Text messages at the breakfast table, conference calls on family vacations, emails from bed, Facebook in class. Is technology’s power to connect bringing us closer or rending us apart?

Dalton Conley and Natalie Jeremijenko are experts with different views on that question. To Conley, our gadgets and online identities are prying away our attention from meaningful exchanges, while popping the all-important bubble of private space. To Jeremijenko, technology can make the world a better place, if we’re strong enough.

Did we mention they’re married? Yup. With two kids.

Technology Is Pulling Us Apart

by Dalton Conley

Dalton Conley is Dean for Social Sciences at New York University and the author of Elsewhere U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.

In most cases, technology is pulling families apart. People are increasingly distracted by their gadgets—texting under the dinner table isn't uncommon—and meaningful exchanges are harder to come by. Thirty years ago, even if people didn’t have a conversation, they at least watched the same television show in the family living room and made a comment once in a while. Now, everyone’s immersed in their own individual social or entertainment media; there’s no common totem in the family hearth.

These same technologies do enable folks to be in touch throughout the day via text messages or phone calls. Today, when your kids go off to school you stay in touch with them. Before you just sent them out into the ether and hoped they came back. But this doesn't necessarily bring us closer together. In order to be intimate in the way that families should be, you need alone time. You need to let go and cut the electronic umbilical cord before you can reconnect. It’s only during the alone time that we’re able to internalize, process, and retain the social interactions of the day.

Also, the more that we’re on stage (posting on Facebook or Twitter, or otherwise broadcasting our daily states and moods), the less of a backstage there is. The boundary between public and private is increasingly blurred. I think of intimacy as selectively granting passes to your personal backstage, where you let certain people see your grumpy side, or get the update on how you’re feeling at 3:00 in the afternoon. But if you’re using social media as a soapbox to post one-to-all, then there’s no backstage anymore.

In my house there is no such thing as people sitting down for family dinner and talking, unfortunately. I know my kids can observe good manners—like clearing their plates and keeping technology off the dinner table—because they do it when we go to other people’s houses. But in our home the phone rings for Natalie and she inevitably takes it, I’m texting or emailing on my BlackBerry, and the kids invariably want to be online because they’re screen addicted. And we're lucky if we’re even home at the same time, which is unlikely.

I’m not going to say technology creates these disjointed schedules and competing demands on attention in our household, but it is the catalyst, the enzyme that makes them possible.

I recently tried to have a no-screen rule for a month because our son, Yo, who is 10 years old, was misbehaving in school. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I caught Yo updating his Facebook status during school (he’s too young for Facebook, but lied about his age to set up an account). I wrote back asking what the hell he was doing on Facebook during school. “Oops,” he replied.

A no-screen rule is difficult to enforce because we, the parents, need to be on screens ourselves. Short of unplugging and going to a log cabin in the woods, I don’t know how one can balance it. As a parent, I do think the month without screen time, imperfect as it may have been, had a positive effect in our family—on behavior, on homework, and on intimacy. But as a social scientist I know I was going in with clear biases, so I really can’t be sure.

Technology Is a Tool, We Can Use it How We Want

by Natalie Jeremijenko

Natalie Jeremijenko is a tech-obsessed artist and engineer who invented the word “thingker” to describe herself. She directs the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic at New York University and runs HowStuffIsMade.org. Her recent work includes the Strap-On Flight Simulator (she’s Imaginary Air Force Squadron Leader), and rhinoceros beetle wrestling.

Is technology eroding families or bringing them closer together? It’s doing both at the same time. We can use technology to connect with one another or to disconnect. The question becomes: To what extent do we exercise that agency? And why don’t we feel more in control of it?

My position is that we have more agency than we often exercise.

In my household there’s clearly a polarization on the issue, though. I agree with Dalton that it’s important to “cut the electronic umbilical cord” on a regular basis in order to process and reflect. I don’t find it terribly hard to carve out and create the alone time I need, though. We’re the authors of our own lives—we’re not under the remote control of our technology. If people don’t seek out that quiet, contemplative time, then they probably don’t need it.

