Oops, sorry, we didn't mean to eliminate ALL terrestrial plants. [MonSatan, I mean Monsanto, now owns 70% of the seed industry].

From:
Nature's Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies, Sierra Club Books

Elaine Ingham would never treat soil like dirt. She reveres it, as we all should, since this precious substance is the thin brown line between plenty and starvation. Given the necessity of topsoil to human survival, you'd think we'd have legions of soil biologists on the case, but Elaine is one of only a handful of serious scientists delving into this microcosmos that feeds the world and helps support life on earth.

Until recently an associate research professor of forest science at Oregon State University, Elaine has twenty-five years of experience in microbiology, botany, plant pathology, and soil and ecology research. She founded Soil Foodweb Inc. and is currently president of the Soil Foodweb Institute in Australia and research director of Soil Foodweb in New York. She serves on the boards of several sustainability organizations and is an active member of numerous prestigious microbiology and ecology associations. She has done stints as president of the Soil Ecology Society and program chair of the Ecological Society of America and has penned over fifty peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Elaine speaks to groups around the world on how to grow plants without the use of toxic pesticides or synthetic fertilizers while at the same time increasing soil fertility and crop production. She has led countless workshops and training sessions at which farmers are taught highly practical techniques for building soil health, using sophisticated composting methods, and enhancing microbiological communities for crop production. Unquestionably one of the world's leading specialists in soil health, she is an exceptionally creative innovator who has made major contributions to our understanding of the soil food web (as she likes to call it) and its structure and function in terrestrial ecosystems from arctic to tropical climates. Her research spans agricultural. grassland, and forest ecologies, where she has analyzed the action of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, and mycorrhizal fungi from over 30,000 soil samples.

When a scientist of Elaine's stature warns us about the catastrophic potential of topsoil loss and the escape of genetically modified organisms into the already compromised environment, we do well to pay close attention.
----
Unnatural Selection: The Bacterium That (Almost) Ate the World
Elaine Ingham

IN MY PROGRAM at Oregon State University in the early 1990s, we started testing the ecological impacts of most of the genetically engineered organisms being produced at that time. The question our lab was asked to address was, Did these engineered organisms have any impact out there in the real world?

The first fourteen species that we worked on - microorganisms, bacteria. and fungi - were organisms incapable of surviving in the natural environment. Putting them in the world would be like taking penguins from the South Pole and dropping them into the La Brea tar pits. Would there be any ecological effect if we dropped a penguin into the middle of the tar pit? Probably not; the impact would be rapidly absorbed by the system.

These first fourteen species of GMOs that we tested had a similarly negligible impact. On this basis. the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the regulatory agency that was determining U.S. policy on genetically engineered organisms, set a course that essentially said that a genetically engineered organism posed no greater risk to the environment than the parent organism does.

GMO number fifteen. however, was a very different story. Klebsiella planticola, the bacterium that is the parent organism of this new strain, lives in soils everywhere. It's one of the few truly universal species of bacteria, growing in the root systems of all plants and decomposing plant litter in every ecosystem in the world.

The genetic engineers took genetic material from another bacterium and inserted that trait in the GMO to allow Klebsiella planticola to produce alcohol. The aim of this genetic modification was to eliminate the burning of farm fields to rid them of plant matter after harvest. The idea was that you could, instead, rake up all that plant residue, put it in a bucket. and inoculate it with the engineered bacterium, and in about two weeks' time you would have a material that contained about 17 percent alcohol. The alcohol could be extracted and used for gasohol. for cleaning windows, or for myriad other uses: cooking with alcohol in Third World countries, for instance.

The genetic engineers thought this transformation would bring huge benefits. We would no longer have to burn fields, we would breathe better in the fall, and both the company and farmers would get a product that could be sold. There was actually a fourth win: the sludge at the bottom of the bucket is an organic fertilizer, and there are no waste products from that material. So what's the problem? Suppose you're a farmer and you've got live, alcohol-producing Klebsiella planticola that you're going to spread on your fields (which might be easier than gathering up all the plant waste and putting it in buckets). Can it wash into the root systems of your plants? Most likely. Once it's there and growing in the root systems of your plants, it's producing alcohol. What level of alcohol is toxic to plants? It's one part per million. How much alcohol does this engineered organism produce? Seventeen parts per million. Very soon you will have drunk dead plants.

We did this experiment under controlled conditions in the laboratory because I wasn't going to take this kind of risk out in the field. We constructed three kinds of microcosms of a field, filled them with normal field soil as a growing medium, and planted wheat plants in the three separate systems - each consisting of multiple units - and put them in an incubator. In the first third of the units, we added only water. We added parent, non-GMO bacterium to the second group and the engineered Klebsiella planticola to the third. About a week later, we walked into the laboratory, opened up the incubator, and said, "Oops, what did we do wrong?" Many of the plants were dead and were turning into slime on the surface of the soil. In all the units with just water in the system, the plants were doing okay. In those that had been inoculated with the parent Klebsiella planticola, the plants were even bigger, because increased nutrient cycling in the root system makes more nitrogen available, causing the plants to grow bigger. Clearly the parent organism was a benefit to the plant. But where the engineered bacterium was growing, all the plants were dead. Later we tried this experiment using several different kinds of soils, but the result in every case was dead plants.

