Food on our Thanksgiving table will come from farther and farther north
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Posted on November 24, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, a quiet time to remember the importance of gratitude — for life, for the abundance of the Earth’s many gifts, for family and friends, quiet time, real time.
…before hitting the shopping malls at 5 in the morning. Sigh…
What, really, is the matter with us? Maybe as bad or worse than the shopping is that it is considered a news story by the media — we not only shop, we watch ourselves shop, our shopping is news; on CNN this morning it’s the story that immediately follows the latest suicide bombings in Baghdad.
And I ask myself if we have within us what we need to get out of the ecological crisis we have created.
If you read my last post from Wednesday, I find scientists now saying publicly what I have been saying to anyone who will listen — the crisis, the downward spiral of quality of life on this planet, comes in the generation of those young people alive today. It is not a future story; it is a current one.
So I wanted to link this day to this wonderful guest op-ed by Corby Kummer, which reflects on how one result of global warming is that our Thanksgiving feasts will be coming to us from farther and farther north as food production in the US is degraded steadily over the coming years because of climate change due to global warming. It is one of those reflections that brings the coming disaster right into the reality of our daily lives.
What’s great about this is that Kummer is not an ecologist or environmentalist — he is a food critic and writer. He writes about food. One of his recent books is, The Pleasures of Slow Food, an answer to this unhealthy fast food society, a celebration of local growers, organic farmers, and the joy of the actual cooking of actually healthy fresh foods.
In this increasingly obese diabetic over-consuming society, taking time to cook good food and sit long with family and friends at the table becomes a choice for a countercultural lifestyle. Just imagine all the awful fast food being eaten this weekend, chowed down by all the shoppers at the malls. Then remember that we reached ‘overshoot’ on October 9 — that everything we consume from now to the end of the year is more than the earth can replenish. Does that put a damper on holiday shopping? Is this really the only way we know how to live, to find meaning, to create low-wage jobs without benefits?
Ecological hope: as I have said before, it rests with us and the choices we make now — including during this holiday season.
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