Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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April 26, 2010Maria Rodale's Organic ManifestoWe can argue endlessly about what causes this or that, but the bottom line is that it would be a good thing if we stopped burning so much fossil fuel and stopped pumping poisons into our environment. Not since reading Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers (2006) have I read a book that makes these points as well as Maria Rodale's Organic Manifesto.
In fact, Maria gets straight to the bottom line. What is the most important, most fundamental thing we do? Provide food for ourselves and our families. Why do we use millions of tons of petrochemicals to do so? We do not even know how much damage this is doing to our health, but we know that it is doing a lot of damage to the planet, from fouling the water to contributing to global warming. There are germane facts on every page of this book:
Myra Goodman, cofounder of Earthbound Farms, has done the math. She and her husband sell organic fruits and vegetables grown on 33,000 acres of farmland in California (what the farm bill would call "specialty produce"). They don't own all of the land themselves. Rather, the group consists of 150 independent, certified organic farmers. They don't get a single penny from the government. In 2008, these organic farmers kept 10.5 million pounds of chemical fertilizers and 305,000 pounds of chemical pesticides out of the environment and saved 1.7 million gallons of petroleum. The carbon they have sequestered, according to the Rodale Institute's measurements, is the equivalent of taking 7,500 cars off the road every year.
Note the sly reminder that the annual federal farm bill regards this as "specialty produce" not because it is in any way exotic, but because it is organic, not soaked in petrochemicals like most of the food we eat.
Here and there Maria makes me chuckle. On one page she points out that the chemical companies have co-opted the word "conventional" to describe their sort of agriculture; now they are selling genetically modified organisms (seeds), and a few pages later she puts the word in quotes again: the chemical companies compare the output of a plot of land growing a GMO crop to that of a "conventional" plot, that is, one whose soil is exhausted from chemical treatment, rather than comparing it to an organic plot.
Among the things I have learned from this book, by the way, is that plants on plots that have been chemically treated for years have "wimpy roots" that do not hold carbon the way they should. So we not only spew carbon into the environment by the manufacture, transport and use of petrochemicals, but reduce nature's ability to cope with it.
Some people think organic food is a fad, amounting to social engineering. Here's some social engineering: American subsidies for cotton growers have resulted in lower prices around the world, so that cotton growers in India borrow money to buy GMO seeds and chemicals, not knowing that the chemical companies will raise the price every year, so that they all end up owing their souls to the company store. In the Akola region of Maharashtra, there were 5,000 suicides among cotton farmers from 2005 to 2007, Maria writes. Then
a local textile company started contracting with a few hundred small farmers to grow organic cottron for them. The textile company pays a fair price and trains the farmers how to grow organically [...] and has been able to provide organic cotton fabrics to meet the growing worldwide demand.
There have been no farmer suicides since the program started.
The right sort of social engineering grows organically (one might say) from doing the right thing. You can buy Maria Rodale's book here. I make no apology for the fact that my wife works for Rodale Inc, or that I am sending you to Barnes & Noble, the company that I work for; that is all coincidental. The health of the planet is more important.