Take that information and extrapolate it to the real world. Given that the parent organism lives in the root systems of all plants, what's the logical outcome of releasing this organism into the natural environment? Very possibly, we would have no terrestrial plants left. Some plants, such as riparian and wetland plants, have mechanisms for dealing with alcohol production in their root systems. But the logical extrapolation of that experiment is that we would lose terrestrial plants.

I have attended some of the United Nations biosafety protocol meetings. At the 1995 meeting in Madrid, the U.S. delegation was the strongest in saying, in essence, "Don't worry, be happy. Trust us. We don't need a biosafety protocol. Why would biotech companies ever do anything to harm people?" To me, their words echoed those we've heard before from tobacco, pesticide, and fertilizer companies.

At one such meeting, I related the story of Klebsiella planticola as an example of the lack of adequate testing for the ecological impact of genetically engineered organisms. The biotech companies object that it costs too 'much to do this kind of environmental testing. In my view, that's just hype, because I pointed out that our lab spent a very insignificant amount of money to do these simple experiments, especially considering that if this bacterium were let loose in the environment, we would have some very significant problems with our food supply.

No one in his or her right mind is going to test for the kind of risk Klebsiella planticola represents because once you release an organism, there is no way to get it back. How far does a single-point inoculation of a genetically engineered organism spread in one year? An engineered Rhizobium bacterium that was released in Louisiana in the mid-1990s spread eleven miles per year and has by now dispersed across the North American continent.

At these United Nations meetings I warned that corn pollen is going to move a lot more than three feet away from the plant. "Oh no," said the biotechnology representatives present. "Corn pollen falls out of the air three feet from the plant." I would say, "Wait a minute, you've never heard of bees? How about birds? and insects? and wind "Oh no, it falls out of the air within three feet of the plant." Why do our bureaucrats choose to to believe these "scientists"? Just open any plant textbook and you find that corn pollen can be found in the Antarctic and the Arctic. But if you listen to Monsanto, corn pollen can't possibly be there.

Armed with the knowledge of this peril, we need to convince members of Congress that appropriate ecological testing must be done prior to releasing GMOs into the environment. If this happens, it could help keep the problems that are already starting to occur from getting worse.

Special Notice to APPLE Bloomington Relocalization Members and Crawfordsville Members: Please join us if you can this Saturday the 26th for a joint meeting with the Bloomington Permaculture Guild plus a movie and potluck. This will be the first opportunity for local APPLE members to get together and meet and collaborate with strong allies.
Agenda will be to MEET each other and plan our next meeting. Beyond that, we're free to make it up as we go.

BPG agenda:
12-1 Set up/informal gathering
1-3 movie: I thought I might introduce how we came to show the movie, briefly define permaculture/the guild, and explain the day's agenda.
3-? community discussion (I imagined that people will need a chance to react and also that we might gather together information about initiatives in this area that begin to respond to what is presented in the movie) -- possibly create a working group to support other initiatives?
?-5 meeting/potluck -- this means the community at large would be welcome to stay for our meeting.

Noon to 5PM
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire by T.S. Bennett. Showing in the first floor auditorium, Monroe Co Public Library. This 123 minute film is a fast-paced look at the synergy of challenges facing humans today -- especially Americans. For some of us it is familiar, but seeing it all put together visually is valuable. For those that are just beginning to think about these issues, it is eye opening. And it is a challenge to all of us to think of how to move forward together in community. For this reason, we want to bring in as much of the regional community to watch it and discuss as possible. After the film, we're hoping to do some brainstorming and talking together.

Ecovillage Design Curriculum

We live in a rapidly changing world that is transforming before our very eyes. Humanity is now being challenged as never before to grow in wisdom, maturity, and understanding.

A plethora of deep and pressing concerns is calling for our immediate attention, concerns such as: Earth's environmental degradation, including the loss of precious topsoil and forest cover, the encroachment of deserts, the depletion of fisheries and aquifers, the loss of habitat and the extinction of species, etc.; the glaring and increasing disparity between rich and poor leading to exploitation, poverty, and the associated regimen of malnutrition and over-population; the disintegration of families, communities, even entire cultures; unrestrained urbanization resulting in social alienation, displacement, and feelings of disconnection with the natural world; the dimming of a sense of spiritual awareness and purpose; global warming and ozone depletion; etc. And now, looming on the horizon is “peak oil,” with its coming adjustments and retrofits, including the probability of ongoing conflict over access to the remaining energy reserves.

All of these problems are quite real and, by now, well-documented; but gaining awareness of the extent of the problems is only half the project of becoming educated these days. Amidst these intense challenges, and largely catalyzed by them, lies the prospect for tremendous growth in human potential and consciousness.

People and communities all over the globe are coming together to reclaim responsibility for creating their own living situations – at local and regional levels. In the process, they are overcoming prior limitations and developing new talents, skills, knowledge and approaches. Paradoxically, many of the most innovative solutions rely on a timeless, perennial kind of wisdom that seems to have been disregarded recently. The potential for a refreshed, renewed, revitalized humanity goes hand-in-hand with meeting the challenges of our present Age.