Raising children certainly does bring up some interesting challenges. Dalton got mad at Yo for using Facebook during school and tried to cut off his screen time for a month. But I say bring it on. First of all, Facebook is the kind of thing a kid could use to get a homework assignment that he missed, or do other practical school-related things.

But more deeply than that, much of what kids learn at school is how to function socially and draw on the sense-making that comes, not from a textbook, but from interacting with other kids who are responding to the same information. That’s what makes it a rich learning environment, and that's why kids go to school rather than learning at home. School is social, and a social technology like Facebook can be a worthy partner.

In fact I’ve been encouraging my kids’ school to give them more socially connected software tools. They started on Powerpoint (eek!) for class presentations. At least now they’re using Google Docs. Still, I advocate a more conceptually powerful program, Prezi, which lets people share ideas and visual strategies. Most contemporary education at that age is based around group work, so why wouldn’t he be using social technology?

Yes, there’s going to be mischief and misuse of technology. But kids aren’t evil. They’re just quick to experiment with technological tools. They’re going to explore all sorts of uses, good and bad. To explore people’s reactions they’ll experiment with jokes—maybe even racial slurs. This is part of their process of making sense of the world. They need a way to experiment.

Yo recently got ahold of my Twitter account and sent a message to my several hundred followers. He said: “This is Yo so fuk of.” (Yes, he’s still getting a handle on the art of spelling.)

To Dalton, this episode is proof that social media pulls families apart. But kids have always made bad decisions. I hijacked my parents’ car and drove on the freeway at age ten (and I would rather Yo hijack my Twitter account to explore social limits than hijack a deadly technology like a car). Like any child, Yo is experimenting. He is exploring his agency with technology in the social world. He watches how we make sense of his actions, how we respond, and figures out how to respond himself.

Incidentally, the Twitter hijacking left Yo with some remorse. Before being caught he followed up with a second tweet: “Sorry about that last message everyone. I posted it by accident. I meant to say: carrot guy screams, I want my veggies!”

Jacob Gordon is a Nashville-based freelance writer and the host of TreeHugger Radio. 

Public transit advocates and road warriors

Electric Cars Are Still Cars

by Diana Lind

As Editor in Chief and Publisher of Next American City, Diana Lind is constantly looking at ways to make cities sustainable. She also produces NAC’s signature events, Next American Vanguard and Open Cities.

Who wants to argue against the positive impacts of small steps toward sustainability? I don’t—but I have to.

There’s no doubt that small efforts are meaningful. Using compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent ones lower’s humanity’s carbon footprint. Recycling instead of throwing away plastic and paper saves acres of trash from landfills, and using plant-based detergents instead of harsh chemicals keeps harmful toxics out of our ecosystems. But taking a long view, these are minor ways to counter monumental climate change and the degradation of our natural environment.

What if, instead of promoting slight modifications to our behavior, we created new systems that led us on a radical path toward sustainability? What if, instead of promoting recycling, we taxed disposable items that could not be reused, making a plastic bottle of water cost $5 instead of $1? Think about how many bottles of water would never be purchased and instead how much more urgently the public would fight for clean tap water.

There are countless ways we could rethink our consumption and our carbon-fueled behavior, but instead we rally around “smarter” choices—compact fluorescent bulbs and recycling plastic, for example—that merely delay, rather than prevent, inevitable environmental catastrophe. Case in point: the move toward electric cars and the investment in new car infrastructure to accommodate these new vehicles.

