the market economy

people sell you "death in a bottle" everyday and you buy it, because of marketing and addiction to chemicals. we've been tricked into thinking it's a good thing, or that it's okay. it's part of the corporate "beauty" (for them) - they've trained us not to care.

-OBE

Walmart, KFC, Burger King Paper Purchases Destroying Indonesia's Rainforests

Walmart, KFC, Burger King Paper Purchases Destroying Indonesia's Rainforests
By Matthew McDermott, TreeHugger
July 6, 2010

Greenpeace is again pointing a finger the international companies responsible for Indonesian deforestation, and the international brands aiding and abetting them through purchasing their products. This time it's the Sinar Mas group and their subsidiary Asian Pulp & Paper clearing forest and Walmart, Burger King, Dunkin Donuts, KFC, and other well-known consumer names that are helping them, albeit one step removed.

Critical Endangered Species Habitat & Carbon-Storing Rainforest Cleared Illegally
The new blame and shame report How Sinar Mas is Pulping the Planet [PDF] documents how Asian Pulp &Paper is clearing forest in the Bukit Tigapuluh Forest Landscape and in the Kerumantan peat forest, both on the island of Sumatra.

Please read the article: http://www.alternet.org/story/147444/

Betting on Disaster Is the planet really warming up? Just ask the corporations that stand to make—or lose—billions due to "climate exposure."

Betting on Disaster
Is the planet really warming up? Just ask the corporations that stand to make—or lose—billions due to "climate exposure."
By Clive Thompson
Mon Apr. 19, 2010

Last year, Beluga Shipping discovered that there's money in global warming.

Beluga is a German firm that specializes in "super heavy lift" transport. Its vessels are equipped with massive cranes, allowing it to load and unload massive objects, like multi-ton propeller blades for wind turbines. It is an enormously expensive business, but last summer, Beluga executives hit upon an interesting way to save money: Shipping freight over a melting Arctic. Read the full article: http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/04/climate-desk-climate-change-corporations


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GM's Money Trees

GM's Money Trees
In Brazil, people with some of the world's smallest carbon footprints are being displaced—so their forests can become offsets for SUVs.
By Mark Schapiro
November/December 2009 Issue Link to full article below

I am standing in the shadow of General Motors' $1 tree. It's a native guaricica, with pale white bark and a spreading crown that looms about 40 feet above my head. Hanging from its trunk is a small plaque that identifies it as tree No. 129. I've come here, to the verdant chaos of Brazil's Atlantic forest, to understand the far-reaching and politically explosive controversies taking shape in diplomatic corridors thousands of miles away over the fate of trees like this one.

No. 129 stands in the heart of the Cachoeira reserve in the state of Paraná—one of the last slivers of a forest that once blanketed much of the country's southeastern coast. Just 7 percent of the Atlantic forest remains, but it is still one of the Earth's richest centers of biodiversity, home to a wealth of plants and creatures comparable to the Amazon's. On the way here, our group—led by Ricardo Miranda de Britez and his team of forestry experts from the Brazilian conservation group Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS)—walked past clusters of yellow-and-white orchids, stepped over the footprints of an ocelot, kept an eye out for the endangered golden lion tamarin, and were bitten by, it seems, every one of the thousands of species of insects native to the area.

To read the full article: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/11/gms-money-trees

What's So Scary About Michael Pollan?

What's So Scary About Michael Pollan?
Why Corporate Agriculture Tried to Censor His University Speech
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
October 28, 2009 Link to full article below

Even if agribusiness could shut Michael Pollan up, the outspoken author of Omnivore's Dilemma and a journalism professor at University of California, Berkeley, it still has the Los Angeles Times to contend with.

Last week, the Times blasted California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for downgrading a scheduled Pollan lecture because it received pressure from David E. Wood, a university donor who happens to be chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co.

"Agribusiness gets plenty of opportunities to preach its point of view at agriculture schools such as Cal Poly, where the likes of Monsanto and Cargill fund research," the Times wrote, calling the 800-acre Harris Ranch, near Coalinga, whose "smell assaults passersby long before the panorama of thousands of cattle packed atop layers of their own manure,"--"Cowschwitz." Ouch.

And agribusiness has the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal with.

The land grant, ag-based university, in the middle of dairyland, clearly doesn't remember its roots. It gave Pollan's In Defense of Food, another anti-agbiz screed according to industry, free to all incoming freshmen as part of its common book read program where everyone reads the same book, Go Big Read, in August.

To read the full article: http://www.alternet.org/story/143519/

Hog Heaven? Life is no picnic for free-range pigs.

Hog Heaven?
Life is no picnic for free-range pigs.
By James E. McWilliams Monday, June 29, 2009
Link to full article below

The horrible fates of factory-farmed pigs are relatively well-known: They live crammed in drab confinement. Their tails are docked, they're castrated to reduce aggression, and they're stuffed with growth promoters and antibiotic-laden feed. In the minds of most, the humane alternative is the free-range cultivation of pigs, an arrangement that affords access to open space and the chance to behave like pigs. As a system of swine management, however, free-range-even though it mercifully allows ample pig mobility-is in many ways far from the ideal that most people imagine it to be.

To read the full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2221754/

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Food Inc: Michael Pollan and Friends Reveal the Food Industry's Darkest Secrets

Food Inc: Michael Pollan and Friends Reveal the Food Industry's Darkest Secrets
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
June 25, 2009
link to full article below

It turns out that figuring out the most simple thing -- like what's on your dinner plate, and where it came from -- is actually a pretty subversive act.

That's what director Robert Kenner found out while spending six years putting together the amazing new documentary, Food Inc., which features prominent food writers Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation).

Warning: Food Inc. is not for the faint of heart. While its focus is not on the gory images of slaughterhouse floors and filthy feedlots, what it does show about the journey of our food from "farm" to plate is not pretty.

To read the full article: http://www.alternet.org/story/140890/

Food Inc - See the movie!

Meet Your New Farmer: Hungry Corporate Giant
June 12, 2009




Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You’ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch.

