The Mounting Imperatives of 21st Century Agrarianism: Farms & Food Face Fundamental Forces

The elemental wherewithal of our farms and our food is in motion. Whirlwinds of change bear upon our land, air, water and climate. Fundamental forces have shouldered their way front and center. The land calls urgently.

As reported worldwide this month, scientific evidence shows that the level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide (CO2), has mounted far beyond the danger zone. Heat is rising. Consequences are evident.

CO2 has now reached an average daily level above 400 parts per million, a level the Earth has not experienced for three million years. That was during an epoch called the Pliocene.

The overwhelming majority of scientists understand that this current rise in CO2 portends epic changes.

“Our food systems, our cities, our people and our very way of life developed within a stable range of climatic conditions on Earth,” former Vice President Al Gore observed in the wake of the CO2 report. “Without immediate and decisive action, these favorable conditions on Earth could become a memory.”

Following the front-page news about the rapid deterioration of the earth’s climate, came two other hard news stories that underscore the matter of food vulnerability: news of the disease-driven collapse of the staple food crop for more than 500 million human beings in Africa, and news of grave troubles for citrus fruits in America and around the world.

Climate change and crop disease are serious business. Here the land is not just calling, it’s shrieking.

Cassava root

In Africa the cassava plant – which produces a large, edible root – is succumbing to brown streak disease. Africa already suffers debilitating food shortages. Because casava is the staple food for the continent, this plant disease is calamitous.

Meanwhile, the citrus industry is grappling with an infernal bacterial disease that has now killed millions of plants in the southeastern United States and is threatening to spread across the entire country. The disease has also been found in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Citrus Greening, also called Huanglongbing or Yellow Dragon Disease, is fatal. The bacteria devastate trees, rendering bitter, misshapen oranges, then death for the entire organism. There is no known cure.

“This year (2012-13) was a real kick in the gut,” Florida’s agriculture commissioner told The New York Times. “It is now everywhere, and it’s just as bad as the doomsayers said it would be.”

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When I absorb this short stack of climate and food news — just a fraction of the farm and food factors in flux — I realize that we must dig in now more resolutely to build a clean, respectful, sacred and sustainable foundation for civilization. That is the direction forward.

Many thousands of local, organic agrarian farm-and-food initiatives have arisen across the Americas in the last 25 years. They offer a wide array of working models. Those models can and should be replicated and emulated far and wide. They represent intelligent and promising responses to the imperative call of the land.

Organic farms and the cooperative food systems they are entwined with (the whole, broad range of 21^st century agrarian initiatives) have manifold positive responses to the central issues, and a track record of evidence. They sequester carbon in the land and thereby mitigate CO2, helping stabilize climate. They offer clean, fresh food directly to people who live near the source. They provide dignified work in nature. They knit together healthy webs of relationship, both personal and digital, around concerns of a foundational nature to every human being. They teach essential ethical values. They establish oases of radiant environmental health. And they bring large numbers of people into a more direct and equitable relationship with the human beings who grow their food, and the land it is grown upon.

21^st century agrarian initiatives also provide wholesome anchoring points (network nodes) for the brittle high-tech, digital-wave culture emerging so dynamically in our world. We are just at the beginning of that, really.

This 21^st century agrarian initiatives – the many thousands of urban farms, CSAs, co-ops, community kitchens, church farms, and city gardens of all sizes shapes and descriptions – constitute core elements of a more wise and respectful human response to the imperative call of the land.

The cooperative development of clean local food systems is in no way a boutique idea or a passing fad. It is a key element of modern food security, and it is emerging not just as prudent but also as essential. It is also about the renewal of our overall human relationship with the earth that sustains us.

The Roots of Good Health Are Anchored in the Land

“Let food be thy medicine,
and medicine be thy food.” - Hippocrates

Healthy land is the key to healthy food; thus, inevitably it’s also the key to healthy human beings.

The famous Greek physician of antiquity, Hippocrates – often called the father of western medicine – drew attention to this health key over 2,000 years ago when he authored On Airs, Waters, and Places.

Hippocrates

Hippocrates argued that disease was not a punishment inflicted by the gods but rather the product of environmental factors: diet, habits, and the land where you live.

As observation over time shows, clean, vibrant land that is intelligently, organically cultivated constitutes an oasis of health on the face of the earth. The land’s health radiates to everything around, as well as everything that banquets from the land’s bounty arising. Conversely, unhealthy, polluted, chemically saturated land — and  the food raised from it — trend health on a numbing downward spiral.

In a time of increasing impact from climate instability and swiftly rising food prices, we can no longer leave the care of the land that sustains us, and the production from it of our food  – to less than 1% of the population. That’s how few of us are active farmers — the human beings who serve as ambassadors to the earth for all of us.  They touch the land on our behalf. Depending on how we have invested our money to secure our food, the ambassadors work either great good or great harm upon the land.

The land is calling out with thunder as we approach planting season 2013. We are called to listen now and to respond creatively by establishing thousands more networked oases of clean, organically cultivated land, or by directly and actively supporting the farmer ambassadors touching the land for us via the many thousands of 21st Century agrarian initiatives already at work to sink the roots of good health deep into the land.

Model Modern Barn Raising: An All-American Community Project Aboard Spaceship Earth

“The only true and effective ‘operator’s manual for spaceship earth’ is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.”  ― Wendell Berry, What are People For?

This barn will be ‘raised’ (rehabbed) to serve anew as a community hub. 

For over a century there has been a steady pulling back from the land in North America. People have been replaced by increasingly mechanized means as the industrial agriculture model, with its focus on profits rather than people, has proliferated. Social roots have been ripped out.

But as modeled by a ‘barn raising’ project at the Angelic Organics Farm in Caledonia, Illinois, it is time to bring local communities of human beings – the local cultures Wendell Berry speaks of — back into active relationship with the land that feeds them.

This is not an philosophical ideal or an armchair theory, but rather a crucial and present necessity brought on by stark social, environmental, and economic realities.

