April 13, 2011:
Local Grows Up: What It’s All About
A Sarasota farmer for 35 years, Peter Burkhard tells us why local, sustainable agriculture is his heart and soul.
Speaking of human beings, our progress has become in part an effort to complicate simplicity. Farmers and fishermen remain the only true nobility of modern society, working to feed us from the natural world we left behind. Without them, modern society with all its banks and shops and power lines and water pipes would collapse. — Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer
The care of the Earth is our most ancient, most worthy, and—after all—our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only hope. — Wendell Berry, American author and farmer
A recent theme on CSPAN’s morning call-in show was “Does business have a responsibility to U.S. workers?” This was a spin-off on a comment President Obama had made in a speech to the Chamber of Commerce. My own philosophy would take it much further: do humans have a responsibility, in all phases of their lives, to the future and present generations of all life that they share the planet with? And, of course, the answer—in spite of the sad reality we are surrounded by—is a resounding “Yes!”
How can anyone not think that and live accordingly? What is more important in life than that?
Tragically, those of us who share such a consciousness are faced with an extremely powerful foe who believes that acquiring money trumps all such higher values. The creation of the Greater Sarasota EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide & Directory is one small step by the good guys in the right direction, but never forget songwriter Pete Seeger’s wisdom: “The world will be saved by millions of small things.”
There is one overarching theme to all our efforts, and when I say “our,” I mean all those who realize the depth of the mess our world faces and are committed to doing their part to fix it. This way of thinking replaces the dominant, destructive, unsustainable model, which is destroying any prospect for life as we know it to continue, with a new culture of respect for our life-support system and one another.
This model really is not new, but it has been overshadowed in recent decades by a “sickness” spreading among humankind. The symptoms of that illness often include the following:
- Having a life goal of maximizing one’s financial well-being without regard for the consequences of how that money is made.
- Using money and its inherent political power to eliminate any obstacle to maximizing one’s financial status: things like common-sense regulations, laws against corruption or white collar crime, and environmental protections.
- A “me first” mentality, with a relative disregard for society at large, fellow humans, or the present condition of, much less the future of, the biosphere.
It should be clear that such people, many of whom hold tremendous power throughout the world, rely on a tremendous level of either ignorance or denial of scientific reality. How can anyone base their life on the illusion that we are not fully dependent for survival, individually and collectively, on the health of the biosphere as a whole? How can anyone not be aware of or, worse, know and not care about, the negative impacts we are having on our life-support system?
It’s Up to Us
A big part of the fight we face as enlightened individuals is combating those described above who value money higher than creating a better world. We face a constant barrage of corporate and political propaganda designed to create confusion and uncertainty, weakening our convictions and our passion.
Corruption pervades our political system, such that moneyed interests call the shots in virtually every instance, stomping on the public interest in the process. We need to see that evil for what it is, call it out every chance we get, and push for things like public financing of all political campaigns as an alternative vision.
Until then, we’ll continue to have more political leaders who promise change and still fail to deliver it.
It falls to those of us at the grassroots level to lead the way toward a better world, one in which frugality, thrift, resourcefulness, and personal and planetary health are priorities. Fortunately, there are thousands of ways to do this: non-governmental organizations, “green”-oriented careers, low-impact lifestyle choices. I suggest that one be led by their own unique set of skills and interests into collaborating with like-minded fellows to model a more just, peaceful, and sustainable present and future. It will be the synthesis and symbiosis of all those efforts that hopefully leads to that better world, if enough of us participate.
Obviously, if you are reading this, one of your interests is supporting an alternative to industrial agriculture. When it comes to agriculture, every one of us can have a positive impact, even if we never put a seed in the ground. As Wendell Berry famously said, “Eating is an agricultural act.” So here is a part of life in which it is easy to tip the scales in a bio-positive direction, simply by being selective with what we support with our food dollars.
Those who wish to grow some of their own food can take that positive impact a step further by doing so sustainably. We have plenty of models and choices for how to do that, as the Greater Sarasota EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide & Directory will focus on. Have no illusions that the work will tax you physically, but the rewards far outweigh any discomfort.
Getting It
It seems that in recent years, we’ve had a critical mass of people in our society that came to “get it,” in regards to the state of our environmental predicament. Such issues as climate change, the declining honeybee population, and the chronic poor quality of our food supply have contributed to this understanding.
One of the encouraging movements that have risen up in response is the local food movement, a movement inspired both by these environmental concerns and by a public getting “fed up” with food that is fast, uniform, and abundant but increasingly lacking in taste, nutrients, and safety. It’s a movement that was conceived to contribute to the greater good through reducing our carbon footprint and to enhance countless individual lives, through healthier, tastier, and safer diets.
I submit that NOW is the time for local to grow up. When an individual organism grows up, it becomes more complete and complex, more productive, and, hopefully, more of a contributor to the greater good. As successful as the “childhood” of this movement has been, there remains an immense amount to accomplish as it evolves through “adulthood”—nothing less than helping rescue our species and the biosphere from a collapse of our own making.
Don’t be overwhelmed by the immensity of all that. Your role is merely to do your part, and hopefully convince others to do theirs, if only by the example you set. Your job is essentially to strive to do everything for yourself that you are capable of.
As our society has moved farther and farther down the path of the centralized production of life’s essentials and specialized livelihoods, our measurements of happiness and quality of life have steadily diminished. Your life will be enhanced by things like fixing stuff yourself, entertaining yourself in simpler ways, consuming less, conserving energy, producing your own energy from the sun, or, my favorite, growing your own food.
For the local food movement to grow up, we need to combine purchasing as much as possible from local growers with growing as much as possible ourselves. Your own property is clearly the most local and the most environmentally benign place for your food to come from.
Though I’ve been a market gardener for some 35 years, I’ve always encouraged home food production, never thinking of it as lost sales. On the contrary, once people taste the profound difference in the quality of such food, they will be hooked and will increasingly seek out whatever they are not growing from us local commercial growers. Besides, it simply is the right thing for the greater good.
As some of you no doubt already know, when you are able to grow a significant portion of your meals yourself, and possess even a modicum of skill at preparing that food, you will frequently enjoy meals that are simply incredible. In fact, you will eat better than almost any president, king, queen, or VIP in any five- star restaurant in town. The only reason I’m starting to qualify that statement now with the “almost” is that more and more restaurants are starting to grow some of their own food, including the restaurant at the White House. And political leadership certainly matters: in 1943, after President and Mrs. Roosevelt called upon the country to grow Victory Gardens, the fruits and vegetables produced in home gardens roughly equaled all commercial production for that year.
I believe I can speak for all others involved in Greater Sarasota’s EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide & Directory in this regard: it is our hope that this website will serve both as a practical guide to finding the best local food available AND as an organizing tool, something that brings together those of us who share a vision for a better world, so we can multiply our impact and our positive influence on humanity’s future.