Divided into chapters dedicated to points along the commercial food chain — from farm to fork, to borrow a loaded agribusiness phrase — the movie is nothing if not ambitious. “There are no seasons in the American supermarket,” the unidentified voice intones in the opening scene, as the camera sweeps the aisles of one such brightly lighted, heavily stocked if nutritionally impoverished emporium. From there the director Robert Kenner jumps all over the food map, from industrial feedlots where millions of cruelly crammed cattle mill about in their own waste until slaughter, to the chains where millions of consumers gobble down industrially produced meat and an occasional serving of E. coli bacteria.

To read the full article from NYTimes:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/movies/12food.html?ref=arts

Film aims to expose dangers in U.S. food industry

Film aims to expose dangers in U.S. food industry
By Christine Kearney
Tue Jun 9, 2009



NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bigger-breasted chickens fattened artificially. New strains of deadly E. coli bacteria. A food supply controlled by a handful of corporations.

The documentary "Food, Inc." opens in the United States on Friday and portrays these purported dangers and changes in the U.S. food industry, asserting harmful effects on public health, the environment, and worker and animal rights.

Big corporations such as biotech food producer Monsanto Co., U.S. meat companies Tyson Food Inc. and Smithfield Foods, and poultry producer Perdue Farms all declined to be interviewed for the film.

But the industry has not stood silent. Trade associations across the $142-billion-a-year U.S. meat industry have banded together to counter the claims. Led by the American Meat Institute, they have created a number of websites, including one called SafeFoodInc.com.

To read the full article: http://www.reuters.com/article/filmNews/idUSTRE5586OK20090609?sp=true

Studies Show Global Companies Still Failing to Report Strategies and Potential Impacts From Climate Change

Studies Show Global Companies Still Failing to Report Strategies and Potential Impacts From Climate Change
Investors Call on SEC to Take Steps to Improve Company Disclosure
WASHINGTON, June 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire

http://news.prnewswire.com/ViewContent.aspx?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/06-03-2009/0005037689&EDATE=

Climate change-related disclosure continues to be weak or altogether nonexistent in SEC filings of global companies with the most at stake in preparing for a low-carbon global economy, according to two major studies released today by Ceres, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Center for Energy and Environmental Security (CEES). The reports' findings highlight the need for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to respond to repeated investor requests for formal guidance on climate-related disclosure companies should be providing in securities filings.

"These findings are a clarion call for quick SEC action to require better climate risk disclosure from publicly-traded companies," said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres and director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk, comprised of 80 institutional investors with $7 trillion in collective assets. "Climate change is a bottom line issue and investors have a right to know which companies are best positioned for the emerging clean energy global economy."

"Corporate climate disclosure falls far short of what CalPERS and other investors need to carry out their fiduciary duties," added Anne Stausboll, chief executive officer of the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), the nation's largest public pension fund and one of 18 investors that petitioned the SEC in fall 2007 to issue climate disclosure guidance. "We call on the SEC to ensure that information regarding climate change effects, including regulatory and physical impacts, are accessible and delivered to investors."

To read the full article: http://news.prnewswire.com/ViewContent.aspx?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/06-03-2009/0005037689&EDATE=

U.S. Corporations Size Up Their Carbon Footprints

U.S. Corporations Size Up Their Carbon Footprints
Coca-Cola, Cisco, Intuit, and others use ever more sophisticated tools to measure their environmental impact and meet emissions goals
By Rachael King
June 1, 2009

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc2009061_692661.htm?chan=rss_topEmailedStories_ssi_5/
http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/jun2009/tc2009061_692661.htm

Like many companies, Coca-Cola (KO) wants to cut its carbon footprint. The soft-drink maker has pledged to eliminate 2 million tons of CO2 emissions from its manufacturing operations by 2015. To do that, Coca-Cola has become adept at using spreadsheets and databases to measure how much carbon it produces and energy it consumes. It's even able to track less tangible causes, such as greenhouse gases emitted by vending machines. But when it comes to tracking and managing the projects that will help it reduce carbon emissions and make better use of resources, Coca-Cola is having a harder time.

The company needed a more sophisticated set of carbon accounting and management tools, says Bryan Jacob, director of energy management and climate protection at Coca-Cola. "I'm looking for something to take us to the next level," he says. "I'm going to either enhance what I've got or move to a different platform that's much more robust." To that end, the company is testing a product from software company Hara that goes beyond simply measuring carbon footprints. The Web-delivered tools, formally introduced June 1, help companies manage efforts to actually reduce carbon and more efficiently use natural resources such as water, waste, and paper.

Amid growing pressure from investors, employees, and environmental watchdogs such as Greenpeace, the circle of companies making a concerted effort to go green is widening. But corporations are finding that even in cases where there's a will to reduce emissions, it's not easy to measure a company's environmental impact, much less keep track of the various projects aimed at meeting aggressive carbon reduction targets.

To read the full article: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc2009061_692661.htm?chan=rss_topEmailedStories_ssi_5/

Mother Nature Doesn't Do Bailouts

Mother Nature Doesn't Do Bailouts
March 17, 2009

http://www.seventhgeneration.com/learn/inspiredprotagonist/mother-nature-doesnt-do-bailouts?source=email&utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=READ+MORE+&utm_content=fidyl%40yahoo.com&utm_campaign=7Gen+-+March+25%2C+2009+-+Non-Nation-

Thomas Friedman began a recent New York Times column by quoting from a brilliantly insightful, fake 2005 story from the Onion. The article cited an employee of "Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd.," expressing his disbelief over the "sheer amount of [garbage] Americans will buy" and the "contemptible" fact that when we no longer want an item we "simply throw it away."

Friedman, in top form, then launches into a description of what's missing from almost every analysis of the current economic meltdown: "What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall -- when Mother Nature and the market both said: 'No more.'"