Sure, electric cars may offer an improvement upon gas-?fueled cars, but this innovation is insufficient to create the kind of social, economic, and environmental sustainability our planet needs. You’ll hear electric car advocates praise the fact that hybrids can be fueled by solar and wind energy, rather than coal-sourced electricity. But recent estimates show that solar, wind, and geothermal energy account for only about 7 percent of the world’s total energy. While I am hopeful that one day our country will run on renewable energy, it is naive to assume that the country’s 250 million vehicles would, if plugged in anytime soon, be fueled by anything other than coal. That’s the very same coal whose high carbon emissions are guaranteed to push us past the ecological tipping point.

In any case, changing the source of a car’s fuel does not change the fact that the car still contributes to a number of other major environmental and socio-economic problems. To name just a few: Cars fuel sprawl, create hideous hours-long commutes, contribute to the obesity epidemic, and are accomplices to our ever-worsening social isolation. Consider the fact that car-oriented communities are much less sustainable than walkable communities. For example, our auto-dependent suburbs and exurbs typically are zoned for larger houses and bigger commercial spaces, all of which consume much more energy than compact, dense cities.

If you then agree that cities are the key to sustainability, then mayors and transportation directors shouldn’t be encouraging car usage. As Dean Kamen, the creator of the Segway, will tell you, cars move at a speed of about eight miles per hour in cities—they actually aren’t suited to the fast pace of urban places. Bikes, buses, and subways move much quicker and provide the public with a variety of other benefits—from the health benefits of biking to the economic benefits of inexpensive public transportation. Will cars ever really be “plug-in-and-play?” I don’t think so. And I fear cash-strapped cities are going to end up with a new kind of electric bill—the kind that pays for new infrastructure to service electric cars, at a time when economic strains should be encouraging greater public transit.

We are fortunate to live at a time when all major municipalities are serious about sustainability. But shouldn’t the advent of the electric car provide a perfect moment to rethink how cities incorporate cars in their urban fabric? Instead of creating new electric car plug-in infrastructure, which will undoubtedly become outdated within a decade or two, is it not time to rethink personal mobility altogether? What if cities outlawed private cars for leisure purposes? What if money otherwise spent on plug-in infrastructure went toward feasibility studies for car-free downtown centers?

Anyone who thinks that this kind of transformation in cities is beyond our capability for change should remember this: We once ripped up public transportation infrastructure and built highways through our downtowns. It is no more outlandish to think that we could reverse these changes today if we created comprehensive plans to wean cities off cars. Wouldn’t that be smarter?

People Want Cars, Give Them Better Ones

by Marc Geller

A veteran advocate for electric vehicles, Marc Geller is on the board of directors of the Electric Auto Association and co-founded the association’s San Francisco chapter and the San Francisco Electric Vehicle Association, as well as DontCrush.com and Plug In America.

Greater support for mass transit and appropriate land use policies that make mass transit accessible are essential. They are essential for more livable communities and more efficient use of resources, including energy. However, we have created a nation that is dependent, for the foreseeable future, upon the automobile. And many of the rest of the world’s inhabitants aspire to automobile ownership. China has opened up high-speed rail lines while the United States fiddles. Yet simultaneously, China has overtaken the United States in the number of automobiles sold annually.

Despite billions of dollars of investment, in most of the United States only a tiny percentage of people use mass transit regularly. The latest report by the American Public Transportation Association documents a 3.8 percent decline in ridership overall in the first nine months of 2009. Designing our cities and regions around mass transit is something we must do, but it is a multi-generational project.

In other developed countries—in Europe and Asia, for example—clean, electric public transit is the principal means of transportation. In most of the developing world, public transit remains the only viable means of getting around. But the commuters in poorer nations usually travel in a haze of pollution created by petroleum-powered trains and buses. The basic problem that faces transportation today isn’t whether people travel on mass transit or in automobiles, but rather the technology and fuel employed.

The question that faces us is how to ensure that our mass transit and private cars minimize the negative environmental impacts of travel. To do that we must set our nation, and the world, on a path to eliminate petroleum as the predominant fuel for transportation. To continue to rely on petroleum is to accept as inevitable the immense political power of the world’s wealthiest corporations and the resultant pollution, climate change, and war. There is no catalytic converter that can fully scrub the toxics that result from burning oil. And there is no way to democratize the production and distribution of petroleum.

