The Growing Food Crisis

[Shepherd]

The following articles on the growing food crisis and the links included have merit. How much of your own food do you grow? The more you grow, or have secure food and water sources, the more likely are your chances for survival. The pace of the pending collapse--far beyond Recession and probably beyond the 1929 crash--quickens. Our soon future is not very probable to be like our present.

Right now is a good time to plant here in Sonoma County, in yards and containers. I know that I have said this before, but I want to repeat that a chicken in every backyard is a big part of the solution. Now is the time to legalize chickens in all cities; it is legal at least in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa, but apparently not in Healdsburg. And your town?
Shepherd

The first two*pieces are first-rate.*They*define the crux of*many*global problems*in an exemplary manner. The second one is affiliated with a link*in the*preceding piece and, based on its quality,*it*seems*almost certain that some of*the other links in the first*one have excellent writings*connected to*them, too. However, one only has so much leisure time to spare. Therefore, I highly recommend perusal of these two*compositions and, if further time is available,*a glance at the ensuing brief descriptions*in that*they do create a somewhat synthetic overview*en toto. -E.

https://www.counterpunch.org/goff04242008.html*

The Politics of Food is Politics

By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF

"The extractive mindset that capitalism requires to provide its fantastical rates of return is incompatible with biotic reality."

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand -- because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, "package" vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.

This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations -- an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping -- turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.

The end of cheap air tourism may seem like a good thing. And yet the collapse of tourism, in economies where the culture and scenery have become a last-ditch cash crop, can have effects just as disastrous as the collapse of any other external commodity market in a country that has been sucked into the undertow of global capitalism.

How much more devastating is the catastrophic cascade of food price inflation? (It's also directly related, by the way, to the plateau of global oil production in the face of relentless expansion of "demand" -- more on this below.) They're intertwined; the downsizing of air tourism reduces money income for populations dependent on the global capitalist economy for staple foods, just at the moment when scarcity, uncertainty, and rampant speculation are causing staple food prices to spike.

It's not a pretty picture, and the mainstream media are reporting on it with breathless alarm and utterly unjustified surprise; commentators from various perspectives (left, environmental, anti-colonialist, even libertarians) have seen this coming for a while.

Why Us? Why Now?

The airline industry has been very forthright about their problems. They are saying, "We were neither tooled nor organized for $120-a-barrel oil." Most of us get this, because we associate transport technology with fossil hydrocarbons. We drive cars; and we buy the gas to put in those cars. Planes run on No. 1 Jet Fuel and if oil prices go up, so does the cost of jet fuel. Most of us are less likely to associate is oil prices with food prices.

We buy food at the supermarket; so we don't generally experience -- directly -- the association between fuel and food. The connection, however, is every bit as central in the current food production regime as the link between aircraft engines and their fuel. Industrial monocropping for global distribution is "neither tooled nor organized for oil at $120-a-barrel." It is not just the far-flung food transport network (much of it refrigerated and fuel-hungry) that creates the intimate dependency on oil; it is the whole scheme called industrial (or corporate, or "modern") agriculture.

This oil/food link -- during the onset of what some call the Peak Oil event -- has resulted almost overnight in steep food-price inflation, hitting peripheral economies like a tsunami.

Half the world's population survives on less than $2 per person per day. Even an increase of a few pennies for a kilo of rice can threaten survival on such a slender margin. That -- on the surface -- is why we are witnessing an outbreak of food riots around the globe.The unexamined assumption, however, is that it's somehow natural for human beings to be in the position of abject dependence on cash money to obtain food.

We said that we are seeing the outlines of "an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance." In a real sense, however, we are suggesting a return to a perennial politics of resistance: the defense of "peasant" (smallholder, local) agriculture against imperial profit-takers. We are embarking upon an epoch that might best be called "imperial capitalist exterminism," in which billions of people may be left -- through calculated villainy or sheer stupidity -- to the tender mercies of war, pestilence, and famine as "externalities" of the so-called "free market."

In this new world order, the old class antagonisms across the axis of employer-employee have been replaced by debtor-creditor and producer/processor, and material "contractions" in the economy have transformed the "reserve army of labor" into "surplus people"... a darwinian nightmare leaving us nearly 7 billion souls at extreme risk.

Though the brunt -- as always -- is now being borne by the most marginal and fragile, the over-developed industrial metropoles are not escaping the impact of this crisis. In the United States, the culmination of a decades-long crisis of capital accumulation -- which has heretofore been exported to the rest of the world -- is coming home to roost in the form of a severe "credit crisis" at the same time as the oil price spike. We are entering a protracted period of stagflation: economic stagnation (recession) combined with price inflation (due in part to the impact of oil prices on virtually all economic sectors). We in the US are more deeply in debt, personally and nationally, than at any time in our history. And the key products that are driving up our cost of living -- even as our net worths stagnate and fall back -- are basically gasoline and food.

We metropolitan Americans panic when we contemplate the possibility of becoming unable to afford our private automobiles. This is not just because of our legendary ego-attachment to the car. The primary reason we panic is because we need our cars to get to our jobs (at least one study has suggested that Americans spend 20 percent of their take-home pay on their cars, so we are working one day out of five to pay for the car so we can drive to the job). And we need our jobs.

It's a given: people need their jobs. But why? Because without the income from those jobs, we and our children don't eat. Our access to food is permitted only when it's mediated by money -- which we can only obtain by working (for the ruling class) or by becoming wards of the state (which, increasingly involves coerced labour).

Once again, gasoline and food are intimately entwined -- in the mesh of dependencies that keeps us all obedient to the bosses of the monetized economy. Most people can't eat without participating in the money economy because they have been driven off the land, and live in high-density "people storage" buildings without any access to living soil; or because, despite living in the suburbs or semi-rural areas with ample access to soil, they lack the skills and knowledge to produce their own food; or the soil they do have access to has been killed by industrial farming practises and can only "produce" by means of massive external inputs that must be purchased from the money economy (and the extractive industries).

The fossil/extractive industries and the money economy have built fences all around the food supply, from production to consumption. We play their game or we don't eat. Now their game is coming apart at the seams.

Food is Not What it Once Was

Now it may be time to take a longer view and remember how these fences around food were built. The story of the last 200 years can be told many ways, but one way we can tell it is as the triumph of the extractive industries -- and their mindset and methods -- over all other human activities. The masters of mining and metallurgy, and of colonialist exploitation, have their fundamental premises: a reductionist approach that isolates the "valuable" in any "resource base", separates it from the "dross", and discards -- externalizes -- the "dross" while selling the "high value" extracted product for the best price possible.

With the rise of industrial capitalism (itself built on intensive colonial extraction) these premises became definitive for all human activities in the dominant imperial culture -- including those where such premises would be more than merely dysfunctional, they would (eventually, if adhered to rigorously) be fatal for their practitioners. We now practice farming as an extractive industry supported by other extractive industries: mining topsoil and fossil water, growing only a handful of predetermined "high value" crops and discarding/exterminating all other cultivars, and seeking "best price" in markets regardless of distance and appropriateness (if it makes more money to grow palm trees for biofuel to ship to wealthy customers overseas, then by all means destroy peasant smallholdings that produced food for local people, or forest that maintained water circulation and climate stability, in order to establish massive monocrop palm oil plantations).