To read the full article: http://www.seventhgeneration.com/learn/inspiredprotagonist/mother-nature-doesnt-do-bailouts?source=email&utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=READ+MORE+&utm_content=fidyl%40yahoo.com&utm_campaign=7Gen+-+March+25%2C+2009+-+Non-Nation-

Capitalists Hail the End of Corporate Responsibility

Capitalists Hail the End of Corporate Responsibility
March 9, 2009

http://www.seventhgeneration.com/learn/inspiredprotagonist/capitalists-hail-end-corporate-responsibility?source=email&utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=READ+MORE+&utm_content=fidyl%40yahoo.com&utm_campaign=7Gen+-+March+25%2C+2009+-+Non-Nation-

Given that our financial system is teetering at the edge of a very deep, very scary abyss, it's certainly understandable that alpha capitalists -- the folks who believe that business' only "responsibility" is to maximize profits for shareholders -- are desperately scrambling for something, anything, to grab onto. Something reassuring. Some signal that the world is at least starting to return to their definition of "normal."

The Financial Times' Stefan Stern thinks he's found the beginning of the new normal: the end of values-driven business. In a column last month, he opined that, "now the recession's here we can forget all that nonsense about corporate social responsibility and get back to trying to make some money." In his view, there's a silver lining to the world economy's near-collapse: it has chastened the "politically correct…global elite" and finally put those "burbling do-gooder[s]" to flight.

To read the full article: http://www.seventhgeneration.com/learn/inspiredprotagonist/capitalists-hail-end-corporate-responsibility?source=email&utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=READ+MORE+&utm_content=fidyl%40yahoo.com&utm_campaign=7Gen+-+March+25%2C+2009+-+Non-Nation-

Toxic Coal Ash Stored in 32 States a "Risk to Human Health and the Environment"

Toxic Coal Ash Stored in 32 States a ‘Risk to Human Health and the Environment’
by www.SixWise.com

http://www.sixwise.com/Newsletters/2009/January/28/Toxic-Coal-Ash-Stored-in-32-States.htm?source=nl

Coal ash is a byproduct of coal-fired power plants. The waste, which is a mixture of noncombustible ingredients of coal and the ash trapped by equipment designed to reduce air pollution from the plants, has become an increasing burden as electricity needs have increased, as have the regulations restricting emissions from power plants.

In 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, the Associated Press found that 721 power plants produced nearly 96 million tons of coal ash. Some of the waste was transferred to landfills while another portion was sold for use in concrete, but about 20 percent of this, or close to 20 million tons, was put into surface ponds.

What are Coal Ash Ponds, and What’s All the Concern About?

Some 300 ponds for coal ash exist in 32 states around the nation, with Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama storing the most. These ponds are subject to very little regulation, despite the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) saying eight years ago that it wanted to set up national standards to do so. Because the EPA has not yet addressed the issue, the ponds are subject to less regulation than landfills that accept household garbage.

“Your household garbage is managed much more consistently” than coal combustion waste, Dr. Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the New York Times. “It’s such a large volume of waste, and it’s so essential to the country’s energy supply; it’s basically been a loophole in the country’s waste management strategy.”

The regulations that do exist vary by state, and most of the ponds have no liners and no monitors in place to ensure that the toxins held within do not leak into underground aquifers. Already, leaks and ruptures in several states have contaminated surrounding land and water supplies, and the EPA has suggested that contamination may be more widespread than is realized due to lack of monitoring and poor state records.

As of 2007, there were 24 cases of water pollution linked to coal ash ponds or landfills, spread throughout 13 states, and another 43 cases where coal ash was the likely cause of the pollution.

Most recently, in December 2008 a coal ash pond in East Tennessee ruptured, spewing a billion gallons of the toxic waste over 300 acres of land.

Just what types of risks are involved here? Coal ash is a concentrated source of arsenic, lead, mercury and many other contaminants. It is also radioactive. Not surprisingly, according to the EPA the wastes "have the potential to present danger to human health and the environment."

Also according to the EPA, coal ash poses an increased risk of cancer when metals from the ponds leach into drinking water sources. It’s also been linked to birth defects, and tadpoles and certain fish species have also suffered deformities as a result of coal ash leaks and spills.

As for when regulations may be enacted to help clean things up, it doesn’t appear to be anytime soon.

“We’re still working on coming up with those standards,” Matthew Hale, director of the office of solid waste at the EPA, told the New York Times. “We don’t have a schedule at this point.”

A Simple Solution to Protect Your Family’s Water

Whether or not you’re in the vicinity of a coal ash pond or any other toxic waste area, it’s a good idea to make sure that your family’s drinking water is safe.

According to the EPA, consuming contaminated tap water over time that contains excessive levels of chemicals (such as disinfection by-products, solvents, and pesticides), radionuclides (such as radium), and minerals (such as arsenic) can lead to chronic health effects such as cancer, liver or kidney problems, or reproductive difficulties.

To put your mind at ease and get safe, superior quality water from your own kitchen, Sixwise.com highly recommends The Wellness Kitchen Water Filter. It reduces chlorine, chloramines, cysts, VOCs, pesticides, and herbicides below detectable levels for the life of the filter.

The Wellness Kitchen combines the best filtration and enhancement technologies to deliver the purest and most natural tasting water available. It effectively reduces harmful contaminants, while at the same time enhancing the water with adding important yet delicate wellness "ions and minerals" that your body needs.

Your health is simply too important to gamble with, and that’s why we at Sixwise.com believe you’re better off safe than sorry. If you choose not to filter your family’s water, we highly recommend getting a sample independently tested so you can be sure it’s safe for you to drink.

How the Rich are Destroying the Earth

How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth
November 24, 2008

http://www.enn.com/lifestyle/commentary/38716
http://www.enn.com/lifestyle/commentary/38716/print

Environment: There is an emergency. In less than a decade we will have to change
course, but there are a few major obstacles blocking the way.

The following is reprinted from the new book How the Rich Are Destroying the
Earth by Herve Kempf and published by Chelsea Green.

There is an emergency. In less than a decade we will have to change course --
assuming the collapse of the U.S. economy or the explosion of the Middle East
does not impose a change through chaos. To confront the emergency, we must
understand the objective: to achieve a sober society; to plot out the way there;
to accomplish this transformation equitably, by first making those with the most
carry the burden within and between societies; to take inspiration from
collective values ascribed to here in France by our nation's motto: "Liberty,
ecology, fraternity."

