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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Where are the Conservatives in the Local, Sustainable Movement?
  • Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:08:25 -0600


Where are the Conservatives in the Local, Sustainable Movement?
July 24, 2009 03:48 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zachary-adam-cohen/where-are-the-conservativ_b_244576.html

Let's think about the word conservative for a second. True conservatives are
interested in "conserving" things right? The caricature of conservatives is
that they try to preserve abstract things like traditional culture, the
sanctity of the family, morality, and community but are really only
interested in moralizing. But where are the conservatives who want to
conserve the environment? Where are the church groups unwilling to
participate in a system where factory farming of livestock is a reality?
Where are the conservatives who want to preserve traditional agriculture, the
kind of small scale, local and family based agriculture that Thomas Jefferson
dreamed would be the future of the nation? Talk about an Originalist!

As a political conservative who favors limited-government, the authentic over
the mass produced, the local over the federal, and small business over
corporate, the sustainable food movement seems a perfect fit for me. And yet
when I look out over the various constellations that make up the movement, I
don't see very many conservatives.

It may be that many of us, accustomed to decades of caricature and derision,
simply choose to keep our heads down and soldier on. But as the movement
progresses it will be important for advocates of all political stripes to be
transparent about their agendas. Transparency is never a bad thing. I also
believe that advocates of a local, sustainable food system should be more
welcoming and accepting of conservatives that hold the same goals, even if
they have different reasons for doing so. It's not that current stakeholders
in local foods activism have excluded conservatives, I do not think they
have. But what they also have not done is made it a priority to reach out to
community members from across the aisle.

Crunchy Cons

I recently read Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture, by the
journalist Rod Dreher. Dreher found that the U.S. food system was a target
rich environment for him to criticize using his conservative credentials. His
criticisms, while well known to local foods advocates, are enlightening for
conservatives.

Conservatives value small businesses over corporations because they keep
people empowered. The local and sustainable food movement elevates small
farmers, artisans and restaurateurs, almost to a heroic level. Just look at
how Alice Waters and Joel Salatin are regarded.

Dreher writes,

The traditional conservative will want to take a stand for the
mom-and-pop cheese maker over the pasteurized processed food disgorged by the
factory and sold cheaply.

Dreher also recognizes and exposes how big business has purposely manipulated
the free market to make it less free and competitive, by shutting out the
small producers:

I started looking into how the government regulates the meat industry. It
was shocking to see how agribusiness has gamed the system to keep small meat
producers marginalized. Our regulatory system is designed to favor
industrialized meat production, with its factory farms, its cattle jacked up
with antibiotics and growth hormones, and its chickens in cages filled with
their own feces. As a conservative, I am angry about this, not only on behalf
of the small businesspeople slapped around by the deep-pocketed agribusiness
behemoths, but because of how industrialized agriculture has made a
traditional agrarian way of life difficult, if not impossible....

To participate in a system and a way of thinking in which the act of
eating is merely a commercial transaction is to sell out our spiritual and
cultural patrimony. I understand the free-market reasons why Americans do
this. But I don't understand why it is called conservative.

Dreher nails this important point home by talking with economist Edward
Hudgins. "Hudgins told me that it's often the case that big companies
willingly absorb the cost of extra regulation because those rules 'have the
effect of killing off the competition.'"

Is Slow Food Conservative?

Rod is fortunate to discover Slow Food and immediately finds parallels
between Slow Food and conservative impulses.

As the Slow Food movement grew beyond the bounds of Italy, its proponents
realized that they could never succeed by trying to stop McDonald's and its
ilk. Rather, they had to show people why the Slow attitude toward
life--esteeming tradition, celebrating the particularity in the face of mass
culture, and taking time to enjoy life--is more sensible, more fun, more
human.

Dreher further establishes Slow Food's conservative credentials by recalling
Russell Kirk's Six Canons of Conservative Thought, the second of which is
"affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life."
Dreher notices how well Kirk's principle fits in with one of Slow Food's
primary missions, to educate, save and esteem plant and animal variety with
the Ark of Taste.

It's truly notable when Italian Marxists and American Conservatives mirror
each others thinking. Politics really does make strange bedfellows.

For decades now, conservatism has been in bed with big business Republican
and Democratic interests. This marriage of convenience has proven itself
hopelessly corrupt. As the conservative movement reconnects with its
principles, something that liberals and democrats should desire, we can
expect to see more conservatives opting out of these political arrangements
and shifting their gaze in our direction.

It behooves the local sustainable movement to encourage political
conservatives to remove themselves from under the yoke of a dominant food
culture that disrespects their core beliefs and traditions. When problems in
our society become so blatant that factions who normally would have nothing
to do with each other begin to cooperate in order to find solutions, we know
we are at a turning point. Let's grow the movement from all sides.




  • [Livingontheland] Where are the Conservatives in the Local, Sustainable Movement?, Tradingpost, 07/25/2009

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