Farmer Trauger Groh of the Temple-Wilton Community Farm expressed the ideas eloquently over 20 years ago when we teamed up to write Farms of Tomorrow. Our book contained basic essays on new structures for community supported farms.

Driven by Tauger’s insights, those essays acknowledged that farming is not just a business like any other profit-making business, but a precondition of all human life on earth, and a precondition of all economic activity. As such, farming is everyone’s responsibility, and has likewise to be accessible for everyone. Community farms (CSA) are an increasingly useful and popular way to meet this responsibility.

By ‘raising’ a beautiful old barn to become an active community hub for their CSA and the local community at large, Angelic Organics is creating a model for deeper, more meaningful, and more practically powerful community involvement with the land and the farmers who tend it – their ambassadors to the earth.

The farm is home to the non-profit Angelic Organics Learning Center, a resource for adults and children seeking to connect to the land, and to renew our ecology, economy and culture. Many of the farm’s classes are held in the dairy barn and the corn crib that the farmers have begun to transform into majestic community spaces, filled with light and vibrant color and breathtaking panoramic views of the Midwestern prairie.

To finish the barn, the farm has launched a Kickstarter campaign (Barns are for People, Too) complete with a delightful and educational video clip. The video shows how they will complete the necessary construction and safety measures to convert the barn and corn crib into public spaces with a stage, fire escapes, emergency lighting and stairwells.

The improvements will transform the space into a beautifully crafted gathering place for children’s groups, beginner farmers, members of the farm’s successful CSA, and people who naturally yearn for a direct connection with the land that sustains them. It will also serve as a model, as Wendell Berry encourages, for agrarian initiatives in North America and around the world, thereby aiding local cultures to navigate wisely aboard spaceship earth.

The Emerging Social, Economic and Environmental Intelligence of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): A Global Phenomenon

Thanks to the recommendation of noted CSA author Elizabeth Henderson, I’ve been invited to address the 2nd Organic Farming Summit in Chengdu China (Nov. 17th~18th). Circumstances prevent me from traveling, and so instead I have prepared and sent the following remarks on CSA farms.

I send greetings and respect to all my relatives gathered together in China to exchange knowledge about organic agriculture – taking care of the Earth and each other. It is an honor to address the Organic Trade Union of China, and to offer some observations about our land, our farms, our times, and our many diverse communities of human beings around the world.

With its many variations and cultural adaptations, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a seed that has been steadily setting roots in various places around the globe for several decades. With the benefit of 30 years of involvement and observation, I have come to regard CSA as a 21st Century agrarian initiative with tremendous potential in different cultures to organize human beings – out of their free will choices – around the essential matter of a renewed relationship with the land that sustains them, as well as renewed relationships with each other.

CSA is emerging as an altogether necessary and wise response to the extreme state of our economies and our environment — the urgent call of our land which has been so severely challenged by reckless industrial impulses and  intensifying natural forces. Any person who chooses to can be part of a CSA, and that CSA will be part of a growing network of CSA nodes, as Elizabeth Henderson has noted, in China, the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, Egypt, Ireland, and other nations around our world.

In my land – the continent of North America – where over 6,000 CSA farms have come into being in recent decades — we are currently engaged with issues of identity. What does the ‘community’ part of CSA really mean?

CSA is at a decision point. Is it going to become just another “business model” based primarily on monetary transactions for food? Or will CSA fulfill its ideal potential to become a model for healthy cells of social well-being, environmental health, and economic justice?

As a longtime CSA writer, I’ve hypothesized that in an era of economic and environmental stress, CSA social networks would assume increasing importance. That’s because through CSA human beings, households, and farmers have direct opportunity to form a wide constellation of relationships. They can feed each other on a lot of levels. They are linked not just by theories of the ideal, but also by matters that are inescapably real: land, food, and farms, as well as personal, family, and community health.

Yet as I have observed, and as I have read about in Farming Alone, many farmers and CSA shareholders identify community as a weak part of CSA. They say that it just is not happening as theorized. The realm of the ideal has had a hard reckoning with the realm of the real.

Increasingly over the last ten years, more and more farms have embraced CSA as a “marketing approach” or “marketing tool.” Yet that is a digression from what CSA started out to become, and what it still has the potential to become.

As made boldface plain by Robyn Van En long ago with her initial video It’s Not Just About Vegetables, CSA was in no way conceived of as a new way to buy and sell vegetables. The core ideas — the sparks that illumined and defined CSA and made it so immediately understandable and appealing for people all around the world — were both practical and idealistic. The concept was supporting a whole farm, and having the whole farm support and nourish the web of people who support it. In my view, these concepts remain integral. They are what make a CSA a CSA.

Anthropologists Cynthia Abbott Cone and Ann Kakaliouras, among others, have identified CSA as a social movement, as expressed in Building Moral Community or an Alternative Consumer Choice. Many CSA farmers and shareholders do recognize their commitment to CSA in moral terms. They see themselves as nurturing not just soil and family well being, but also the larger community and  environment of which they are part.

When these dimensions are actively cultivated, CSA farms have potential for re-embedding  (grounding) people in time and place by linking them to a specific piece of land and to an awareness of the seasons. From this the environment is not only protected, but also organically cultivated to a higher, healthier state of vitality that radiates outward from the land and animals of the farm to the surrounding communities.

To me — someone who has participated in and written about CSA since 1986 — these social, economic, and environmental dimensions of CSA appear as acutely important.

China’s Organic Summit

Creating a Sustainable Future Together

This is a moment in time when more people are looking to become active in creating a sustainable future. CSA is a proven vehicle for doing that.

CSA is, in and of itself, a community supported concept. No one person conceived of the whole of CSA. Rather, many pioneering people from many places around the world birthed the concept and nurtured it.  As CSA pioneers conceived of it — and as it is still being practiced at many farms — CSA is not just another new and clever approach to marketing. Rather, community farming is about the necessary renewal of agriculture through its healthy linkage with the human community that depends on farming for survival. It’s also about the necessary stewardship of soil, plants, and animals: the essential capital of human cultures.