What are the main obstacles that block the way?

ADVERTISEMENT

First of all, received wisdom -- prejudices really -- so loaded that they orient
collective action without anyone really thinking about them. The most powerful
of these preconceived ideas is the belief in growth as the sole means of
resolving social problems. That position is powerfully defended even as it is
contradicted by the facts. And it is always defended by putting ecology aside
because the zealots know that growth is incapable of responding to the
environmental issue.

The second of these ideas, less cocky although very broadly disseminated,
proclaims that technological progress will resolve environmental problems. This
idea is propagated because it allows people to hope we will be able to avoid any
serious changes in our collective behaviors thanks to technological progress.
The development of technology, or rather of certain technical channels to the
detriment of others, reinforces the system and fosters solid profits.

The third piece of received wisdom is the inevitability of unemployment. This
idea is closely linked to the two previous ideas. Unemployment has become a
given, largely manufactured by capitalism to assure the docility of the populace
and especially of the lowest level of workers. From a contrary position, the
transfer of the oligarchy's wealth for the purpose of public services, a system
of taxation that weighed more heavily on pollution and on capital than on
employment, sustainable agricultural policies in the countries of the South, and
research into energy efficiency are immense sources of employment.

A fourth commonly associates Europe and North America in a community of fortune.
But their paths have diverged. Europe is still a standard-bearer for an ideal of
universalism, the validity of which it demonstrates by its ability to unite --
despite problems -- very different states and cultures. Energy consumption,
cultural values -- for example, the critical significance of food -- the
rejection of the death penalty and torture, less pronounced inequality and the
maintenance of an ideal of social justice, respect for international law, and
support for the Kyoto Protocol on climate are some of the many traits that
distinguish Europe from the United States.

Europe must be separated from the obese power and draw closer to the South,
unless the United States shows it can really change.

The Oligarchy Could Be Divided

Then there are the forces at work.

The first, of course, is the power of the system itself. The failures that will
occur will not in themselves be sufficient to undo the system, since, as we have
seen, they could offer the pretext to promote an authoritarian system divested
of any show of democracy.

The social movement has woken up, however, and may continue to gain power. But
it alone will not be able to carry the day in the face of the rise of
repression: it will be necessary for the middle classes and part of the
oligarchy -- which is not monolithic -- to clearly take sides for public
freedoms and the common good. The mass media constitute a central challenge.
Today they support capitalism because of their own economic situation. They
depend, for the most part, on advertising. That makes it difficult for them to
plead for a reduction in consumption.

On top of that, the development of free papers that depend solely on advertising
further increases the pressure on widely distributed paid newspapers, many of
which have entered the stables of big industrial groups. It's not certain that
the information possibilities generated by the Internet, although immense -- and
for as long as these remain open -- will be adequate to counterbalance the
weight of the mass media should it wholly become the voice of the oligarchy.

Nevertheless, not all journalists are totally enthralled yet, and they could be
galvanized around the ideal of freedom.

The third, wobbly force is the left. Since its social-democratic component
became its center of gravity, it has abandoned any ambition of transforming the
world. The compromise with free-market liberalism has led the left to so totally
adopt the values of free-market liberalism that it no longer dares -- except in
the most cautious terms -- to deplore social inequality. On top of that, the
left displays an almost cartoonish refusal to truly engross itself in
environmental issues.

The left remains pickled in the idea of progress as it was conceived in the
nineteenth century, still believes that science is produced the same way it was
in the time of Albert Einstein, and intones the chant of economic growth without
the slightest trace of critical thinking. Moreover, "social capitalism" rather
than "social democracy" is undoubtedly the more apposite term.

Nonetheless, can the challenges of the twenty-first century be addressed by the
currents of tradition other than the one that identified inequality as its
primary motive for revolt?

This hiatus is at the heart of political life. The left will be reborn by
uniting the causes of inequality and the environment -- or, unfit, it will
disappear in the general disorder that will sweep it and everything else away.
And yet, let us be optimistic. Optimistic, because there are ever more of us who
understand -- unlike all the conservatives -- the historical novelty of the
situation: we are living out a new, never-seen-before phase of the human
species' history, the moment when, having conquered the Earth and reached its
limits, humanity must rethink its relationship to nature, to space, to its
destiny.

We are optimistic to the extent that awareness of the importance of the current
stakes becomes pervasive, to the extent that the spirit of freedom and of
solidarity is aroused. Since Seattle and the protests against the World Trade
Organization in 1999, the pendulum has begun to swing in the other direction,
toward a collective concern about the choices for the future, seeking
cooperation rather than competition.

The somewhat successful, although still incomplete, battle in Europe against
GMOs, the international community's continuance of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001
despite the United States' withdrawal, the refusal by the peoples of Europe to
participate in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the general recognition of the
urgency of climate-change challenge are signs that the wind of the future has
begun to blow. Despite the scale of the challenges that await us, solutions are
emerging and -- faced with the sinister prospects the oligarchs promote -- the
desire to remake the world is being reborn.

Herve Kempf is the environmental editor of Le Monde, France's most influential
newspaper and the author of the new book, How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth.

Is FL Just One New Development Away From Environmental Ruin?

Is Florida Just One New Development Away From Environmental Ruin?
By Stan Cox, AlterNet
January 15, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/119325
http://www.alternet.org/water/119325/

[Read comments:
http://www.alternet.org/water/119325/#comments ]

The monumental stone signs and freshly paved entry road appear to lead to nothing but wide-open, semitropical countryside. But a second look reveals a skyline of sorts on the horizon, and it's topped by a beige-and-brown, sharply arched roof. That turns out to be a 100-foot-tall church known as the Oratory, which sits at the core of downtown Ave Maria, Fla.

The new town is situated in a semi-agricultural part of Collier County, 30 miles northeast as the gull flies from the beaches of Naples -- the state's southwesternmost resort area. But with its narrow, curving streets, cobblestones, quaint architecture, fresh stucco and paint, and (on a recent Tuesday afternoon) almost total absence of any human presence, Ave Maria appears to be a village in some unidentifiable European nation that has just endured an all-out attack by an enemy armed only with neutron bombs and power washers.

