hold.

Mr. Brock learned about a feeding plan developed by a Hungarian poultry scientist, Dr. Ferenc Bogenfürst, that shortened the time geese were force-fed to 14 or 15 days, from 18 to 21 days, and reduced the number of force-feedings per day. The plan is a variation on the French method of limiting birds’ access to food to certain times, both encouraging them to overfeed and preparing their stomachs for force-feeding.

Using the new machine and his version of the feeding method, Mr. Brock raised more than 642 geese last fall. He said that not a single bird was sickened or injured during force-feeding. He plans to raise 12,000 this year.

He said it was clearly healthier. A 1998 European Union report found that 2.5 percent to 4.2 percent of ducks raised for foie gras died before being slaughtered (for geese, the range was 3.5 percent to 5.3 percent). Marcus Henley, production manager of Hudson Valley Foie Gras in Ferndale, N.Y., the largest American producer, said the company’s average fatalities were within the range for ducks.

The United States Department of Agriculture inspection reports from Grimaud Farms in Stockton, Calif., which processed and distributed Mr. Brock’s birds, found that all the geese were healthy. And while the reports indicated that six geese died during the four- to five-hour drive to Grimaud in October and four died during the drive in November, all survived the latest trip, in December.

Izzy Yanay, vice president and general manager of Hudson Valley, said that he was intrigued by what he had heard about Mr. Brock’s technique and that he intended to send Mr. Brock ducklings and travel to California to observe their force-feeding this fall.

“I’ve spoken with my customers who are also his customers and they told me that the foie was nice,” he said. “If everything everybody says is correct, this sounds great.”

But opponents do not seem satisfied.

“Is a soft rubber tube better than a hard tube?” said Paul Shapiro, director of the factory farming campaign of the Humane Society of the United States, one of the groups that pushed for the California bill. “Maybe, but you are missing the point. You are still forcing them to eat more than they would ever eat voluntarily and inducing a state of disease.”

Ms. Daguin of D’Artagnan, who is also president of the Artisan Farmers Alliance, a coalition of American foie gras makers, said that the producers were merely taking advantage of the birds’ natural tendency to gorge during migration and that the animals were not injured or sickened.

“There is a pendulum, and people are going overboard,” she said of foie gras’s critics. “We are a small industry selling an elitist product, it has a French name, and there is a tube in the esophagus, and if you don’t know any better, then yes, I would think the same. I think the pendulum will swing the other way.”

The Unintended Consequences of Hyperhydration

May 27, 2007
The Unintended Consequences of Hyperhydration
By JON MOOALLEM

It’s easy to find, in the mightily expanding iconography of American waste, the monumental (a ziggurat of flattened cars), the sinister (ocher sludge foaming on a riverbank) and the sublime (a plastic bag fluttering in a Japanese maple). The empty bottle and crushed aluminum can are none of these. They are almost too commonplace to notice, too dreary to evoke anything at all. Foundered on a roadside or slumped in a bag of spent Chinese takeout, the can without its Mountain Dew and the bottle without its Bud are unremarkable things. They’re just trash: something we once wanted and now can’t be bothered with.

Eleven states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon and Vermont — give this valueless stuff a value, however. Typically we pay a nickel when purchasing a container and get the nickel back if we return the container for recycling. It’s a deposit, a contract binding us to our garbage. Though these days, that nickel may elicit only the faintest twinge of regret as we toss the empty into the trash and rejoin our busy lives. More than three decades since it was first legislated, the transaction that the so-called bottle bill sets in motion — pay a nickel, recoup a nickel — is the same as ever. The world surrounding it, though, is almost unrecognizable.

Oregon passed the country’s first deposit law in 1971, and as one native Oregonian told me, “We don’t have too many firsts.” So in February in Salem, hearings to dust off and modernize the law began with a certain romantic pride. Oregon’s speaker of the house called the bottle bill “an Oregon institution” and described tacking toward floating bottles and scooping them out of the Columbia River while learning to sail with his father. The Senate president credited the bottle bill with making him want to become a legislator. “I just think it’s part of being an Oregonian, that you return your bottles and cans,” he said.

Representative Vicki Berger, a Republican from Salem, introduced herself as “the only living witness to the actual birth of the Oregon bottle bill.” Berger, who is largely spearheading the reforms, is the daughter of a fabled citizen-activist, Richard Chambers, who proposed the first bill, a man subsequently described to me as “a voice in the wilderness” and “totally prophetic.” Berger called the law “part of our mythology.” For others it was a “shining beacon” and “the one bill more than any others that Oregonians identify with.”

Never, it seemed, had such a ceremony been made over trash. Except that this same thing has been going on, almost perennially, in state legislatures across the country for decades. Bills to update existing laws or pass one in a non-bottle-bill state typically flail around in committee until, clobbered by the powerful grocery and beverage industry lobbies or skipped over for sexier environmental issues, they disappear. This year, however, the Oregon campaign, along with similar ones in New York and Connecticut, have gained greater traction.

Bottle bills are still surprisingly good at inspiring recycling and reducing litter. But, though they are idiosyncratic in every state, the vast majority of the laws share one colossal, unanticipated flaw: they place a deposit on beer and carbonated beverages only. The bottle bill’s scope, and to some extent the very vision of a more waste-conscious world that first motivated it, has been swiftly trivialized by the ubiquity of bottled water. This year, Americans will drink more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water. Oregonians will throw out about 170 million empty ones. Those same bottles, filled with something fizzy, would carry nickel deposits.

“That was the stupidest thing we ever did,” says a veteran of the original Oregon campaign. The laws were written in a different era, a less health-obsessed one, when drinking out of a bottle or can meant drinking beer or soda. If bottled water, teas, juices and energy drinks existed at all, they were quaintly called “new-age beverages.” (“In the late ’70s,” one bottled-water executive urged me to keep in mind, “no one was putting on little shorts and running in the streets.”) Bottled water, Berger says, “is what’s truly different from 1971,” which is why she and others are battling to expand their bottle bills to include it.

From there, proposals often seek to fix a mess of other unanticipated dysfunctions and complaints. For starters, no state had the foresight to require its nickel deposit be adjusted for inflation. That nickel is now worth about a penny in 1971 terms, and redemption rates have depressed — except in Michigan, the only state with a dime deposit, where the rate remains 97 percent. Other states have tried to move to a dime. What’s more, in most states, if we toss the can, or even if we dutifully put it in our curbside recycling, our nickel quietly remains with the beverage-distributing company to which we first paid it. This year, the Bigger Better Bottle Bill campaign in New York is making its sixth attempt to redirect those unclaimed deposits — estimated at $100 million each year — into a state environmental fund. “It’s the people’s nickel,” says Judith Enck, Governor Spitzer’s deputy secretary for the environment.

Opposing such changes are disgruntled bottlers, distributors and grocers. Americans buy about 215 billion beverage containers every year, more than quadruple those bought in 1971. Steadily, these industries have been forced to sacrifice more space, time and money to run shadow businesses that are, as if out of a surrealist novel, haunting reversals of their regular businesses: trucks shuttle from store to store picking up empties; clerks hand customers money for grimy containers of air. Including bottled water would only inundate them further.