The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) believes the most promising and effective way to deal with all these issues is through education – not a typical education but a new kind of global education, specifically designed to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century:

• This is an education where a thorough and objective assessment of the state of the planet is followed by regional, community, and place-based solutions;
  
• an education that empowers individuals and communities with the knowledge for shaping their worlds and becoming more self-reliant;
  
• an education that is universal in scope but local in application, directed toward preserving precious cultural diversity;
  
• an education where investigating theory is followed by practical application;
  
• an education that imparts useful and instrumental life-skills as part of the curriculum;
  
• an education relevant to peoples of both developed and developing countries, rural and urban regions;
  
• an education focused on the complexly interwoven, transdisciplinary issues pertaining to the transition to sustainable culture;
  
• an education promoting and facilitating healthful planetary evolution;
  
• an education exploring and expanding the perceived limits of human potential;
• an education identifying and reconnecting all these essential considerations to a meaningful, dignified, high-quality life for all the world’s people...

This is the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) – an education preparing the way for a sustainable future. The EDE is being introduced to the world at this time to complement, correspond with, and assist in setting a standard for the United Nations’ “Decade of Education for Sustainable Development – 2005-2014.” Download the complete 7.46MB PDF Ecovillage Design Curriculum document from which this was excerpted. More info at Gaia Education

The
Ecovillage Design Curriculum has the endorsement of the United Nations
Institute for Training and Research- UNITAR and is an official
contribution to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development- UNDESD.

Download the Gaia Education 4 Keys book on Social Design- Beyond You and Me- Inspiration and Wisdom for Buildin

New entries at my Permaculture Blog

• The Waking Up Syndrome
• Ego-Illogical Illiteracy by Brock Dolman, Occident...
• Foodsheds and Food Circles
• Seeds for Afghanistan

The whole New Internationalist Permaculture Issue is now online free of charge at http://www.newint.org/issues/2007/07/01/
Keith Johnson
"Be fruitful and mulch apply."
Permaculture Activist Magazine, PO Box 5516, Bloomington, IN 47407 (812) 335-0383
http://www.permacultureactivist.net
http://www.PermacultureTradingPost.com
Switch to Solar Power the Easy Way http://www.jointhesolution.com/KeithJ-SunPower
http://www.PowUr.com/KeithJ-SunPower
Blog: http://kjpermaculture.blogspot.com/
also Patterns for Abundance Design & Consulting http://www.permacultureactivist.net/design/Designconsult.html
also Association for Regenerative Culture http://www.ARCulture.org
also APPLE-Bloomington (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) It's a small world after oil.
http://www.relocalize.net/groups/applebloomington
also Bloomington Permaculture Guild http://my.calendars.net/bloomingtonpccal/
and: http://bloomingtonpermacultureguild.blogspot.com/
also: Bioregional Congress http://www.bioregional-congress.org

I haven't posted much to this blog lately but I've been very active on my other blog at http://kjpermaculture.blogspot.com/

Here's a few of the topics considered:

+ WHEN PEAK OIL MEETS GODZILLA ...
+ Seriously folks, you all need to think about growing some food and getting good at it.
+ What the World Eats, again
+ They Rule
+ Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth: A Quechua Christmas Carol
+ Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
+ 101 things you can do about peak oil & climate change
+ Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See
+ Potenco’s Pull-Cord Generator
+ Bioneers: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the Earth
+ Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and Permaculture
+ Downloadable Audio and Video recordings from the 8th International Permaculture Convergence in Brazil
+ The Biorock® Process Accelerates Coral Growth
+ Farming the Future By Kenny Ausubel
+ Our Decrepit Food Factories
+ Tools, Books, and Equipment at Permaculture Trading Post
+ The Story of Stuff
+ Two new photo albums at Picasa

For all of you who wanted to do something different than peeing and pooping in clean drinking water, the following books will give you direction and incentive to change your ways. There's no need to keep contributing to huge ocean dead zones, toxic red tides, acid seawater, brain damaged marine mammals, and dying coral reefs. One solution to these problems is dealing with our own shit, etc., and these will give you the tools to transforms our wastes into food.

Kudos to those who have already started harvesting your homegrown liquid gold.

You can order these books at
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/booksvid/food%20wastecycling.htm

Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants by Carol Steinfeld
Pee=fertilizer. Witty, practical, liberating! Grow with the flow! Urine charge. A golden opportunity. Every day, we urinate nutrients that can fertilize plants that could be used for beautiful landscapes, food, fuel, and fiber. Instead, these nutrients are flushed away, either to be treated at high cost or discharged to waters where they overfertilize and choke off aquatic life. Liquid Gold details three ways to use urine hygienically and productively for plant growth, with studies that show the science behind this practice. Several advocates of urine diversion and their gardens are profiled, demonstrating that using urine for fertilizer is a feasible, safe, and cost-saving way to prevent pollution and save on fertilizer costs.

The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure by Joseph C. Jenkins Learn how to deal with your own shit. "Stop trying to change the world. Toilet-train the world and you won't have to keep changing it."(Swami Beyondananda) Here's all you need to know to make sewage treatment systems obsolete. Answers all the questions you never dared ask!

Composting Toilet System Book: A Practical Guide to Choosing, Planning and Maintaining Composting Toilet Systems by David Del Porto & Carol Steinfeld
An impressive, comprehensive, reader friendly, and practical guide to choosing, planning and maintaining composting toilet systems for those seeking an alternative to traditional sewer and septic tank systems. David Del Porto and Carol Steinfeld collaborate to explain the technologies, sources, applications, graywater issues, and regulations relevant to a composting toilet system for the home, whether manufactured or site-built.

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Vol 1: Guiding Principles by Brad Lancaster
First of a 3-volume work, this book lays out an integrated approach to capturing water in landscape: swales, pits, diversion drains, urban runoff, and roofwater. Essential for drylands, useful everywhere.