Facing the Oratory is the gleaming Ave Maria University, and clustered around the town center are streets lined by densely packed houses. Stubs of yet-to-be-built streets lead off in all directions, but most of the 8 square miles owned by the town remain open land.

Ave Maria is the creation of Domino's Pizza tycoon and prominent conservative Catholic Tom Monaghan, who teamed up with the Barron Collier Co. (the latter founded in the 1920s by the region's original big-time developer). In addition to the university, the town plan calls for 11,000 residences of various sizes, 690,000 square feet of retail space, 400 hotel rooms, two schools and two golf courses.

Much of the controversy surrounding Ave Maria has focused on the question of how it can simultaneously be a Catholic enclave and a governmental unit. But Ave Maria is also the most recent and most striking incarnation of south Florida's most persistent problem: Overdevelopment.

Agribusiness, led by Big Sugar, once posed the greatest threat to south Florida's ecosystems. The long struggle to save the Everglades from agricultural and urban growth on the state's southeast coast -- a struggle that is far from over -- has been thoroughly documented by Michael Grunwald in his 2006 book The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise.

Now the chief threat to lower Florida's remaining natural lands comes from residential developments like Ave Maria and the tentacles of transportation and commerce that feed them. As Grunwald and others have shown, local governments and developers in southwest Florida are creating new environmental crises faster than the past mistakes made on the other side of the state can be corrected.

Historian Gary Mormino of the University of South Florida up the west coast in St. Petersburg, looks at the low-lying, automobile- and air-conditioning-dependent peninsula where he lives and sees a state that's extremely vulnerable to coming climatic changes and energy shortages: "Florida is a kind of brave new world in the 21st century. And we haven't arrived very well prepared."

What's more, in his 2005 social history of modern Florida, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, Mormino concluded that "the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow." If he's right, we'd better pay closer attention to the paving and building that's going on down at our continent's soggy tail end.

Long-Run Biology

Six million years ago, South Florida was covered by a shallow sea. Then the state's original land-developers -- microscopic marine organisms -- went to work. Their calcium-rich remains gradually built up a solid limestone floor, and large parts of that floor rose into the sunshine from time to time as sea levels fluctuated over the past 100,000 years.

The southern part of the state remains part dry, part wet. Here, the collection of extraordinary ecosystems collectively known as the Everglades are sustained by vast sheets of fresh water that creep continuously and imperceptibly south across the entire lower peninsula.

But over the past century, thanks to encroachment from the coasts and farming in the interior, the Everglades is down to half its original size. In the state's southwestern counties -- including Lee and Collier, which, respectively, contain the coastal cities of Fort Myers and Naples -- the natural system that's now endangered is very different from the more easterly "River of Grass" that has been under siege by Miami-area urbanization and sugarcane farming for so many years. The victim here is the Big Cypress Swamp -- a vast, flat mosaic of cypress forests, wet prairies, pinelands and marshes. The culprit is growth: Collier County, which had a scant 16,000 inhabitants in 1960 and 86,000 in 1980, is now home to almost 350,000 people year-round -- plus an additional 150,000 or so winter residents. Additional throngs of tourists converge on the area from December through February to soak up the warmth.

The Big Cypress Swamp's flora and fauna are just as sensitive to disruption of natural water flows and fragmentation of habitat as are those of the vast, grassy tracts of Everglades to the east. To date, most attention has been focused on the region's most charismatic inhabitant, the Florida panther. The big cats require large, undisturbed ranges (100 to 400 square miles for one animal), and their numbers have been thinned severely by the spread of human activity across the landscape. But the panther's plight is only one highly visible indicator of much broader ecological degradation.

In South Florida, problems often have a way of coming down to a matter of water. The region leads the nation in water use per person. The most heroic efforts to square the circle, to keep both the remaining natural lands and the accelerating commercial development of South Florida supplied with clean water, are doomed from the start. There simply is not enough to go around.

Short-Run Economics

Their famous can-do spirit intact, despite a real-estate market that was hit early and hard by the big pop of the national housing bubble, southwest Florida developers continue to demand the freedom to pave and build ever farther inland from the Gulf of Mexico and its bright-white beaches. Asked about the region's building boom in 2002, Al Hoffman, then-CEO of WCI Communities, told the Washington Post, "There's no power on earth that can stop it!" So far, no one has proved him wrong.

At the time of Hoffman's prophecy, WCI had done as much as any company to make Naples the second-fastest metro area in the country. Today, Hoffman is gone, WCI is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and board chairman Carl Icahn recently sold his 6 million company shares for a total of 2 cents (not 2 cents per share, just 2 cents).

The march of suburbia hasn't stopped, but it has slowed. And Florida's real-estate and construction barons are now clamoring for a healthy share of federal bailout money to get them through hard times.

Naples currently ranks 11th among 350 cities nationwide in mortgage foreclosures (Fort Myers just up the coast is No. 1); despite that, it's still in seventh place for population growth. It also has the second-highest per capita income in the nation, so there's plenty of cash in the system to help push roads and subdivisions into new territory. The Bonita Bay Group, a dominant force among developers in the region, saw its new home sales shoot up in the crash of 2008, exceeding 2007 sales by 38 percent.

Since the 1950s, when Northerners looking for a future home in the sun would shell out the widely advertised "$10 down and $10 a month" for southwest Florida swampland that might one day be dredged, drained and built upon, the region's energies have been focused on the manufacture of real estate. Writer John Rothchild put it best: "as Detroit must sell cars, Florida must sell property."

From 1980 to 2000, an average of 400 people per day moved out of Florida. Most of them, according to Mormino, were fed up with runaway growth and sprawl. But each day during those same years, 1,000 people moved into the state.

Whatever happens to the national economy, South Florida will march on in its pursuit of growth. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, approved in 2000, is meant to save South Florida's ecosystems while keeping its humans supplied with water. But it emphasizes water supplies for cities and suburbs and gives mainly lip service to the natural hydraulic flow that keeps the Everglades alive. Based as it is on the assumption that the region's population will double by 2050, CERP faces an uphill battle, to say the least.