By now the players on both sides, in each state, all know one another. They issue reports. They recite dueling statistics. But the debate, wherever it happens to flare up in a given year, is essentially a philosophical one. While recycling advocates rail against society’s wastefulness as a solemn problem, so much of that society relies on the freedom to throw things out as a solution to problems. As naïve as it looks, the bottle bill forces the very contemporary environmental question of whether those who sell a product, not to mention those who use it, should be accountable for its mess — and just how accountable, and at what cost. By Day 3 in Salem, one dumbstruck grocer, pressed after his testimony, finally blurted out: “Are we responsible for all the containers and all the garbage we sell?” He meant it as a rhetorical question. But it’s precisely the question that, for 36 years, everyone has been getting together to hash out.

The People’s Lobby Against Nonreturnables

Opponents often denigrate the bottle bill as an old antilitter law, ill equipped to do the 21st-century job of recycling. But the ethos behind it was more forward-thinking than is commonly remembered.

Richard Chambers sold plywood production equipment. Before dying of cancer in 1974, he climbed every peak in Oregon and to the highest point in every state. On a Sunday morning in 1968, returning from a walk on the beach near his house in Pacific City, Chambers saw an article in the newspaper that his teenage daughter was reading over breakfast. It described a proposed deposit system in British Columbia. “And he says: ‘That’s it. That’s the answer,’ ” his daughter, Vicki Berger, told me recently. Immediately, Chambers called a state representative, a young black-sheep Republican named Paul Hanneman. The call woke up Hanneman. Soon the two men were standing near the town’s only intersection, grimacing at the mess of broken glass Chambers spotted there on his walk: a typical Saturday night’s detritus.

The beverage industry was changing, as were its consumers’ expectations. For decades, producing glass bottles was so costly that bottlers operated their own deposit systems to ensure they got them back. Beer usually came in glass “stubbies,” each with a deposit of a few cents. A stubby could be returned to any local bottler, regardless of its brand. There it was sterilized, scrubbed clean of its label and refilled. A single container could be repurposed as many as 30 times. But by the ’60s, aluminum cans were ubiquitous, and glass bottles were shedding their deposits. The convenience of these new “one way,” or disposable, containers was marketed enthusiastically. By 1970, nearly 40 percent of America’s packaged soda and 75 percent of its packaged beer came in one-ways.

“We could see the returnables disappearing,” Paul Hanneman, now 70 and retired, told me in the house near Pacific City where he has lived since childhood. The morning I visited, he had unearthed 300 copies of letters Chambers sent, often while overseas for business, to strum up support for the bottle bill. Chambers collected hotel stationery, hoping letterhead from Zaire would make his cause look important.

Hanneman first introduced the bottle bill in 1969. The idea — to put an artificial value on what everyone increasingly saw as worthless — was swiftly crushed. “The industry people came down on us like crazy,” he said. As convenient as one-ways were for consumers, they also alleviated great hassle and expense for grocers and bottlers. Those businesses themselves were becoming one-way, less hobbled by having to take back empties. Many bottle-washing lines, where containers were sterilized, were already dismantled. Hanneman was accused of trying to turn back the clock, ordering major corporations to jump through so many impracticable hoops in his one, inconsequential state that ultimately the whole industry might collapse. Businesses and unions, normally enemies, sat together on the same side of the hearing room. On the other side, Hanneman told me, “you’ve got Rich Chambers sitting all by himself”: a 6-foot-4, 275-pound man, needlepointing assiduously to calm his nerves. “He’d get so wound up. He’d say, ‘If we don’t reverse the trend now, nonreturnables, especially cans, are going to be so numerous we’ll never beat these people.’ ”

In 1971, when Hanneman and Chambers reintroduced the bill, modern environmentalism was just forming in the unfocused afterglow of the first Earth Day a year earlier. It was a moment when discussing humankind’s negligent stewardship of the planet and simply picking pieces of litter off its surface were both seen as deeply ecological acts. As an outdoorsman, Chambers loathed litter as a blight on the landscape. But he was also fearful of the broader wastefulness it signaled. He kept compulsive files on the resources needed to manufacture aluminum cans. An ad-hoc group called PLAN, the People’s Lobby Against Nonreturnables, studied the energy that a deposit program could conserve.

“My father understood fully about resource management,” Berger says, but “he was a salesman first.” Only by trumpeting the bottle bill as an antilitter measure could Chambers and Hanneman find the support they needed. Fighting litter was straightforward; it felt good. Gov. Tom McCall championed the bill exhaustively, telling the press he would “put a price on the head” of every bottle and can. This time, an unlikely coalition staggered in on Chambers’s side of the hearing room. “You had some younger people with longer hair sitting right next to a guy in big overalls from the Linn County Farm Bureau,” Hanneman said. “They were from all around the state — some urban, some rural. They hadn’t been to the Capitol before and really didn’t know what to do. All they knew was that they ought to go there.”

Opposition intensified. Before one hearing, a small cavalcade of private jets landed at the Salem airport, carrying various industry representatives from the East Coast. Jerry Powell, who volunteered for Chambers as a graduate student and now edits the trade magazine Resource Recycling, says the men came off as bullies and outsiders. For starters, “they called it ‘Oregoan,’ ” Powell says, still irritated. Local businesses meanwhile stepped up with crucial support, particularly five northwest breweries that hoped the bill might handicap the Anheuser-Buschs of the world, however slightly. (Freed from the cost of shipping bottles in two directions, national companies were now outcompeting local ones.) The bottle bill ultimately passed, Powell argues, because of “locals talking to locals.” “Incidentally,” he adds, “all five of those breweries are out of business now.”

Eric A. Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council describes the first bottle bills emerging at a time when nationalizing markets were making goods more affordable and convenient, but also further detaching consumers from their environmental costs. The one-way soda can is only convenient because we can throw it out when we’re finished and don’t have to worry where it goes. So is the Bic razor, the paper towel, the disposable camera and the Swiffer mop head. “As significant as the bottle-bill legislation is,” Goldstein says, “the growing movement toward a throwaway society that started in the ’60s and ’70s is an even larger trend.”

Berger told me: “My father envisioned a world where we were overburdened with trash. He wasn’t aiming for recycling in the sense we know it, but recycling in the sense he knew it, which was that the bottle would go back to the bottling plant and get refilled.” (Chambers put a sticker over the toilet in the family’s beach cabin that read: “Rejoice! You’re Refillable!”) “I think his real purpose was to conserve that system” — to preserve the tidy, closed loop the industry was allowing to diffuse. “And in that sense,” Berger said, “the bottle bill was a failure.”

Today a great many of Oregon’s returned glass bottles are trucked to a plant near the Portland airport. There, they accumulate in towering piles. Then they are melted down and made into new bottles.