Water Storage: Tanks, Cisterns, Aquifers, and Ponds by Art Ludwig
Covers water system design and construction of storage both in and above ground. Comprehensive, concise information about water quality, potential difficulties, and how to avoid them while creating your own supply for domestic use or fire control. With instructions for making ferrocement tanks.

Creating an Oasis with Greywater: Your Complete Guide to Managing Greywater in Landscape by Art Ludwig
An extremely practical and thorough primer detailing 18 systems that work and how they might fail; parts, design diagrams, operating and maintenance tips. Clear, logical, easy-to-read. The definitive guide.

Builder's Greywater Guide by Art Ludwig
How to fit greywater systems into the code with tried and tested methods. Thorough, precise, well-documented, with explicit building code references and diagrams.

Branched-Drain Greywater System by Art Ludwig
Gravity and carefully laid plumbing can diffuse greywater safely with little expense or maintenance. Details a cheap system that meets most meeds.

http://www.permacultureactivist.net/booksvid/food%20wastecycling.htm

Since I received this note on the Permaculture list from good friend Brock Dolman at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center I felt I had to share it with all the Post Carbon community.
Keith

In my minutia world of semantics and language I must admit I feel
compelled to rant on a recurring pet peeve of mine about the current use of
the term/concept "Post Carbon".

I know that this is not your original phrasing, and so my intention is not
for any of you to take this personally, rather I offer my thoughts on this
for collaborative discussion, as you all are increasingly out in the world
spinning the good vision!!

Language has power and clarity is a good thing. Most people in this world
are confused about such issues as climate change and peak oil and such.
Think of the work of linguists Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff. Think of how
much it irks you when Bush's says "nukuler"?

As far as I can tell lately this 'post carbon' phrase around here is mostly
fueled by Julian Darley's Post Carbon Institute (who I have met and respect
as I thinker/activist), who I am fairly sure is from England, and as far as
I can tell they are accustomed in their colloquial parlance to use 'carbon'
as a synonym for petrol or fossil fuels, etc.

I get the point of peak oil and moving beyond fossil fuels - right? But
beyond or "Post Carbon" - literally is absurd language in my American
biologists mind! Biologists by definition study life and life is based on
carbon, what am I to study in a Post Carbon future?

Carbon is an element on the periodic chart. It is the foundational atomic
element of all life on this planet, except for a few strange sulfur based
critters in the oceanic trenches. Plants fix it from C02 gas through
photosynthesis. Store it as wood, fungus breaks it down. Compost happens -
humus rules, dude! Imagine, post - black carbon rich soils, that is what the
dust bowl already brought us. Organic gardening/farming is by definition
carbon based soil farming as defined by Sir Albert Howard. No graphite in
your pencil? What about diamonds?? Veggie oil and ethanol are carbon! On and
on and on...

What are 'post carbon' fuels - Nuclear - Hydrogen - solar - wind - hydro?

I wish to celebrate a carbon rich "organic" world that is based on
sustaining the living carbon cycle and getting off the dead carbon cycle,
but, in my mind, there is no post-carbon cycle. Lifecycle-probiotic or
Deathcycle-anti-biotic take your pick!

"Post Petroleum"- bring it on...But post carbon is post life... Which in
this age of Oilgarchy fossil fool driven extinctions is well underway.

Now Post Car-Ban, after we Ban-Cars, maybe that is what we need here??

The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: October 15, 2006, New York Times Magazine

Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states
had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I
received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food
business. "I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of
RadSafe," he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of
food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even
so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to
bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very
soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate
the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That¹s exactly
what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces
was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor
and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat ‹
sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our
food. Why? Because it's easier to find a technological fix than to address
the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of
industrial capitalism (to take its failings and turn them into exciting new
business opportunities).

We can also expect to hear calls for more regulation and inspection of the
produce industry. Already, watchdogs like the Center for Science in the
Public Interest have proposed that the government impose the sort of
regulatory regime it imposes on the meat industry (something along the
lines of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system (Haccp,
pronounced HASS-ip) developed in response to the E. coli contamination of
beef. At the moment, vegetable growers and packers are virtually
unregulated. "Farmers can do pretty much as they please," Carol Tucker
Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of
America, said recently, "as long as they don't make anyone sick."

This sounds like an alarming lapse in governmental oversight until you
realize there has never before been much reason to worry about food safety
on farms. But these days, the way we farm and the way we process our food,
both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few
decades, are endangering our health. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans
every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing
5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this
latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed
to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand
around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to
turn a cow¹s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can¹t
survive long in cattle living on grass.)

Industrial animal agriculture
produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides
being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high
concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can
tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn¹t be,
rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also
actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than
fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them
onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution (the one where
crops feed animals and animals' waste feeds crops) and neatly divided it
into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution
problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution,
however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the
first problem (chemical fertilizers on the farm). As yet, there is no good
fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and
overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these
solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than
what it is:

a fact of industrial agriculture.

But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has
spread it far and wide.

We don't yet know exactly what happened in the case
of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was
contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the
sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great
deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at
that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to
contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million
servings of salad every week. In effect, we're washing the whole nation's
salad in one big sink.

It's conceivable the same problem could occur in your own kitchen sink or on
a single farm. Food poisoning has always been with us, but not until we
started processing all our food in such a small number of "kitchens" did the
potential for nationwide outbreaks exist.