Trauger Groh and I wrote Farms of Tomorrow (1990) and Farms of Tomorrow Revisited (1997) to suggest some possibilities. We also wanted to serve a need that was explicit then, and that has become even more urgent now: the need to share the experience of farming with everyone who understands that our relationship with nature and the ways that we use the land will determine the future of the earth.

The problems of agriculture and the environment belong not just to farmers, but are the common problems of all people. CSA is a pathway to link human beings and their communities directly in free-will association with Earth Ambassadors — the nearby farmers who touch the earth on their behalf to bring forth its bounty in the form of food, fiber, and flowers.

As author Gary Lamb observed in his landmark 1994 paper, Community Supported Agriculture: Can it Become the Basis for a New Associative Economy?, the community farm movement does indeed embody elements of a new associative economy that is fundamentally different from the ruling market economy.

“The market economy is driven by the self-interest of every participant,” Lamb wrote. “In an associative economy, we associate with our partners — active farmers among themselves, active farmers with all the member households, farm communities with other farm communities. The prevailing attitude is a striving to learn the real needs of our partners, and the ways we can meet them.”

Associative economy means that all participants in the economic process try to listen to the needs of all other partners in the process. On this basis they proceed. The key economic question for a CSA that is expressing associative economics, either explicitly or implicitly, is not “How can we make greater monetary profit?”  Rather the questions are “What does the farm need? What do the farmers need? What do the shareholders need?”  In response to these questions, the community proceeds in its work.

Awakening Social Intelligence

The element of community – and the environmental and health dimensions of CSA — are just as important as the practical and economic arrangements that take place in a CSA.

Because CSA possesses so many inherently beneficial dimensions, I continue to regard CSAs as a way of building a clean, stable agrarian foundation for the fast emerging high-tech digital-wave culture. The digital culture can in reciprocity connect, network and sustain the agrarian initiatives which give it roots.

Thus, CSA farms have the potential to bridge the gap between the personal and the global. They are contributing not just to their family and community health and well being as adapted to their chosen culture and lifeways, but also having a larger global impact through the emerging network of associations both in-person and virtual.

The dynamic of farmers and consumers in free will association via community farms creates the potential for the kind of phenomenon that Rudolf Steiner termed “social intelligence.” In the particular case of CSA, I feel that construct can naturally be extended to include economic and environmental intelligence as well.

In my view, CSA carries potential to express the very essence of social, economic, and environmental intelligence, and to do so on a global scale.

Cracks in the Land

“Our farmers and ranchers have never faced as many problems as they do today with drought, range fires, high gas prices…”
- Michael McCau

My cracked lawn.

The land is dry and cracking across the heart of America. Drought is the natural cracker, shriveling everything up till there are gaps that demand radical shifts for underground pipes and construction footings, doubtless as well for all forms of subterranean life.  Then there are mournful, moanful cracks in the land from the massively arrogant and suicidal impulse of industrial-scale fracking in a time of profound earth changes. Foundational cracks abound on planes both inner and outer.

Each day as I open my back door and step out into the world I see this inescapably. I’m confronted with a crazy quilt pattern of cracked land where once had been a lawn. It’s a troubling sight. Here at home all 93 of Nebraska’s vast, sprawling counties have been declared disaster areas because of the drought. Late August now, and the forecasters say we may not get substantial rain until Halloween.

Our U.S. Midwestern drought — impacting over 62% of the entire nation — is having and will have  global consequences: ”People in wealthy industrialized countries spend between 10 to 20 per cent of their income on food. Those in the developing world pay between 50 to 80 per cent of their income. According to Oxfam, a one per cent jump in the price of food results in 16 million more people crashing into poverty — accelerating what global agriculture ministers call The Spiral of Hunger.

Meanwhile, with at least one more long month of melting to go for the Arctic Sea Ice, the pace of heat-driven destruction to our North is staggering in proportion. Behold this brief composite animation. It’s a must see. Just about every record has been shattered, with a month more of melting to come.

Watching the world’s larger patterns unfold like this is profoundly unsettling, and can be unbalancing as well without some active, creative initiative to respond to the urgent call of the land.

Proactive response is a key element of 21st Century Agrarianism, and thousands upon thousands of people and communities are responding dynamically, helping to establish healthy new footings and foundations on the land as ballast and complement to the surging waves of digital culture. What is needed now — in this extreme state — is positive creative response from millions upon millions of people.

If you are among those who will no longer ignore the call of the land, then here is one place to initiate a response: to become informed, to find ways to cultivate the land to restore its health and beauty, as well to grow clean food for yourself, your family, and your community. Check out the possibilities.

Food Coops 2012 Growing Strong

Coop members march the streets of Philadelphia on the way to the first ever public reading of the Declaration of Rights for America’s Food Coops. Photo by S. McFadden

As the summer Sun began scorching in earnest, I traveled to Philadelphia for the 56th annual conference of  the Consumer Cooperative Management Association (CCMA). That’s the group that networks 128 of America’s food coops.

Owned independently by their local citizens in cities and towns across the nation, food coops are a major web of market nodes in the overall good food movement. For decades, food coops have provided a principal connection between families who want clean, chemical-free food and the stalwart network of sustainable organic farmers who provide it.

In mid-June representatives from the independent coops gathered together to talk, to walk, and to make a declaration concerning coops, corporations, and the context of our era. Here are some of my notes from the gathering.

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Marion Nestle, long-time nutrition activist and author of several influential books including Food Politics, gave a keynote address on the final day of the conference. “There is a global food crisis right now,” Nestle told  us, “with one in seven people on the earth already hungry.” It looks as if the global food crisis will continue to intensify in the years immediately ahead. She said we would likely see the crisis play out not just with overseas famines, but also domestically in cost, volatility, availability.