The mindset and praxis of mining has been superimposed on all other activities: fishing is now practiced as stripmining by factory trawlers, bottom draggers, etc. The "bycatch" phenomenon, decimating hundreds of species as "collateral damage" in the hunt for select high-value species, is directly analogous to the proliferation of slag piles and acid pools around mining operations.

Dairy farming is practised as stripmining, pumping external inputs (hormones and other drugs) into heifers to force maximum production and extraction of the "high value" product (milk), and discarding the "dross" (a cow burnt out as a milk producer by the age of 3 and sold for cheap meat). This extractive praxis is guaranteed to destroy biotic systems -- whether it be the body of a cow, or an entire ecosystem -- because no biotic system can survive being stripped for specific "high value" parts.

Ecosystems, like animals, function as a whole. The rates of return demanded by finance capitalism are inherently incompatible with the rate of solar return expressed by natural growth patterns in biotic systems. We are biological -- biotic -- creatures, and all our food is the product of biotic systems. The extractive mindset that capitalism requires to provide its fantastical rates of return is incompatible with biotic reality.

Capitalism and food have been on a collision course from the beginning. The forcing of higher rates of return out of biotic systems to satisfy finance capital and to conform to the extractive metaphor, requires doing such violence to individual organisms and to entire ecosystems, that very soon grotesque amounts of tinkering and external input are required to maintain (temporarily) an unsustainable "harvest."

In animal husbandry this translates to the need for massive doses of antibiotics and other medications to enable animals to (barely) survive the cruel and pathogenic conditions of factory farming; in agriculture it translates into the systemic weakness of monocrop plantations which similarly require massive doses of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers etc. to compensate for what is effectively a sickly biotic system, with a compromised immune response, low resilience, no robustness.

These massive external inputs are all fossil-based: they come from the extractive/chemical/synthetic sector (the sector of human endeavor that, in the "advanced" West, has dominated culture and industry since the early 1900's). That sector in turn is the product of -- is wholly dependent on -- cheap fossil energy.

The maintenance of factory farms and feedlots like terminal patients on perpetual life-support has proven very profitable for the chemical/fossil sector. It has proven, temporarily, profitable for agribusiness which reaped record returns. And it has, as a side benefit, "improved the efficiency" of farming to such a startling extent that fewer than 2 percent of Americans still work on the land producing food. This means -- from a capitalist boss perspective -- that 98 percent of the population can be held to ransom for money, being unable to produce their own food. (And even those two percent of Americans who still farm often get all their household food from a corporate supermarket, since what they grow on their vast overcapitalized monocrop spreads is not edible by humans but merely the feedstock for industrial processes.)


The Official Story


The dismal quality of factory food has been ably documented by the Slow Food Movement, watchdog groups, and medical associations as well as by mavericks like Weston Price.


Why do we tolerate it -- and the near-totalitarian control exercised over our food supply by a handful of giant agribiz combines? In part we tolerate monopoly and lousy quality in our food economy because the public believes industry propaganda that (in Margaret Thatcher's infamous phrase) There Is No Alternative. The industry has cranked out a relentless barrage of propaganda for the last 50+ years, the gist of which can be summarised as follows:



* Industrial farming (aka the Green Revolution, one of history's more painfully ironic misnomers) has increased yields per acre


* Given the pressure of present and future population growth, only industrial farming can feed the world


* Industrial farming is hygienic, scientific, smart and safe; all earlier farming techniques were dirty, primitive, ignorant and inferior


However, present circumstances impel us to ask what is smart or safe about a farming praxis that destroys topsoil and depletes millennia of subterranean water accumulation in a matter of decades; what is hygienic about a farming praxis that notoriously contaminates soil and watersheds with industrial chemicals, or creates "lagoons" of unmanageably concentrated animal urine and manure, or produces food that routinely generates "health scandal" headlines; and what is scientific about a farming praxis that routinely disregards the most basic principles of ecosystem theory and management. Add to the mix the fragility of a farming praxis utterly dependent on a fast-depleting finite resource like fossil fuels, and it looks more and more like folly ... or a con game.


According to the industry propaganda line, only industrial farming can feed the world because industrial farming increased yields, and previous methods of farming were inadequate. Therefore, according to industry propaganda, the solution to the present food crisis is to throw more technology at it -- namely, genetic modification to produce organisms that can somehow survive or even thrive in the cruel and pathogenic conditions of factory farming. (The fact that intellectual property law related to GMOs could then be used to extend the centralized control of food production into a completely enclosed monopoly is, of course, merely coincidental.)


To deconstruct this seamless "no alternative" story we have to return to the first big lie: that the Green Revolution (chemical/factory farming) improved agriculture, increasing efficiency/yields, reducing pest losses, making the best use of land, etc. In the short term some of the claims appear to be true: you can grow larger vegetables if you salt the soil with artificial fertilizers, and this appears to improve yields per hectare.


However, several studies confirm that foods produced biotically ("organically" in the somewhat confusing US idiom) are more nutritious than the larger and more cosmetically perfect factory-farmed equivalent; not only are they uncontaminated with chemical poisons, but they are more nutrient-dense, ounce for ounce, than the industrial product. In this case, what "yield" means to the industrial ag-nexus is not food -- not nutritional value for people to eat -- but hundredweight of marketable commodity.


In terms of "efficiency," industrial agriculture does indeed look efficient from the finance capitalist point of view: using large mechanised devices to plant, harvest and process uniform, engineered monocrop from vast regimented plantations means that labour can be minimised: fossil fuels and machinery substitute for human labour, so that the wages/subsistence of workers/peasants are eliminated as an "operating cost". So long as fossil fuels are dirt (so to speak) cheap, this is efficient (in terms of realizing maximum profit on a hundredweight of commodity); and it creates a large alienated, captive labor pool of people who at one time had some kind of food self-sufficiency as agricultural laborers and smallholders, but are now thrown into the industrial/money economy in utter dependency. But in the long term, it seems patently absurd to call any farming method "efficient" if it invests 10 fossil fuel calories to produce one calorie of food; or if it uses up a inch of topsoil for every 13 years or so of farming the same fields. (F. H. King's Farmers of Forty Centuries documents practices which permitted Asian peasant farmers to plant and harvest on the same land for 4 millennia without exhausting the soil; North American topsoil 21 inches deep or more prior to European colonization is now down to 6 inches or less in many areas after only 200 years.)


In the long term, even the initial successes of the Green Revolution (GR) are hollowed out by diminishing returns and inconvenient facts: losses to pests are now higher per hectare than they were before the GR, despite the application of more and more costly high-tech pesticides. Monocrop plantations are simply too sickly, and pests are too rapidly-evolving and adaptive, for anything other than an endless treadmill of escalating cost and increasing toxicity. The artificial fertilizer and heavy machinery treadmill is very similar: for the first few years, yields may seem to improve, but soon the application of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides kills the soil, over-irrigation and heavy equipment compact it into hardpan, and what was fertile farmland becomes, essentially, semi-desert -- a near-sterile growing medium requiring more and more chemical inputs to support plants in a kind of gigantic outdoor hydroponic garden.