The Old Jalopy

Despite the elaborate overhauls first discussed, the updated bottle bill that passed out of the Oregon senate and into the House last month was essentially what Berger called the “just add water” option. It would place a 5-cent deposit on bottled water.

The change is far more complicated and politically ambitious than it sounds, given that grocers, stuck with the bottle bill’s grunt work, have traditionally been opposed to any expansion. Last year, The Oregonian reported that, before any changes were even introduced, Joe Gilliam, president of the Northwest Grocery Association, issued this warning to a meeting of stakeholders: “We can sit back and kill bottle bills. We’ve got the money to do it. We’ve got the political know-how to do it.”

Not long ago, Gilliam and I visited a store in northeast Portland together. It was a Fred Meyer, a chain of large-scale retailers. We met at the bottle house, a cement structure resembling a bus terminal near the edge of the parking lot. There, people fed empties into “reverse vending machines,” which scanned the barcodes and issued redemptions. An employee stood by to switch out the bins and hand-count any containers mistakenly rejected. The store fills three trucks with empties every week. Adding water, Gilliam speculated, would at least double that volume. That means twice as many machines in a bottle house twice as big. And if that happens, he said, pacing into the lot with his arms extended, you run into compliance problems with parking, access to public transportation and so on. Some grocers also warn that funneling garbage into grocery stores has health risks. “The bottle bill is basically maxed out on its capacity,” Gilliam said. “They’re going to have to do something far more innovative to make it work at this point.”

Meanwhile, as is the case in most states, Oregon’s beverage distributors — who via the grocers, collect and refund the deposits — claim they are being defrauded. They are refunding nickels for out-of-state containers on which they never collected a deposit in the first place. In Portland, bottles and cans flood in from the nearby suburbs in Washington, a state with no bottle bill. (“Seinfeld” fans will remember Kramer driving a mail truck full of empties to the 10-cent Promised Land of Michigan.) A cooperative of Oregon distributors says this fraud almost entirely cancels out, and in some years exceeds, the windfall of unclaimed deposits it gets to keep.

Bottled-water companies claim that, because water is not distributed in strict territories like soda and beer, keeping track of their nickels will be even more difficult. In Maine, one of two states so far to expand its law to include bottled water, Nestlé Waters North America says it handed back $815,000 more in nickels than it collected last year. (Globally, Nestlé owns 72 different brands of water, including Poland Spring, Deer Park and Arrowhead.) Brian Flaherty, a Nestlé spokesman who has testified in Connecticut and Oregon, told me those states are trying to drag the water business into an already dysfunctional system. They’re trying to “update the old jalopy,” Flaherty said.

The grocery and beverage industries largely advocate relying on curbside recycling instead — the programs by which homeowners set out bins at the ends of their driveways for collection. They argue that running a deposit program — a separate system just for beverage containers — is redundant. It may even be counterproductive. In Connecticut, a recycling contractor warns that placing a deposit on noncarbonated beverages, and thus inspiring more people to recycle those containers at stores, would divert at least $900,000 of recyclable material from the curbside bins. Such losses of revenue can threaten the financial viability of the curbside programs altogether.

The rise of municipal curbside recycling is yet another thing the bottle bill’s authors couldn’t have predicted. Bottle-bill proponents note that nearly half of Americans don’t have access to curbside recycling and maintain that it does a poor job of capturing containers commonly consumed away from home, like bottled water. But curbside still has a way of complicating their arguments, or at least of exposing just how stubbornly idealistic their vision actually is. If the goal is to conserve resources, it seems unfair that someone who conscientiously recycles his bottles and cans at the curb rather than at the grocery store loses his nickels regardless. I told this to Betty McLaughlin of the Container Recycling Institute, a tiny nonprofit that serves as a nerve center for bottle-bill advocates. McLaughlin disagreed, categorically. People drive to the grocery store regularly anyway, she said. If they took their empties with them, and if states put deposits on even more products, the volume of curbside material would drop, and the haulers’ trucks could make fewer trips. That would result in a net — though small, it seems — reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions.

More important, McLaughlin said, curbside is financed by municipalities; the bottle bill is designed to hold industry accountable for the disposal of its products. This accountability has practical, not just philosophical, benefits: forcing companies to take back their empties has ensured they make their containers recyclable and build markets for the scrap. (It is because of the bottle bill that fleece jackets, mattresses and carpeting are now made from recycled plastic bottles; recycled bottles have become one of the most valuable scrap materials.) Nevertheless, defenses of the bottle bill often boil down to an insistence that the essential rightness of its principle, the idea of producer responsibility, simply outweighs its many other costs and inconveniences — particularly since the bulk of those costs and inconveniences are borne by the industry. That’s only just.

Each side of the debate has its own emphatic standards of fairness and efficiency, and the distance between them was evident earlier this month, when, with an expansion seeming almost inevitable in Oregon, Michael Read of the WinCo Foods grocery chain spoke at a second round of hearings, sounding defeated. Read didn’t bother preparing testimony, he said, because “all of the cogent arguments where we have good data . . . have unfortunately been largely ignored. No one seems to care about the health issues, sanitation issues, space issues, handling issues, efficiency issues, cost issues.” I asked Paul Hanneman how he and Chambers responded to similar objections in 1971, the contentions that the bottle bill would demand calamitous changes to a complex industry. “We said, ‘You figure it out,’ ” Hanneman told me; the state was done paying for those containers as garbage or litter.

In her office one morning, Vicki Berger seemed to share this principled insensitivity. When it comes to bottled water, she said, “when are we going to say enough is enough of this product?” (Berger had previously explained her position on water this way: “The product is zilch! You’re buying a friggin’ container!”) Now she handed me a bottle from a little collection she kept. The brand was called Oregon Rain; its slogan, “Virgin Water Harvested From Oregon Skies.” “This is my poster child,” she said. “It’s laughable.” Then to prove this, Berger laughed.

Water

Singling out bottled water is unfair. All successful products cater to our values, and it may be that, in water, we see our unflattering reflection most clearly. Steve Emery, president of the Oregon-based bottled-water company Earth20, told me, “It’s funny that people think if you add a lot of sugar to the water, it’s better than just providing water.”

Bottled water is invaluable for those without reliably safe drinking water or during disaster relief. But the product thrived only after Americans were accustomed to, even reliant on, buying single servings of soda while on the go — in the convenience stores and little delis the industry calls “immediate consumption channels.” This year, Americans will drink more than nine billion gallons of bottled water, nearly all of it from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, plastic bottles. Water, together with other nonfizzy drinks, accounted for 90 percent of the growth of the entire beverage industry between 2002 and 2005. By the end of the decade, they are expected to outsell soda.

Despite the chicness of certain brands, the market is dominated by hundreds of more workaday waters. Brands like Crystal Geyser, Kirkland and Arrowhead function as tap water for a country that spends most of its time away from the tap. While even the most pedestrian waters invoke the grandeur of their source — a secluded spring, a glacial brook — Gary Hemphill of the Beverage Marketing Corporation says, “As far as consumers go, I don’t sense that they really care one way or the other.” We just want water. “If you could put your kitchen sink on your back and carry it around with you, the bottled-water industry might not be as big as it is today.”

