newsroom

TODAY Monday 18 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Thirty Glorious Years

According to a story yesterday on the indispensable Planet Ark, the French are having a problem with their trash. More particularly, they are having a problem with the transport of their trash. Thirty-five percent of all cargo traveling on French highways is solid waste headed for either disposal or recycling. Worried about congestion and emissions, officials are looking at train and barge alternatives.

The good news behind this story is that re-use and recycling industries have become profitable investments in an otherwise lackluster French economy. The bad news is that much of the trash can't yet be recycled profitably, and there's lots more of it than there used to be. American opinionizers love to beat up on the French these days (" Il Faut Que Get A Grip"), but the French and other Europeans have become astonishingly Americanized recently, not least in the way their food and other household products now come wrapped in great masses of bulky packaging.

Quelle change! Once upon a time...

"...[N]o one throws away a rag or tin can or piece of paper that has any possible use. There is little paper in the village to throw away. The grocer never wraps up an article if he can avoid it... When the grocer is obliged to wrap something -- an order of rice, for instance -- he turns to the pile of neatly cut-up newspaper... For olives or a piece of soft cheese newspapers cannot be used. For such articles he regretfully tears off a piece of waxed paper he has had to buy for that purpose. When the customer arrives home after a shopping expedition she has only a few little squares of newspaper or oily wrapping paper to dispose of. These are saved to help light the fire."

The time was 1950-51, the place was the southern village of Roussillon, and the witness was Laurence Wylie, a Haverford professor on sabbatical. His account of what he saw that year, "Village in the Vaucluse," has become a classic of intelligible anthropology. It is one the best records of a way of life that was still common for a majority of Europeans at mid-century (Wylie picked Roussillon from a list of statistically typical towns). It is also an excellent reminder of the enormous transformation that has occurred in human behaviors and their environmental consequences since that time.

Wylie estimates that the average monthly cash income of a Roussillon family was between sixty and seventy US dollars. That's the equivalent of about ten thousand 1997 dollars per year. Most of the money went for food, which people loved to eat and loved to talk about. Housing was cheap and, by contemporary measures, substandard. Only one room was heated in winter, generally below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Electricity use was confined to a radio and a couple of 25-watt bulbs for reading. Toilets were outdoors and unplumbed. Clothes were handed down, sewn, and patched. Five families in Roussillon owned automobiles, only one of them less than ten years old. The villagers worried about money, wanted more, and fretted about the loss of young men and women to the more lucrative life of the towns. They had to work hard to maintain their dignity (most crucial of social values), and the men would often sigh and complain about "the bitch of life."

They were poor but not miserable, says Wylie. Their small incomes were supplemented by home production (nearly every household had a garden and chickens or rabbits) and barter of food or services was a common form of intra-village exchange. The diet was salubrious and their health was generally good. Water came from uncontaminated springs and sewage was either composted or piped over the cliff. All children were vaccinated and the state paid for home visits by physicians (who were rarely called). Parents limited the number of children to two or three, without recourse to contraceptives. Everyone was literate and all placed a high value on education in general and the village school in particular. Ninety percent of eligible voters participated in local elections. There was one incidence of theft during Wylie's stay (someone swiped a coat off a clothesline, and the two gendarmes who bicycled up to the village couldn't find the perpetrator). Every man could afford a nightly drink in the cafe and weekend games of boules (losers buy).

The culture was by no means into deep ecology. Nature represented sources of food and money, and animals were regarded as things to eat. There was simply no question that human claims -- or more precisely, family claims -- held sway over all others. The villagers and their ancestors rarely took a long view of reforestation, and so firewood became expensive. When objects finally outlasted their usefulness, they were pitched into the ravine. But their poverty and their customs kept them from causing much damage in faraway places. They consumed few calories of fossil fuels, didn't use many poisons in their agriculture, and required little in the way of bulky goods that had to be transported in or out.

That's all gone now. The Roussillon that Laurence Wylie observed was already undergoing dramatic change, and, as an American, he knew about its force and inevitability better than the villagers did. He was there at the beginning of what the French call "les treintes glorieuses," the thirty-plus years of splendid wealth creation that democratized material prosperity in France (and lots of other places). The French have much more money these days, fewer of them grow more food, and they amass and discard objects and drive their automobiles at rates at about 60% of the American. Roussillon has become a haven for well-to-do expatriates and tourism has replaced ochre mining as the most important local industry. The suffocating conformity of the 1950-51 village has no doubt been ventilated, the feuds and grudges that people employed as means of diversion have probably abated, and the ravine is almost certainly less littered, but life, she is still the bitch, n'est-ce-pas?

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

To paraphrase John Riggins, Hibernicus is broke, he's bored, and he's back. Our resident political malcontent casts a cold eye on the upcoming battle for the ratification of the not-yet-negotiated Kyoto Treaty on climate change. Key question: Can the enviros stimulate some grassroots pressure? Read all about it in today's new installment of the Capitol Hill Spy.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/15: We Span the Energy Globe
8/14: Up in Flames
8/13: Environmentalism for Grown-Ups
8/12: Right to No
8/11: Cleavage
8/08: The Monsters from 12,000 BC
8/07: A Little More Room
8/06: Big Victory, I Guess
8/05: Necessary Vulgarization
8/04: More Crime, Please

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.