The Happy Ever After story of the Green Revolution and Better Living Through Chemistry is not wearing well. Moreover, contrary to industry claims, there is an alternative; and the alternative has -- potentially -- profound political implications (which is precisely why the finance capital/extractive nexus wishes to eliminate it from public discourse).


Another Agriculture is Possible


Many well-substantiated studies show that intensive biotic polyculture -- that is, the cultivation of many species of food plants in a small footprint, using biotic soil amendments and nutrient recycling -- produces far more food per hectare than factory farming; uses far less water; and builds, rather than destroying, topsoil.


Although more human ingenuity, care, and attention are required, the adoption of permaculture principles and techniques reduces the drudgery of food production considerably; the permaculturist is assisting food to grow rather than forcing it to grow (or more hubristically, "growing" it), which is much less work all round than our cartoon cultural memory of dawn-to-dusk backbreaking peasant labor (which became backbreaking to pay "tribute" and debts to people with weapons and ledgers, not survive).


What intensive biotic polyculture does not do is maximise money profits, minimise labour inputs, or facilitate large-scale extractive cash-cropping.


For these reasons -- not for any failure to produce food for eating -- it is derided by industrial agribiz "experts" as impractical, inefficient, inadequate, etc. In fact, poly/permaculture's abundant success in producing food for eating is one of the things that makes it a frightening prospect for those who control people by controlling people's access to food.


What they don't want us to know is that it works. Eisenia hortensis -- the European nightcrawler (earthworm) -- under ideal worm-farming (vermiculture) conditions double their volume through reproduction every 90 days. Each individual worm can eat approximately half its body weight each day. A pound of E. hortensis, then, can consume a half-pound of non-oily, vegetable kitchen scraps each day. The majority of that mass is excreted as an extremely high quality compost, with a bit of fluid (worm tea) left over (considered by many to be the organic uber-fertilizer). So, potentially, one pound of worms can convert around 180 pounds of kitchen scraps each year into the highest quality organic soil additive. Every five pounds of worm-castings can convert one-square surface-foot of soil into a super-producer for a four months. So one pound of worms can sustain 12 square surface-feet of garden throughout the year for the highest levels of productivity.


My own [Stan's] anecdotal evidence, without using worm castings but using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each... producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year... being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.


They want to sell you mass-produced food, for money... which you have to work for. Let us not forget that Enclosure (forcing people off the land, or separating them from their land) was the method used to compel people into the monetized industrial economy in the first place. A 12-foot garden bed is three-feet by four-feet. How many of these can you build on a half an acre? The key is always in the design.


But by design, we mean learning -- as in the design philosophy of "permaculture" -- how to work with nature, and not to attempt the vain conquest of nature. The key to that design -- aside from the mechanical tricks of trellising, water catchment, etc. -- is to create the conditions for increasing dynamic biotic complexity, beginning at the micro-level with the soil itself.


We are not accustomed, especially on the political left, to thinking about such practical activities as "political." We are still trapped in a strategic-theoretical model that equates power with policy, and policy is then undertaken as a purely ideological struggle. The persuasion of the word and the concept is given primacy over the persuasion of actual conditions and deeds. Metaphorically, we have constructed a line, running from left to right, and we use a constellation of policy-issues to place both people and discourse along that line.


The system, however, reproduces itself most earnestly through "facts-on-the-ground." Fighting a system with nothing more than ideas is the most Quixotic, and ineffectual, form of struggle. Before we can suggest ideas, we must first have some facts-on-the-ground of our own to point to. Fortunately, we do. Some of them have just been recited above. We just need to point to them with more urgency now. Because the facts-on-the-ground of the present capitalist system, as we can see, have slammed into something like the end of an unexpected cul-de-sac. The epidemic of dollar hegemony has torn through the world like a plague; but plagues burn themselves out when all who are susceptible have been wiped out.


The airlines have run into the deep impasse of tooling and organization... and so has our food system. Our system has arrived decisively at what Ivan Illich called its second watershed: all our "cures" have become the disease. We are in a state of accelerating iatrogensis. The capitalist/extractive/technomanagerial system can only prescribe more of the same medicine that is killing us... or new medicines to treat the symptoms of the last medicine. This is not a metaphorical treadmill, but a downward spiral... and there is a bottom.


This may look gradual and incremental in the daily chronos of our lives; but in the larger sweep of historical kairos -- a time that punctuates and disrupts chronos -- the convergence of a crisis in dollar hegemony with the energetic limits to "growth" (a wicked bit of misnaming if ever there was one) has been concentrated on the reality of food -- a reality from which no one can escape. Those in the commanding heights of the world food regime are watching their edifice begin to crumble.


Meanwhile, we already have our facts, our examples; and we have an opportunity -- through sheer necessity driven by empty bellies -- to expand those facts while the toppling food regime falls into its inexorable disarray. This is a teachable moment if ever there was one.


What is a Food Issue? Why Do We Need a Politics of Food Praxis?


At the policy level, because we would never eschew that, there is a nascent opposition to the "Farm Bill" -- a massive annual government giveaway to agri-business. The left is not alone in its oppositon to this. Libertarians oppose it, too. Does it matter why?


The grotesque dysfunctions and injustices of the Farm Bill are visible to people across the political spectrum: more importantly perhaps, so is the unsatisfactory quality of the food and pseudo-food produced by the agribusiness cartels coddled by the Farm Bill. This is a food issue.


Free-trade agreements are ultimately designed to convert foreign economies into dollar-generating export platforms; and agriculturally this means monocropping at the expense of peasants, the urban poor, and the globe's disappearing forests. This is a food issue.


US agricultural "dumping" is facilitated by massive government subsidies to agribusiness, which also facilitate the competitive destruction of local small producers. This same dumping introduces patented and GMO foods and seeds into the Third World to extend the reach of intellectual property lawsuits (a prime weapon of the extractive nexus against small producers). That is a food issue.


36 million households in the US are "food insecure," because food is largley available only on the monetized economy; and poor people have very little money. This is a food issue. The food we do eat is filled with chemicals and contaminants -- because the regulatory agencies (like the Food and Drug Adminsitration) have been converted into industry advocates by the determining role of money in politics (Ethanol, for example, is a vote-buying scheme, with ADM behind the scenes.). And because the industrial methods of farming require chemicals and contaminants to compensate for their pathogenic and violent treatment of creatures and biotic systems. These are food issues.


Health authorities increasingly acknowledge that the "western diet," especially the western/industrial junk-food diet, is associated with the onset or the exacerbation of many debilitating diseases and conditions. Meanwhile, our medical care system is in crisis, in an endless death spiral of increasing demand and increasing cost. Our hospitals contain McDonald's franchise outlets. These are food issues.


Our children are subjected to crap-food propaganda in school; and they eat crap food there. Corporations are behind this; and they intentionally addict our kids to crap-food. Some schools have begun to grow their own food; and the gardens are used as practical pedagogical tools as well as a source for clean food, with great success. Behavioral problems drop dramaticaly when kids eat clean, fresh food. These are food issues.