Michelle Barry of the market research firm the Hartman Group told me, “Water is not really critically considered” — not even the object itself, it seems. “We believe bottled water has become less about the physical act of hydration and more about being a companion to people,” she said. “They like to walk around with it and hold it.” Increasingly, the typical consumer sips out of a bottle of water “to mark time.” “It’s like their bangie,” Barry added, meaning a security blanket. Or rather, each bottle of water is one in a readily available cast of interchangeable security blankets that we can capriciously acquire and toss throughout the day.

Several industry people told me that water’s most exciting growth is now in sales of large multipacks or flats of single-serving bottles — stockpiles that we keep in our pantries or garages and grab a few bottles from on our way out the door. The obvious question then is, why not fill up a reusable bottle from the tap and take that with us. “If you’re on the go, and you’re buying something to consume on the go,” Barry told me, “that assumes you don’t have the time for preparation before you go. You need that ultimate convenience.” It follows that you don’t have time to shepherd around that bottle once it is empty either.

Americans will throw out more than two million tons of PET bottles this year. Even when recycled, it is hard to turn scrap PET into new bottles. More virgin material is always necessary. PET is a petroleum product; it comes from oil. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that 18 million barrels of crude-oil equivalent were needed to replace the bottles we chucked in 2005, bottles that were likely shipped long distances to begin with —from Maine or Calistoga or Fiji.

Whether more states manage to put deposits on bottled water or not, we have become real-life grotesques of the disconnected, profligate consumer the bottle bill saw coming and, waving a roll of nickels, tried to fend off. I easily bought more than a dozen bottles of water while working on this article.

Redemption

Three weeks ago, the Northwest Grocery Association proposed its own startling modernization of the Oregon bottle bill. The State Legislature, Joe Gilliam told me, “hasn’t understood or really wanted to understand” how devastating its just-add-water expansion would be to grocers. Grudgingly resigned to some kind of expansion, Gilliam came to the table at the 11th hour with a more grocer-friendly, radical reinvention of the system: all carbonated and noncarbonated beverages and liquor would carry nickel deposits, and new, state-run redemption centers — not grocers — would handle the returns. They’d also collect materials like home electronics. Grocers would help finance the redemption centers and relinquish all unredeemed deposits to a state anti-litter program.

A legislative committee promptly ignored this proposal, however, passing the original expansion to the full chamber, where, as of last week, it awaited probable passage. Meanwhile, after rocketing through one house of the State Legislature, Connecticut’s expansion was recently killed in committee. (Proponents have promised to resurrect the measure as part of another bill.) New York’s “Bigger Better Bottle Bill” continued to gain unprecedented momentum, though it still faced some discouraging resistance in one house.

“It probably won’t go through this year,” the Rev. Dr. Earl Kooperkamp told me last month. Kooperkamp helped introduce the Bigger Better Bottle Bill campaign six years ago. He is 50 now, with an odd little braid of hair that swishes at the back of his clerical collar. He had invited me to Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, to a monthly meeting he holds for “canners,” those who scour the city for bottles and cans for a living. The meeting is part support group (he helps those harassed by grocers file complaints) and part long-range planning committee (he envisions canners lobbying for improvements to the law). He is confident that, if the deposit were raised to a dime, more than enough containers would still be abandoned to keep his canners in business. Kooperkamp calls the group the Redeemers.

It’s unclear how big a share of America’s recycling the homeless and working poor do. Clearly it is considerable. The Container Recycling Institute reports that an average of 490 beverage containers are recycled per person per year in bottle-bill states. Yet many canners told me that they can easily earn a daily wage of 20 or 30 dollars; each then recycles upward of 600 containers every day. When proponents argue that bottle bills are the best way to capture containers consumed on the go, it’s not because a frenzied Dr. Pepper drinker will make a scrupulous detour to return the can, but because, when that can is inevitably thrown out, a scavenger might retrieve it.

In Manhattan, many canners start at the tip of the island after the first Statue of Liberty ferries have sailed. They hit Wall Street as lunch is ending and wind up in Times Square to pick up after the pretheater stampede. Since canners may not get to a grocery store before closing, Kooperkamp describes the rise of “mobile redemption,” middlemen in trucks who buy loads late at night, two for a nickel. Fearing overnight theft, many canners in Portland sleep beside their containers at bottle houses. Though few in Portland find it worth their time to dig through garbage; most work set routes, emptying each neighborhood’s curbside bins on its designated recycling night — a situation that may signal a breakdown of both systems.

While we sat in the church foyer waiting for Redeemers, Kooperkamp explained that, in Leviticus, the Bible issues laws about leaving the corners of your fields for the poor to harvest. “It’s saying that something has to be left that somebody else can make use of,” he said. “What the Redeemers are doing is gleaning the fields, sustaining their lives in a way that actually ends up making life better for all of us.” Still, Leviticus had to remind us to leave some for the gleaners. Today enough useful detritus seems to flake off our lives by itself that an entire underground economy traffics in our trash.

The bottle bill created an economic incentive for something its authors felt we ought to do for its own sake. It was a mandate to recycle rather than litter but, more broadly, to stay mindful of the tension between convenience and conscientiousness — to stay tethered to our waste as, more and more, that connection slackened. Talking with Kooperkamp, I realized that canners may be the only ones even remotely living the principle of the bottle bill as Richard Chambers envisioned it, and only then, out of desperation.

“A good number of the Redeemers see that they’re doing a real service,” Kooperkamp said, “cleaning up after us, taking care of the environment.” Some come to see picking up a can — replacing it into the cyclic narrative from which it strayed — “as running totally opposite to our egocentric, convenience-driven, disposable culture.” It can be a deeply connective act. “I went to seminary,” Kooperkamp told me. “I learned all about redemption. Redemption is about taking something that is worthless and giving it value, about taking that worthless thing and changing it into something life-sustaining.” Jean Rice, a canner in the Bronx, summed it up this way: “Five years ago, I used to call myself a canner. But now I call myself an ecological engineer.”

After an hour, it was clear that no Redeemers would show. Kooperkamp apologized, reached for his cup of coffee (paper, with a plastic sip-top) and stood up. His whole demeanor said, Ah well, maybe next time. These guys have pressing difficulties in their lives, he said. He understood why they might not be focused on the long-term.

Fighting the Tide, a Few Restaurants Tilt to Tap Water

May 30, 2007
Fighting the Tide, a Few Restaurants Tilt to Tap Water
By MARIAN BURROS

DON’T bother asking for Fiji, San Pellegrino or any other designer water at either Incanto, a restaurant that opened in San Francisco in 2002, or at Poggio, which opened in Sausalito, Calif., two years later.

All their water comes out of the tap. It’s filtered before it reaches the table, but it’s from the public water system, just the same.

“Serving our local water in reusable carafes makes more sense for the environment than manufacturing thousands of single-use glass bottles for someone to use once and throw away,” Incanto explains at its Web site.

