As an introduction to what we can do to ensure clean and healthy food (in next post), I would like to ask a simple question: How long does it take for a food crisis to occur? While I have had colleagues argue this with me, I say 3-4 days! My friend Suzi lives in Florida. When a hurricane is predicted to landfall, people either rush out of town or buy up supplies to hunker down. Two days before the hurricane hits, the supply trucks for all the stores stop coming, and in the stores themselves everything is bought up so the shelves are now bare of food and all essentials! Even the transfat processed food dissappears. After the hurricane it can take 2-3 days to get things running again. Now where does your food come from? What would happen if for any reason the nightly supply trucks that deliver to the distribution centers all over the country stop arriving for 2-3 days? Let’s make it a Hollywood disaster movie – the trucks stop coming – a bit like Puerto Rico recently after the hurricane came through. Not to be negative, but to emphasize a simple reality check of modern industrialized living – the fragility of our food system! When you are poor or hungry you will take what you can get – even if the food is processed to high hell. And much of the food is shipped vast distances before you get your hands on it – even the so called fresh produce! The solution? To re-localize the food system. Throughout history, food has always been local. Food is now a distraction from daily living when it used to be the center of culture. Fast food, so we don’t have to spend more time than necessary to feed ourselves. Got to get back to the electronic joy – many continue to serve the electronic joy even while they eat. Rob Hopkins in Totnes, England, espouses relocalization of food and energy (I’ll cover relocalized energy more in another post ) through his ‘Transition network.’ Much of the problem lies in the growth of globalization at the expense of the local. Both can occur and co-exist, but the local system must take priority for local needs. Food is one thing that must become local again. That isn’t to say we still can’t have imports of ‘exotic’ food, but resilience must be built locally.
Relocalization by its very nature requires that we actively cooperate as a community group and not just be people living in the same area. This is the idea of community. It gets mentioned a lot but we seem to keep that sense of isolation as a way of living. Today, even when we do cooperate it is only as much as is needed. While this blog is from a U.S. perspective, it applies to everyone. This individualized identity we have in the more developed countries (MDCs) has been the deliberate consequence of a consumer driven lifestyle that is really no more than 70 years old. In Europe, the ‘village’ was the center of a community based lifestyle. In my SL text I cover this a little with some discussion of peasant societies, that despite being ‘poor’, were completely supportive of all within the village. We have amnesia now about this way of life and through mainstream media have come to view it as some deplorable past we managed to grow out of. In reality, all we have done is create individuated people dependent on the ‘system’ and not people collaborating with each other for mutual benefit. Both Jared Diamond and Daniel Quinn talk about indigenous peoples and how they have a lot to teach us about living as community. The need to mesh an understanding of the ways that humans successfully lived for millennia coupled with the new freedom to move globally around the world is one we should be embracing. This is a new way for all humanity to thrive as a set of tiered communities, each living self-sufficiently, yet collaborating with adjacent ones for mutual benefit. Quinn refers to this idea as a new kind of tribalism that doesn’t have the tribal boundaries of ancestral tribal systems. Whenever I talk about this I can hear all those silent voices beaming ridicule about how we could never achieve this. I say it anyway. It’s a new model, and as Buckminster Fuller said, “In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.” And of course I always get people who want the bulleted list of how to do it. There is NO one right way, for every place will be different. I present the idea, the tool, and if it looks good to run with it. Again, as Fuller said, “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” That’s why my SL text is titled “Principles” and not rules!
At some conferences when I talk about SL, I inevitably have some enthusiastic urban organic gardener telling me what they do on their 5 acres of land on the edge of town and how everyone has to live that way. In England when this occurred I asked people to consider what Manchester or Birmingham would look if everyone had their own 5 acres – I don’t think there’s enough land with the populations of those cities, even if everyone wanted to have their own urban farm. Of course, the same is true in the States even with all the extra land per population available. And I just don’t see farmers giving up their land to allow lot of urban exiles to become tenant farmers. We do, however, need to rethink how our food is produced, where, and who is doing it. We don’t need to a have a catastrophe, just a willingness to think as a community and then work together. I’ll end this post with another quote by Fuller, but one that is echoed by many of my favorite philosophers, “Traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.” My friend Bill thinks humanity will be loathe to let go this hyper-consumer lifestyle. The good news is that if we don’t choose a better alternative way to live, we won’t have to let it go, because it will be ripped away from us – you can’t live an economy that grows infinitely on a finite planet, and we’re meeting limits of all kinds at this time. Next post – back to localized food options.
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