Deep Economy: The Wealth of
Communities and the Durable Future
By: Bill McKibben. 2007
This book is about slowing growth, switching to a more localized
scale, and changing our values from “more” to “better” He talks about localizing everything: why we
need to, why that’s important, how to do it, and what the benefits are. This book has many different parts and uses
an incredible variety of examples from around the world discussing the
necessity and impact of localizing everything from radio, to energy, even
currency. However the start of this
local movement is food.
Growth
Before I get to the local food stuff, here are what he says are
the three fundamental challenges to our fixation on growth:
1. The
first is political; growth, at least how we now create it, is producing more
inequality than prosperity, and more insecurity than progress.
2. The
second argument draws on physics and chemistry as much as on economics; it is
the basic objection that we do not have the energy needed to keep the magic
going and we can’t deal with the pollution it creates.
3. The
third argument is both less obvious and even more basic: growth is no longer making us happy.
Current American Food System
Consolidation
•
Cargill controls 45% of the world’s grain trade
•
Four multi-national companies control over 70%
of milk sales in the US
•
Four firms control 85% of global coffee roasting
•
Philip Morris/Nabisco collects nearly 10cents of
every American dollar spent on food.
•
five companies control 75% of the global veggie
seed market
•
Wal-mart is the largest seller of food in the
world
•
Since the end of WWII, America has lost a farm
about every half hour
Illness
76 million Americans fall ill annual from food-borne illness
Resource depletion
We are running out of the two basic ingredients we need to grow
crops on an industrial scale: oil and
water.
Water: 70% of water used by humans is used to
irrigate crops. Water demand has tripled
in the last 1/2 century.
Oil: Between 1910 and 1983, U.S. corn yields grew
346%, energy consumption for agriculture increased 810%.
•
The average bite of food an American eats has
traveled fifteen hundred miles changing hands an average of six times along the
way.
•
A pound of grapes flown in from Chile gives off
6 pounds of carbon dioxide.
•
To package a box of breakfast cereal, requires 7
times as much energy as the cereal contains
•
75% of the apples for sale in NYC come from the
west coast or overseas, even though NY state produces 10times as many apples as
NYC residents consume.
•
Compared to local and regional food systems, our
national and international model releases 5 - 17 times more carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere.
Why?
It makes a certain kind of intuitive sense, that industrialized
farming is the most productive farming... however, this simply isn’t true. Smaller farms produce more food. According to a recent USDA Census of
Agriculture, smaller farms produce far more food per acre- tons, calories, and
dollars. They use land, water, and oil
much more efficiently; if they have animals, the manure is a gift, not a threat
to public health.
Why does agri-business still exist then?
There are many reasons, including the way farm subsidies have
been structured, the big guys’ easier access to bank loans, and the convenience
for politically connected food processors of dealing with a few big
operations. But the basic reason is
this: we have substituted oil for
people.
Shift
What does a good system
look like?
Example 1: Cuba. Cubans have created what may be the
world’s largest working model for a semi-sustainable agriculture.
Example 2: The Intervale- just outside of the center of
Burlington VT. Will Rapp helped to found
a non-profit to lease about 200 acres surrounding an old dump and began renting
it to people who wanted to start farming.
These two hundred acres supply 7-8% of all the fresh food consumed in
Burlington.
Other ways:
•
In 1970, the US had 340 farmers’ markets. In
2004: 3,700
•
The first CSA was founded in MA in 1985, now
there are more than 1,500.
•
Urban areas already produce about 1/3 of the
food they consume.
•
Colleges and universities are an obvious market,
since they offer a captive population, and one likely to be receptive to the
environmental and community impulses behind local food. At least 200 universities have made serious
commitments to local food.
Greatest Challenge:
The deepest problem that the local-food efforts face however, is
that we’ve gotten used to paying so little for food. In the 1930’s a family might have spent 1/3
of its income on food, middle-class Americans now spend more like 1/10
“It may be expensive in
terms of how much oil it requires, and how much greenhouse gas it pours into
the atmosphere, and how much tax subsidy it receives, and how much damage it
does to local communities, and how many migrant workers it maims, and how much
sewage piles up, and how many miles of highway it requires- but boy, when you
pull your cart up to the register, it’s pretty cheap.” ouch
Local Food
Eating local food requires you to live with a stronger sense of
community in mind. Requires that you reorient your personal compass a little
bit. Requires that you shed a certain
amount of your hyper-individualism and replace it with a certain amount of
neighborliness.
After a year of eating locally- In my role as eater, I was part
of something larger than myself that made sense to me- a community. I felt grounded, connected.
Consumers have ten times as many conversations at farmers’
markets as they do at the supermarket..
A simple change in economic life- where you shop- produces an enormous
change in your social life. You go from
being a mere consumer to being a participant.
I’m not suggesting an abrupt break with the present, but a
patient rebalancing of the scales. It
will not be fast, cheap, or easy- that’s what we have now. It’s a quiet revolution begun by ordinary
people with the stuff of our everyday lives.
