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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] how and where food is grown

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Subject: Market Farming

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  • From: Marty Kraft <martyk AT allspecies.org>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] how and where food is grown
  • Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 08:36:57 -0500

I don't think it sounds xenophobic or isolationist.

The quote reminds me of Shakespeare¹s (roughly) ³To thine own self be true.
Then as night follows day thou can not be false to anyone².

I believe that we must honor the needs of the place we¹re in and the people
around us, for that¹s who and what we are close enough to observe and
compassionately respond to. Because we are sitting on top of millions of
years of coal and oil we are allowed to act globally, buying what we want
from where ever we want . Since we are distant from the land where we get
many of our products and the people who fashion them we cannot know what is
being done in our behalf. Our dollars are blind. We place them on the
counter and they activate a chain of activity we know nothing or very little
about.

The global village sounds good but we need volumes more information about
what we are buying, how it has been produced, what the people must do to
prepare it, how that fits into their culture, what its harvesting or
extraction is doing to the local ecosystem, what our state department and
military has done in our behalf to manipulate local politics for our benefit
and on and on.

I think it is healthy and wise for me to live as locally as I can and at the
same time respect all cultures and ecosystems as my own. I¹m not sure how to
do the latter very well. It sure makes shopping harder.

Marty Kraft


> From: "M N" <gershom_ivri AT hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
> Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 06:14:42 -0600
> To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: RE: [Market-farming] how and where food is grown
>
> Sounds xenophobic/isolationist.
>
> mn
>
>> “If economics is reconceived in the service of community, it will begin
>> with a concern for agriculture and specifically for the production of food.
>> This is because a healthy community will be a relatively self-sufficient
>> one. A community’s dependency on outsiders for its mere survival weakens
>> it. It is often unable to develop the policies it desires for the sake of
>> its own members, since its survival depends on terms dictated by others.
>> The most fundamental requirement for survival is food. Hence, how and where
>> food is grown is foundational to an economics for community.”
>> --Herman Daly and John Cobb





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