Forrest’s Recent Comments

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  Your addendum

  Thanks for your thoughtful response to my post, Tom.  There is a piece I read in this month's Orion on the power of farmer co-operatives in North Dakota.  You can find it at http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/06-3om/Nace.html  I think one of the major solutions to the scale and distribution problems you have referred to in some of your posts is the formation of such farmer co-operatives.  Farmers can't wait for the government to help them - I have to admit that I think the USDA is no more a friend of small farmers than Cargill or Monsanto - but they can take action on their own to buy co-operatively owned processing and transport facilities.

  On the point about packaged salad greens, I again want to point out a different perspective.  My parents, who are very "green conscious" vegetarians, love pre-packaged salad greens.  Fifteen years ago, when they travelled outside of the leftie belts of the USA (and they travel quite a bit), it was almost impossible to buy any salad green other than pesticide soaked, dehydrated iceberg lettuce.  Today, every supermarket in the entire country sells bags of pre-washed greens.  While they may not be as high quality as the greens they grow in their own garden in the spring and summer, they are an enormous step up from what used to be accessible to most of middle America.  In other words, while a small organic farmer like yourself might view Earthbound salads as a pitiful substitute for the real thing, for the vast majority of Americans, Earthbound lettuce may be much better than anything they've ever had access to.  I don't think this is cause for despair - but rather I think it is an awareness that we should cultivate in our planning for local food systems.  Local food systems that require people to entirely rework their lifestyles will be a failure.  So will ones that are preachy.  Food systems that find ways to market improved products in ways that fit into people's existing patterns (i.e. pre-packaged food in supermarkets in the Earthbound example) will be succesful.

  I tend to think that the reason Wal-mart is threatening is not so much because Wal-mart is evil, or big, but that Wal-mart has traditionally sold cheaper merchandise through buying huge lots at reduced prices - and this may limit their interest in buying into these local markets.  But what if you approached the produce manager at your local Earth Fare (or Wal Mart) and offered to sell him local organic greens? On Wal-mart's organic bomb posted 3 years, 5 months ago 40 Responses

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  A few questions

  Way back when I was in Econ 101, I learned that when there was alot of demand, and limited supply, prices would rise.  How does Wal-mart plan to undersell everyone else in the organic business and simultaneously increase organic volume dramatically?  Remember... it takes three years to transition a farm to organic, and wal-mart is trying to do this in one year.  

  When I lived in the Bay Area (about five years ago), I had a friend who was a farmer turned computer programer.  After about ten years of barely making ends meet on a rented piece of land in the northern central valley, he had given up, and now was earning money as a programmer, and gardening on the side.  He told me that in his experience, small organic operations could rarely afford the kinds of crop rotation and soil building that he had idealistically believed were the core of organics.  They tended, as his operation had done, to overwork their soil and die of exhaustion.  Larger farms he knew were able to maintain comfortable profit margins, and thus had time and space to practice Albert Howard-like rotations.  

  In the context of the northern central valley, perhaps these large organic farms (Lundberg, for example), were much better for the environment.  Perhaps better still would have been if the entire central valley had been returned to the verdant grassland that John Muir described.  Then we could begin restoring some of California's many endangered species.  Of course, it would be much harder to provide the yuppies in San Franisco with their local food without the central valley.  But is the food really local when the farmer has to get up at 2 AM to drive four to six hours to the urban farmer's market (as most farmers at most Bay Area markets that I went to did)?

  The problem I'm pointing out with this story is that it is extremely difficult to correlate agricultural practices as we know them with sustainability.  I don't know the answer, and like many, I distrust Wal-mart.  But let's be careful when we assume that "small farms are better."  It may not always be the case.On Wal-mart's organic bomb posted 3 years, 6 months ago 40 Responses

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  Another way of asking

  Does industrial farming feed the world?
  Did pre-industrial farming feed the world?
  Did forest gardens feed the world?
  Did hunter-gathering feed the world?

  I do not know of a single human society in history or pre-history where hunger - and death by starvation - were absent.  In many, they were (and still are) commonplace.  The problem is not production of food, so much as it is distribution.  In hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, with limited ability to store and transport food, the distribution problems were seasonal, or related to occasional extreme weather events.  In modern societies, the distribution problems are generally more closely related to what welfare economists call "entitlements" - i.e. the ability of people to purchase food (or purchase the inputs necessary to grow their own - such as land, seed, fertilizer, labor).

  If our goal is to feed the world, our focus ought to be on wealth distribution more than on agricultural technology.  I have seen no credible evidence that hypothetical utopian organic farming would create fewer calories than current industrial agriculture.  But I have also yet to see any evidence that organic farming solves hunger problems.  

  Since many of the hungriest and poorest people in the world are rural people (laborers, and yes, even small landowners), primarily in Africa and South Asia, one of the most helpful things we could do to "feed the world" would be to raise farm incomes in those regions.  Cutting first world agricultural subsidies and increasing imports of high value (and value-added) crops from those regions to the wealthy countries might be viable strategies, as would be investing in agricultural technology R & D specific to those regions (instead of breeding more Round-up Ready okra or whatever).  Political stability would be a key prerequisite.  Global warming is expected to have a disproportionately negative impact on sub-saharan Africa.  Thus, we might go so far as to say that a society that is changing its climate cannot feed the world.On A food-politics writer expresses angst at the obscurity of his topic posted 3 years, 7 months ago 24 Responses

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  Some of us just don't like cities

  There are alot of interesting ideas here, and I can't claim to be any kind of expert on "new urbanism."  I did read an interesting and highly intelligent critique of new urbanism a while back by libertarian environmentalist Randall O'Toole, called, "The Vanishing Automobile and other Urban Myths." O'Toole, who is better known for his work on the economics of public lands, basically argued that all of the factors identified in the above posts were not that strong compared to the desire of people to live in big homes, with lots of space around them.  

