Culture Change e-Letter #2
Hunting and Gathering in Ecotopia
Today I gathered nuts along
the trail, eating some and putting most in a bag that had previously
contained seaweed. I had already "bagged" some fresh
meat that I need in my diet occasionally. (We all evolved eating meat, and
after years of being mostly vegan, I'm finding certain red meat the right thing
for me.)
The nuts had spilled out of my bike box unbeknownst to
me as I pedaled along this trail. So, not having money to replace
the organic walnuts, I retraced my steps (my revolutions) and found them
one by one on the ground. They had not been stepped on or ridden
on yet, and I deem them okay to consume because cars don't go there.
The key is not to step on your own nuts, if you're hurrying in
the heat.
If the bird population were what it should be, I woulda seena
woodpecka, or any bird at all, right? Nothing. Not having
learned from the environmental crisis, or believing it to be only an
aspect of big dirty cities, our little town intends to build a road
along this nature area where I'd spilled the walnuts. The
road supposedly would solve a speeding problem along a parallel road, by
reducing congestion—so the public works department says.
Traffic-calming the old road is apparently too radical and cheap a
notion.
Arcata is supposed to be "the greenest town in America,"
according to the mainstream media hype. But the city government
recently allowed a chain video store to build an ecologically dead, really ugly structure across from city hall, destroying a fine cedar
tree, and—attention gatherers!—plum trees and blackberries. In
times past, the unused land had seen a bike rental business there.
Pot smokers, who couldn't afford to hide in comfortable buildings,
occasionally smoked a bowl in the midst of the greenery, unseen by any
passersby. Doing away with such anarchic space might have been a reason to pave the place, knowing cArcata's rulers.
The U.S. has been losing 1.5 million acres per year of
prime farmland to urban sprawl. And that figure, which varies
depending on how "well" the economy is doing, probably does
not include urban food production zones. However, an incipient
trend is depaving; Arcata is maybe second or third in the nation in
reclaiming paved land for gardens through citizen action.
The U.S. responded to World War II with, among other things, Victory
Gardens. When I met author Theodore Roszak, and told him I was
with the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, the first thing he said was,
"The Victory Gardens of World War II were from depaving."
But today, under the current mayor of New York City and his
predecessor, bulldozing healthy community gardens (as "squats") has been a passion of law 'n order
officialdom and its "developer" backers.
A crisis similar to World War II hit Cuba when the Soviet Union
collapsed and Cuba suddenly had no more petroleum. No gasoline,
and no petrochemicals for agriculture. I don't know how they got
their collective ass in gear so fast, but we didn't hear about mass
starvation, did we. What they did was create 30,000 urban food
gardens/farms in Havana for its two million people.
Arcata, with 16,000 souls, would therefore need almost 400 community
gardens or local farms within city limits, when our petroleum becomes
history. But instead there are two or three urban food production
zones. Well, maybe six if you count the few depaved average-sized
driveways. In case depaving sounds outrageous to you, there are
plenty of lawns and some wasted pasture here (and maybe near you beyond
Ecotopia). When the Big Discontinuity hits—final
petroleum shortage—early this century, the idea of local food
production by any means necessary will not seem crazy at all.
Radical, yes—the word means "to the root" in Latin.
I did not forget to talk about the meat I got.
It was store bought, just like my walnuts. I got both from the giant
corporate co-op, at one time the largest health food store in the known
world—and that was before its recent expansion. Rather than raise
workers' pay above minimum wage, the Co-op became a caricature of growth
to cater to consumers looking for packaged convenience, organic and
otherwise. Anyway, this meat was locally grown lamb without any
hormones added. (For some garnish, plenty of wild onions pop up
around Arcata for a couple of months, and mint's around in other months.)
I don't like my meals to have faces, but I had been
advised by knowledgeable friends to eat red meat occasionally for the
improvement of my health. I finally took their advice, and they
were right. I feel and maybe look better. Supposedly there's
an amino acid in red meat you can't get in a plate of tofu and rice.
And red meat in your diet seems to reduce stress. Boy, that line
can get me some hate mail from stressed out vegans! But how do
they explain the considerable meat in our diet for the past million
years or so?
True, there is twenty times the protein per acre when
land is devoted to grains for humans rather than grains for animals that
are eaten by humans. Alright, I say, "Let the vegans eat
cake or bread!"
The lesson here is that there are too many people
doing everything. Talking on phones, driving cars, eating meat,
you name it. People don't seem to have the intelligence or the
will to heed Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb's message (1969).
So we will have to run out of petroleum for feeding the overpopulation,
before things will change significantly. The SUV, as a past
monster of excess and waste—despite its role as a shopping
cart—could someday engender more hate and fear in the children of
the future than kids ever had for Tyrannosaurus Rex or "Jaws."
In Eating Oil, by Maurice Green (1978), it is
shown that the U.S. can do without fossil fuels for agriculture only by
reducing the population "to the 120 million it was in 1930... and
then order most of the remaining population back to work on the
land." Just driving to the market for a loaf of bread can add
an additional 50% increase in fossil-fuel input of the history of that
loaf reaching your mouth, wrote Dr. Green, a former chemical company
executive and crop technology professor. So-called organic bread
is thus steeped in petroleum still.
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