•
I am going to end with urging us to think and act like a social
movement.
• During this discussion, I am going to address three questions:
1. The situation we are in,
2. Where we aspire to be, and
3. What strategies we might employ to get there
1.
The situation we’re in:
If we were keeping tally - the score over the last 30 years:
1. We have gained much ground:
• We have learned much, and greatly enhanced organic farming
practices;
• We have grown the market for organic foods geometrically;
and
• We have introduced to an illiterate public key concepts
– key components of a sustainable agriculture system such
as: eating fresh, organic, seasonal and local; the importance
of biological diversity; the contrast between organic farming
systems and chemically dependent farming systems.
2. However we are losing badly:
• We see unprecedented corporate consolidation of the food
system;
• We see a rather catastrophic decline in the number of
farmers and farmland available;
• We are in the midst of the sixth great species extinction
event in the history of the evolution of life on Earth;
• We are experiencing rapidly concentrating toxicity in
all of life – for only the past 70 years or so; and
• We are watching the rapid loss of traditional agrarian
cultures and cultures worldwide.
In sum… For all of our amazing successes, we are
losing badly
2.
Where we aspire to be:
• We aspire to re-define “conventional agriculture”
– to change the very definitions and public understanding
of “farming” and “food”;
• We aspire to have ended industrial-scale farming (and
we need to stop calling this pillage “farming”, and
call it what it is: “industrial resource extraction”);
• We aspire to have replaced this “industrial resource
extraction” with “restorative farming” -- farming,
eating and living as if we plan to be here another 10,000 years
or so;
• We aspire to replace unsustainable technologies and chemical
toxins with sustainable, appropriate technologies, people and
healthy biological processes;
• We aspire to have achieved food security, economic independence
and social justice for all; and
• We aspire to have found a sustainable balance between
human settlement, agriculture, the hydrological cycle, and nature’s
biological diversity.
3.
What strategies we might employ to get to where we aspire to be:
I think we
need to employ three strategies aggressively and concurrently.
Two of them we do somewhat well. The third, which I’ll argue
is the most important, we are still learning how to do…
1. Fight
fires – Stop immediate harms
2. Build alternatives – Walk our talk; give people a vision
of how it can be; merge means and ends
3. Self-Govern and Dismantle the Mechanisms of Corporate Rule
–
How might we do this? Here are just two goals:
• Implement full cost pricing – reconcile the externalities
• Shift the tax and subsidy levers – reward that
which is sustainable; punish and disallow that which is unsustainable
How might we accomplish these and other goals that will
help dismantle the mechanisms of corporate rule?
• Think like a movement: think and plan long-term;
• Shift our language so we are defining meaning;
• Organize – Actualize democratic self-governance.
Use initiatives and other local rules to enact our objectives
at the arena of governance where we still have considerable power:
the local and regional levels;
• Develop electoral campaigns. Run people for local offices:
school boards, RCDs, water boards, city and county councils, etc;
• Choose ripe moments to act.
There
is no shortcut – movements are about power, and we have
to have the courage and confidence in our values and goals to
exercise that power.
Let’s
start thinking and acting like a movement!
back
to New Directions in Sustainable Agriculture
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Ecological
Farming Association • 406 Main Street Ste. 313 •
Watsonville, CA 95076
ph. 831-763-2111 • fax. 831-763-2112 • info@eco-farm.org
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