Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

So, spring is in full flourishing mode and, if you care about what you eat, or if you love the soil, how could you not be thinking about farming, about farmers’ markets, about vegetable gardens and the feel, smell, and taste of a warm tomato picked ripe under the sun sometime later this summer.

A friend is giving me a corner of her backyard garden to help satisfy my yearning to get my hands back in the soil.  I am very grateful.

Anyway, so I want to post about food.  And I want to lift up a crucial voice from our local community here, Will Allen, founder of ‘Growing Power,’ which is getting quite the national reputation now.

Will Allen of Growing Power, Inc.

Allen is all about urban agriculture, about growing actual food, good nutritious food, and dedicating what he produces to those inner city neighborhoods that hardly ever see a real, fresh grown tomato.

The poor of our cities are neglected in many ways.  Try to find a grocery store in some of the neighborhoods here beaten down by ‘white flight,’ slumlords, high unemployment, racism, economic deterioration and now depression, and public school systems that do more to serve the convenience and perpetuation of a system that stopped serving the real needs of its students long ago — needs like self-respect, learning that anchors them in their real world (not test scores), critical thinking skills, cultural and creative endeavors that can alter the fractured social world in which they live.

One of the problems affecting their learning abilities is malnutrition.  And if all you have available in your neighborhood are convenience stores which might have a head of nutrition-less head lettuce on their shelves and then can call that produce, and fast food outlets at every intersection, and you don’t own a car and you work two jobs trying to make ends meet, etc., etc., getting good food becomes a matter of justice.  Actually, it becomes a matter of human rights, and this one is being sorely violated in much of our world, including the U.S.

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, no. 1:  Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

In other words, the right to nutritious food adequate for one’s health and well-being is among the most basic internationally recognized human rights, not food that kills you slowly by malnourishment, diabetes, obesity, cancer, high blood pressure — you know the drill.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a main instigator of drawing up this UDHR back in the 40s.  Would that the world would live up to this document.  Would that this nation which had so much to do with its creation saw it as a priority to make these rights real even within its own society.

Okay, enough pontificating.  Will Allen’s May 9 blog post is entitled “A Manifesto.”  I urge you to take a moment over this long holiday weekend to read it, and then get involved in supporting his policy proposals.  This is not only important for matters of hunger and the human community, but for bringing to an end a way of agriculture that is contributing its enormous share to the ecological breakdown of the planet’s ecosystems.

Excerpts:

Over the past century, we allowed our agriculture to become more and more industrialized, more and more reliant on unsustainable practices, and much more distant from the source to the consumer. We have allowed corn and soybeans, grown on the finest farmland in the world, to become industrial commodities rather than foodstuffs. We have encouraged a system by which most of the green vegetables we eat come from a few hundred square miles of irrigated semi-desert in California.

Industrial farm

When fuel prices skyrocket, as they did last year, things go awry. When a bubble like ethanol builds and then bursts, things go haywire. When drought strikes that valley in California, as is happening right now, things start to topple. And when the whole economy shatters, the security of a nation’s food supply teeters on the brink of failure…

What is happening is that many vulnerable people, especially in the large cities where most of us live, in vast urban tracts where there are in fact no supermarkets, are being forced to buy cheaper and lower-quality foods, to forgo fresh fruits and vegetables, or are relying on food programs – including our children’s school food programs – that by necessity are obliged to distribute any kind of food they can afford, good for you or not. And this is coming to haunt us in health care and social costs. No, we are not suddenly starving to death; we are slowly but surely malnourishing ourselves to death. And this fate is falling ever more heavily on those who were already stressed: the poor…

It is time and past time for this nation, this government, to react to the dangers inherent in its flawed farm and food policies and to reverse course from subsidizing wealth to subsidizing health.

Will Allen & Friends - photo: Growing Power, Inc.

We have to stop paying the largest farm subsidies to large growers of unsustainable and inedible crops like cotton. We have to stop paying huge subsidies to Big Corn, Big Soy and Big Chem to use prime farmland to grow fuel, plastics and fructose. We have to stop using federal and state agencies and institutions as taxpayer-funded research arms for the very practices that got us into this mess.

We have to start subsidizing health and well-being by rewarding sustainable practices in agriculture and assuring a safe, adequate and wholesome food supply to all our citizens.