Last week I attended the 28th annual Ecological Farming Conference at the beautiful Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove (near Monterey), California. The first year I went to the conference was in 2002, just a few short months after 9/11. I don’t know if it was the fact that I came alone—or that the farm I had been volunteering for and fighting to save had just been sold to developers—or just the general mood of the country that year—but I left that conference feeling completely despondent. The world was going to hell and despite our best efforts as environmentalists, there seemed to be nothing we could do to stop this destructive, downward course.
But this year the mood is completely different. You can feel it. Hope and change is in the air. We are electing a new president this year. “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and “Fast Food Nation” have awakened a lot of people to the fact that there are changes happening in our environment and that it is imperative (and in our best interests) to get involved and make some changes in the direction we are headed.
The theme of this year’s Eco-Farm Conference was “Root Values: Connecting Ecology, Community, and the Land.” I was here representing San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project, a group of volunteers that came together 7 years ago to help save a farm that we loved from being sold and converted into a housing development.
San Diego Roots has grown in these past few years from a handful of concerned citizens to a community-wide effort. We have much to celebrate. We helped start and maintain a successful high school garden project at Morse High School and we are now in the process of buying a farm, WIllow Glen Farm, which will eventually serve the entire San Diego community as a working sustainable farm model and educational center.
Representing San Diego at the conference were fellow Roots’ board member & OB People’s Food Coop board member Doug Zilm, as well as David Solomon, Dashiell Kuhr & Erika Shickle from La Milpa Farm in Escondido. We left San Diego on Wednesday morning and made the 7 hour drive up to the Monterey Peninsula through rain and snow (at 4000 feet through the Tejon Pass)!
The first evening of the conference began with a keynote speech on sustainability by author Eric Schlosser. Schlosser didn’t really cover any new ground, but reiterated what he learned in writing his best-selling book Fast Food Nation.
Schlosser took us through the history of the fast food system that now dominates the world, quoting the ominous McDonalds slogan “One Taste Worldwide.” He also pointed out that the same anabolic steroids banned by Olympic and professional sports organizations are being implanted in the ears of conventionally-raised cattle and are ending up in our water supply.
Cloned animals, he noted, are coming next, and will be brought to market without any long-term epidemiological studies. “I would rather chew on this podium,” he said, “than eat cloned meat, eggs or milk.” (See the Center for Food Safety website for more information on cloned food products.)
Schlosser emphasized the fact that our food system, which is controlled by a handful of companies, is a system based on ignorance, misinformation, and disinformation, one that maintains control by limiting our access to information. A system that spends billions of dollars on advertising (to get us to eat their product) but doesn’t want us to know what we are eating, ie, genetically engineered food--products that have been put out into our food supply largely without our knowledge or our consent.
“Is this system sustainable?” Schlosser asked. “Absolutely not.” He made an analogy to a crystal meth user who smokes the drug night after night, without sleeping or eating. What is true on an individual level, he noted, is also true for the society as a whole. We need a healthy diet in order to be healthy individuals, a healthy planet.
Schlosser predicted this system will eventually collapse and someday we will look back and see it for the failure it is. (For an interesting study of how environmental problems contribute to societal collapse see Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed).
Schlosser’s speech was an inspiring rallying cry and great opening to the conference. But it was hard to concentrate on Schlosser when I had this really cute guy sitting right in front of me, flirting and smiling at me:
For another perspective on the conference, read Doug’s dispatches on the Willow Glen Farm blog.
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