Anal-retentive white homeowners associations, who "associate" (pun intended) vegetable gardens with (eewwww) immigrants and dark-skinned folks, prohibit vegetable gardens in their neighborhoods (in the belief that veggies lower property values). This is a food issue. The agribusiness cartels are already trying to "crack down" on CSAs, farmers' markets and other direct producer-to-eater convenyances of real food, usually under the banner of "public health". They have already managed to leverage well-meaning public health and safety laws as weapons against small dairy and meat producers, and are even now trying to leverage the E Coli scares into a weapon against organic salad greens producers. This is a food issue.


One of the imperial fiats issued by Proconsul Bremer during the early occupation of Iraq was Order 81, the imposition of US intellectual property law on the subjugated nation; and one of the earliest "aid" initiatives was the marketing arm of the GMO seed vendors, attempting to force Iraqi farmers to use US patented GMO strains of wheat and barley. The American invaders may or may not intentionally have destroyed Iraq's premier national seed bank of traditional, varietal cultivars. This is a food issue.


There is no aspect of our existence, locally, regionally, nationally, or globally, that does not have a direct connection to food. We are what we eat. What we eat is who we are. Resistance is Fertile In India, there are already mass movements of farmers against agribusiness. In Brazil, there is a mass movement of peasants against agribusiness. Even in Europe, there is mass resistance to genetically-modified crops and US monocrop dumping. Other regions will evolve their own forms of resistance, out of their own cultures.


The job of Americans is to work with other Americans; and the more locally, the better. This is where we know each other culturally. This is the belly of the beast. This is where we can make some facts-on-the-ground; where we can break out of the impasse created by these agribusiness behemoths and create practical alternatives... first cell-divisions of new social forms in the interstices of a decaying system. Practical alternatives, skill sets and designs -- not alternative abstract ideologies -- can give us the wherewithal to resist control when the ruling class tries to bully and bluff its way out of the crisis unfolding aroung us. Moreover, the fact of food independence is something tangible that people can --- and will -- defend.


Food dependency has always been the most essential weapon of the oppressor. That applies to the abused wife who will be cast into penury if she leaves her abuser (we ask, "How will she eat?"); and it applies to the alienated suburban technodrone, who knows -- deep down -- that he doesn't know how he would eat without money. It applies to the indigenous population forbidden to grow their traditional crops by colonial masters; kicked off the best arable land by colonial masters; made dependent on second-rate food exports from the colonising nation; etc. It applies to the yeoman farmer deprived of common land and forced into the pool of desperate, hungry, deracinated wage-slaves who staffed the first industrial factories. It applies to citizens of Zimbabwe forbidden by President Mugabe and his political clique to keep vegetable gardens in the yards of their urban and suburban homes.


"Self-determination," that shopworn phrase used by right and left alike, is not practicaly feasible -- in any guise whatsoever -- without food independence. If someone else controls your access to food then you have, by definition, no self-determination. You can't hold a strike without a strike fund. Why do you need a strike fund? So you can eat. Food independence -- food autarky -- is not possible without greater separation of food from the monetized economy: (money is a weapon of control, an entitlement against others).


There is quite simply no independence, and little hope of a sustained resistance, without food security. Nor is there any way to get there (to a state of food democracy or food security) without relocalization as our most fundamental precondition.


What is To Be Done?


This is primarily a design-task, and only secondarily an ideological one... which bears the truth historical materialism should teach us above all others. In the United States and the other metropolitan nations, there is an emerging -- if not terribly vocal -- food movement. It involves everything from fighting prohibitions on raw milk to farmers markets to community-supported agriculture to community gardens.


This practice, which is coalescing into a movement, constitutes the original facts-on-the-ground referred to above. It is a hungry movement (another pun intended); and it craves expansion... not into a bureaucratic behemoth, but through organic expansion (another pun intended) at the local level. It is connected, through inextricable chains of implication, with a commitment to social justice, to environmental responsibility, to community-building, to fair labor practice, to fair trade. It connects people to these issues through the positive attraction of hedonism -- good food tastes better -- and the pleasures of engagement in community: it connects people to these issues through their urgent concerns about their own food security and the cleanliness/honesty/safety/responsibility of their food supply. And it cannot -- by its very nature -- fail to critique industrial capitalism as a system.


The argument from the archaic left, i.e. that the Food Underground is simply individualistic voluntarism, has copped to the idea that all practical palliatives are somehow the realm of the individual. This is premise-shifting and a deeply fallacious correlation. It means we still see the world exclusively through our left-to-right, linear continuum; and we still see politics as the persuasion of the word, our deeds being limited to symbolic expressions of resistance. And so, as counterpoint to the overwhlemingly overdetermined facts of the system, there is no concrete alternative we can show. We can only tell, or consult the historical archives. We need less telling and more showing. Food autarky and relocalisation are not symbolic acts of resistance, but actual resistance... the basis of resistance, the precondition of resistance.


Past revolutions began not with ideas in isolation; they began with facts-on-the-ground. By the time the French overthrew their aristocracy, that aristocracy was already moribund except for its political power. In every other realm, the businessmen who led the revolution were already dominant. The revolution evolved through the Kairos of history -- through slowly maturing metatrends -- which then interjected itself into the here-and-now Chronos of politics. The Kairos of history, in our time, is the long arc of fossil fuel depletion and the inevitable collapse of intricate profit-taking systems and hyper-extraction strategies predicated on unlimited cheap energy. "Just throw petroleum at it" is not going to work any more, This means that deep contradictions and crises papered over by desperate energy-intensive bandaids will become visible and painful (and they are, already).


The industrial food system is riddled with such crises and contradictions, barely papered over by throwing ever-more petroleum at it. It has reached a breaking point, and popular discourse is not unaware of this (as we may infer from the groundswell of popular nonfiction books highly critical of the system). The exposure of these fault lines -- and the intimate nature of food, for us social primates -- can be highly politicizing for large numbers of people; and whatever the ideological effects, the praxis of food autarky and community-through-food can only enhance our chances of survival and resistance during a period of (potentially) extreme dislocation.


The kitchen garden -- the "victory garden" -- represents not only the ability to sustain resistance (or aggression) against a foreign enemy, but the ability to resist domestic authority and to withdraw, at least partially, from the money economy and the wage-slavery and debt on which it is based.


Capitalism began by kicking people off their land and forbidding them to grow their own food; the end of capitalism may come when people who grow their own food and share it with neighbors are able to say a resounding No to capitalism's end-phase exterminism.


We need not start from scratch in order to "return to a perennial politics of resistance: the defense of "peasant" (smallholder, local) agriculture against imperial profit-takers."


The Food Underground is already here. It has been invisible to many of us, because our eyes were fixed on "higher" ideological struggles... while the basis of effective counter-ideology -- skill and design -- quietly passed us by. It is time to change that. Political resisters need to learn and apply the skills and designs of the food underground; and the food underground needs deeper, more focused and intentional politicization.