The mounting clouds of the global food crisis that Nestle pointed out to us have been becoming increasingly evident in news stories, such as this July example from Bloomberg Business Week: Drought Stalks the Global Food Supply.

“Hunger and malnutrition are social problems,” Nestle told us, “and that is one of the reasons why food coops are so important. Coops are a viable alternative to Big Food. Because coops are both community-based and value based, they make a point of selling clean, healthy, nutritious food.”

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Michael Sansolo, a marketing consultant, also gave a keynote address. Sansolo said that conventional markets see that the movement now and over the next 30 years is toward organic, sustainable foods. Food coops have led the way for the last 40 years, but now profit-focused food corporations are in the mix and bringing their values to bear. As the NY Times reports, organic food has become “a wildly lucrative business for Big Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery store.”

The theme of Sansolo’s talk was that there are, in his view, three central challenges now faced by everyone who is involved with the market for food: economics, demographics, and technology.

During the Q & A session after Sansolo’s talk a man rose to urge that he add a fourth challenge to his presentation: the natural environment. The environment is changing fast, the man said. Along with economics, demographics, and technology, coops had best take that that reality into account.

In his remarks Sansolo said that the notion of community has changed radically with technology in recent years. The face of America is shifting. It is already way more diverse. Also, we are seeing in all economic sectors the rise of women.  Women are stepping into leadership roles, especially in the food sector.  He advised that food coops and other initiatives actively reach out to a younger, multicultural base. “That’s where the future is,” he said.

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A coop member dressed as Ben Franklin reads the coop declaration of rights.

Ben Franklin initiated the first coop in America back in 1752 right in Philadelphia, the city where we had gathered 260 years later to size things up, and make plans for going forward cooperatively toward meeting a triple bottom line of economic, environmental, and social benefit.

A common experience for participants in the coop conference, and one I certainly experienced this year, is the realization that my local coop in Lincoln, Nebraska — Open Harvest — is but one node in a wide and growing network of food coops in North America and around the world — continuing to make creative progress as ethics-based businesses.

Another strong wave of coop development is currently underway. At the conference we heard that about 300 new food coops that are trying to get it together this year. However, Marilyn Scholl, a consultant with the CDS Consulting Coop, told me that if 20-30 of these new coop initiatives make it and actually establish themselves, that will be a strong outcome.

Colombia University professor Dr. Gary Dorrien has defined cooperatives as the foundation of economic democracy. They “extend the values & rights of democracy into the economic sphere…and create environmentally sustainable economies.”

Paul Hazen, former President and CEO of the National Cooperative Business Association and now ED of the Overseas Coop Development Council, commented that we are at a moment of profound consumer unrest and searching.

“Many are recognizing,” Hazen said, “that coops are a better kind of corporation…Right now the ‘free market’ is not meeting the needs of the people for clean, healthy, affordable food. That is where coops fill an important niche, because coops are value-led businesses. The economic and political momentum is swinging in our direction…Coops are a key to attaining food security.”

A Multitude of Postive Pathways

This morning I’ve been emailing press releases with variations on this sentence leading the way: “In the context of an unstable economy, a storm-wracked environment, and accelerating food and fuel prices, many people will be inspired to practical action in the world by the 2nd edition of  The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century.

Arising from my memory of observations expressed elsewhere, I feel the impulse this first day of December to repeat emphatically the following messages about the call of the land, and our opportunities to respond:

“The call of the land is exceedingly loud and urgent. In response to the call, we have the possibility of manifesting a renewed agrarian foundation for our global human culture  that is rooted in experience, adapted to the specific, contemporary needs of our earth, oriented to the future, and capable of integrating high-tech, sustainable energy, tools, and practices. This is the basic vision articulated in The Call of the Land.

“The transition to a food system free of fossil fuels is in no way a utopian reverie. It is, rather, an immediate, immense, and unavoidable challenge that calls for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. While there is no single remedy for the many problems affecting our farms and our food, there are many positive paths and possibilities.”

Everybody in the Food Pool – Innovative Concept for Neighborhoods

Earlier this year Andrew Sigal launched FoodPool, an innovative concept for strengthening and stabilizing neighborhoods while feeding people clean, fresh food in communities of all sizes.

As a new and as of yet unincorporated non-profit, Food Pool’s mission is to create small, local groups to gather backyard garden produce and deliver it to food banks and food pantries. These “FoodPools” are modeled on carpools – neighborhood based, easy to set up, and easy to run. “By creating numerous small, local groups,” the Food Pool website states, “we feed our neighbors while strengthening our communities.”

Food Pool offers a free Guide to Starting a FoodPool in their FoodPool starter kit.

The Dangerously Deranged Ethics of Biotech Ag

My unease about genetically engineered crops and animals dates back to the beginning. I had immediate concerns in the late 1980s and early 90s as I began to learn about the technology and associated marketplace machinations. Over the following decades as more and more facts emerged my concerns deepened.

Then just a couple of weeks ago my misgivings were rudely provoked to the forefront when I read an op-ed column by Nina Federoff, published in The New York Times. Her column amounted to a fact-deficient apologia for the GMO industry, and an exhortation to charge heedlessly forward with genetically engineered food. For me, and for millions of other people, this is a massively deranged and dangerous proposition.

So many factors are coming to a head now. Widespread famine, a global land grab, soaring food prices, a horde of profit-mad speculators, drought on the scale of the Dust Bowl, a host of other wildly wobbling environmental events, and a huge, well-organized, well-funded propaganda push by corporate industrial agriculture to claim that the only sensible way forward is with genetic engineering and its allied cauldron of petrochemical-based herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides. But it’s not the only way forward. It is, instead, a profoundly perilous pathway encouraged by what I regard as dangerously deranged ethics.

After the Times published Federoff’s column, well-reasoned rebuttals came swiftly from Anna Lappe writing for Civil Eats, from Tom Philpott in Grist, and from Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, Senior Scientist, Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). Individually and collectively, their articles constitute a convincing, fact-backed refutation of Federoff’s claims for GMO safety and suitability. They effectively assert the case for a global 21st century agrarian vision of human-scale organic sustainable farms and food.