There is, however, an alternative path: Electricity. It’s been around a long time and powers just about everything we use except transportation. It’s ubiquitous, relatively price stable due to government regulation, and is created in many ways, increasingly including renewable—such as solar, wind and geothermal—sources.

Of course we need energy to create electricity, and just as we’ve been burning petroleum for a century to move us and our stuff around, we’ve been burning oil and coal and natural gas to create electricity. While burning all those fuels has caused pollution just as surely as gasoline cars and trucks, we have options. As aging, filthy coal power stations are retired, they are often replaced with cleaner-burning natural gas generators. And now we are making a commitment to renewable electricity generation. Multiple sources of electricity generation make the grid reliable. In contrast, there is no effort to protect our transportation “grid” from vulnerabilities to petroleum’s monopoly.

While our electricity generation is becoming cleaner and more renewable due to state and federal mandates, switching to electricity for transportation immediately lowers emissions. On the existing U.S. electric grid, half of which is powered by dirty coal, an electric car already is less polluting and emits fewer greenhouse gasses than the average gasoline car. In the worst cases, like some nearly 100 percent-coal-powered states, the emissions profiles may be a wash. In others, like California and Texas, which use a preponderance of natural gas, it’s truly a slam dunk for electric transportation. Given our commitment to ever more solar, wind, and other renewables, electric transportation will only get cleaner.

Only with an electric car could you aspire not only to zero-emission driving, but to making your own zero-emission electricity to feed it. Putting solar photovoltaic panels on one’s roof is not rocket science, nor out of reach for millions of homeowners. With renewable power and plug-in cars, we can begin to get control over our energy destiny.

A central goal of the twenty-first century must be to bring the revolution of electrification to transportation—and that will include both mass transit and personal vehicles.

Animals Are Essential to Sustainable Food

by Nicolette Hahn Niman

As senior attorney at Waterkeeper Alliance, Nicolette Hahn Niman sought to improve conditions at livestock operations. Today she and her husband Bill, founder of Niman Ranch, raise grass-based cattle, heirloom turkeys, and goats. She is the author of the book Righteous Porkchop.

A chorus of impassioned criticism has been rising against meat and dairy consumption. Many of the critics identify themselves as environmentalists. Their vehemence has been stoked by several reports, most notably one from the United Nations, documenting that animal farming is contributing to climate change, depleting and polluting groundwater, and poisoning rivers and streams. These reports are timely and necessary. But they cannot rightly be used to bolster arguments that farm animals should be scrubbed from our landscapes. The data indict only inappropriate practices in raising animals, not animal farming per se. The prevailing industrial methods differ radically from traditional land stewardship and animal husbandry. The most environmentally sustainable food production mimics nature in all its complexity—and animals are an essential component.

Today’s debate over livestock is characterized by oversimplified rhetoric. In one corner, agribusiness implacably (and ineffectively) defends the status quo; in the other, vegan activists urge total abolition of animal farming. Their fervent advocacy echoes prohibitionists at the dawn of the twentieth century, some of whom attacked apple trees with axes because they were the source of hard cider.

Like the prohibitionists, activists against meat are fueled by the excesses of the day. The number of animals slaughtered in the United States has grown substantially over the past century: It’s doubled for cattle; increased seven-fold for swine; and skyrocketed fifty-fold for chickens.

From an environmental perspective, the concentration of animals is more problematic than the total number. America’s farm animals were once widely dispersed, living in moderate herds and flocks, their manure effectively recycling nutrients, an invaluable part of the farm’s economy and ecology. Today, they are densely concentrated in massive populations, often far from where their feed is grown. The average hog herd, for example, has gone from 15 in 1900 to 766 in 2002. Many modern chicken and hen flocks number over a million birds. In this setup animals are separated from the land and crops, creating soil infertility and erosion on the farm and air and water pollution at industrial animal operations. Taking animals off the land and confining them in buildings has caused inhumane conditions and a food system wildly out of balance.