Surely this points to one of the great advantages of a decentralized food
system: when things go wrong, as they sooner or later will, fewer people are
affected and, just as important, the problem can be more easily traced to
its source and contained. A long and complicated food chain, in which food
from all over the countryside is gathered together in one place to be
processed and then distributed all over the country to be eaten, can be
impressively efficient, but by its very nature it is a food chain devilishly
hard to follow and to fix.

Fortunately, this is not the only food chain we have. The week of the E.
coli outbreak, washed spinach was on sale at my local farmers' market, and
at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where I usually buy my greens, the spinach
appeared to be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered why I didn¹t
think twice about it. I guess it¹s because I've just always trusted these
guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach was probably cut and washed
that morning or the night before (it hasn't been sitting around in a bag on
a truck for a week). And if there ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly
who is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I'm sure there is some, it seems
manageable.

These days, when people make the case for buying local food, they often talk
about things like keeping farmers in our communities and eating fresh food
in season, at the peak of its flavor. We like what¹s going on at the
farmers' market (how country meets city, how children learn that a carrot
is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a root;
how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and even, in some sense, reconnect
through these foods and their growers to the natural world). Stack all this
up against the convenience and price of supermarket food, though, and it can
sound a little. . .sentimental.

But there's nothing sentimental about local food (indeed, the reasons to
support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic).
Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system,
vulnerable to accidental (and deliberate) contamination. This is something
the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy
Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004,
he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: "For the life of
me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food
supply, because it is so easy to do."

The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. "The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry make them "vulnerable to terrorist attack." Today 80 percent of America¹s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy (and at the moment they are thriving) is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies (to the farmer
selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef) is,
of all things, the government's own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the
industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of regional meat-processing plants
(the ones that local meat producers depend on) are closing because they
can't afford to comply with the regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly
imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 400 head of cattle an hour.
The industry insists that all regulations be "scale neutral," so if the
U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, say, a bathroom, a shower and an
office for the exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small processing
plant that slaughters local farmers' livestock will have to install these
facilities, too. This is one of the principal reasons that meat at the
farmers' market is more expensive than meat at the supermarket: farmers are
seldom allowed to process their own meat, and small processing plants have
become very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is willing to let them
operate at all. From the U.S.D.A.'s perspective, it is much more efficient
to put their inspectors in a plant where they can inspect 400 cows an hour
rather than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.

So what happens to the spinach grower at my farmers' market when the F.D.A.
starts demanding a Haccp plan (daily testing of the irrigation water, say,
or some newfangled veggie-irradiation technology)? When we start requiring
that all farms be federally inspected? Heavy burdens of regulation always
fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting
the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a
larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to
accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in
the first place. We end up putting our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue
Heron Farms (in technologies rather than relationships).

It's easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a new rule banning animals from
farms that produce plant crops. In light of the threat from E. coli, such a
rule would make a certain kind of sense. But it is an industrial, not an
ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping animals on farms used to be,
as Wendell Berry pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved onto feedlots
did it become a problem. Local farmers and local food economies represent
much the same sort of pre-problem solution (elegant, low-tech and
redundant). But the logic of industry, apparently ineluctable, has other
ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized food system undisturbed but
also imperil its most promising, and safer, alternatives.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author most
recently of "The Omnivore¹s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals."

http://www.bioregional-congress.org/
Tenth Continental Bioregional Congress, 2009 (probably at The Farm in Tennessee, date to be announced)

A growing number of people are recognizing that in order to secure the clean air, water and food that we need to healthfully survive, we have to become guardians of the places where we live. People sense the loss in not knowing our neighbors and natural surroundings, and are discovering that the best way to take care of ourselves and to get to know our neighbors, is to protect and restore our region.

Bioregionalism recognizes, nurtures, sustains and celebrates our local connections with:

* Land
* Plants and Animals
* Springs, Rivers, Lakes, Groundwater & Oceans
* Air
* Community, Native Traditions, Indigenous Systems of Production & Trade

It is taking the time to learn the possibilities of place. It is a mindfulness of local environment, history, and community aspirations that leads to a sustainable future. It relies on safe and renewable sources of food and energy. It ensures employment by supplying a rich diversity of services within the community, by recycling our resources, and by exchanging prudent surpluses with other regions. Bioregionalism is working to satisfy basic needs locally, such as education, health care and self-governance. The bioregional perspective recreates a widely-shared sense of regional identity founded upon a renewed critical awareness of and respect for the integrity of our ecological communities. People are joining with neighbors to discuss ways we can work together to:

* 1. Learn what our special local resources are
* 2. Plan how to best protect and use those natural and cultural resources
* 3. Exchange our time and energy to best meet our daily and long-term needs
* 4. Enrich our children's local and planetary knowledge.

Security begins by acting responsibly at home.

Welcome home!

Event url: http://www.bioregionalcongress.org/

This is a very profound essay on localization that I have shared with my students in Permaculture Courses (It can be found in other places on the web). Hope you enjoy it and share it. Keith

The Idea of a Local Economy by Wendell Berry

Let us begin by assuming what appears to be true: that the so-called "environmental crisis" is now pretty well established as a fact of our age. The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or scoffed at, but they are not denied. Concern for these problems has acquired a certain standing, a measure of discussability, in the media and in some scientific, academic, and religious institutions.