Their responses to the Times column deepened my understanding of why it’s fundamentally important to advance clean natural organic practices and products. They also impelled me to consider again my anxiety about the deranged ethics evidenced in the GMO industry: utter disregard of the baseline Precautionary Principle, repeated roughshod override of human free will, and a radically impudent abnegation of the Seventh Generation teaching.

Seventh Generation Teaching

Tipi for the Prayer Vigil for the Earth at the Washington Monument. All people of all traditions are welcome. This year the Vigil is set for September 30 - October 2, 2011 in Washington, DC. Photo courtesy of The Circle.

In the market-driven rush to bring GMO crops into the fields and thence into the people, I see forces and institutions fundamentally averse to the common sense teaching of the Seventh Generation. That precept — native to North America — holds that leaders are responsible for considering the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation yet to come.

Most memorably, I heard the seven generations teaching expounded by Leon Shenandoah, the late elder and chief in service to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Six Nations).  I shook hands and spoke with Leon in 1995 in a ring of tipis set up for the annual, ecumenical Prayer Vigil for the Earth at the base of the Washington Monument in our U.S. capital city.

“Look behind you,” Grandfather Leon said. “See your sons and your daughters. They are your future. Look farther and see your sons’ and your daughters’ children and their children’s children even unto the Seventh Generation. That’s the way we were taught. Think about it: you yourself are a Seventh Generation.”

Another Six Nations elder, Oren Lyons, has commented, “As a general injunction to live responsibly and respectfully, and as a practical guide to specific moral decision-making, the seventh generation principle may be without equal.”

I agree. I look around and I see that just one generation has passed since the widespread introduction of GMO crops. Already potentially catastrophic problems have begun to arise by the bushel. These are amply documented in the rebuttals to Federoff’s column.

Free Will

A second troubling realm of GMO industry ethics and practices involves the ongoing violation of human free will. From the outset, the industry has insisted and aggressively lobbied to make sure there are never any identifying labels on GMO products.

The American public does not, and never has had, any way to actively choose, or actively avoid GMO food. The real nature of the food is hidden, and consumers have no opportunity whatsoever for informed consent about the nature of the food they feed themselves and their children.

Out of respect for the sacrosanct nature of human free will, we should be able to know the truth of the food that is set before us. But we do not know this in 2011, nor can we. There are no identifying labels to let people know they are eating genetically engineered food. Our free will, thus, is continually disregarded and disrespected.

In response to this abuse, many citizens and organizations are actively advocating the labeling of all genetically engineered foods: to restore for consumers a free-will choice in the marketplace. You can begin to learn about the burgeoning movement for labeling GMO foods at the Non-GMO Project, and at the Truth in Labeling project.

Precautionary Principle

The Precautionary Principle is a simple and sensible ethical guideline. It holds that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those promoting the product or action. In other words, you must establish that your action or product will not cause harm before you promulgate it and actually cause irreversible harm to human beings or to the natural world essential to life.

This common-sense principle is a statutory requirement in the law of the European Union, but not in the USA. The USA has, in fact, lobbied actively and secretly — without citizen knowledge or approval — to pressure European governments to ease or overlook legitimate objections to genetically engineered food.

Mounting Evidence

The evidence continues to mount that GMO technologies and practices are causing profound harm. Respected agricultural researchers are repeatedly raising serious concerns.

In mid-August Robert Kremer, a microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, told a Kansas City audience that repeated use of the chemical glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide, adversely impacts plant roots.

He said also that fifteen years of research indicates that the chemical is causing harmful changes in soil, and potentially reducing yields of the genetically modified crops that dominate vast acreage in North America and elsewhere around the world.

Research shows that genetically engineered crops do not, in fact, yield more than conventional crops, he said. Nutrient deficiencies tied to the root disease problems are likely a limiting factor for crop yield, as is the burgeoning plague of poison-resistant Superweeds unleashed by the overuse of chemical herbicides used on GMO crops. Further and alarmingly, news reports revealed this week that researchers are now finding significant levels of the poison widely infesting both the water and the air of farm states.

Meanwhile, Michael McNeill, an agronomist who owns Ag Advisory Ltd. in Algona, Iowa, has pointed out that scientists are seeing new, alarming patterns in plants and animals due to increased use of glyphosate on GMO crops. “When you spray glyphosate on a plant, ” McNeill has said, “it’s like giving it AIDS.”

McNeill reports that he and his colleagues are seeing a higher incidence of infertility and early-term abortion in cattle and hogs that are fed on GM crops. He adds that poultry fed on the suspect crops have been exhibiting reduced fertility rates.

Ominously, the warnings of these scientists echo what Purdue University professor emeritus Don Huber has been saying: “I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen (nurtured in the context of GMO crops and glyphosate) is unique and of a high-risk status…it should be treated as an emergency.”

Huber said he sees the GMO-glyphosate industrial ag complex as having led to an increase in cancers of the liver, thyroid, kidneys, and skin melanomas, as well as sharp increases in allergic reactions in general,  and an increase on an epidemic-scale in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

Ethos and Mythos

Corporations, universities, and governments are racing blithely forward as if the benefits and safety of GMO technology are above question. But for anyone paying attention now, that is clearly not so. A comprehensive 2011 literature review documents the reality that nothing is settled. The GMO debate is still wide open.

The authors of the literature review reported that most studies claiming that GM foods are as nutritional and as safe as those obtained by conventional breeding, have been performed by biotechnology companies or associates. They conclude: “the controversial debate on GMOs…remains completely open at all levels.”  That conclusion should raise ethical red flags for everyone.

The words ethos and ethics derive from the Greek root ethikos, meaning moral, and it’s the root of our modern term for moral competence. While ethics may be individual, ethos is communal and arises out of common experience and insight. It denotes a characteristic spirit—the guiding beliefs and values of a team, a company, a tribe, or a nation.