This imbalance is what aggravates global warming. The U.N. report blames 18 percent of global warming on livestock. But very little of that has any connection to well-managed traditional, grass-based animal farming. For starters, 48 percent of it is from land-use changes, mostly clearing of forests (for grazing and growing feed crops) in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and other developing countries. The United States, however, is not expanding croplands. In U.S. farming, most CO2 releases come from fuel burned for vehicles, equipment, and machinery. Smaller, traditional American farms have low CO2 emissions because they keep their animals outdoors on pasture and use little machinery.

Livestock farming also plays a role in nitrous oxide emissions – about five percent of US greenhouse gases. But more than three-quarters of agriculture’s NO2 emissions are from manmade fertilizers. Thus, animal farming that doesn’t need fertilized crops creates little NO2. Using animal manure mitigates the need for commercial fertilizers.

As for methane, there are two types. Much methane caused by animal farming comes from manure lagoons at industrial facilities. Other methane (“enteric emissions”) is generated from animal digestive tracts, particularly of ruminants like cattle, and can be reduced by dietary supplementation and rotating grazing pastures.

It’s important to note that there were plenty of animal enteric emissions in this country long before the arrival of cattle. Prior to European colonization, enormous herds of large ruminants covered the continent, including an estimated 10 million elk and as many as 75 million bison. “The moving multitude … darkened the whole plains,” Lewis and Clark wrote of bison in 1806. The total number of large ruminants was surely greater than the 40 million mature breeding beef cows and dairy cows in the United States today.

And we shouldn’t forget that all food has global warming impacts. Wetland rice fields account for almost 30 percent of the world’s human-generated methane. Researchers in Sweden discovered that the carbon footprint of a carrot varied by a factor of 10, depending on how and where it was produced. Singling out meat’s climate impact makes no sense.

Traditional animal farming also has environmental benefits. Recent studies show that pasture and grassland areas used for livestock actually lessen global warming because their vegetation and soils effectively act as carbon sinks. Converting croplands to pasture sequesters significant amounts of carbon. Perennial pastures can decrease soil erosion by up to 80 percent and improve water quality, according to the Minnesota Land Stewardship Project. Even the U.N. report notes, “There is growing evidence that both cattle ranching and pastoralism can have positive impacts on biodiversity.”

The Kansas-based Land Institute agrees. The institute has presented the Obama administration with a 50-Year Farm Bill that proposes increases in perennial crops and permanent pasture. “We see future herbaceous perennial grain producing polycultures being managed through fire and grazing, just as the native prairie was ‘managed,’” Institute President Wes Jackson told me. “The large grazer on grassland has always been an integral part of the system here in North America.”

Solving what ails agriculture must entail reducing the total number of animals raised and returning animals to the land, where they belong. A study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research concluded that with moderate reductions in Western meat eating, we could easily feed the world in 2050 using grass-based, humane farming methods.

Environmentalists are rightly angry about the industrialized livestock sector. But eliminating all animal husbandry is like taking axes to apple trees—it wouldn’t work. Worse still, it would make the most environmentally appropriate farming impossible.

There's No Reason to Eat Animals

by Lindsay Rajt

A vegetarian since her teenage years, Lindsay Rajt manages grassroots campaigns at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Rajt has coordinated campaigns targeting KFC’s “torture” of chickens as well as the treatment of horses at Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby.

If we care about the environment and believe that kindness is a virtue—as we all say that we do—vegan diet is the only sensible option. The question becomes: Why eat animals at all?

Animals are made of flesh, bone, and blood, just as you and I are. They form friendships, feel pain and joy, grieve for lost loved ones, and are afraid to die. One cannot profess to care about animals while tearing them away from their friends and families and cutting their throats—or paying someone else to do it—simply to satisfy a fleeting taste for flesh.