And it's not just living space that will be needed. Doubling the population will mean, at minimum, doubling the population of golfers. As of a year ago, Lee and Collier counties were already home to 152 golf courses -- one of the densest concentrations of fairways in the country -- and given the demand, space certainly could be made for 150 more.

The fast eastward creep of southwest Florida's development is mirrored by continued inland creep from the state's east coast. Grunwald wrote The Swamp, "In coming decades … South Florida could become an uninterrupted asphalt megalopolis stretching from Naples to Palm Beach. Perhaps it could be called Napalm Beach."

A Paler Shade of Green

Ave Maria is not hanging out there totally alone in eastern Collier County. It was preceded a century ago by the town of Immokalee, 8 miles to the north. Lying amid orange groves and fields of tomatoes and other vegetables, Immokalee is home to 20,000 people, many of them immigrant agricultural workers. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has won headline-making victories in recent years, pushing Subway, Taco Bell and other fast-food chains to pay more for tomatoes. But the people who pick the tomatoes go home each day to trailer parks that present a shocking contrast to the condos and McMansions just over the horizon in Ave Maria.

Half of all mobile homes in the United States can be found in the southern half of Florida. Those occupied by well-heeled retirees can be quite luxurious, but the trailers in Immokalee are clearly unfit for human habitation. Clustered in dusty lots at the center of town or scattered around its fringes, the bare aluminum boxes have windows hardly bigger than slits, and many have no functioning air conditioner.

In contrast to Immokalee's trailers, Ave Maria's solid, climate-controlled properties are built atop a colossal earth-moving project that was needed to render the area suitable for building. Now, when the residents and students of Ave Maria go for a walk beyond their town limits, they have plenty of open countryside in which to wander. Having found a haven from Naples' frenetic development to the east, and what Mormino calls "the other Florida" in Imokalee to the north, they will also be sheltered, as Ave Maria University advertises in its promotional literature, "against the windstorms of secularism and apostasy which seem to overwhelm our nation and our church." (That lofty goal is reflected beautifully in the shape of the Oratory's facade, which brings to mind ceremonial papal headgear).

Another town, to be called Big Cypress, will be located between Ave Maria and Naples. Still on the drawing board, it will include -- just for a start -- 9,000 residences, a 500-room hotel, ample shopping, schools, a 200-bed hospital and the requisite golf course. Between and surrounding the two new towns will remain some of the more ecologically important zones of the Big Cypress Swamp. And the towns, say developers and some environmental groups, will be pioneer settlements in a new era of green planning, meant to protect rather than degrade the region's land- and waterscapes.

An order signed by Gov. Jeb Bush in 1999 urged Collier County to protect 200,000 acres of land in the Immokalee area by concentrating development in "urban villages," "new towns" and "satellite communities" rather than on larger, traditional rural housing tracts. In 2002, a plan called the Rural Land Stewardship Area created a complex credit-trading system that allows developers to build on certain numbers of acres if they preserve other areas.

Some major environmental groups have endorsed the county's plans to allow dense settlements in the Big Cypress region. One Audubon of Florida representative told the press, "People will look back a decade from now, and we'll have protected a million acres of land based on this model, and we'll say, 'It all started right there in Immokalee.' "

But others have sounded alarms over the environmental impact. I asked Ellen Peterson, who chairs the Sierra Club's Calusa Group in southwest Florida, if the region's self-styled "green" developers like Barron Collier and the Bonita Bay Group have earned the plaudits they've received from major environmental groups, including Audubon International.

Peterson has no faith in developer-led conservation: "You can't put people close to panthers and not end up killing panthers. And anytime there is increasingly dense development around water, you get runoff of fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals." The economic and ecological costs of the vast infrastructure needed to support new housing developments, she said, turn out to "far exceed the one-time environmental impact fee that developers pay."

Land preservation can take strange forms in Collier County. After the county commission purchased a 2,500-acre former ranch last fall under a program called Conservation Collier, it began weighing the possibility of allowing recreational all-terrain vehicle use on the property. The program's acquisition director said the property, "will be used for all sorts of things the Conservation Collier ordinance allows … which is quite a bit."

In December, there surfaced a map illustrating the potential for "build-out" into the Rural Land Stewardship Area that has been designated in eastern Collier County. On the map, a large portion of the RLSA is peppered with 22 black ovals designating "development areas" laced together by four- and six-lane roadways and bypassed by a few "panther corridors." The effect is reminiscent of the most tortuously gerrymandered legislative districts, or perhaps Israeli maps of a vision for the West Bank. Ostensibly development-free parts of the RLSA are cut by six-lane thoroughfares that will take residents in to Naples, Fort Myers and Bonita Springs on the coast.

Published on the Naples Daily News Web site, the map was applauded by some environmental groups but eyed with deep suspicion by others. The Conservancy of Southwest Florida was swift with its negative reaction. Conservancy spokeswoman Nicole Ryan told me that most of the stewardship area is the property of a half-dozen large landowners who contracted with a private firm to come up with a way of building new subdivisions that would be acceptable to the county commission. The map, she says, illustrates the principle that, "When a plan is drawn up at the developers' request, it will be done to their benefit."

The area's mainstream environmental organizations gave up long ago on trying to call a total halt to encroachment on undeveloped lands. "We know there will be growth," Ryan said. "Florida has landowner-friendly property-rights laws that allow one housing unit for every 5 acres, and you can't take that right away in this state." She says the new strategy of clustering development isn't as bad -- at least theoretically -- as having development spread uniformly across the county.

But as plans have evolved, the amount of landscape to be built up has already almost tripled, and that, says Ryan, is certain to disrupt panther habitat and much more. Planners can call as loudly as they want for nice-sounding elements like villages, nodes and mass transit, says Ryan, but if developers get their way, "we'll have glorified subdivisions leapfrogging one another 20 miles east of Interstate 75 [the former eastern boundary of sprawl], and everyone will be driving in to Naples."

From Sunshine State to Land of the Air-Conditioned Flea Market

Novelists, historians and journalists have exhausted entire thesauruses in their attempts to capture the exuberance with which Florida has welcomed hordes of diverse new residents and all sorts of zany enterprises for over half a century.