As we confront radically changing circumstances in our economy, energy supply, and food chain, we have an opportunity to change and reconstitute our ethos and the way we live with the land.  The corporate, university, and government institutions that comprise industrial biotech agriculture have embraced an ethos of speed, efficiency, and profit and as a consequence created an environmental behemoth of threatening mien. Yet we have potential to make a deliberate shift to embrace a conservative but enlightened ethos not just out of necessity, but also out of wisdom. Perhaps mythos will be a factor in bringing about this urgently necessary shift.

Forty years ago a small group of citizens — seeing profound harm being inflicted upon the natural world that supports human life, and impelled by their shared ethos — formed the nucleus of Greenpeace.

While the actions of that seed group were mandated by immediate realities, much of their inspiration came from the realm of mythos — specifically, the legend of the rainbow warriors. The myth tells of how in a time of great peril, people of all colors and faiths — in response to ominous degradation and disturbance of the natural world that supports us all — band together peacefully and give birth to a clean world based on principles of respect. That modern myth is so powerful and offers so much hope that as a journalist I’ve been drawn to write about it repeatedly in several nonfiction books: Legend of the Rainbow Warriors, Odyssey of the 8th Fire, and most recently in Tales of the Whirling Rainbow.

Greenpeace long ago embraced a life-preserving ethos including the Precautionary Principle, respect for human free will, and the teaching of the Seventh Generation. The orrganization has called for a ban on all genetically engineered crop field trials in Australia and elsewhere.

A new report from Greenpeace and GM Freeze analyzes almost 200 independent and peer-reviewed scientific studies. Those studies show that the culture of genetically engineered food and its chemical supplements has serious problems, and is linked with upsurges in rates of cancer, birth defects and neurological illnesses including Parkinson’s. This study also echoes resoundingly the sharp warnings of Don M. Huber.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in a recent article about Greenpeace, an emerging consensus among eco-activists is that environmentalism is now a matter of life and death. It is in this alarming context that new executive director Kumi Naidoo and all of Greenpeace are preparing this month to mark their 40anniversary with the launch of Rainbow Warrior III, a successor to the group’s famous flagship sunk by the French government in 1985.

Perhaps the new ship –  a visible manifestation of the mythos and a powerful action-oriented expression of a wisdom-based ethos — will help spark and encourage a necessary moral evolution in citizens, governments, universities and corporations.

The new Rainbow Warrior III will be launched this month to mark the 40th anniversary of Greenpeace, fusing mythos and ethos.

Rivulets of Revelation Flow from Tales of Two Farm & Food Conferences

© 2011 by Steven McFadden

White Shell Woman, sculpture by Oreland C. Joe, Sr.

Eight years ago I was among a band of pilgrims privileged to set out on the annual Journey of the Waters, traveling the ancient route north from pool to pool along the spine of the Rocky Mountains. In this manner I learned something of the teachings of White Shell Woman and the sweet waters she is said to nurture.

As with the teachings of classical Greece and Rome, so in North America and in most traditions around the world, the elementals of water have predominantly been personified in feminine-yin form: Sirens, Jengus, Melusine, Yami, Morgens, Nereids and Naiads, the Lady of the Lake, Swan Maidens, and White Shell Woman, to name a few.

Whether dwelling in still pools, rushy streams, ornate fountains or plastic bottles for drinking, fresh water spirits around the world have most frequently been appreciated as feminine. Everywhere the Undines, water elementals possessing voices of lilting beauty, may be heard over the sound of water, sages have long maintained, if one takes care to listen.

Thus, early in May upon entering the global Water for Food conference hosted by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) — a conference “generously supported” by Monsanto and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — I was immediately struck by the overwhelming male-yang dominance of the proceedings. By approximate measure, 75-80% of the conferees were men; likewise by my reckoning, the program listed 48 men presenters, just six women.

Conference talk flowed around themes of what people — and the nations and corporations they organize themselves into — either want or need to do with water, as if our relationship with this essential resource were one way. In traditional teachings of North America it’s understood fundamentally that the elements and forces of the earth should be considered: listening to the call of the water, so to speak, as basic tenet of living in right relation.

Dance of the Undines. Beadwork by Margie Deeb and Frieda Bates

After three days at the Water for Food gathering, yin drops of consideration finally condensed and rose to the surface during the closing panel discussion. Robert Meany, Senior VP at Valmont Industries, a maker of irrigation equipment, remarked, “hydrology and the humanities need to come together.”

Moments later, in response to a question from the audience, Dr. Simi Kamal, CEO of the Hisaar Foundation in Pakistan made an emphatic point. She said agricultural policies must not overlook the human dimension. She said policies — and I took it she meant corporate policy as well as political policy — “must empower and engage the dispossessed, the marginalized, the landless, including unpaid and underpaid women laborers in the developing world.”

“The challenges for women in developing countries represent a huge issue,” Kamal said. “We need to hear from them. Let’s bring women out of the niche they have been placed in, and also begin to see agriculture as part of the larger ecosystem…Next year this Water for Food conference needs to dedicate a day to the issues of gender, water and food.”

Slamming into the Ceiling

The same week, some 1,200 miles away from the Water for Food conference in Nebraska, another conference was unfolding a different vision. The Future of Food gathering sponsored by The Washington Post featured spokespeople not from corporations or universities, but rather advocates for organic, sustainable agriculture. The program included Marion Nestle, Will Allen, Deborah Koons-Garcia, Eric Schlosser, Vandana Shiva, Senator Jon Tester, England’s Prince Charles, and agrarian patriarch Wendell Berry.

Thanks to a bicycle I could attend the Nebraska conference, and thanks to the Internet I could also see and hear parts of the Washington conference. Both gatherings of high power food and farm leaders held potential for impacting policy, and shaping real activity around critical matters of water, land, and food. They embodied the yin and yang character in the parallel universes of agrarianism and industrial agriculture: the Tao of the Land 2011. These matters are in vivid relief this spring with over a billion hungry people on the planet. As the United Nations Environment Program once again made screamingly blunt this season with yet another report: humanity is slamming into the environmental ceiling. “Global resource consumption is exploding,” their report said. “It’s not a trend that is in any way sustainable.”