  I can't speak to the ins and outs of the economic and political arguments, but I think it is important for us to understand that many people, myself included, don't really like living in dense, urban environments, no matter how well designed.  Yes, as an environmentalist I hate being dependent on my car, and I also hate the extra expense.  I hate commuting.  But when I get home, there might be elk grazing in my field.  It is quiet.  I can make as big of a garden as I want, and I can walk off into the woods.  The stars shine at night, and coyotes howl in the swamp.  My neighbors live half a mile away - but when I need them, they are always helpful.  I might add that I'm fortunate to live in a city small enough that I can have all of these amenities, and still be less than one hour's bike ride from my office.  We need to remember that people who don't choose to adopt the "new urbanism" aren't necessarily SUV driving rubes.  They may be nature lovers who want nature to be something other than a manicured city park or a weekend trip out into the mountains.  I think the philosophy of new urbanism is great - but I've yet to be convinced that it has anything to offer somebody like me.  Perhaps you can convince me otherwise.  On Why isn't there more new urbanism? posted 3 years, 7 months ago 28 Responses

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  Crazy Horse, ecosystem people, and equity

  Several years ago, I read a book titled Ecology & Equity, by Ram Guha, an Indian sociologist, and Madhav Gadgil, an Indian ecologist.  I don't remember all the details of their argument, but the big picture was that ecology and equity were two sides of the same coin.  In India, where their examples were taken from, destroying the environment was the same thing as destroying the livelyhood of the poor.  They described these poor people as ecosystem people  - i.e. people who depended on the ecosystem for their subsistence - as subsistence farmers or migrant pastoralists, or at least with some major component of their livelyhood dependent on products provisioned from the ecosystem.  When the government "developed" those resources, it basically redistributed those resources from the ecosystem people to the industrial or global capital people - for example, damming the Narmada River destroyed the livelihoods of people who depended on the river for subsistence in order to provide irrigation water to commercial farmers and electricity to urban areas.  Another example - the British took control of the Indian forests in order to put them to "productive use" - providing commercial lumber - and prohibited harvests by local people providing products for their own subsistence.

  Here in the US, we are fortunate in that we don't have the widespread, grinding poverty that continues to affect so many hundreds of millions of people in India.  The question that I was left wondering after reading Gadgil and Guha was - where are our ecosystem people?  How does equity relate to environmental protection in the US?  Klingle & Taylor point out, correctly, I think, the elitist roots of the environmental movement, but I think they miss alot of the story.  In the environmental world where I work currently, National Forests, environmentalists are frequently accused of destroying jobs and denying access to the common people.  These people whose livelihoods we effect are not ecosystem people - they don't depend on the forest for subsistence - instead they seem more like a rural proletariat - dependent on industrial extraction from the forest for their incomes.  Similarly, recreationists who wish to drive ATVs or snowmobiles in wilderness areas are people who wish to recreate in vehicles that cost more than 10 times the annual income of an Indian subsistence farmer.  Federal land ranchers are by and large far wealthier than the average American.  

  It seems to me that all of us in federal land battles, "elitist" environmentalists and "poor" loggers, ranchers, and motorized recreationists, are a part of the powerful industrial class that drove the ecosystem people off the land years ago.  What ecosystem people?  Well - Crazy Horse, who someone else used, is a great example - but it was not only American Indians - it was also white and black subsistence farmers driven off their land by USDA subsidies, rising land prices, and competition from mechanized mega-farms during the first several decades of the 20th century.  

  The early environmental movement, it is true, largely ignored (and sometimes even aided the wrong side, as the authors point out in their quotes from Muir) in these struggles - but the environmental movement has a long history, dating back at least as far as Aldo Leopold's early attempts at ecological restoration, of aiding the poor and displaced as well.  Klingle & Taylor mention some interesting examples, but urban, non-white poverty is not the be-all and end-all of poverty.   The Back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s is frequently portrayed as a movement of hippie elites, but at the same time it deeply revitalized many impoverished rural communities - notably those in Northern Vermont and New York that Bill Mckibben, in his new book that I haven't read yet, describes as "the most hopeful place in America."  The back-to-the-land movement also provided the genesis for the organic farming movement, which has helped many rural farmers stay on their land, and here in the Northwest, nearly every rural grassroots environmentalist that I've met was a part of that movement.

  I'm not exactly sure how to end this post - but I would be very interested in seeing other responses.  I think Klingle & Taylor (and Grist) are correct to raise these issues - but I think we need to think more seriously about their ideas and not just assume that Environmentalist = John Muir toting Wilderness fanatic.  The story is far more complex (and interesting!)On Environmentalism's elitist tinge has roots in the movement's history posted 3 years, 8 months ago 17 Responses