In 1971, Gene Kahn, a hippie grad-school drop out from the South Side of Chicago, ‘”who had been inspired by Silent Spring and Diet for a Small Planet to go back to the land – and from there to change the American food system,” in 1971, at the age of 24, he started The New Cascadian Survival and Reclamation Project. A quintessentially hippie name for a farm located on “a narrow, gorgeous shelf of land … about seventy-five miles northeast of Seattle “that would grow food for a collective of environmentally minded hippies in near-by Bellingham, WA. And that is exactly what Kahn did. He had no idea what he was doing at first, and he had his share of crop failures, but eventually – through trial and error and reading the latest organic farming literature – his farm began to thrive.
Michael Pollan is the one telling this story in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a beautifully written book that Donna loaned me that could be subtitled: an investigative journalist discovers where his food really comes from – right now he’s investigating an organic TV dinner purchased at Whole Foods. Pollan continues the story:
By the late seventies, Kahn had become a pretty good organic farmer and an
even better business man. He had discovered the economic virtues of adding
value to his produce by processing it (freezing blueberries and strawberries,
making jam), and once … [he] started processing food, Kahn discovered he could
make more money buying produce from other farmers than by growing it himself – the same discovery conventional agribusiness companies had made a long time
before. (p. 152)
The rest of the story of The New Cascadian Survival and Reclamation Project is, in Kahn’s unapologetic words, a story about “how everything eventually morphs into the way the world is.” The idealistic Survival and Reclamation Project eventually became Cascadian Farms, a division of General Mills that makes the organic frozen corn, spinach and orange juice that are in my freezer right now, and the organic TV dinners in Michael Pollan’s grocery cart. And, Gene Kahn, erstwhile hippie farmer out to change the American Food System, is now a vice president with General Mills.
Whether this is a success story or not depends on your perspective. Kahn has probably done more than anyone else in the United States to popularize organic food. Organics are now the fastest growing segment of the grocery market. When Meijer and Walmart get into the game, you know you’ve had an impact.
Or have you? Because when Meijer and Walmart, and Kraft and Dean and General Mills join together in something called the Organic Trade Association (NOT to be confused with the Organic CONSUMER Association) as the Organic TRADE Association they pool their resources and lobby to have the standards of what can be labeled “organic” lowered, so they can put more synthetic additives in their “organic” processed food items. And that’s not hypothetical. They succeeded in lowering those standards last year. So organic isn’t quite as organic as it was a year ago.
On the other hand, all this new “organic” food is being produced with far fewer herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and antibiotics that enter our soil and water and bodies than the comparable non-organic items on the shelves at Meijer, Walmart, D&W or Hardings. Gene Kahn readily admits he hasn’t changed the American Food System he set out to transform. But he seems to believe this is about as good as it gets in “the way the world is.”
And maybe it is. And maybe that’s the problem, the tragedy of the commons: the tragedy that occurs when we fail to think about what would happen if every one lived like us; the tragedy that occurs when the price we pay for things isn’t anywhere near what it costs the EARTH to produce them.
The thing about the commons, about how our societal systems and the environmental system interact: if we keep going the way we are going, we will reach a point of collapse, a point when the “well-balanced garden” of Earth will turn “into a bleak world of thorns and sweat and gloom” (McLaren, p. 63).
When you hear that, maybe there’s a little voice that you hear from somewhere inside you: Well, that could never happen to us. (ibid). But it could. And it has. It happened on Easter Island. It happened to the Aztecs. And I don’t for a minute believe that all our modern technology is enough to prevent it from happening again.
********************We stuck our fine fine finger into the web of life … to find death. We
learned how to end the world in nothing flat. Now, we come crying … “Send
us a miracle.” (paraphrase)
Look at your hand, I sayListen to your
sacred heart
I set you downa miracle among miraclesYou want more
It's your turn
You show me.
It’s our turn. What will we do to save our commons
and ourselves?