This year in Nebraska, for the third consecutive year, the global Water for Food conference grappled in its way with the immediate challenges of growing more food with less water. Many a speaker uttered the by-now familiar refrain: Earth’s population will rise to nine billion people by 2050; how will we double food production by then with increasingly diminished natural resources?

Feeding a growing world population with less water is “one of the greatest challenges of this century,” said Jeff Raikes as the conference opened. Raikes is a Nebraska native and now the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation is a major supporter of and investor in Monsanto and their promotion of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as the response of industrial agriculture to global crop challenges.

Raikes said that the Gates Foundation aims to reduce poverty by helping farmers produce more efficiently and to move beyond producing only enough food for their own families. He noted that of the 1.3 billion or so of the world’s population who live in extreme poverty, about 75 percent depend on subsistence agriculture.

Agrarians actively question the corporate model of extensive high-tech farming and GMO crops as inappropriate for most of the developing world. They argue that it should not be pushed on the poorest farmers in the name of feeding the world, and that these schemes enrich only the corporations, not the people on the land.

The general thrust of discussion at the Nebraska conference, however, was that large-scale approaches and techniques such as hybrid GMO crops with fertilizers and pesticides could produce more food more quickly and with less water, including small-scale farms in developing countries. The Monsanto representative, VP for Global Strategy Kerry Preete, mentioned efforts to increase plant density, such that they could put 40,000 corn plants on one acre of land. In 2012-13 Monsanto will introduce a new GM corn variety that, despite reports showing this is dubious, he claimed would use less water. How could small-scale farmers in developing nations pay for such technology? Poor farmers can’t, Preete said, but rich farmers can and as they adopt technology, the cost comes down.

In Washington meanwhile critics vigorously questioned the claimed yields and pointed to recent studies stating that sustainable, organic farming methods use less water and could provide more food and better livelihoods for farmers in the developing world.  They cited research done by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) which established that small-scale systems of agro-ecology are capable of producing enough food for the developing world while helping to preserve and replenish natural resources. A report published earlier this year by United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food came to similar conclusions, arguing that more sustainable systems could double food production in certain regions.

UNL President James B. Milliken said at the conference that the university’s new Water for Food Institute aims are “fully compatible” with the aims of the Gates Foundation. “The challenges are so numerous that we can’t expect to solve them all,” he said, advocating that a “network of knowledge around the world,” as represented at the conference, is essential. He expressed UNL’s intention that the Water for Food Institute evolve to become an international pivot point for disseminating such knowledge.

UNL is just now making a momentous switch in the Land Grant universe by joining the Big Ten Conference. The key importance of the new institute and the issue of water for food — globally as well in America’s agricultural heartland — was apparent in the ongoing conference involvement of top university officials: President  Milliken, Chancellor Harvey Perlman, and Vice Chancellor Prem Paul. All participated actively in the conference, and welcomed the formal agreement UNL signed with the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education. The agreement sets out the arrangements for cooperative research and education on matters of water and food. They said they intend a multidisciplinary institute mobilized to meet urgently impending matters.

In committing itself robustly to the means and ends of industrial agriculture, UNL has drawn criticism from both inside and outside the university. Critics have charged UNL with catering primarily to corporate agriculture, thereby giving only secondary support to  family-sized farms, mid-sized farms, and the far-flung rural communities of the Cornhusker state. With this emphasis, critics say, UNL is stinting in its obligation to carry out the fundamental land-grant mission — creating and applying “knowledge with a public purpose.”

New Realities: Signs All Over

András Szöllösi-Nagy, rector of the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in The Netherlands, told the Nebraska conference that food is closely linked with social and political issues. As food prices go up, he said, those issues come to the forefront. There is growing vulnerability in this, he said, because humans are driving dramatic change in global water systems and food production with population growth, trade, subsidies, political upheaval, technological implementation, and the reality of climate changes.

“Is climate change accelerating?” Szöllösi-Nagy asked rhetorically. “The hypothesis is yes it is accelerating, but we have no hard proof yet. What we do know is that global mean temperatures are clearly increasing…There is lots of uncertainty, and the Precautionary Principle should hold.

“Still,” he added, “something is changing. The signs are all over: more floods, more droughts, more extreme weather events. We have new realities we need to reckon with, he said, explaining that the whole concept of a 100-year flood is outdated. We must throw out the tools we use to characterize such extreme events, he said, because “so-called 100-year floods and storms are happening all the time and becoming routine.”

The very week of the two conferences in early May, those new realities again smashed into the news: Texas and much of America’s Southwest because of an exceptional drought, the Mississippi River for impending flooding of farmland and suburbs on a scale “never seen before,” and the Arctic Circle because of newly accelerated melting due to global warming.

Meanwhile in Washington at the Future of Food, England’s Prince Charles (text – video) was setting out a case that our current use of the land, and our systems of food production do not address these problems but rather aggravate them. He said if we are going to address the challenges of climate change, water shortages, general resource depletion, and all the other things, then the current industrial model of agriculture and food systems is unsustainable. It requires radical transformation.

The Irrigation News

The Water for Food conference in Nebraska was brimming with intellectual acuity, technological sophistication, organizational aptitude, and sincere determination to overcome the global challenges. The event, fueled by a recent $50 million gift to UNL from the late Robert B. Daugherty, attracted more than 400 participants from 24 nations.

Daugherty, a Nebraskan who died last November, made his fortune developing and marketing center pivot irrigation systems through the Omaha-based company now known as Valmont Industries, Inc. UNL used his bequest to establish the new Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute as an information distribution center in partnership with national and international agencies, including UNESCO.