The Left may even learn something about organising and social change from the permaculture principles; it may be that in the long run, we do not "grow" revolution any more than we grow plants; it may be that social change is not forced, but is assisted to happen by creating the preconditions for an explosion of vitality, diversity and robustness in our (counter)culture. It may be that successful social change is more like gardening, and less like war, than our rhetoric and our habits of thought assume.


In summary, the Left and the food underground need each other; because history's Kairos has interjected itself into our Chronos and opened a path, a teachable moment for all of us. It is an unfamiliar path, perhaps, but not nearly so perilous as standing still.


De Clarke is a radical feminist essayist and activist living in the United States from 1980 to 2008. She now lives in Canada on her old boat. Much of her writing addresses the link between violence against women and market economics. While in the US, she raised vegetables and kept bees.


Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003 He is a Methodist and an organic gardener. He has written about the military and militarism, and about masculinity-constructed-as-conquest.


They can be reached at: [email protected]




https://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/02/280191.shtml, oil prices with food prices


The Oil We Eat (from Harper's)

author: Richard Manning


The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not
really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president
will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll follow the
energy.


Title: THE OIL WE EAT , By: Manning, Richard, Harper's Magazine,
0017789X, Feb2004, Vol. 308, Issue 1845
Database: MAS Ultra - School Edition

Section: ESSAY
THE OIL WE EAT

Following the food chain back to Iraq

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime,
forgotten because it was done neatly.

--Balzac

The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not
really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president
will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll follow the
energy.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don't get
something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The
scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As
James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only
so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light,
but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The
conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first
law of thermodynamics.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals
eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and
pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored
energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals.
Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is
no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen.
The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as
cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth
in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's
"primary productivity." There have been two efforts to figure out how that
productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an
independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we
humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of
Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple
number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that
which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have
simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.

Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is
the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo
George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning
committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United
States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth.
"We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of
its population," Kennan wrote. "In this situation, we cannot fail to be
the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is
to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this
position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.
To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and
day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on
our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we
can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction."

"The day is not far off," Kennan concluded, "when we are going to have to
deal in straight power concepts."

If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere.
Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless,
more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity results
from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants:
rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these
grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they
are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of
carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is
to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the
most concentrated form of true wealth--sun energy--to be found on the
planet.

As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of
wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human
experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a
broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this
approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and
long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly
indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more
disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries.
Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the
answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural
villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts--the presence not just of
grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses
significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those
granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the
accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have
been in charge ever since.

Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution of wealth
within the plant world. Plants can spend their solar income in several
ways. The dominant and prudent strategy is to allocate most of it to
building roots, stem, bark--a conservative portfolio of investments that
allows the plant to better gather energy and survive the downturn years.
Further, by living in diverse stands (a given chunk of native prairie
contains maybe 200 species of plants), these perennials provide services
for one another, such as retaining water, protecting one another from
wind, and fixing free nitrogen from the air to use as fertilizer.
Diversity allows a system to "sponsor its own fertility," to use visionary
agronomist Wes Jackson's phrase. This is the plant world's norm.

There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of
a single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight
bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves.
Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb
idea for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and
volcanic eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities
and create opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers.
It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe,
it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this
is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not
true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and
stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture
arose independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last
ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose
sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of
catastrophe.

Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their
niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank
slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal
circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals
would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic
matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close.
Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is
an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three
or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa's fields
require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.

Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find
what Iowans call a "postage stamp" remnant of some, it most likely will
abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the
field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had
been stolen from beneath you. Settlers' accounts of the prairie conquest
mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout
grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.

When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in
energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots
and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter.
The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A
farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat. Much
of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks
and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted, a trail of dollars
billowing from the burglar's satchel.

I've already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the globe's
primary productivity every year. You might have assumed we and our
livestock eat our way through that volume, but this is not the case. Part
of that total--almost a third of it--is the potential plant mass lost when
forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for
grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the
whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident
of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year
than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem
is, it's mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can't eat. So
we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind
that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is
perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely
were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than
all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it
preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move
on.

Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again
with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary
productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over
many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy
to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land--in
1997 we burned through more than 400 years' worth of ancient fossilized
productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as the earth beneath
Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized.

Six thousand years before sodbusters broke up Iowa, their Caucasian blood
ancestors broke up the Hungarian plain, an area just northwest of the
Caucasus Mountains. Archaeologists call this tribe the LBK, short for
linearbandkeramik, the German word that describes the distinctive pottery
remnants that mark their occupation of Europe. Anthropologists call them
the wheat-beef people, a name that better connects those ancients along
the Danube to my fellow Montanans on the Upper Missouri River. These
proto-Europeans had a full set of domesticated plants and animals, but
wheat and beef dominated. All the domesticates came from an area along
what is now the Iraq-Syria-Turkey border at the edges of the Zagros
Mountains. This is the center of domestication for the Western world's
main crops and live stock, ground zero of catastrophic agriculture.

Two other types of catastrophic agriculture evolved at roughly the same
time, one centered on rice in what is now China and India and one centered
on corn and potatoes in Central and South America. Rice, though, is
tropical and its expansion depends on water, so it developed only in
floodplains, estuaries, and swamps. Corn agriculture was every bit as
voracious as wheat; the Aztecs could be as brutal and imperialistic as
Romans or Brits, but the corn cultures collapsed with the onslaught of
Spanish conquest. Corn itself simply joined the wheat-beef people's
coalition. Wheat was the empire builder; its bare botanical facts dictated
the motion and violence that we know as imperialism.

The wheat-beef people swept across the western European plains in less
than 300 years, a conquest some archaeologists refer to as a "blitzkrieg."
A different race of humans, the Cro-Magnons--hunter-gatherers, not
farmers--lived on those plains at the time. Their cave art at places such
as Lascaux testifies to their sophistication and profound connection to
wildlife. They probably did most of their hunting and gathering in uplands
and river bottoms, places the wheat farmers didn't need, suggesting the
possibility of coexistence. That's not what happened, however. Both
genetic and linguistic evidence say that the farmers killed the hunters.
The Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of
Cro-Magnons, the only trace.

Hunter-gatherer archaeological sites of the period contain spear points
that originally belonged to the farmers, and we can guess they weren't
trade goods. One group of anthropologists concludes, "The evidence from
the western extension of the LBK leaves little room for any other
conclusion but that LBK-Mesolithic interactions were at best chilly and at
worst hostile." The world's surviving Blackfeet, Assiniboine Sioux, Inca,
and Maori probably have the best idea of the nature of these interactions.

Wheat is temperate and prefers plowed-up grasslands. The globe has a
limited stock of temperate grasslands, just as it has a limited stock of
all other biomes. On average, about 10 percent of all other biomes remain
in something like their native state today. Only 1 percent of temperate
grasslands remains undestroyed. Wheat takes what it needs.