These two Bay Area restaurants were pretty much alone in kicking the bottle habit until Alice Waters, the godmother of things organic, sustainable and local, banned bottled still water at Chez Panisse in Berkeley last year and started serving only house-made sparkling water this year. Then the press took notice. Now other California restaurants, like Nopa in San Francisco, are following suit. Even an ice cream shop — Ici, in Berkeley — has jumped on the non-bottled-water wagon.

And now, with a little push from Ms. Waters, an important New York City restaurant is coming on board.

It’s a big move in the restaurant industry, which, if you extrapolate from the amount of water it buys, takes in at least $200 million to $350 million from bottled water a year, according to the restaurant consultant Clark Wolf.

The “eat local” movement first became popular in California, so it makes sense that “drink local” is catching on there as a way to reduce the environmental costs of manufacturing and transporting bottles of water, as well as the mountains of plastic that end up in landfills.

But soon the owners of Del Posto in New York, the most elegant and expensive of the restaurants in the empire of Joseph Bastianich and Mario Batali, will be joining the nascent movement — once they decide on the proper containers for their filtered still and carbonated tap water. Etched on the glass will be an explanation of why bottled water is no longer available.

“Filling cargo ships with water and sending it hundreds and thousands of miles to get it around the world seems ridiculous,” Mr. Bastianich said. “With all the other things we do for sustainability, it makes sense.”

He added that of all their restaurants, Del Posto was best able to afford the change.

When Maury Rubin opened the first Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery in the East Village in 2005 and the second in Greenwich Village last month, banning bottled water was a no-brainer. “It was actually an easy decision,” Mr. Rubin said. “Bottled water is not great for the environment.”

Other restaurants, including the Farmers Diner in Quechee, Vt., have made the switch, but they have not made waves. Tod Murphy, who owns the diner and has gained a certain celebrity in the food world for serving local products, stopped ordering bottled water in February. “It makes no sense, because we have great well water,” he said, “but I had no idea I was on the cutting edge.”

For almost everyone else the idea is still in the talking stage, in part because there’s a big profit in bottled water, even though some of it comes out of a tap before it goes into the bottle. Restaurants buy it for $1 or $2 and sell it for as much as $8, or even more, giving it the highest markup of any item on the menu. Most restaurants making their own sparkling water are not charging for it.

Geoffrey Zakarian, the chef and an owner of Country in Manhattan, described the ban as “a worthy thing to do.” But he added, “You have to make a profit.”

“Alice is very commendable and extraordinary, and we look to her,” Mr. Zakarian said, “but I think she gets carried away sometimes.” He wondered where he would make up the lost revenue if he eliminated bottled water. “Serving tap water is a great idea that we’d all love to be able to do, but it’s not going to happen all at once.”

Tom Colicchio, the chef and an owner of Craft restaurant and several spinoffs, was incredulous that restaurants would contemplate such a change. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he said. “Why would you do that — not from a money standpoint, but from a service and hospitality standpoint? Fifty to 60 percent prefer bottled water, especially sparkling.”

Credit the bottled water industry with a brilliant marketing job, selling purity and convincing the public that its product tastes better, is more convenient and is safer than good tap water. From a trickle of Perrier in the early 1980s, consumption of bottled water in America rose to 27.6 gallons per capita last year, according to the International Bottled Water Association.

On the West Coast, at least, tap water is looking more fashionable. Seltzer Sisters, a company in Redwood City, Calif., that sells seltzer made from local tap water in old-fashioned reusable glass bottles, says its sales in Berkeley have risen 20 percent in the last six months. The Berkeley school district replaced commercially bottled water with large containers of tap water and cups in all its schools last year.

“The students were up in arms, but a year later no one says anything,” said Ann Cooper, director of the district’s nutrition services, who added, “We have been marketed to the point that children believe they can’t drink water out of the tap.”

Dr. Gina Solomon, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental advocacy group, said there is no reason to believe that bottled water is safer than tap water, though there can be problems with either. The public water supply is much more stringently regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency than bottled water is by the Food and Drug Administration. The E.P.A. requires multiple daily tests for bacteria, for example, with the results available to the public; the F.D.A. requires weekly testing, which does not have to be reported to the agency, to the states or to the public.

“The rationale for buying bottled water is a fantasy that has a destructive downside,” Dr. Solomon said. “These companies are marketing an illusion of environmental purity.”

Her organization has calculated how much carbon dioxide — a major greenhouse gas — is emitted during the transportation of bottled water imported from France and Italy, the two largest exporters to the United States, and Fiji water, which travels much farther. Together they account for 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent, Dr. Solomon said, of the yearly emissions from 700 cars on the road. She called that “a significant contribution to global warming, and fundamentally an unnecessary one.”

But Stephen Kay, the vice president for communications at the International Bottled Water Association, said eliminating bottled water would have “a negligible, nonexistent impact on protecting the environment.”

Most restaurateurs seem unready to go cold turkey. Some have moved toward reducing their carbon footprint by switching to local bottled water instead of imported, as Dan Barber has done at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills in Westchester County, N.Y. A week ago he also added house-made seltzer, served from old-fashioned glass bottles.

As part of its low-carbon plan Bon Appétit, the institutional food service company, is switching to domestic bottled waters from imported and is looking at a filtering system using local water and reusable glass bottles for some customers.

Some restaurants make a point of serving tap water but still provide bottled water on request. “Santa Monica is known for its terrible tap water,” said Anastasia Israel, an owner of Abode, which opened there a month ago. Patrons are reluctant to drink the tap water, but after servers explain the filtration process, 80 percent of them give it a try. Carbonation will follow soon.

Mr. Wolf, the consultant, said he is confident that if restaurants are pressed to eliminate bottled water, they will figure out how to do it. “No one is more adaptable than a restaurateur,” he said, noting that they whined when smoking was banned but “survived beautifully.”

Worms in the Apartment

March 18, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Worms in the Apartment
By COLIN BEAVAN

FOR the year beginning last December, my wife, our 2-year-old daughter and I, while living in the middle of the city, are trying to survive without making any net impact on the environment. This means we’ll get as close as we can to creating no trash (so no takeout), emitting no carbon dioxide (so no driving or flying) and pouring no toxins in the water (so no laundry detergent), as well as mitigating impacts we can’t avoid (so planting trees). Not to mention: no elevators, subways, buying products in packaging, plastics, air-conditioning, TV or toilet paper.

Though I’m ashamed to admit it, this is the first time I’ve substantially changed my life to reflect my beliefs. I have boycotted products that contributed to the hole in the ozone layer; written letters against the Japanese for hunting whales; called for an end to the poaching of Congolese gorillas; marched against the whites who controlled South Africa in the apartheid era; detested the Israeli killing of Palestinians; and despised Palestinian killing of Israelis. But I made the mistake of believing that condemning the misdeeds of others somehow made me virtuous.