Brian McLaren, a leader in the new progressive evangelical Christian movement, has written a book called Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope. McLaren says we are in a time of Deep Shift. (That’s “deep shift” with an F, though without the F it’s fairly evocative, too.) “We are in Deep Shift,” he says. “A time of transition, re-thinking, re-imagining, and re-envisioning; a time for asking new questions and seeking answers that are both new and old, fresh and seasoned, surprising and familiar.”
McLaren talks about a “framing story.” It’s a story, a message, that frames both what we see and what we believe is possible. Right now, he suggests that the message of our framing story goes something like this: we can engage in pleasurable or profitable behaviors with undesired consequences and either avoid the consequences or clean them up later. We can over spend and carry the debt on our credit cards (or in an ever-increasing national debt). We can dump toxins into the rivers and dredge them later (though what we’ll do with all the dredgings creates a whole new problem). We can raise our children on violent media and then play ignorant about why kids see violence as a reasonable way to deal with life’s problems. We can keep building new housing on pristine land while hundreds – thousands – of homes go unsold, we do it because “shouldn’t other people be able to live like we do?”
The title of McLaren’s book lets you know that he doesn’t think a few changes here and a few tweaks there, even a little revolution over there, is not enough to save us. “Everything Must Change” he says. Everything must change. Because, he says,
… we can safely conclude … that our societal systems are perfectly designed to
yield the results we are now getting. Any attempts to change the results
without changing the system, starting with its framing story, will fail
(McLaren, p. 68).
They’ll fail like Gene Kahn failed. He’s wildly successful in the eyes of most, and while some good, even significant good, has come of the organic revolution, the framing story is still entirely intact. We still operate as if we can engage in pleasurable or profitable behaviors with undesired consequences and either avoid the consequences or clean them up later. And we believe this is about as good as its going to get.
Which might lead us to ask, as Brian McLaren does:
Can the suicide machine really be stopped?(that’s what he calls the Tragedy
of the Commons, the Suicide Machine.) Can the suicide machine really be
stopped? Can the earth really be liberated from the destructive framing
story that drives it? …
The simple answer(he says) is that nobody knows.
And that’s a truth we have to tell. Nobody knows if we can turn this around. But the absolute only hope – the only hope for us, the only hope for the commons – is to live as if there is hope. Without hope, there is no motivation for resisting the old story of pleasure now and consequence some other time. Without hope there is no motivation for engaging in the work of creating a new story.
Not every idealistic and successful farmer grows up to be an executive with General Mills. Joel Salatin and his family did it differently. In 1961, (their website says) William and Lucille Salatin moved their young family to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, purchasing the most worn-out, eroded, abused farm in the area…. Using nature as a pattern, they and their children began the healing and innovation that now supports three generations. (http://www.polyfacefarms.com/)
They call it Polyface Farm, “the farm of many faces.” Photos of some of those faces are on the cover of your Bulletin. The Salatin’s are LIVING a new framing story. It can be told first in one of their core principles.
INDIVIDUALITY: Plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows
them to express their physiological distinctiveness. Respecting and
honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health. (honoring
the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health.)
The new story can also be told by telling you about the cattle barn at Polyface Farm, and how they let pigs be pigs.
The barn (Michael Pollens writes) is an unfancy open-sided structure
where the cattle spend three months during the winter, each day consuming
twenty-five pounds of hay and producing fifty pounds of manure. (Water
makes up the difference.) But instead of regularly mucking out the barn,
Joel leaves the manure in place, every few days covering it with another layer
of woodchips or straw. As this layer cake of manure, woodchips, and straw
gradually rises beneath the cattle, Joel simply raises the adjustable feed gate
from which the get their ration of hay; by winter’s end the bedding, and the
cattle, can be as much as three feet off the ground. There’s one more
secret ingredient Joel adds to each layer of this cake: a few bucketfuls
of corn. All winter long the layered bedding composts, in the process
generating heat to warm the barn (thus reducing the animals’ feed requirements),
and fermenting the corn. Joel calls it his cattle’s electric
blanket.
