As I said, I’d
been on both sides of the issue, but now that the decision has been made by
Sect’y Salazar, my feelings have settled like silt in a pond and now, I’m
profoundly sad about how this went down. Families with children are affected,
the Lunny family who has put heart and soul into this endeavor is affected, we
are all affected by the loss of a viable and rich source of sustainable food.
Food. Not only food but also, the mighty oysters function as nature’s kidneys
cleaning the estuary.
Judith, my
wife, and I were in DC early this fall to give a presentation at the NEWSEUM
about plastic pollution in the ocean. We were put up in a hotel used mainly by
out-of-town lobbyists. During our stay we kept running into large, blond,
thick-fingered folks speaking with dipthonged A’s—the accent we heard in the
movie Fargo. They all had big yellow buttons saying “Ask me about the farm
bill.” We did.
They were in
DC from North Dakota, Iowa—Midwestern farmers lobbying for an extension of the
Crop Insurance Act, a program that allows family farmers to compete with big
agribusiness. The Cargills and ADMs of the world can absorb the vicissitudes of
weather and pricing, but family farms, always at the edge of financing, have a harder
time. The farmers told us the thrust of not allowing crop insurance has allowed
the agri-giants to absorb family farm after family farm. Bad news for the
environment especially as the chemical industry is in the business of making
farming drug-dependant—the pushers are Dow, Monsanto, Bayer, BASF—getting
farmers hooked is their idea of better living through chemistry.
Disinformation
abounds, just last summer the nationally distributed report from Stanford that
became a media meme, said organic food wasn’t any better for you than
chemically farmed food. Hmmm…. who supported that report and pushed its
distribution? Although Cargill had no traceable link to the funding, they fund
the department that did the study. And a group from the UK, using the same data
came up with opposite results. The crucial and unspoken issue was not the food
itself but what “conventional” farming does by destroying the soil, increasing
dependency on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
In January of
2009 the Supreme Court acceded to the Citizen's United case. However,
corporations are not people or alive, they are robots whose only
purpose is to maximize profits. The "good guys" in the contention are
all of us who value the complexity of living systems. The "bad guys"
are entities who have little at stake save a quarterly report. And they
are not "bad," per se, there is no evil 007 bad guy working the
levers—corporations are simply mindless automatons, disconnected from
biological life. Although Lunny was figured in some press reports as a
corporate giant, he’s a family farmer, a neighbor and a vital member of our
community.
Specifically,
here in West Marin we have the opportunity to be a little more free of the
burgeoning corporate food business and blessedly free of the corporate
"fun" business of a Leisure World Theme Park. Handmade cheese and
lettuce that doesn't kill the soil goes a long way in my book. Let's be a model
of acting like an organism and feel our way through this. So, which side? What
I’m for is creative solutions to our problems like Peggy Rathman and John
Wick’s Marin Carbon Project. Lunny actually tried to DO something about the
environment, raising food with sensitivity while doing an admirable of tidying
up the mess at Johnson’s. Kumbaya? There are some scary forces at work, I’m
just sayin’, “lovers of the biosphere Unite!”
Having just
seen the terrific new movie Lincoln, I'm reflecting on the history of the
passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery — how congressmen basically on
the same side, were blocking passage because they weren't getting exactly what
they wanted. And, how Lincoln was masterful at making a coalition to get the
bill passed. And Lincoln,
as a model for making tough legislation work was also a prescient follower of
money interests. Before his presidency Lincoln was an early version of a
corporate lawyer, defending the interests of the mushrooming corporations. His
specialty was railroads so he knew the danger of the growing giants.
As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an
era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the
country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of
the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is
destroyed.
The passage appears in a letter from Lincoln to (Col.) William F.
Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864
Today, we are poised at another history-changing moment, easily as
momentous as ending slavery. It's clear our environmental problems need another
Lincoln—our relationship to the natural world must be corrected or we're
finished. And, maybe, in the end we can even get the vote for Harbor Seals.