This is good, of course; obviously, we can't hope to solve these problems without an increase of public awareness and concern. But in an age burdened with "publicity," we have to be aware also that as issues rise into popularity they rise also into the danger of oversimplification. To speak of this danger is especially necessary in confronting the destructiveness of our relationship to nature, which is the result, in the first place, of gross oversimplification.

The "environmental crisis" has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of "raw materials," and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically powerful and more brutal.

And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as "environmental" problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them. This oversimplification is now either a matter of corporate behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior. This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.

What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the "developed" world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of "service" that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities. Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others.

The danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the solution to the "environmental crisis" can be merely political - that the problems, being large, can be solved by large solutions generated by a few people to whom we will give our proxies to police the economic proxies that we have already given. The danger, in other words, is that people will think they have made a sufficient change if they have altered their "values," or had a "change of heart," or experienced a "spiritual awakening," and that such a change in passive consumers will cause appropriate changes in the public experts, politicians, and corporate executives to whom they have granted their political and economic proxies.

The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. The "environmental crisis," in fact, can be solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take back into their own power a significant portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the "environmental crisis" is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an "environmental crisis" because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, theGod-given world.

We live, as we must sooner or later recognize, in an era of sentimental economics and, consequently, of sentimental politics. Sentimental communism holds in effect that everybody and everything should suffer for the good of "the many" who, though miserable in the present, will be happy in the future for exactly the same reasons that they are miserable in the present.

Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the corporate and political powers claim. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the "free market" and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to "the many" - in, of course, the future.

These forms of political economy may be described as sentimental because they depend absolutely upon a political faith for which there is no justification, and because they issue a cold check on the virtue of political and/or economic rulers. They seek, that is, to preserve the gullibility of the people by appealing to a fund of political virtue that does not exist. Communism and "free-market" capitalism both are modern versions of oligarchy. In their propaganda, both justify violent means by good ends, which always are put beyond reach by the violence of the means. The trick is to define the end vaguely - "the greatest good of the greatest number" or "the benefit of the many" - and keep it at a distance.

The fraudulence of these oligarchic forms of economy is in their principle of displacing whatever good they recognize (as well as their debts) from the present to the future. Their success depends upon persuading people, first, that whatever they have now is no good, and second, that the promised good is certain to be achieved in the future. This obviously contradicts the principle - common, I believe, to all the religious traditions - that if ever we are going to do good to one another, then the time to do it is now; we are to receive no reward for promising to do it in the future. And both communism and capitalism have found such principles to be a great embarrassment. If you are presently occupied in destroying every good thing in sight in order to do good in the future, it is inconvenient to have people saying things like "Love thy neighbor as thyself" or "Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them." Communists and capitalists alike, "liberal" and "conservative" capitalists alike have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their victims, "I am doing this because I can’t do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable." The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along with this lie.

The idea of an economy based upon several kinds of ruin may seem a contradiction in terms, but in fact such an economy is possible, as we see. It is possible however, on one implacable condition: the only future good that it assuredly leads to is that it will destroy itself. And how does it disguise this outcome from its subjects, its short-term beneficiaries, and its victims? It does so by false accounting. It substitutes for the real economy, by which we build and maintain (or do not maintain) our household, a symbolic economy of money, which in the long run, because of the self-interested manipulations of the "controlling interests," cannot symbolize or account for anything but itself. And so we have before us the spectacle of unprecedented "prosperity" and "economic growth" in a land of degraded farms, forests, ecosystems, and watersheds, polluted air, failing families, and perishing communities.

This moral and economic absurdity exists for the sake of the allegedly "free" market, the single principle of which is this: commodities will be produced wherever they can be produced at the lowest cost, and consumed wherever they will bring the highest price. To make too cheap and sell too high has always been the program of industrial capitalism. The idea of the global "free market" is merely capitalism's so-far-successful attempt to enlarge the geographic scope of its greed, and moreover to give to its greed the status of a "right" within its presumptive territory. The global "free market" is free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the boundaries of the old national colonialisms, and replaces them with a new colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby "freeing" the hounds.

The "right" of a corporation to exercise its economic power without restraint is construed, by the partisans of the "free market," as a form of freedom, a political liberty implied presumably by the right of individual citizens to own and use property.

But the "free market" idea introduces into government a sanction of an inequality that is not implicit in any idea of democratic liberty: namely that the "free market" is freest to those who have the most money, and is not free at all to those with little or no money. Wal-Mart, for example, as a large corporation "freely" competing against local, privately owned businesses has virtually all the freedom, and its small competitors virtually none.

To make too cheap and sell too high, there are two requirements. One is that you must have a lot of consumers with surplus money and unlimited wants. For the time being, there are plenty of these consumers in the "developed" countries. The problem, for the time being easily solved, is simply to keep them relatively affluent and dependent on purchased supplies.

The other requirement is that the market for labor and raw materials should remain depressed relative to the market for retail commodities. This means that the supply of workers should exceed demand, and that the land-using economy should be allowed or encouraged to overproduce.

To keep the cost of labor low, it is necessary first to entice or force country people everywhere in the world to move into the cities - in the manner prescribed by the United States' Committee for Economic Development after World War II - and second, to continue to introduce labor-replacing technology. In this way it is possible to maintain a "pool" of people who are in the threatening position of being mere consumers, landless and also poor, and who therefore are eager to go to work for low wages - precisely the condition of migrant farm workersin the United States.

