Revolution and Victory Gardens

Jenna Orkin


Revolution is in the air. Even Ben Stein says so.

The former Nixon speechwriter who crafted a whole persona out of a professorial drone (in the field of Economics, no less) is sounding a little bewildered these days. If the old saying is true that a radical is a conservative who's been arrested, Ben's acting like a Wall Street hotshot who wakes up to find himself in a jail cell with a bunch of weirdo peak-oil salesmen.
Politics makes strange bedfellows. Like so many other things these days, (Putin, for one,) human commonality is rearing its head in the oddest places.

Which means that so is enmity.

My former enemy is now my ally so who is now my enemy? Oh, right; I am.

The head-scratching, "expert"-addicted American is going, perhaps for the first time, to have to do some independent thinking. Not grabbing the nearest soundbite and repeating it to his buddies as though it were sage counsel; not summing people up with the snappiest stereotype, but real research, upending all his fondest, most comforting notions and assumptions.

Once that process begins, there is no end. The rabbit-hole of inquiry is one in which question leads only to bigger, more fundamental question. No longer can we automatically endow the older or even the more expert with authority. Like the earliest victims of AIDS who, for lack of knowledge among the medical profession, were forced to do their own research and come up with far-flung solutions which their doctors then adopted for their other patients as well, we must become the experts.

At least, expert enough to make rational decisions about our own lives. And in a world in which nothing can any longer be taken for granted, that is going to take some effort.

Where to start?

From scratch. Seeking knowledge not just from the purported experts, the "suits," but from anyone who seems to have a handle on whatever the given problem is. The off-hand dismissal of people who lack credentials can be suicidal.

In this way, true sustainability must come hand in hand with equality. Our deeply-rooted pyramid notion of society is going to have to crumble. Pyramids were built on slave labor. A different social structure might have erected a differently-shaped tomb.

Let the festivities begin.


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Meanwhile, the New York Times is also sounding radical note, muted by reasonably-cadenced prose.

In an article entitled, "Farmer in Chief," in the Sunday Magazine, journalist Michael Pollan lays out a presidential policy plan for growing food during the next administration.

It is filled with points which will sound familiar to readers of this blog as well as peak oilists and permaculturalists everywhere, denouncing monocultures which depend so heavily on pesticides and fertilizers and calling for a return to solar- rather than fossil fuel-based agriculture.

Pointing out the Dale Allen Pfeiffer nugget which Mike Ruppert has repeated in countless lectures, that it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food as well as other equally galvanizing tidbits (it takes 5000 gallons of water to produce a pound of feedlot beef) - the article also provides some history of our current food-growing practises:

"After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides."

That's a loaded sentence, couched in a multi-thousand word article, like a landmine in an idyllic pastorale. How many Americans, furrowing their brows as they read it over their morning coffee, are going to sit bolt upright in bed eighteen hours later at 3 A.M.? Probably not many, but otherwise Pollan would never have gotten away with it. This is but one straw on the camel's back and far from the last one.

Pollan advocates regional food economies both in America and around the world and recommends setting up a Strategic Grain Reserve modelled on the current Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

He also points out:

"Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in “conservation” or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched."

Some of his proposals are creatively sensible:

To qualify as 'food' he recommends that an edible substance contain a minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy.

And while he doesn't use the phrase "Food, not lawns" he proposes that "the White House [should] observe one meatless day a week - a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year."

The White House lawn should also be a paragon for the rest of the country.

"[T]ear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.
When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the USDA which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.)"

Let's just hope his ideas are not all too little too late.