The supply of temperate grasslands lies in what are today the United
States, Canada, the South American pampas, New Zealand, Australia, South
Africa, Europe, and the Asiatic extension of the European plain into the
sub-Siberian steppes. This area largely describes the First World, the
developed world. Temperate grasslands make up not only the habitat of
wheat and beef but also the globe's islands of Caucasians, of European
surnames and languages. In 2000 the countries of the temperate grasslands,
the neo-Europes, accounted for about 80 percent of all wheat exports in
the world, and about 86 percent of all com. That is to say, the
neo-Europes drive the world's agriculture. The dominance does not stop
with grain. These countries, plus the mothership--Europe accounted for
three fourths of all agricultural exports of all crops in the world in
1999.

Plato wrote of his country's farmlands:

What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick
man. ...Formerly, many of the mountains were arable, The plains that were
full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with
forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once
the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are
now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it
absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into
the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned
shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our
description of the land is true.

Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his
country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed
centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth
century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on ran up
against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice
agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium
between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major "corrective" famine about
every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period.
The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an
influx of new food to Europe.

The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves.
Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his
hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans
present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists
in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well
as a lower infant-mortality rate--all indicators of the better nutrition
afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin
soil.

The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen
when the planet's supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer.
In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable
lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was
grain yields tripled.

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution,
though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it
applied exclusively to grain--wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders
tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be
hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially
nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased "efficiency" of
the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the
domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has
ever happened to the planet.

For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide,
moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world's
most severe poverty. The experience in population control in the
developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people
so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period
beginning about 1960, the world's population doubled, adding virtually the
entire increase of 3 billion to the world's poorest classes, the most
fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain
contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the
population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.

Discussion of these, the most poor, however, is largely irrelevant to the
American situation. We say we have poor people here, but almost no one in
this country lives on less than one dollar a day, the global benchmark for
poverty. It marks off a class of about 1.3 billion people, the hard core
of the larger group of 2 billion chronically malnourished people--that is,
one third of humanity. We may forget about them, as most Americans do.

More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added
orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors,
drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by
taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming
had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not
farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time,
tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure
oil, not food. There's a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of
arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at
least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the
United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of
fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked
closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the
problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there
is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less
energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we
got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting
it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a
calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers
and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has
estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats,
humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over
seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being
off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten
years.

Fertilizer makes a pretty fine bomb right off the shelf, a chemistry
lesson Timothy McVeigh taught at Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in 1995--not a small matter, in that the green revolution has
made nitrogen fertilizers ubiquitous in some of the more violent and
desperate corners of the world. Still, there is more to contemplate in
nitrogen's less sensational chemistry.

The chemophobia of modem times excludes fear of the simple elements of
chemistry's periodic table. We circulate petitions, hold hearings, launch
websites, and buy and sell legislators in regard to polysyllabic organic
compounds--polychlorinated biphenyls, polyvinyls, DDT, 2-4d, that sort of
thing--not simple carbon or nitrogen. Not that agriculture's use of the
more ornate chemistry is benign--an infant born in a rural,
wheat-producing county in the United States has about twice the chance of
suffering birth defects as one born in a rural place that doesn't produce
wheat, an effect researchers blame on chlorophenoxy herbicides. Focusing
on pesticide pollution, though, misses the worst of the pollutants. Forget
the polysyllabic organics. It is nitrogen-the wellspring of fertility
relied upon by every Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban
groundskeeper--that we should fear most.

Those who model our planet as an organism do so on the basis that the
earth appears to breathe--it thrives by converting a short list of basic
elements from one compound into the next, just as our own bodies cycle
oxygen into carbon dioxide and plants cycle carbon dioxide into oxygen. In
fact, two of the planet's most fundamental humors are oxygen and carbon
dioxide. Another is nitrogen.

Nitrogen can be released from its "fixed" state as a solid in the soil by
natural processes that allow it to circulate freely in the atmosphere.
This also can be done artificially. Indeed, humans now contribute more
nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the planet itself does. That is,
humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen in play.

This has led to an imbalance. It is easier to create nitrogen fertilizer
than it is to apply it evenly to fields. When farmers dump nitrogen on a
crop, much is wasted. It runs into the water and soil, where it either
reacts chemically with its surroundings to form new compounds or flows off
to fertilize something else, somewhere else.

That chemical reaction, called acidification, is noxious and contributes
significantly to acid rain. One of the compounds produced by acidification
is nitrous oxide, which aggravates the greenhouse effect. Green growing
things normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but
nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make
every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net
contributor to global warming. Fertilization is equally worrisome.
Rainfall and irrigation water inevitably washes the nitrogen from fields
to creeks and streams, which flows into rivers, which floods into the
ocean. This explains why the Mississippi River, which drains the nation's
Corn Belt, is an environmental catastrophe. The nitrogen fertilizes
artificially large blooms of algae that in growing suck all the oxygen
from the water, a condition biologists call anoxia, which means
"oxygen-depleted." Here there's no need to calculate long-term effects,
because life in such places has no long term: everything dies immediately.
The Mississippi River's heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead
zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.

America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw
material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you
can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You can eat
unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These four crops cover 82
percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about
food; it's about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy
to become food.

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled "processed," meaning it is
milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45
percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners,
the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods,
especially soft drinks, the food of America's poor and working classes. It
is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather
nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer
Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the
early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor,
who eat the most processed food.

It began with the industrialization of Victorian England. The empire was
then flush with sugar from plantations in the colonies. Meantime the
cities were flush with factory workers. There was no good way to feed
them. And thus was born the afternoon tea break, the tea consisting
primarily of warm water and sugar. If the workers were well off, they
could also afford bread with heavily sugared jam--sugar-powered
industrialization. There was a 500 percent increase in per capita sugar
consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1890, around the time when the
life expectancy of a male factory worker was seventeen years. By the end
of the century the average Brit was getting about one sixth of his total
nutrition from sugar, exactly the same percentage Americans get
today--double what nutritionists recommend.

There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding,
milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about
four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A
two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of
gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the
United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every
calorie of food energy it produces.

That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from
the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people
driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where
the land is cheap. It appears, however, that the corn cycle is about to
come full circle. If a bipartisan coalition of farm-state lawmakers has
their way--and it appears they will--we will soon buy gasoline containing
twice as much fuel alcohol as it does now. Fuel alcohol already ranks
second as a use for processed corn in the United States, just behind corn
sweeteners. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories
of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department
of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol
for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain,
because gasohol is a "clean fuel." This claim to cleanness is in dispute
at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf
of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering
over every farm field. Nor does this claim cover clean conscience; some
still might be unsettled knowing that our SUVs' demands for fuel compete
with the poor's demand for grain.

Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food
chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all
that carrot's energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the
chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some
energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most
of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that
factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some
fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary
predator, meaning it not only doesn't eat plants but eats other fish that
themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up,
easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than
eating a plant.

This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian's case can break down
on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are
kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent
of wildlife's habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. In
rural Michigan, for example, the potato farmers have a peculiar tactic for
dealing with the predations of whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with
small-bore rifles, in hopes the deer will limp off to the woods and die
where they won't stink up the potato fields.

Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument
by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every
calorie of food energy produced. The question, then, is: Does eating
processed food such as soy burger or soy milk cancel the energy benefits
of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace?
Maybe. If I've done my due diligence, I will have found out that the
particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that
of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches
here in Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under closely
controlled circumstances--no farming, no plows, no corn, no nitrogen.
Assets have not been stripped. I can't eat the grass directly. This can go
on. There are little niches like this in the system. Each person's
individual charge is to find such niches.

Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the short end of this
argument, especially in the United States. Take the case of beef. Cattle
are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb. Some cattle
cultures--those of South America and Mexico, for example--have perfected
wonderful cuisines based on grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in the
United States, and it is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the
grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent
of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain,
mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle
spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much
bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with
grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this
sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen
and once provided a farm's fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far
removed from farm fields, so it is simply not "efficient" to haul it to
cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It
pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a
calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.

Still, these livestock do something we can't. They convert grain's
carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per
capita protein production in the United States is about double what an
average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the
human body but is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a
factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument
to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle.
Prairie's productivity is lost for grain, grain's productivity is lost in
livestock, livestock's protein is lost to human fat--all federally
subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly
to only two crops, corn and wheat.

This explains why the energy expert David Pimentel is so worried that the
rest of the world will adopt America's methods. He should be, because the
rest of the world is. Mexico now feeds 45 percent of its grain to
livestock, up from 5 percent in 1960. Egypt went from 3 percent to 31
percent in the same period, and China, with a sixth of the world's
population, has gone from 8 percent to 26 percent. All of these places
have poor people who could use the grain, but they can't afford it.

I live among elk and have learned to respect them. One moonlit night
during the dead of last winter, I looked out my bedroom window to see
about twenty of them grazing a plot of grass the size of a living room.
Just that small patch among acres of other species of native prairie
grass. Why that species and only that species of grass that night in the
worst of winter when the threat to their survival was the greatest? What
magic nutrient did this species alone contain? What does a wild animal
know that we don't? I think we need this knowledge.

