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Agripreneurs need our help	[Activism]
Posted on April 23, 2009 @ 09:13:00 AM by Paul Meagher Joel Salatin is a successful agripreneur but it was a tough struggle to get there. His 2007 book, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front, documents many of the bureaucratic and legal dustups he has had with local and federal officials over what he was allowed to do on his farm. One of Joel's major beefs is with policies that demand large upfront startup costs for sanitized equipment, facilities, inspections and certifications before a person can even begin selling an agricultural product: How do I know if I have a cheese that people will want unless I can experiment with a few pounds and try to sell some to folks? How do I know I have a decent ice cream until I make some and sell it to taste testers? Innovation demands embryonic births. The problem is that complying with all these codes requires than even the prototype must be too big to be birthed. In reality, then, what we have are still-birth dreams because the mandated accoutrements are too big. pp. 17-18. In other words, our food security policies have created a huge barrier-to-entry for agripreneurs. It virtually guarantees that the only "innovation" in the food industry we will get will come from the big players who have pockets deep enough to comply with our overly-regulated food security and inspection regime. The root of the problem is that the policies often do have a role to play in regulating larger industrial operations, but when applied to small-scale farmers that are grossly inappropriate. One size does not fit all. The book documents many instances of how food security and inspection regimes can quickly put a small agripreneur out of business for no good reason. Micheal Pollan has these two suggestions for how we might improve the situation for agripreneurs: Make food-safety regulations sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that small producers selling direct off the farm or at a farmers' market are not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. Urge The U.S.D.A. to establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve and support the local food processors that remain. I think these would be good first steps in the fight to re-establish local food networks; however, I think that in the interim we are probably going to see increased civil disobedience as consumers and producers increasingly come to the realization that our current food policies are not in the people's best interests but are rather in the interests of large multinationals. Civil disobedience will be manifested in a huge and growing market for "illegal" local food that is not taxed or recorded. It will untimately be the potential for huge losses of government revenue that will make government realize that it needs to change the way it regulates locally produced and distributed food.
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Losing touch with nature	[Activism]
Posted on January 16, 2009 @ 08:00:00 AM by Paul Meagher In Bernd Heinrich's 2007 book, The Snoring Bird, he makes the claim that "our well-being is tied not so much to the structure of our society and the politics that determine it, as to our ability to maintain contact with nature, to feel that we are part of the natural order and that we are capable of making a living within it" (p. 25). We might constrast this statement with another claim that I heard this week from a heating specialist who said that we spend 90% of our time indoors. This claim, which really should be verified, may have only applied to Canada and not the United States which as a whole has milder winter conditions. Even if the percentages quoted are incorrect, it is worth reflecting upon how much time we spend indoors and to what extent this might be contributing to negativity and stress. Do people who get outdoors year round have a better sense of well-being? It would seem to break down a bit in terms of farmers who are often under large amounts of stress (for example when fuel prices were very high during crop season) who also spend large amounts of time outdoors. Perhaps it is their longer time in nature that allows them to endure the long hours and hardships? Interestly, I talked with a farmer's wife over the xmas holidays who discussed the possibility that they would keep their cows indoors during the summer because their milk production drops off so much when pastured (about 100 liters per day or $57 CDN per cow). I had a bad viseral reaction to this idea, especially when it was revealed that they shell out $2000 per month on medical fees mostly for antibiotics which, incidentally, organic dairy farmers cannot use. These are not evil corporate farmers; they are a family farm struggling to stay profitable and this is what is looming on their horizon now. Many farmers are apparently considering this switch to keeping dairy cows indoors all summer. All this makes me wonder if we are losing touch with nature and what this might mean for our well-being and the well-being of animals and the environment. It also makes me wonder what it means to be "in-touch" with nature? Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that getting out on my bike or running is one of my primary ways of keeping in touch with nature. Lately, I've found that reading about forest ecology has made me look at the trees around me differently and has helped me to feel more "in-touch" with nature. I'm not sure that his is making me overly happy; I'd probably say it helps keep me positive and distracts me from other matters that might wear on me if I maintained a focus on them for too long. I don't think we can take it for granted anymore that people will make the effort to stay in touch with nature. Kids are hooked on the internet and videogames and parents are bubble-wrapping their kids by not making them walk to school and back when they could be. Sub-divisions are built so that kids can't engage in sports or other activities without being driven to a facility miles away. Today school was called off because school board officials are afraid of letting kids go outside in the cold. The media chimes along with nonsense about staying indoors on cold days. I don't know what the answer is. I do think we need to become more aware of how out-of-touch we have become with nature and figure out ways to be more proactive in ensuring that we can be more in-touch. Perhaps the first step might be simply to try to calculate how much time we spend indoors, consider whether it is too much, and, if it is, become more proactive about bringing that percentage down. Perhaps we should track our time in nature for a few weeks just to bring awareness to the issue and track progress. It would be nice if we could increase the quality of our nature experiences, however, I think that it is also worth thinking about ways to simply increase the quantity of our nature experiences because the percentage of time we now spend in nature has become so small. To increase the quality of our outdoor experiences I would recommend reading anything by Bernd Heinrich who I recently discovered. His books can help tremendously in increasing the quality of our outdoor experiences, and, perhaps by that route, increase the quantity of our outdoor experiences.
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Using Google Earth for environmental activism	[Activism]
Posted on October 24, 2008 @ 08:00:00 AM by Paul Meagher Reading about the Bioneer 2008 conference that had a great list of presenters. One talk that caught my attention was a Google-sponsored talk about using Google Earth for environmental activism: Google showed how Google Earth has been used by activists to influence policymakers and the public by making impacts visible. One example painted a proposed logging site onto the map, showing it to be within a football field's width of an elementary school, and tagged photos of the area so people would see what would be gone, which ended up defeating the plan. Another showed before-and-after mountaintop removal for coal mining in Appalachia, using historical aerial photos for the "before" pictures that were seamlessly overlaid on the map; the activists also used video and text to tell geo-tagged stories about the area. Even a pre-industrial Amazon tribe learned how to use computers and the internet to put themselves on the map, showing the outside world how illegal logging was encroaching on their land.
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