Why the corn? Because there’s nothing a pig
enjoys more than forty-proof corn, and there’s nothing he’s better equipped to
do than root it out with his powerful snout and exquisite sense of smell.
“I call them my pigaerators,” Salatin said proudly as he showed me into the
barn. As soon as the cows head out to pasture in the spring, several dozen
pigs come in, proceeding systematically to turn and aerate the compost in their
quest for kernels of alcoholic corn. What had been an anaerobic
decomposition suddenly turns aerobic, which dramatically heats and speeds up the
process, killing any pathogens. The result, after a few weeks of
pigaerating, is a rich, cakey compost ready to use.
“This is
the sort of farm machinery I like:[says salatin] never needs its oil
changed, appreciates over time, and when you’re done with it you eat it.” (p.
217)
The phrase “deep shift’ takes on another layer of nuance.
Polyface Farms is comprised of at least a dozen synergistic, interdependent units like this. There are almost no inputs to the farm (other than a few buckets of corn) – no fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, or antibiotics – and, as we could see in the cattle barn, one animal’s waste is another’s hog heaven. It turns out that healthy soil grows healthy grass which grows healthy animals, which makes healthy soil.
But that’s just one family and one farm, and we don’t even live close enough to the idyllic Shenandoah Valley to patronize it. Not only that, in an article Salatin has written called “Everything I want to do is Illegal,” he describes how government regulations make his farm nearly impossible to run, applying the same rules to a family-size integrated farm as apply to giant single-crop agribusiness, disallowing his composting toilet while subsidizing giant pig-waste lagoons. Salatin concludes that article saying:
Those of us who would aspire to opt out — both consumers and producers —
must pray for enough cleverness to circumvent the system until the system cannot
sustain itself. … Often, the greatest escapes occur at the moment the
noose becomes tightest. I’m feeling the rope, and it’s not very loose. … But
there’s power in truth. And for sure, surprises are in store that may make
society shake its collective head and begin to question some seemingly
unalterable doctrines. (“Everything I want to do is Illegal”, by Joel Salatin,
in the journal ACRES.)
The question remains: what do WE do. Jim Wallis says we need to “change the wind.” We know politicians choose their positions by licking their finger, holding it up to the wind of public opinion and seeing which way it’s blowing. There’s not much hope in changing the politicians, he says, so we have to change the wind.
Changing the wind would mean changing public opinion, which requires
changing the values that guide people…, which in turn requires changing the
vision of what is both possible and desirable, which ultimately means changing
our framing story (McLaren, p. 269).
If you eat at McDonalds, you change the wind by telling McDonalds you wish they used grass-fed beef and organic potatoes, and you tell them this over and over again, and you get everyone you know who eats at McDonalds to tell them this, and when McDonalds decides its consumers want organic potatoes, the whole potato industry will go organic to satisfy their needs. Politicians aren’t the only ones with their fingers in the air. And history has shown us that when McDonalds says jump, everyone, the world over, will jump.
If you shop at the People’s Food Co-op, you change the wind by choosing local products as often as you can. You change the wind simply by shopping there.
Every time we buy from the farmer’s market or right from a farmer, instead of from Meijer, we change the wind.
Every time we buy organic or unprocessed or local, every time we make or grow something for ourselves, we change the wind.
Wherever we shop, wherever we live, we change the wind by telling our elected officials that sustainable ecological policies are VERY important to us, and we suggest what some of those policies might be and why they are important for all of us.
We change the wind by talking to our neighbors and friends about why we are willing to trade a few weeds for a chemical free lawn and we praise the naturalness of other non-immaculate lawns.
We change the wind by doubting, rejecting, and defecting from the old framing story.
We change the wind by believing. Believing that the current story is destructive. Believing that there is another way. Believing that there is hope.
We change the wind by listening to our sacred hearts, by putting our hands to a new kind of work.
We stuck our fine fine finger into the web of life … to find death. We
learned how to end the world in nothing flat. …
Look at your hand, I
say
Listen to your sacred heart
I set you downa miracle among
miracles …It's your turnYou show me.
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