The current CEO of Valmont, Mogens Bay, told the Nebraska conference that despite problems irrigation is not going away. Without it, many farms around the world would dry up and blow into the far distance. Bay said center-pivot technology — which has made vast stretches of formerly unfarmable land productive — is adapting to become more efficient. His company’s newest center-pivot rigs use a variety of sensors linked to a central computer. The computer divides a quarter section farm field (160 acres) into 5,000 zones, with specific zone control for the rate of applying water, fertilizer or insecticide.

Circles of farmland with center pivot irrigation, a familiar scene for airplane passengers above America's Heartland.

Likewise, Anil Jain, managing director of Jain Irrigation Systems, Ltd. in India, told the conference about the “transformational impact” of drip irrigation. He said more than a billion people on the planet are small holders, tending 1-5 acres. Many of them must irrigate the land to produce a crop, he said, and drip irrigation can do the job efficiently and conserve water.

Jain spoke enthusiastically about “fertigation” — applying water and fertilizer in liquid form through the systems. Fertigation, he said, is a catalyst for high-tech agriculture hand-in-hand with biotechnology because the systems deliver fertilizers and pesticides directly to plants. He said solar-powered water pumps, rain-harvesting systems, and small-scale drip irrigation could be installed for $1,000 an acre. He said that smallholder farmers could pay that investment back fast with increased crop productivity — not the first time an enthusiastic farm-profit forecast was declared in the agricultural pivot of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Industry Leader Guys: Get Bigger

Kerry Preete, Monsanto’s VP for Global Strategy, appeared on the Industry Leader panel in Nebraska. He began by posing his variation on the standard rhetorical question: “How do we double the world’s food supply on the same footprint?” The world needs to produce 1.5 billion more tons of grain by 2050. The obvious industrial implication of his question was through transgenic crops, Monsanto’s profit pony.

As with many of the other speakers in Nebraska, Preete articulated the case for agriculture to become bigger and more efficient to meet global needs. A student participating in the conference asked the panel whether transgenic (GMO) crops are a safe way to meet this projected need? As if served a slow softball over the center of home plate, Monsanto’s Preete cheerily answered “Yes. After 20 years of wide use we are confident, as are all of the regulating agencies, that our seeds and crops are safe.”

Not everyone shares that confidence. Certainly not soil scientist Don Huber, who has warned of potential catastrophe, and certainly not the authors of a new literature review into the safety studies on GM food. The review documents the reality that most studies claiming that GM foods are as nutritional and as safe as those obtained by conventional breeding, have been performed by biotechnology companies or associates. The authors concluded “the controversial debate on GMOs…remains completely open at all levels.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, Jon Tester (D-Montana), the only farmer in the US Senate, was telling the Future of Food conference, “The rise of GMOs and who controls the seed, is one that’s particularly disturbing to me as a farmer. With GMOs, farmers don’t control the seed, multinational agribusiness does…You and I have heard over and over that our only hope to feed the planet as our population grows is GMOs,” Tester said. “Well, I’m here to tell you that I don’t buy it. What it has done and what it continues to do is take away options for family farmers. And it takes away options for consumers. If we keep moving down this path, farmers won’t be able to control their seed, something they have done since the beginning of time. And no longer will you truly know what you’re eating.”

Back in Nebraska, listening to Monsanto’s Preete, I could not help but think of Earl Butz, the Republican Secretary of Agriculture (1971-76), whose infamous mantra to farmers was to “get big or get out.” Butz’s challenging remarks immediately preceded the epic farm crisis of the 1980s that drove thousands of American families off of their farms, consolidating and concentrating good farm lands in far fewer hands, a process that continues pell mell not just in the US but globally.

This harsh reality of farm consolidation was cited in Washington where Will Allen, founder and chief executive of Growing Power, told the Future of Food conference: “We need more people growing food in their back yard, side yard, community farm. We need to support those existing farmers that are struggling. Our rural farmers are struggling, and they have been the backbone of our food system for so many years. In 1960, they told us farmers to grow soybeans and corn, fencerow to fencerow; we were going to feed the world. And we have what? A million less farmers. That system hasn’t worked.”

What does it profit a land?

In Nebraska, CEO Jeff Raikes said the Gates Foundation believes that an increase in technology leads to an increase in wealth, “We need to see farmers as customers,” he observed. “We need more affordable solutions, and we need to shift the mindset of farmers toward prosperity, somehow enabling them to see farming as a business…One of the greatest challenges of the century is getting more crop per drop.”

Raikes said that countries that have been able to move out beyond extreme poverty have done so, historically, by improving their agricultural productivity. “What ultimately happens is that improvement in agricultural productivity creates greater wealth in the economy, and that opens up new opportunities.”

This point of view was widely supported by presenters at the Nebraska gathering. Kebede Ayele, country director of International Development Enterprises in Ethiopia, said that while better technology is important, it has to be accompanied by education. “We have to convince them (farmers) and make them believe they can be profitable in agriculture.” Mick Mwala, Dean, School of Natural Resources, University of Zambia, also argued that farming is a business, urging that more and more farmers need to embrace this conception.

These messages struck my ears bluntly. They are distinct from the agrarian motivations and pathways I see as leading forward for generations to come. Farming as a business to make profit and feed people, or farming as a way of life in harmony with nature and health, and serving as a clean healthy foundation to support the high-tech digital culture evolving so swiftly in this new millennium?

In Washington, agrarian elder Wendell Berry delivered the agrarian gospel with no holds barred at the Future of Food conference: “We must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization,” he said. “Our fundamental problem is world destruction caused by an irreconcilable contradiction between the natural world and the engineered world of industrialism.”

“…There is no use in saying that if we can invent the nuclear bomb and fly to the moon, we can solve hunger and related problems of land use,” Berry said. “Epic feats of engineering require only a few brilliant technicians and a lot of money. But feeding a world of people year to year for a long time requires cultures of husbandry fitted to the nature of millions of unique small places — precisely the kind of cultures that industrialism has purposely disvalued, uprooted and destroyed.”

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