With age, I even ratcheted down my political action and veered perilously close to joining that brand of liberal who whines about the world but doesn’t actually do anything about it. If I were still a student, I’d probably march against my adult self. And, as a member of that passive group of do-nothings, I was far from alone.

Prof. Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University, in his recent book “Who Really Cares,” published data showing that, for all our liberal ideology, people like me volunteer their time no more than conservatives, and we actually donate 30 percent less to charity. We even give less blood.

“It’s not that liberals are selfish,” Professor Brooks told me on the phone. Rather, he said, they worry that individual action lets everybody else off the hook. Believing to a large degree that, as Professor Brooks put it, “societal coercion is better than individual action,” they prefer to exert their efforts on grand schemes to change the government and the laws.

So people like me work to get out the vote, but feel entitled to heat our empty homes all day because, hey, we’ve done our best. Liberals, Professor Brooks said, “are suffering from cognitive dissonance — because the way they live their lives is not in accord with their ethics.”

And anyway, with global warming, there is no time to wait around for a strategy of “societal coercion” to take effect. But can individual New Yorkers really help? Isn’t this really a problem for the sub- and ex-urbanites who guzzle gas in their S.U.V.’s? After all, 78 percent of Manhattan households don’t even have cars — can’t we content ourselves with the eco-efficiency of our crammed-together little island? Not when you consider that, together with the rest of our state, New Yorkers make nearly 1 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide, the predominant greenhouse gas.

So my family and I have started our experiment in extreme environmental living. We keep a bin full of worms that turn our organic waste into compost. We make our own yogurt, staying away from those nasty plastic tubs. We grow herbs on our windowsills.

We’ve faced a million problems — how to make a meal without creating a mountain of plastic; how to bike through the city streets without ending up with a crushed skull; what to do about diapers — but we’re reaping some unexpected benefits.

With all the stair climbing, I’ve lost 15 pounds. We produce less than half a small bag of trash in a week. My wife loves riding her foot-propelled scooter to work. Family life now centers around the kitchen and dining table, where we talk, instead of around the TV, where we didn’t. Even parts of the banks of the Hudson were, a least for a while, a little cleaner because we spent an afternoon picking up garbage (including, God save me, plastic bottles full of urine thrown from vehicles on the West Side Highway). Most of all, we feel that we are not contributing so drastically to the world problems that worry us.

I’m not saying that we’ll retain our most extreme adaptations when the year is over. I don’t know. And I’m certainly not saying we’re doing more about the environment than others — there are many engaged, committed people who do much more than we do.

But I like to hope that, at least, we have stopped doing so much less.

It Don’t Mean a Thing if You Ain’t Got That Ping

April 22, 2007
Tethered
It Don’t Mean a Thing if You Ain’t Got That Ping
By MATT RICHTEL

THE BlackBerry network went dark last week — cache-flow problems, apparently. Service stopped for a mere 12 hours, but to bereft users, 12 minutes was too long. Information feeds our lives, they protested, and the BlackBerry provides it. What if we miss the e-mail message that makes or breaks our happiness, or our bank account?

That’s always possible, of course. But what if what the users were missing was more primitive and insidious than uninterrupted access to information?

Experts who study computer use say the stated yearning to stay abreast of things may mask more visceral and powerful needs, as many self-aware users themselves will attest. Seductive, nearly inescapable needs.

Some theorize that constant use becomes ritualistic physical behavior, even addiction, the absorption of nervous energy, like chomping gum.

This behavior is then fueled by powerful social motivators. Interaction with a device delivering data gives a feeling of validation, inclusion and desirability. (It’s no fun to be the only un-pinged person in the room.)

James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Computing at Rutgers University, said the data coming from the devices was really secondary. “Look at a lot of the communication — it’s idiotic in terms of substance,” Mr. Katz said. “But it’s vital in terms of meaning.”

Mr. Katz argues that participation gives people a sense of belonging, one traceable to the atavistic desire to congregate and cooperate for safety and survival. In addition, he said, the constant checking is an exercise in optimism, like being an explorer or a gambler. Eternal hope delivered in tiny bits while you’re on the go.

“It’s random reinforcement,” Mr. Katz said. The fact that you don’t know when important news will come, he said, “means you will quickly engage in obsessive compulsive behavior.”

These social needs and yearnings may drive the use. But at some point, that use becomes an end unto itself — a physical ritual that can take on some of the qualities of actual addiction, said Dr. John Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, where he specializes in neuropsychiatry.

Several years ago, Mr. Ratey began using the term “acquired attention deficit disorder” to describe the condition of people who are accustomed to a constant stream of digital stimulation and feel bored in the absence of it. Regardless of whether the stimulation is from the Internet, TV or a cellphone, the brain, he said, is hijacked.

“I liken it to a drug,” Mr. Ratey said. “Drug addicts don’t think; they just start moving. Like moving for your BlackBerry.”

When the BlackBerry system faltered on Tuesday night, Steven M. Krausz, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was attending an industry dinner at a conference in Washington, D.C. The malfunction didn’t interrupt his habit.

“I checked it at least a dozen times during dinner,” Mr. Krausz said, in part because he was curious about when service would be restored but also because the constant checking was a placeholder for less desirable activities.

“I’d rather reach for the BlackBerry than reach for bread or dessert and put some high-cholesterol item in my mouth,” he said, calling his habit “a reflexive response.” Besides, he added, he checked his device regularly “because it was a boring dinner speaker.”

There were two speakers, actually: Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Tadataka Yamada, executive director of global health for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Not the least boring to some listeners, but the threshold for boredom is low these days, say compulsive device operators.

BlackBerry users do half-joke that they have become junkies, insatiable data tokers. But because the tool is tied to productivity, defined by some as essential to modern employment, overusers don’t really regard their habit as the digital equivalent of firing up a Marlboro outside work.

Perhaps they should re-examine the tie to productivity, however. The technology creates the allusion that every moment can be a productive one, said Tara Hunt, 33, a marketing director for a technology consulting company in San Francisco. When you’re not participating, it’s like you’re suggesting that you’re not keeping up, she said.

“I might think I’m missing out if Google bought another company and I wasn’t part of the echo chamber around it,” Ms. Hunt said, referring to the chance she’d miss news of an industry development. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter a whole lot.”

B. Marc Averitt, a technology investor, said that on the face of it, his fear was that someone would send him a message, become frustrated and bored if there wasn’t an immediate response, then go look elsewhere for an answer. He keeps up, he said, because everyone else is doing it, forcing his hand.

But on a deeper level, Mr. Averitt said he found a frustrating, even counterproductive, psychological fixation. And one that he sometimes has to satisfy in secret. On vacations, he said, he has been known to check his BlackBerry even after promising his wife he wouldn’t. His wife says the activity takes him out of the real emotions of the present.

And perhaps, for some, that is the point.

Dr. Ratey, from Harvard, likens the problem to a food addiction, which is one of the most beguiling for psychiatrists. After all, he said, food is essential for life, but problematic in excessive doses. And that’s what makes breaking technology addiction so difficult.

