The Global Citizen					June 15, 2000

THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE PERFECT
Wow!  Did I ever infuriate my liberal friends when I said I would vote for Ralph Nader!
They've been hammering me with earnest lectures about how every vote for Nader will help get Bush elected, and how an elected Bush will devastate the environment, enrich the rich, hand the country to the oil companies, appoint Supreme Court justices who will send us back to the dark ages.  As if I didn't know.  Liberals, bless their well-meaning hearts, can be a bit tedious.
This week I heard the same argument from Vermont's governor, an excellent administrator and adroit politician, slightly to the left of tepid Al Gore.  Stick with me this year, he pleaded.  I have a rival on the far right and a rival on the left who will say everything you want to hear.  If you vote for what you really want, you'll end up with what you don't want, the righteous, rigid, crusading right.  Sometimes, he said, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
It's an argument of impeccable logic, and I usually go for logic.  But something in me is rebelling.  I'm tired of the mildly good.
The Kyoto accord, hammered out with the help of mildly good Al Gore (and which the far-righters in our Senate refuse to ratify), is the first international step in the direction of stabilizing the crazed climate.  We should ratify it and celebrate it, of course.  But only in full recognition that it is far too weak to stabilize the climate.  If it were implemented, things would get worse at a slower rate.  We need to do so much better than that.
In the same vein, our government's new revised regulation for organic labeling is mildly good.  It begins to correct the most glaring faults of the first draft, which would have allowed the organic label to be affixed to genetically engineered foods, irradiated foods, and crops grown with sewage sludge.  A huge citizen outcry, beyond anything the Department of Agriculture had ever seen, made it clear that whatever "organic" means, it doesn't mean that.
The new draft allows genetic engineering, irradiation and sludge only by exception, leaving small loopholes that seem destined to become big ones.  It permits huge animal factories as long as the feed is organic and doesn't contain hormones or antibiotics.  It makes the certification process so complex and expensive that only large producers will bother with it.  It looks like it was written mainly to allow large growers to push small ones out of the organic market.
It will, however, reward farms and agribusinesses that stop using toxic chemicals, and that's good.  Maybe even worth sacrificing the word "organic," which will now simply mean "grown without nasty chemicals."  Slightly good agriculture.  Those who practice farming that also builds soil, honors wildlife, keeps farms small so they can be actively nurtured, sells local and fresh, does not draw down groundwater, treats animals lovingly, treats workers as if they were not animals, and builds community -- well, those folks are going to have to come up with another word.
I don't want to complain about small steps in the right direction.  I welcome them.  I recognize that they're the only way to get anywhere worth getting.  What I'm trying to kick at, I guess, is the tendency of those who inhabit the middle of the spectrum of perfection to convince us to settle there -- and to muddle the very words we use to try to distinguish mediocrity from anything better.
At least we can keep the words clear.  In agriculture we go from "industrial" (the huge, cruel, polluting hog and chicken and beef factories) to "conventional" (large, chemical-soaked farms) to -- well, there's no good word for the folks who follow many environmental practices and therefore need and use fewer chemicals.  "Integrated pest management" is the closest term for that mildly good middle.  Next in the direction of virtue comes "organic" as now defined by the USDA.  For the truly virtuous we now need new words.  I suggest "ecological" for farms that work really hard to follow the rules of the planet (that's what "organic" used to mean) and "sustainable" for farms that also follow the highest rules of morality in their treatment of workers, neighbors and customers.
In the arena of politics, we need labels to distinguish the actively destructive (Jesse Helms, for instance) from the inadvertently damaging (George W.), the dawningly aware, the ones who make regular gestures in the right direction (Al Gore), those in steady good motion (the present governor of Vermont), those who can be counted on to push hard, and those who are unrelenting in their dedication to a world that works for everyone (Ralph Nader).
In the arena of products, we might borrow colors from catalog pages and distinguish black (sports utility vehicles), brown (sports utility vehicles that get higher mileage), beige (current compact cars), faintly green (the new gas-electric hybrids), jade (hydrogen-powered cars), spring green (hydrogen-powered buses and trains), deep forest green (bicycles).
How do we honor the good without letting it be the enemy of the perfect?  How do we keep a step in the right direction from becoming a stopping point?  How do we get beyond insipid shades of light green?
(Donella Meadows is an adjunct professor at Dartmouth College and director of the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vermont.)