Now, as Ellen Peterson watches what she sees as "developers' greed" fueling the relentless encroachment on wetlands, she sees a golden goose killing itself: "Without large wetlands to the east, this area won't be beautiful anymore." But, I asked her, if the environment that originally attracted people to southwest Florida is largely gone, why do people keep coming? "A lot of people who live here don't know what it used to be like, so they don't know what they're missing," she says. "Fifteen years ago, just sitting on my porch, I'd hear a symphony of fish every evening, when they were jumping in the Imperial River. Now it's silent, and it's all because of development."

The sun and winter warmth are still there, says Ryan, but not much else is left. "Now this area looks like everywhere else. It's all one damn strip mall. One intersection on Bonita Beach Road has pharmacies on three of the four corners! Speculation and greed have ruined it here."

Balmy weather, sand and sea have been bringing people to southwest Florida for decades, but the recipe for perpetual economic growth includes ingredients of a very different kind. The most recent project to take its name from the ecosystem it's helping to destroy is Naples' Big Cypress Market, just outside the city's southern frontier. The vast, bland, metal-and-concrete structure features an 87,000-square-foot, 300-booth, air-conditioned flea market, mini-winery, performance stage, farmers market and tiki bar.

Maybe sun and fun once were enough to keep people here happy, but, according to Big Cypress Market's developer, "A lot of people are looking for something other than going to the beach and golfing down here. They go shopping to be entertained to some degree.''

A Florida vacation used to be like a trip to an exotic foreign country, but today new residents and visitors need not fear homesickness. They can spend increasing numbers of hours each day in air-conditioned houses, offices, stores and restaurants just like those they left back home, and enjoy familiar scenery as they sit through ever-worsening traffic jams. Many go for long periods without ever catching a glimpse of a beach, let alone a cypress forest or mangrove swamp.

Meanwhile, developers and environmental planners will continue to haggle over acres of land and gallons of water, more shining-cities-on-the-swamp will be built, and environmental quality of life -- as always in the Sunshine State -- will be available for sale or barter.

An anecdote related by Michael Grunwald sums up the extent of physical and mental dislocation that growth has inflicted on the region. When, he wrote, a highway extension threatened 1,500 acres of Lee County panther habitat a few years ago, a county commissioner argued the roadbuilder's case by saying, "Look, we've got tens of thousands of people sitting in traffic. That's not good for the environment either."

In southwest Florida as in the rest of America, everyone cares about protecting the environment, but no one seems to agree on where to find it.

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book, Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, was just published by Pluto Press.

Mary Oliver, "Of The Empire"

Of The Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

John Francis - a wonderful hero & example for our new year

"As we walk upon the road we meet ourselves. And at the end, perhaps we'll find that there are no sides to take, no ememies of state, no arguments against the other. There's only death that waits. But on this tiny planet, and in this precious moment, we have the chance to live in peace together. If only we could take a walk." ~John Francis

an interview with john francis about his years of walking and silence, in honor of the earth:
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/05/10/hertsgaard-francis/

His nonprofit organization: PlanetWalk

Wendell Berry, from "The Unsettling of America"

“By now the [commercial] revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water,” Wendell Berry wrote in “The Unsettling of America.” “Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution had imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.”

~Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Wendell Berry: "In Distrust of Movements"

The movements which deal with single issues or single solutions are bound to fail because they cannot control effects while leaving causes in place.

From Resurgance Issue 198

More articles by Wendell Berry

I HAVE HAD WITH MY friend Wes Jackson a number of useful conversations about the necessity of getting out of movements — even movements that have seemed necessary and dear to us — when they have lapsed into self-righteousness and self-betrayal, as movements seem almost invariably to do. People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical enough.

And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare of children. Worthy as these and other goals may be, they cannot be achieved alone. I am dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are not comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while leaving causes in place. Ultimately, I think, they are insincere; they propose that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to change policy but not behaviour.

The worst danger may be that a movement will lose its language either to its own confusion about meaning and practice, or to pre-emption by its enemies. I remember, for example, my naïve confusion at learning that it was possible for advocates of organic agriculture to look upon the “organic method” as an end in itself. To me, organic farming was attractive both as a way of conserving nature and as a strategy of survival for small farmers.

Imagine my surprise in discovering that there could be huge “organic” monocultures. And so I was not too surprised by the recent attempt of the United States Department of Agriculture to appropriate the “organic” label for food irradiation, genetic engineering, and other desecrations of the corporate food economy. Once we allow our language to mean anything that anybody wants it to mean, it becomes impossible to mean what we say. When “homemade” ceases to mean neither more nor less than “made at home”, then it means anything, which is to say that it means nothing.

AS YOU SEE, I have good reasons for declining to name the movement I think I am a part of. I am reconciled to the likelihood that from time to time it will name itself and have slogans, but I am not going to use its slogans or call it by any of its names.

Let us suppose that we have a Nameless Movement for Better Land Use and that we know we must try to keep it active, responsive and intelligent for a long time. What must we do?

What we must do above all, I think, is try to see the problem in its full size and difficulty. If we are concerned about land abuse, then we must see that this is an economic problem. Every economy is, by definition, a land-using economy. If we are using our land wrongly, then something is wrong with our economy. This is difficult. It becomes more difficult when we recognize that, in modern times, every one of us is a member of the economy of everybody else.

But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work of economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that thrives by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends, and it has not mattered whether the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist or whatever; the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional agricultures and local economies has been constant. The bad news is coming in, literally, from all over the world. Can such an economy be fixed without being radically changed? I don’t think it can.

The Captains of Industry have always counselled the rest of us to be “realistic”. Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing children, or if only it would quit buying politicians, or if only it would give women and favoured minorities an equitable share of the loot? Realism, I think, is a very limited programme, but it informs us at least that we should not look for bird eggs in a cuckoo clock.