Sometimes the habit is there even when the device isn’t. Users talk of phantom urges, like (no kidding) the feeling of a hip vibrating, as if to suggest a belt-hooked BlackBerry is buzzing when, in fact, the person is the shower. Others hear a beep in the night, say from outdoors or an alarm clock, and reach for the device.

“It’s like Pavlov’s dog,” Mr. Averitt said.

The Year Without Toilet Paper

March 22, 2007
The Year Without Toilet Paper
By PENELOPE GREEN

DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.

A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.

A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.

Meanwhile, Joseph, the liveried elevator man who works nights in the building, drove his wood-paneled, 1920s-era vehicle up and down its chute, unconcerned that the couple in 9F had not used his services in four months. “I’ve noticed,” Joseph said later with a shrug and no further comment. (He declined to give his last name. “I’ve got enough problems,” he said.)

Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.

Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin’s best friend.

Why there may be a public appetite for the Conlin-Beavan family doings has a lot to do with the very personal, very urban face of environmentalism these days. Thoreau left home for the woods to make his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren’t budging from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests.

Mr. Beavan looks to groups like the Compacters (sfcompact.blogspot.com), a collection of nonshoppers that began in San Francisco, and the 100 Mile Diet folks (100milediet.org and thetyee.ca), a Vancouver couple who spent a year eating from within 100 miles of their apartment, for tips and inspiration. But there are hundreds of other light-footed, young abstainers with a diarist urge: it is not news that this shopping-averse, carbon-footprint-reducing, city-dwelling generation likes to blog (the paperless, public diary form). They have seen “An Inconvenient Truth”; they would like to tell you how it makes them feel. If Al Gore is their Rachel Carson, blogalogs like Treehugger, grist.org and worldchanging.com are their Whole Earth catalogs.

Andrew Kirk, an environmental history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose new book, “Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism,” will be published by University Press of Kansas in September, is reminded of environmentalism’s last big bubble, in the 1970s, long before Ronald Reagan pulled federal funding for alternative fuel technologies (and his speechwriters made fun of the spotted owl and its liberal protectors, a deft feat of propaganda that set the movement back decades). Those were the days when Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth writers, Mr. Kirk said, “focused on a brand of environmentalism that kept people in the picture.”

“That’s the thing about this current wave of environmentalism,” he continued. “It’s not about, how do we protect some abstract pristine space? It’s what can real people do in their home or office or whatever. It’s also very urban. It’s a critical twist in the old wilderness adage: Leave only footprints, take only photographs. But how do you translate that into Manhattan?”

With equals parts grace and calamity, it appears. Washed down with a big draught of engaging palaver.

Before No Impact — this is a phrase that comes up a lot — Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan were living a near parody of urban professional life. Ms. Conlin, who bought this apartment in 1999 when she was still single, used the stove so infrequently (as in, never, she said) that Con Edison called to find out if it was broken. (Mr. Beavan, now the family cook, questioned whether she had yet to turn it on. Ms. Conlin ignored him.)

In this household, food was something you dialed for.

“We would wake up and call ‘the man,’ ” Ms. Conlin said, “and he would bring us two newspapers and coffee in Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we’d call two men, and get bagels from Bagel Bob’s. For lunch I’d find myself at Wendy’s, with a Dunkin’ Donuts chaser. Isabella would point to guys on bikes and cry: ‘The man! The man!’ ”

Since November, Mr. Beavan and Isabella have been hewing closely, most particularly in a dietary way, to a 19th-century life. Mr. Beavan has a single-edge razor he has learned to use (it was a gift from his father). He has also learned to cook quite tastily from a limited regional menu — right now that means lots of apples and root vegetables, stored in the unplugged freezer — hashing out compromises. Spices are out but salt is exempt, Mr. Beavan said, because homemade bread “is awful without salt; salt stops the yeast action.” Mr. Beavan is baking his own, with wheat grown locally and a sour dough “mother” fermenting stinkily in his cupboard. He is also finding good sources at the nearby Union Square Greenmarket (like Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, which sells milk in reusable glass bottles). The 250-mile rule, by the way, reflects the longest distance a farmer can drive in and out of the city in one day, Mr. Beavan said.

Olive oil and vinegar are out; they used the last dregs of their bottle of balsamic vinegar last week, Mr. Beavan said, producing a moment of stunned silence while a visitor thought about life without those staples. Still, Mr. Beavan’s homemade fruit-scrap vinegar has a satisfying bite.

The television, a flat-screen, high-definition 46-incher, is long gone. Saturday night charades are in. Mr. Beavan likes to talk about social glue — community building — as a natural byproduct of No Impact. The (fluorescent) lights are still on, and so is the stove. Mr. Beavan, who has a Ph.D. in applied physics, has not yet figured out a carbon-fuel-free power alternative that will run up here on the ninth floor, though he does subscribe to Con Ed’s Green Power program, for which he pays a premium, and which adds a measure of wind and hydro power to the old coal and nuclear grid.

The dishwasher is off, along with the microwave, the coffee machine and the food processor. Planes, trains, automobiles and that elevator are out, but the family is still doing laundry in the washing machines in the basement of the building. (Consider the ramifications of no-elevator living in a vertical city: one day recently, when Frankie the dog had digestive problems, Mr. Beavan, who takes Isabella to day care — six flights of stairs in a building six blocks away — and writes at the Writers Room on Astor Place — 12 flights of stairs, also six blocks away — estimated that by nightfall he had climbed 115 flights of stairs.) And they have not had the heart to take away the vacuum from their cleaning lady, who comes weekly (this week they took away her paper towels).

Until three weeks ago, however, Ms. Conlin was following her “high-fructose corn syrup ways,” meaning double espressos and pastries administered daily. “Giving up the coffee was like crashing down from a crystal meth addiction,” she said. “I had to leave work and go to bed for 24 hours.”

Toothpaste is baking soda (a box makes trash, to be sure, but of a better quality than a metal tube), but Ms. Conlin is still wearing the lipstick she gets from a friend who works at Lancôme, as well as moisturizers from Fresh and Kiehl’s. When the bottles, tubes and jars are empty, Mr. Beavan has promised her homemade, rules-appropriate substitutes. (Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.)

Yet since the beginning of No Impact, and to the amusement of her colleagues at Business Week, Ms. Conlin has been scootering to her office on 49th Street each day, bringing a Mason jar filled with greenhouse greens, cheese and her husband’s bread for lunch, along with her own napkin and cutlery. She has taken a bit of ribbing: “All progress is carbon fueled,” jeered one office mate.

Ms. Conlin, acknowledging that she sees her husband as No Impact Man and herself as simply inside his experiment, said she saw “An Inconvenient Truth” in an air-conditioned movie theater last summer. “It was like, ‘J’accuse!’ ” she said. “I just felt like everything I did in my life was contributing to a system that was really problematic.” Borrowing a phrase from her husband, she continued, “If I was a student, I would march against myself.”