To cause the land-using economies to overproduce is even simpler. The farmers and other workers in the world's land-using economies, by and large, are not organized. They are therefore unable to control production in order to secure just prices. Individual producers must go individually to the market and take for their produce simply whatever they are paid. They have no power to bargain or make demands. Increasingly, they must sell, not to neighbors or to neighboring towns and cities, but to large and remote corporations. There is no competition among the buyers (supposing there is more than one), who are organized, and are "free" to exploit the advantage of low prices. Low prices encourage overproduction as producers attempt to
make up their losses "on volume," and overproduction inevitably makes for low prices. The land-using economies thus spiral downward as the money economy of the exploiters spirals upward. If economic attrition in the land-using population becomes so severe as to threaten production, then governments can subsidize production without production controls, which necessarily will encourage overproduction, which will lower prices - and so the subsidy to rural producers becomes, in effect, a subsidy to the purchasing corporations. In the land-using economies production is further cheapened by destroying, with low prices and low standards of quality, the cultural imperatives for good work and land stewardship.

This sort of exploitation, long familiar in the foreign and domestic economies and the colonialism of modern nations, has now become "the global economy," which is the property of a few supranational corporations. The economic theory used to justify the global economy in its "free market" version is again perfectly groundless and sentimental. The idea is that what is good for the corporations will sooner or later - though not of course immediately - be good for everybody.

That sentimentality is based in turn, upon a fantasy: the proposition that the great corporations, in "freely" competing with one another for raw materials, labor, and marketshare, will drive each other indefinitely, not only toward greater "efficiencies" of manufacture, but also toward higher bids for raw materials and labor and lower prices to consumers. As a result, all the world's people will be economically secure - in the future. It would be hard to object to such a proposition if only it were true.

But one knows, in the first place, that "efficiency" in manufacture always means reducing labor costs by replacing workers with cheaper workers or with machines.

In the second place, the "law of competition" does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the "free market" will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.

In the third place, the global economy is based upon cheap long-distance transportation, without which it is not possible to move goods from the point of cheapest origin to the point of highest sale. And cheap long-distance transportation is the basis of the idea that regions and nations should abandon any measure of economic self-sufficiency in order to specialize in production for export of the few commodities or the single commodity that can be most cheaply produced. Whatever may be said for the "efficiency" of such a system, its result (and I assume, its purpose) is to destroy local production capacities, local diversity, and local economic independence.

This idea of a global "free market" economy, despite its obvious moral flaws and its dangerous practical weaknesses, is now the ruling orthodoxy of the age. Its propaganda is subscribed to and distributed by most political leaders, editorial writers, and other "opinion makers." The powers that be, while continuing to budget huge sums for "national defense," have apparently abandoned any idea of national or local self-sufficiency, even in food. They also have given up the idea that a national or local government might justly place restraints upon economic activity in order to protect its land and its people.

The global economy is now institutionalized in the World Trade Organization, which was set up, without election anywhere, to rule international trade on behalf of the "free market" - which is to say on behalf of the supranational corporations - and to overrule, in secret sessions, any national or regional law that conflicts with the "free market." The corporate program of global free trade and the presence of the World Trade Organization have legitimized extreme forms of expert thought. We are told confidently that if Kentucky loses its milk-producing capacity to Wisconsin, that will be a "success story." Experts such as Stephen C. Blank, of the University of California, Davis, have proposed that "developed" countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, where food can no longer be produced cheaply enough, should give up agriculture altogether.

The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as "a person." But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who "let their money work for them," expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-person by giving the global corporate economy the status of a super government with the power to overrule nations. I don¹t mean to say, of course, that all corporate executives and stockholders are bad people. I am only saying that all of them are very seriously implicated in a bad economy.

Unsurprisingly, among people who wish to preserve things other than money - for instance, every region's native capacity to produce essential goods - there is a growing perception that the global "free market" economy is inherently an enemy to the natural world, to human health and freedom, to industrial workers, and to farmers and others in the land-use economies; and furthermore, that it is inherently an enemy to good work and good economic practice. I believe that this perception is correct and that it can be shown to be correct merely by listing the assumptions implicit in the idea that corporations should be "free" to buy low and sell high in the world at large. These assumptions, so far as I can make them out, are as follows:

1. That stable and preserving relationships among people, places, and things do not matter and are of no worth.
2. That cultures and religions have no legitimate practical or economic concerns.
3. That there is no conflict between the "free market" and political freedom, and no connection between political democracy and economic democracy.
4. That there can be no conflict between economic advantage and economic justice.
5. That there is no conflict between greed and ecological or bodily health.
6. That there is no conflict between self-interest and public service.
7. That the loss or destruction of the capacity anywhere to produce necessary goods does not matter and involves no cost.
8. That it is all right for a nation's or a region's subsistence to be foreign based, dependent on long-distance transport, and entirely controlled by corporations.
9. That, therefore, wars over commodities - our recent Gulf War, for example - are legitimate and permanent economic functions.
10. That this sort of sanctioned violence is justified also by the predominance of centralized systems of production supply, communications, and transportation, which are extremely vulnerable not only to acts of war between nations, but also to sabotage and terrorism.
11. That it is all right for poor people in poor countries to work at poor wages to produce goods for export to affluent people in rich countries.
12. That there is no danger and no cost in the proliferation of exotic pests, weeds, and diseases that accompany international trade and that increase with the volume of trade.
13. That an economy is a machine, of which people are merely the interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.
14. That, therefore, vocation is a dead issue. One does not do the work that one chooses to do because one is called to it by Heaven or by one's natural or God-given abilities, but does instead the work that is determined and imposed by the economy. Any work is all right as long as one gets paid for it.