What does it say about us that we’re willing to give animals a safe pasture and freedom from suffering only to betray them by killing and eating them in the end? Nicolette Hahn Niman argues in her recent book that it’s acceptable to raise animals for food as long as they are treated humanely and killed quickly. But we wouldn’t extend that philosophy to dogs, cats, or children. The inconsistency means that eating animals simply cannot be justified.

Niman assures consumers that the animals at the ranch that she manages with her husband, Bill Niman, have a “good life and an easy death.” This likely conjures up images of pigs frolicking together, getting belly rubs and playing in mud puddles while turkeys strut about, gobbling along to music and eating fresh corncobs, melons, and grapes until they’re peacefully euthanized at a ripe old age. Think again. While the animals at BN Ranch may have a better life and may face an easier death than the animals killed for Smithfield or Butterball, “good” is not an accurate description. What kind of good life ends at age 12, which is the human equivalent of the oldest non-breeding animals on farms such as hers? Niman’s arguments are similar to those of slaveholders who advocated treating slaves more kindly but did not actually want to abolish slavery.

Ultimately, it’s not our farming practices that need to change—it’s our diets. As Niman knows, we cannot use only pastureland to produce the amount of meat that is currently consumed in this country. Approximately 10 billion cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys are killed for food each year in the United States alone. The sheer number of animals killed to satisfy people’s taste for flesh makes it impossible to raise and slaughter them all on small family farms.

Claiming that meat eating can be ethical or eco-friendly tends to pacify people who want to feel as if they are doing the right thing but don’t want to stop eating meat. Yet raising and killing animals is neither moral nor green. As Niman knows, meat production is resource-intensive and plays a role in nearly every major environmental problem, including climate change.

Animal agriculture is one of the world’s largest sources of CO2 and the largest source of methane, which is more than 23 times more powerful than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. Research by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, the authors of Livestock and Climate Change, indicates that raising animals for food produces 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions each year. Of course, animals on feedlots produce more greenhouse gasses than pasture-raised animals, but all farmed animals produce methane while digesting food, and their feces also emit methane.

One of the world’s leading authorities on climate change—Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and himself a vegetarian—believes that everyone in the developed world should consume a vegetarian diet for environmental reasons. According to Pachauri, “In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity.” The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has reported that climate change mitigation costs could be reduced by 80 percent if everyone around the globe went vegan.

Meat consumption is also a major contributor to food shortages. There would be more food to go around if more people went vegan because many staple crops are fed to farmed animals instead of to hungry people. This is especially wasteful considering that animals can only turn a small fraction of that food into flesh. It takes about 700 calories worth of feed to produce just one piece of 100-calorie beef.

More food can be grown on a given parcel of land when we aren’t funneling crops through animals. Vegfam, which funds sustainable plant-food projects, estimates that a 10-acre farm can support 60 people by growing soy, 24 people by growing wheat, or 10 people by growing corn—but only two by raising cattle.

The United Nations’ special envoy on food says that it’s a “crime against humanity” to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn into ethanol while nearly 1 billion people are starving. So how much more of a crime is it to divert 756 million tons of grain and corn per year—plus 98 percent of the 225-million-ton global soy crop—to farmed animals? With 1.4 billion people living in dire poverty, reserving these harvests for animal forage is tantamount to stealing food out of people’s mouths.

Meat production is inefficiency at its worst. When you factor in all the water squandered on animal agriculture and all the fossil fuels needed to operate slaughterhouses and processing plants and to transport meat from the plants to the stores—not to mention the air and water pollution that results from it all—you’ll understand why it just makes sense not to eat animals. As Niman—who herself has been a vegetarian for years—can tell you, one can live quite healthily and happily without eating animals.

This debate appears in the Spring 2010 print issue of the Earth Island Journal and on the Earth Island Institute website.