OR WE CAN SHOW the hopelessness of single-issue causes and single-issue movements by following a line of thought such as this: We need a continuous supply of uncontaminated water. Therefore, we need (among other things) soil-and-water-conserving ways of agriculture and forestry that are not dependent on monoculture, toxic chemicals, or the indifference and violence that always accompany big-scale industrial enterprises on the land.

Therefore, we need diversified, small-scale land economies that are dependent on people. Therefore, we need people with the knowledge, skills, motives and attitudes required by diversified, small-scale land economies. And all this is clear and comfortable enough, until we recognize the question we have come to: Where are the people?

Well, all of us who live in the suffering rural landscapes of the United States know that most people are available to those landscapes only recreationally. We see them bicycling or boating or hiking or camping or hunting or fishing or driving along and looking around. They do not, in Mary Austin’s phrase, “summer and winter with the land”. They are unacquainted with the land’s human and natural economies. Though people have not progressed beyond the need to eat food and drink water and wear clothes and live in houses, most people have progressed beyond the domestic arts — the husbandry and wifery of the world — by which those needful things are produced and conserved. In fact, the comparative few who still practise that necessary husbandry and wifery often are inclined to apologize for doing so, having been carefully taught in our education system that those arts are degrading and unworthy of people’s talents. Educated minds, in the modern era, are unlikely to know anything about food and drink, clothing and shelter. In merely taking these things for granted, the modern educated mind reveals itself also to be as superstitious a mind as ever has existed in the world. What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?

I AM NOT SUGGESTING, of course, that everybody ought to be a farmer or a forester. Heaven forbid! I am suggesting that most people now are living on the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic. Most people are now fed, clothed and sheltered from sources toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility. There is no significant urban constituency, no formidable consumer lobby, no noticeable political leadership, for good land-use practices, for good farming and good forestry, for restoration of abused land, or for halting the destruction of land by so-called “development”.

We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and furniture and paper; or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that fill their pitchers and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their obligations.

Money does not bring forth food. Neither does the technology of the food system. Food comes from nature and from the work of people. If the supply of food is to be continuous for a long time, then people must work in harmony with nature. That means that people must find the right answers to a lot of hard practical questions. The same applies to forestry and the possibility of a continuous supply of timber.

One way we could describe the task ahead of us is by saying that we need to enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy. Our economy needs to know — and care — what it is doing. This is revolutionary, of course, if you have a taste for revolution, but it is also a matter of common sense.

Undoubtedly some people will want to start a movement to bring this about. They probably will call it the Movement to Teach the Economy What It Is Doing — the mtewiid. Despite my very considerable uneasiness, I will agree to this, but on three conditions.

My first condition is that this movement should begin by giving up all hope and belief in piecemeal, one-shot solutions. The present scientific quest for odourless hog manure should give us sufficient proof that the specialist is no longer with us. Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery, where we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put two things together without putting many things together. Water quality, for example, cannot be improved without improving farming and forestry, but farming and forestry cannot be improved without improving the education of consumers — and so on.

The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of ourselves and this world. To make ourselves into a practical wholeness with the land under our feet is maybe not altogether possible — how would we know? — but, as a goal, it at least carries us beyond hubris, beyond the utterly groundless assumption that we can subdivide our present great failure into a thousand separate problems that can be fixed by a thousand task forces of academic and bureaucratic specialists. That programme has been given more than a fair chance to prove itself, and we ought to know by now that it won’t work.

My second condition is that the people in this movement (the mtewiid) should take full responsibility for themselves as members of the economy. If we are going to teach the economy what it is doing, then we need to learn what we are doing. This is going to have to be a private movement as well as a public one. If it is unrealistic to expect wasteful industries to be conservers, then obviously we must lead in part the public life of complainers, petitioners, protesters, advocates and supporters of stricter regulations and saner policies. But that is not enough.

If it is unreasonable to expect a bad economy to try to become a good one, then we must go to work to build a good economy. It is appropriate that this duty should fall to us, for good economic behaviour is more possible for us than it is for the great corporations with their miseducated managers and their greedy and oblivious stockholders. Because it is possible for us, we must try in every way we can to make good economic sense in our own lives, in our households, and in our communities. We must do more for ourselves and our neighbours. We must learn to spend our money with our friends and not with our enemies. But to do this it is necessary to renew local economies and revive the domestic arts.

In seeking to change our economic use of the world, we are seeking inescapably to change our lives. The outward harmony that we desire between our economy and the world depends finally upon an inward harmony between our own hearts and the originating spirit that is the life of all creatures, a spirit as near us as our flesh and yet forever beyond the measures of this obsessively measuring age. We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

My third condition is that this movement should content itself to be poor. We need to find cheap solutions, solutions within the reach of everybody, and the availability of a lot of money prevents the discovery of cheap solutions. The solutions of modern medicine and modern agriculture are all staggeringly expensive, and this is caused in part, and maybe altogether, because of the availability of huge sums of money for medical and agricultural research.

Too much money, moreover, attracts administrators and experts as sugar attracts ants — look at what is happening in our universities. We should not envy rich movements that are organized and led by an alternative bureaucracy living on the problems it is supposed to solve. We want a movement that is a movement because it is advanced by all its members in their daily lives.

NOW, HAVING COMPLETED this very formidable list of the problems and difficulties, fears and fearful hopes that lie ahead of us, I am relieved to see that I have been preparing myself all along to end by saying something cheerful. What I have been talking about is the possibility of renewing human respect for this Earth and all the good, useful and beautiful things that come from it. I have made it clear, I hope, that I don’t think this respect can be adequately enacted or conveyed by tipping our hats to nature or by representing natural loveliness in art or by prayers of thanksgiving or by preserving tracts of wilderness — although I recommend all those things. The respect I mean can be given only by using well the world’s goods that are given to us. This good use, which renews respect — which is the only currency, so to speak, of respect — also renews our pleasure. The callings and disciplines that I have spoken of as the domestic arts are stationed all along the way from the farm to the prepared dinner, from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing, as the so-called “fine arts”. To learn them is, I believe, the work that is our profoundest calling. Our reward is that they will enrich our lives and make us glad.
This article is reprinted from Orion magazine.
Wendell Berry is a farmer, a poet and a novelist.