These assumptions clearly prefigure a condition of total economy. A total economy is one in which everything - "life-forms," for instance, or the "right to pollute" - is "private property" and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes - and especially democratic processes - are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale. And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people's products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to "grow" by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world.

Among the many costs of the total economy, the loss of the principle of vocation is probably the most symptomatic and, from a cultural standpoint, the most critical. It is by the replacement of vocation with economic determinism that the exterior workings of a total economy destroy the character and culture also from the inside.

In an essay on the origin of civilization in traditional cultures, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy wrote that "the principle of justice is the same throughout...[it is] that each member of the community should perform the task for which he is fitted by nature..." The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable. That is why Coomaraswamy spoke of industrialism as "the mammon of injustice," incompatible with civilization. It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray."

Aware of industrialism's potential for destruction, as well as the considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for a while used, the means of limiting and restraining such concentrations, and of somewhat equitably distributing wealth and property. The means were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax. And to protect domestic producers and production capacities it is possible for governments to impose tariffs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the government's obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens. There is, then, no necessity or inevitability requiring our government to sacrifice the livelihoods of our small farmers, small business people, and workers, along with our domestic economic independence to the global "free market." But now all of these means are either weakened or in disuse. The global economy is intended as a means of subverting them.

In default of government protections against the total economy of the supranational corporations, people are where they have been many times before: in danger of losing their economic security and their freedom, both at once. But at the same time the means of defending themselves belongs to them in the form of a venerable principle: powers not exercised by government return to the people. If the government does not propose to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its people, then the people must think about protecting themselves.

How are they to protect themselves? There seems, really, to be only one way, and that is to develop and put into practice the idea of a local economy - something that growing numbers of people are now doing. For several good reasons, they are beginning with the idea of a local food economy. People are trying to find ways to shorten the distance between producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more direct, and to make this local economic activity a benefit to the local community. They are trying to learn to use the consumer economies of local towns and cities to preserve the livelihoods of local farm families and farm communities. They want to use the local economy to give consumers an influence over the kind and quality of their food, and to preserve and enhance the local landscapes. They want to give everybody in the local community a direct, long-term interest in the prosperity, health, and beauty of their homeland. This is the only way presently available to make the total economy less total. It was once, I believe, the only way to make a national or a colonial economy less total. But now the necessity is greater.

I am assuming that there is a valid line of thought leading from the idea of the total economy to the idea of a local economy. I assume that the first thought may be a recognition of one's ignorance and vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer, one does not know the history of the products that one uses. Where, exactly, did they come from? Who produced them? What toxins were used in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of producing them and then of disposing of them? One sees that such questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at all. Though one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is denied certain significant choices. In such a state of economic ignorance it is not possible to choose products that were produced locally or with reasonable kindness toward people and toward nature. Nor is it possible for such consumers to influence production for the better. Consumers who feel a prompting toward land stewardship find that in this economy they can have no stewardly practice. To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.

And then, perhaps, one begins to see from a local point of view. One begins to ask, What is here, what is in me, that can lead to something better? From a local point of view, one can see that a global "free market" economy is possible only if nations and localities accept or ignore the inherent instability of a production economy based on exports and a consumer economy based on imports. An export economy is beyond local influence, and so is an import economy. And cheap long-distance transport is possible only if granted cheap fuel, international peace, control of terrorism, prevention of sabotage, and the solvency of the international economy.

Perhaps one also begins to see the difference between a small local business that must share the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community by ruining the local community.

So far as I can see, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices.

Of course, everything needed locally cannot be produced locally. But a viable neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common. This is the principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs have been met. The economic products of a viable community are understood either as belonging to the community's subsistence or as surplus, and only the surplus is considered to be marketable abroad. A community, if it is to be viable, cannot think of producing solely for export, and it cannot permit importers to use cheaper labor and goods from other places to destroy the local capacity to produce goods that are needed locally. In charity, moreover, it must refuse to import goods that are produced at the cost of human or ecological degradation elsewhere. This principle applies not just to localities, but to regions and nations as well.

The principles of neighborhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as "protectionism" – and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or trade with them. The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of protection is not "isolationism."

Albert Schweitzer, who knew well the economic situation in the colonies of Africa, wrote nearly sixty years ago: "Whenever the timber trade is good, permanent famine reigns in the Ogowe region because the villagers abandon their farms to fell as many trees as possible." We should notice especially that the goal of production was "as many...as possible." And Schweitzer makes my point exactly: "These people could achieve true wealth if they could develop their agriculture and trade to meet their own needs." Instead they produced timber for export to "the world economy," which made them dependent upon imported goods that they bought with money earned from their exports. They gave up their local means of subsistence, and imposed the false standard of a foreign demand ("as many trees as possible") upon their forests. They thus became helplessly dependent on an economy over which they had no control.

Such was the fate of the native people under the African colonialism of Schweitzer¹s time. Such is, and can only be, the fate of everybody under the global colonialism of our time. Schweitzer's description of the colonial economy of the Ogowe region is in principle not different from the rural economy now in Kentucky or Iowa or Wyoming. A total economy for all practical purposes is a total government. The "free trade", which from the standpoint of the corporate economy brings "unprecedented economic growth," from the standpoint of the land and its local populations, and ultimately from the standpoint of the cities, brings destruction and slavery. Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.