Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Harvey Ussery <harvey@themodernhomestead.us>]

On 08/21/2010 01:39 PM, Tradingpost wrote:
> Wrap things up with a statement so ludicrous that you have to publish it on 
> your own website because hey, the New York Times is only willing to go so far:
>
>      "...eating food from a long way off is often the single best thing you can do 
> for the environment, as counterintuitive as that sounds." (Quoting Budiansky)

The best way to refute the crazy "logic" behind Buiansky's statement re 
food miles and energy use procuring our food is to ask the question: If 
petroleum supplies shrink radically/prices go up dramatically, will we 
meet the resulting challenge to food supply by making food production 
even *more* centralized/long distance? (President to Secy's of Ag and 
Commerce: "Dang, boys, oil at $200 a barrel--we gotta bring in more food 
from China!") The idea is preposterous.

As for Budiansky, I have long strongly recommended his book THE COVENANT 
OF THE WILD: WHY ANIMALS CHOSE DOMESTICATION as the best easily 
accessible intro to the subject of the evolution of domestication. 
However, I always warn that Budiansky gets a little crazy at the end, 
and betrays the leanings he puts on full display in "Rabid Locavore": On 
the basis of a single anecdotal report of animal behavior on his farm--a 
ewe with a prolapsed vagina actually preferred confinement (Duh!)--he 
implicitly justifies what we do to animals in CAFO's.

Maybe the good news is seeing all these a***oles so desperately grasping 
at straws--would they be doing so if they didn't sense the shakiness of 
their paradigms?

~Harvey


--
Harvey in northern Va
www.themodernhomestead.us

The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that 
people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, 
will be treated as garbage.  ~Wendell Berry