While Ms. Conlin is clearly more than just a good sport — giving up toilet paper seems a fairly profound gesture of commitment — she did describe, in loving detail, a serious shopping binge that predated No Impact and made the whole thing doable, she said. “It was my last hurrah,” she explained.

It included two pairs of calf-high Chloe boots (one of which was paid for, she said, with her mother’s bingo winnings) and added up to two weeks’ salary, after taxes and her 401(k) contribution.

The bingo windfall points to a loophole in No Impact: the Conlin-Beavan household does accept presents. When Mr. Beavan’s father saw Ms. Conlin scootering without gloves he sent her a pair. And allowances can be made for the occasional thrift shop purchase. For Isabella’s birthday on Feb. 25, her family wandered the East Village and ended up at Jane’s Exchange, where she chose a pair of ballet slippers as her gift.

“They cost a dollar,” Ms. Conlin said.

It was freezing cold that day, Mr. Beavan said, picking up the story. “We went into a restaurant to warm her up. We agonized about taking a cab, which we ended up not doing. I still felt like we really screwed up, though, because we ate at the restaurant.”

He said he called the 100 Mile Diet couple to confess his sin. They admitted they had cheated too, with a restaurant date, then told him, Yoda-like, “Only in strictness comes the conversion.”

Restaurants, which are mostly out in No Impact, present all sorts of challenges beyond the 250-mile food rule. “They always want to give Isabella the paper cup with the straw, and we have to send it back,” Mr. Beavan said. “We always say, ‘We’re trying not to make any trash.’ And some people get really into that and others clearly think we’re big losers.”

Living abstemiously on Lower Fifth Avenue, in what used to be Edith Wharton country, with early-21st-century accouterments like creamy, calf-high Chloe boots, may seem at best like a scene from an old-fashioned situation comedy and, at worst, an ethically murky exercise in self-promotion. On the other hand, consider this response to Mr. Beavan’s Internet post the day he and his family gave up toilet paper.

“What’s with the public display of nonimpactness?” a reader named Bruce wrote on March 7. “Getting people to read a blog on their 50-watt L.C.D. monitors and buy a bound volume of postconsumer paper and show the filmed doc in a heated/air-conditioned movie theater, etc., sounds like nonimpact man is leading to a lot of impact. And how are you going to measure your nonimpact, except in rather self-centered ways like weight loss and better sex? (Wait, maybe I should stop there.)”

Indeed. Concrete benefits are already accruing to Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan that may tempt others. The sea may be rising, but Ms. Conlin has lost 4 pounds and Mr. Beavan 20. It took Ms. Conlin over an hour to get home from work during the snowstorm on Friday, riding her scooter, then walking in her knee-high Wellingtons with her scooter on her back, but she claimed to be mostly exhilarated by the experience. “Rain is worse,” she said.

Perhaps the real guinea pig in this experiment is the Conlin-Beavan marriage.

“Like all writers, I’m a megalomaniac,” Mr. Beavan said cheerfully the other day. “I’m just trying to put that energy to good use.”

Slow Down, Multitasker, Especially if You’re Reading This in Traffic

March 25, 2007
Slow Down, Multitasker, Especially if You’re Reading This in Traffic
By STEVE LOHR

Confident multitaskers of the world, could I have your attention?

Think you can juggle phone calls, e-mail, instant messages and computer work to get more done in a time-starved world? Read on, preferably shutting out the cacophony of digital devices for a while.

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

In short, the answer seems to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug.

“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Mayer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

Mr. Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an article last December in the journal Neuron that they used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once.

Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images.

The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time.

In many daily tasks, of course, a lost second is unimportant. But one implication of the Vanderbilt research, Mr. Marois said, is that talking on a cellphone while driving a car is dangerous. A one-second delay in response time at 60 miles an hour could be fatal, he noted.

“We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can,” observed Mr. Marois, who said he turns off his cellphone when driving.

The young, according to conventional wisdom, are the most adept multitaskers. Just look at teenagers and young workers in their 20s, e-mailing, instant messaging and listening to iPods at once.

Recently completed research at the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University suggests the popular perception is open to question. A group of 18- to 21-year-olds and a group of 35- to 39-year-olds were given 90 seconds to translate images into numbers, using a simple code.

The younger group did 10 percent better when not interrupted. But when both groups were interrupted by a phone call, a cellphone short-text message or an instant message, the older group matched the younger group in speed and accuracy.

“The older people think more slowly, but they have a faster fluid intelligence, so they are better able to block out interruptions and choose what to focus on,” said Martin Westwell, deputy director of the institute.

Mr. Westwell is 36, and thus, should be better able to cope with interruptions. But he has modified his work habits since completing the research project last month.

“I check my e-mail much less often,” he said. “The interruptions really can throw you off-track.”

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.

“If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad at other companies, too.”

In the computer age, technology has been seen not only as a factor contributing to information overload but also as a tool for coping with it. Computers can help people juggle workloads, according a paper presented this month at a conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The researchers scrutinized the work at an unnamed executive recruiting firm, including projects and 125,000 e-mail messages. They also examined the firm revenues, people’s compensation and the use of information technology by the recruiters.

The recruiters who were the heaviest users of e-mail and the firm’s specialized database were the most productive in completing projects. “You can use the technology to supplement your brain and keep track of more things,” said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of the paper, along with Sinan Aral of the Stern School of Business at New York University, and Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University.

But the paper also found that “beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation.”

For the executive recruiters, the optimum workload was four to six projects, taking two to five months each.

The productivity lost by overtaxed multitaskers cannot be measured precisely, but it is probably a lot. Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex, a business-research firm, estimates the cost of interruptions to the American economy at nearly $650 billion a year.

That total is an update of research published 18 months ago, based on surveys and interviews with professionals and office workers, which concluded that 28 percent of their time was spent on what they deemed interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main tasks.

Mr. Spira concedes that the $650 billion figure is a rough estimate — an attempt to attach a number to a big problem. Work interruptions will never — and should not — be eliminated, he said, since they are often how work is done and ideas are shared. After all, one person’s interruption is another’s collaboration.

The information age is really only a decade or two old in the sense of most people working and communicating on digital devices all day, Mr. Spira said. In the industrial era, it took roughly a century until Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911 published his principles of “scientific management” for increasing worker productivity.

“We don’t have any equivalent yet for the knowledge economy,” Mr. Spira said.

But university and corporate researchers say they can help. Brain scans, social networking algorithms and other new tools should help provide a deeper understanding of the limits and the potential of the human brain, they said. That will teach workers in groups how to manage the overload of digital communications efficiently.

A new organization, the Institute for Innovation and Information Productivity, whose sponsors include Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson, has been created to sponsor such research. It provided money for the recent research project at Oxford’s Institute for the Future of the Mind, for example.

Further research could help create clever technology, like sensors or smart software that workers could instruct with their preferences and priorities to serve as a high-tech “time nanny” to ease the modern multitasker’s plight.

That is what Mr. Horvitz of Microsoft is working on. “We live in this Wild West of digital communications now,” he said. “But I think there’s a lot of hope for the future.”