November 5, 2009
As Vermonters and New Yorkers wind down the Celebrate Champlain quadricentennial calendar, Lake Champlain appears unwilling to yield the spotlight. The iconic watershed, long a thoroughfare for transport and commerce, became an impassible gulf just over two weeks ago with the closure of the Crown Point Bridge. Already reeling from the effects of the Great Recession, and the free fall of the dairy industry, businesses on both sides of the bridge have been stung by the sudden disappearance of this unlikely economic engine.
Were the fallout from this sudden crisis not so tragically pervasive, one could see it as a fascinating litmus test for the resilience of local economies. While folks on both sides of the lake scramble to concoct stopgap fixes, it would behoove the rest of us to tune in and pay attention.
Keep reading →
March 26, 2009
A passage that firms up quite nicely the advantages of an agrarian ethos:
“An agrarian economy rises up from the fields, woods, and streams–from the complex of soils, slopes, weathers, connections, influences, and exchanges that we mean when we speak, for example, of the local community or the local watershed. The agrarian mind is therefore not regional or national, let alone global, but local. It must know on intimate terms the local plants and animals and local soils; it must know local possibilities and impossibilities, opportunities and hazards. It depends and insists on knowing very particular local histories and biographies.” — From “The Whole Horse” 1996 in Citizenship Papers
Keep reading →
March 26, 2009
Open the newspaper Pull up your customized, electronic news aggregator these days, and you will find a media reality awash in tales of populist rage. Content for a time as the symbol of homespun simplicity, an American Gothic accoutrement, the pitchfork has regained the currency it once carried in the bygone days of agrarian populism. For instance, here it is in the hands of Stephen Colbert.
The Colbert Report: Stephen’s Angry Mob Will Crush AIG
The nature of the protest hasn’t necessarily changed. Then, as now, populism sought to assert the rights of the downtrodden against a corporate culture that had infected the political system, narrowing the spectrum of debate to economic solutions that perpetuated the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few. Unfortunately, we are rapidly losing touch with the utilitarian spirit that once defined the movement, as citizens are, in increasing numbers, no longer rooted in the land. In fact, the contemporary uproar over the failure of AIG and the financial system writ large only underscores the failure of the populist revolt of the 19th century to create meaningful change in the complexion of the American landscape. Keep reading →
March 13, 2009
From the world of pessimism today:
We have a (rather bleak) estimate of the world’s true carrying capacity from climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/scientist-warming-could-cut-population-to-1-billion/
And another shout from the escalating cacophony of alarm on our vastly broken industrial food system. Pigs with MRSA. Sounds like a really, really, awful horror flick, only this one’s the real deal, kids. Nicholas Kristof uncovers some disturbing consequences of antibiotic use in livestock operations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/opinion/12kristof.html?scp=2&sq=MRSA&st=cse
This second tidbit is reason #3,475,392,865 why a) we need to do a much better job of educating the public, and schoolchildren in particular, regarding the provenance of its food and b) “outsourcing” food production to centralized, impenetrable feedlot fortresses far remote from customer bases severs this country’s valuable agrarian heritage.
What to do? For starters, vote with your food dollars. Knowing where my food comes from more than justifies any added expense. Should a critical mass of consumers (which this humble scribe believes must be more than the current constellation of regular Whole Foods and Co-Op customerdom) begin moving away from companies that adhere to simple bottom-line production cost models, we’ll begin to see the some substantive change. Perhaps more boardrooms will come to see the virtues of triple-bottom line business models, and responsible corporate citizenship.
Still fed up? Do what the Egyptians did; have an organic beer.
Over at Grist, Tom Philpott serves up the third installment of his series on organic suds: Brewer’s Dozen.
Kudos Mr. Philpott for showing the love to Middlebury VT shop Wolaver’s , but where is Peak Organic Brewing? Jon Cadoux and the boys at Peak mix up a mean brew … the Espresso Amber they served up at the Vermont Brewer’s Fest was quite tasty and Fair Trade Certified to boot.
I’ll take a full glass in a glass-half-empty-world any day.
March 12, 2009
I’m still buzzing on Tom Friedman’s March 7th editorial, “The Great Inflection,” in the New York Times. If you missed it, shame on you. Go now: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08friedman.html
Whatever you think about the man’s body of work, this take on the current market correction is a revelation. Refreshing is hardly a strong enough word. Call this a hiccup, recession, or depression. Call it whatever you will. Just don’t miss the powerful lesson on markets coded within the collapse. Friedman is one of the only mainstream voices I have seen questioning the assumption not that America will recover to its current economic heft, but rather whether it should.
“What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental
than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth
model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable
economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall —
when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more.’ “
Keep reading →
January 17, 2009
With the Presidential inauguration just days away, giddy optimism seems to be in fashion once again. Count me among the camp of folks who are wary of investing too much hope in the Obama presidency. Don’t get me wrong. I have immense confidence in Obama’s abilities, and the return of intelligence to the oval office will be revelatory after eight years spent wandering in a collective intellectual morass. Even so, we face enormous challenges, and the system charged with conquering them will remain profoundly broken, even after 43 wanders off into the West Texas sunset.
Enter the Sustainable Dozen. These folks comprise a diverse slate of candidates advanced by “Food Democracy Now!” an organization dedicated to advancing sustainable food policy in the office of the USDA. We’ve heard a chorus of voices in recent months, with Michael Pollan’s “Farmer in Chief”, an open letter to President Obama, being foremost among them. True: Farmer Barack might not hop behind a Roto-tiller to plant a victory garden atop the ruins of the rose garden, as Pollan suggests (alas); what he might still do is act decisively to institute a prescient and critical national security policy measure– a sustainable overhaul for our food system.
You can play too. Sign the petition to send the sustainable dozen, or some portion therof, to Washington: http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/ .
It might not be manna from the heavens, but it’s one step forward from the mega-farm corn monocultures currently on the menu at the supermarket. That’s change I can believe in. Or change in which I can believe.
Now, back to filling out my application for Undersecretary of Grammar.
January 14, 2009
“An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”
- Henry David Thoreau
It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a dog along, either. When not chewing household items into unrecognizable shreds, dogs remind us of simplicity, and the importance of stopping to smell the smells every now and then, so to speak. Yesterday morning, I was lucky enough to pause in a little scrub pine grove as champagne snowflakes fell during a sudden squall. Houston was tracking rabbits, their darting movements suddenly frozen, and wonderfully legible in the crust that had begun to harden atop last week’s snowfall.
Snowfall, with its tendency to dampen and insulate sound, produces a unique and transcendent stillness. I stopped to listen, because we are offered lessons like this a million times each day, but rarely possess the necessary patience to wait to be taught. Little wisps of sound drifted into earshot–flakes alighting on the dried leaves of young oaks. The oaks have paused for the winter. Come spring, they will resume their ascent, up from the understory to the roof of the forest, such as it is here in the sandy pine barrens of Cape Cod. Keep reading →