Food is politics. That being the case, I voted twice in 2002. The day
after Election Day, in a truly dismal mood, I climbed the mountain behind
my house and found a small herd of elk grazing native grasses in the
morning sunlight. My respect for these creatures over the years has become
great enough that on that morning I did not hesitate but went straight to
my job, which was to rack a shell and drop one cow elk, my household's
annual protein supply. I voted with my weapon of choice--an act not all
that uncommon in this world, largely, I think, as a result of the way we
grow food. I can see why it is catching on. Such a vote has a certain
satisfying heft and finality about it. My particular bit of violence,
though, is more satisfying, I think, than the rest of the globe's ordinary
political mayhem. I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed,
but then so did you when you bought that package of burger, even when you
bought that package of tofu burger. I killed, then the rest of those elk
went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes, mountain
lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact natural system,
all of it went on.

~~~~~~~~

By Richard Manning


Richard Manning is the author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has
Hijacked Civilization, to be published this month by North Point Press.


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Source: Harper's Magazine, Feb2004, Vol. 308 Issue 1845, p37, 9p
Item: 11985940


Bolivia’s President Urges Development Of Economic System Based On ‘How To Live Well


In the context of finding solutions to environmental issues, including climate change, he said indigenous peoples had the moral authority to participate in those discussions, having lived closely with Mother Earth and defended it for ages. Indigenous peoples in Bolivia had "achieved the Presidency", enabling it to proceed in the fight for justice and equality. It now fell to gatherings of indigenous peoples, such as the Forum, to work with other world leaders to encourage them to play their part. He said indigenous peoples wanted to express "how to live well" within their vision of Mother Earth, which was the source of life. Living well was not possible under the current capitalist system, which sought to turn Mother Earth into a capitalist good. The conclusion had been reached in many circles that the authorities of many places were to be blamed for encouraging climactic factors that caused harm to peoples, which had brought floods and global warming. A conversation must be held with other communities on establishing a new model for living. World leaders must encourage more contact with indigenous peoples. - Evo Morales


Global food crisis grips Latin America


While soaring food prices—driven by financial speculation in commodities, the increasing diversion of grains for bio-fuel production and other factors—have affected every country in the world, clearly the impact has been greatest in the most oppressed countries, where people are forced to spend the bulk of their incomes on food and are faced with the threat of starvation. In Brazil, with the explosive growth of the crisis, one hears less and less from the government about social programs such as “Fome Zero” (zero hunger) touted by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as the solution to hunger. Rather, Lula has adopted as his principal platform the defense of bio-fuel production, seeking to turn the country into a monoculture of sugarcane and steadily reducing the production of cereals for consumption, resulting in the steady increase in their prices. - Giancarlo Marinho Costa

These groups are way ahead of the rest of us: a zero carbon economy by 2050.
Let's support them and recognize their leadership.

LS [Lorna Salzman]

>Subject: IEN Statement on Climate at the UNPFII in NYC

>INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL NETWORK
>At the 7th Session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues
>Intervention on Climate: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
>
>
>As part of the "Road of Destruction" campaign of
>the Indigenous Environmental Network, Indigenous
>grassroots representatives from communities
>traveled to New York City, New York to make a
>statement to the Indigenous Peoples of the world
>and world government leaders and UN agencies on
>the issue of climate change and fossil fuels.
>The following statement (intervention) was read
>to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on
>Tuesday, April 22, 2008. All statements were
>limited to 3 minutes and even though our
>collective statement should have been much
>longer, we respected the policy and limited our
>words to the 3 minute limit. Our delegation
>recognized many of the other statements given by
>Indigenous peoples from around the world.
>However, we recognized the link to fossil fuels
>was not being highlighted. Casey Camp-Horinek,
>of the Ponca Nation was selected by the IEN
>delegation to read the intervention. As a member
>of concerned Ponca tribal members, Casey Camp
>has been fighting for environmental and health
>issues in the shadow of the international
>headquarters of the Conoco-Phillips refinery and
>the Carbon Black coke processing plant. After
>the statement was read, Casey asked for all
>Indigenous Peoples that are affected by oil,
>gas, coal and fossil fuel development, to please
>stand up. Almost the whole assembly stood up.
>This visual action demonstrated the need of
>CO2olonalism and petro politics to be addressed.
>IEN with support of Indigenous organizations
>throughout the world are demanding the Permanent
>Forum to call for an EMERGENCY WORLD SESSION of
>the UN General Assembly to address this issue
>(please see the Recommendation at the end of the
>statement below). Climate change is an
>Indigenous rights issue!
>
>
>INTERVENTION TO THE SEVENTH SESSION ON THE
>UNITED NATIONS PERMANENT FORUM ON INDIGENOUS
>ISSUES
>April 2008
>
>Topic: Climate
>
>Submitted by the Indigenous Environmental
>Network, with support of global endorsements:
>Centre for Organisation Research & Education
>(Indigenous Peoples' Centre for Policy and Human
>Rights in India's Eastern Himalayan Territories
>Center for Organization Research and Education
>(CORE), Federation of Indigenous and Tribal
>Peoples in Asia, Indian Confederation of
>Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, Western Shoshone
>Defense Project, Cabildo Wayuu Noona,
>International Indian Treaty Council, Asociación
>Indígena Ambiental, Seventh Generation Fund.
>
>
>Thank you, Madame Chair, for the opportunity to
>address the Permanent Forum on Indigenous
>Issues. I'm Casey Camp-Horinek a member of the
>Ponca Nation of Oklahoma.
>
>I represent the Indigenous Environmental
>Network, which includes the following affiliate
>organizations and Canadian First Nations
>governments that are with me today: Pa Tha Tah,
>REDOIL [Resisting Environmental Destruction on
>Indigenous Lands], Mikisew Cree First Nation,
>Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the Tribal
>Campus Climate Challenge Youth delegation,
>Dooda' Desert Rock, Fort Berthold Environmental
>Awareness Committee, Passamaquoddy Bay
>Defenders, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Tulalip
>Youth, Laguna Acoma Coalition for a Safe
>Environment.
>
>We cannot deny that the dangers of climate
>change violate the human rights of Indigenous
>Peoples. Climate change threatens our food
>systems and ability to practice our ceremonies,
>forces removals from our traditional lands and
>territories, and creates disproportionate health
>impacts on Indigenous Peoples. Climate change is
>more than an environmental issue to Indigenous
>Peoples. Our cultures are in crisis - the
>inability of governments to address the issue of
>climate change is tantamount to cultural
>genocide for our Peoples. The UN and relevant
>international agencies must address these human
>rights violations immediately. We cannot wait;
>climate change is a real issue in the
>communities we are from. We must build upon the
>discussion of impacts, and take action to create
>real solutions to climate change and global
>warming now.
>
>Madame Chair, while there is a very justifiable
>increase of global interest on studying climate
>issues and debates on its solutions, it is
>business as usual with the expansion of oil,
>coal and other fossil fuel development within
>our homelands. The international scientific
>community, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on
>Climate Change, which was established through a
>resolution of the UN General Assembly, has
>concluded that the burning of oil, gas, liquid
>natural gas, and coal, as fossil fuels, is the
>primary source of human-induced climate change
>and global warming. The Earth has already warmed
>by 0.76 degrees Celsius (nearly 1.4 degrees
>Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Most
>scientists warn that a temperature rise of 2
>degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) could
>have serious consequences. Above the 2 degrees
>level, scientists are saying this is the tipping
>point where temperatures and weather events will
>be out of control, with an acceleration of
>climate changes and global warming. Concerned
>scientists are now saying we are almost at that
>tipping point, within 10 years.
>
>For the well being of Mother Earth and future
>generations, the world must move more
>aggressively then it is now, towards a rigorous
>plan towards a zero fossil-fuel emissions level
>by 2050. Conventional fossil-fuel supplies are
>limited, even if we tear up Mother Earth to
>extract every last drop of oil and shard of
>coal. Tearing up the sacredness of our Mother
>Earth to get to the last drops of oil is not
>sustainable and violates every principle of our
>Indigenous Original Instructions.
>
>As Indigenous Peoples gathered here at the
>Seventh Session of the United Nations Permanent
>Forum on Indigenous Issues, we are in solidarity
>with many other Indigenous Peoples of every
>region of our Mother Earth in demanding a
>worldwide moratorium on new exploration,
>extraction, and processing of fossil fuels on
>Indigenous Peoples land and territories.
>
>The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
>Peoples was adopted by the General Assembly on
>September 13, 2007 and consecrates fundamental
>rights of Indigenous Peoples. Articles 10, 26,
>27, 29, and 32 justify the following
>recommendation:
>
>1)* * The Permanent Forum, through ECOSOC
>[Economic and Social Council] call on the UN
>General Assembly to convene an emergency world
>session to fully explore, with all branches of
>the UN, and relevant treaty bodies, in
>particular UNCERD, the multiple impacts of
>climate change and its link to fossil fuel
>development and the human rights of Indigenous
>Peoples, to include the topics of, but not
>limited to social, economic, cultural,
>environmental, health, food security, land and
>water rights, and treaty rights.
>
>Thank you.

Great news, Michael. Finally!* What about Lester Brown's plan B?

I intended to contact you about an idea I had.
The coal issue needs to be put front and center
nationally. The Appalachia groups are going great
guns. I suggested to them, and now to you, that a
national meeting be organized in DC modelled on
the old Public Citizen Critical Mass annual
conferences there. It could bring all the coal
and renewable energy people together around a
clear agenda based on the carbon free economy.
Maybe Ted Turner or George Soros or some rich
Hollywood people could fund it. This would really
consolidate the movement and give it exposure.
Please consider this.

Stopping coal is the key to EVERYTHING.

Keep me posted. There is a group in NYC forming
to support the Appalachia groups.

Best,
Lorna [Salzman]


>We agree with IEN, and they're not the only ones
>promoting a carbon-free economy by 2050. NIRS,
>Public Citizen, IEER, and others are all
>supporting and building a Carbon-Free,
>Nuclear-Free campaign, based on Dr. Arjun
>Makhijani's recent book that provides a roadmap
>for a carbon-free, nuclear-free future.
>
>Michael Mariotte
>NIRS

Subject: The Texas Coal Wars

I havent seen this film but I have seen two others about* Appalachia
mountaintop removal. The people there fighting this ARE
environmentalists. There is no such thing as Environmentalists. There
are people working on environmental issues. Anyone who does is an
environmentalist...including small town Texans.

* There is no such thing as "outsiders". "Insiders" are
environmentalists defending their own interests, which as it happens
are also the interests of the rest of us, whether the words "global
warming" are used or not.

* People have different motivations for fighting battles. There is no
benchmark that says that a person fighting for her own interests isnt
helping the rest of us. Do we care what the local activist motivation
is? Mercury? Particulates? Land use? Economic development? No,
because they are all valid reasons. We cant dictate to a person what
THEIR reasons for fighting battles should be. Once they get involved
they will start to see the bigger picture. Just wait.

This issue is growing and so is the movement. More power to everyone.
It is very exciting. And encouraging.

Lorna [Salzman]


>As we talk about fighting coal, I think we should pay attention to
>the new documentary
>
>from Robert Redford and the comments on this documentary by Dave
>Roberts at
>Gristmill.
>Notable in Roberts's comments: (Emphasis is mine).
>
>* * * *Environmentalists play virtually no role* -- they're scarcely
>* * * seen, except on the edge of the action. The main players are
>* * * small-town Texans and Texas mayors. It's very clear that this
>* * * isn't about do-gooding from outsiders; it's about Texans defending
>* * * their own interests.
>* * * *Global warming plays very little role* -- I think it's mentioned
>* * * once. The concerns that dominate are the ones that face the
>* * * surrounding communities: mercury and particulates, land taken for
>* * * rail tracks, the effect on economic development.
>
>
>--
>"Anytime you have an opportunity to make things better and you
>don't, then you are wasting your time on this Earth" Roberto Clemente
>
>Wes Rolley...
>https://www.refpub.com/ ...*

An appropriate summation? Let's hope not! -E.

The Course of Empire.....by Hudson River painter, Thomas Cole....................


https://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanitie...olecourse.html


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire