Wildflower Stew

On Saturday, October 27, there will be 11 demonstrations for peace in cities across the country: Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough, Tenn., Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Visit www.oct27.org for more details and information on how to get involved in the demonstration in your region.

Friday, Oct. 19 is the date for this month’s Iraq Moratorium Campaign — an escalating, monthly series of actions demanding an end to the war. Click here to find an action near you. If you are planning an action, please post it on the calendar.

I think a lot about where our food is coming from and how it’s grown these days. Things like genetically modified organisms, mad cows, e coli spinach, tainted food from China, and monocultured organic crops grown by agribiz giants and delivered thousands of global-warming miles to a WalMart near you. Oh, and how about the mercury content in that fish. What to do?

Many people are turning to local farms. For everything. Not just some nice veggies but for meat, eggs, milk, cheese, grains and fish, too. I recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about living for a year consuming nothing but locally grown and produced food. It was a really funny, interesting book; part cookbook, part gardening book and partly a study in sustainable community-based agriculture. So I was delighted to find Michael Abelman’s book, Fields of Plenty, subtitled “a farmer’s journey in search of real food and the people who grow it.”

It seems obvious that if we are to survive the catastrophic consequences of global warming one of the most important things we need to do is secure our food supply. We have to be able to feed ourselves without transporting food thousands of miles using fossil fuels. And this is something we can actually do.

Fields of Plenty is about a summer’s journey all over the United States visiting small farms. We are introduced to the people who work these family farms, how their personal lives are inseparable from the food they produce, their hands, hearts and creativity evident in each tomato, each plum and each round of cheese. It is a delightful book.

The farmers are as different as the Vietnam vet with the PhD in organic chemistry who brews a microbial wine to nurture his fig trees; the family farm that has been passed down through the generations in a little village in northern New Mexico with it’s crops of chilies and tomatoes and the traditional adobe oven in the yard; the Four Season farm in Maine that transformed itself from a hippie farm in the 70s to a successful year round supplier of produce (with the help of large greenhouses) and the chicken farmer in Virginia who describes himself as a Christian Libertarian capitalist environmentalist.

Then there’s the Falks, the cheese makers in Wisconsin, who “have built a national reputation with virtually no funds, a flock of sheep of their own chance breeding, a 1950 Allis-Chalmers tractor, and a milking barn built for stabling horses.”

Some of the farms he visits are small and sell only to local farmer’s markets, some are much larger like Harmony Farms in Wisconsin with a 440 member CSA (Community supported agriculture is a plan where members receive weekly boxes of produce in return for dues paid once a year. You can find your nearest CSA by going to http://localharvest.org). The farmers sell to local restaurants in many areas. There is a farm on Long Island owned by a famous chef and several greenhouses of produce growing on rooftops in Manhattan owned by the restaurant below.

The tour of farms is interlaced with an ongoing discussion of the political and philosophical realities of farming and rural living. Sitting in a mayor’s office in a small black farming community in Illinois listening to the mayor say, “We can’t separate the land and the people. We have to get these kids to appreciate the art of agriculture . . .” the author wonders . . . “there is so much good intention and insight here, I am struggling to understand how conviction will prevail in this battle to preserve alternatives for the next generation. I want some simple answers, some explanation as to the huge gap between insight and reality, between the inspiration I am hearing and the poverty and discouragement I see.”

The farmer in Maine, who is producing $100,000 a year on an acre and a half, says ” . . . the best land preservation, food-security and farm-ecology strategies lie in getting young people involved. . . . How is anyone going to take us seriously and how can we do what we want to do if we can’t make it financially?”

Fortunately, many of these farms are surviving because people in the local community appreciate the fruit of their labors and support them. As individuals we vote for either healthy, locally grown food or big box food from who knows where everytime we shop. Not everyone can have a garden but most of us can shop at farmer’s markets or join a CSA for at least part of our food. And we can encourage local grocery stores and restaurants to buy locally, too. Our future is up to us.

The people in this book are at the leading edge of the future of human life on this planet in my opinion. Unless we learn to feed ourselves simply and sustainably, not much else is going to work. Nothing gives me more hope than seeing what these farmers are up to these days. And did I mention there’s an abundance of really interesting looking recipes I’ll bet you can’t find anywhere else interspersed through the book? Enjoy!

. . . . what it’s like to be a nature mystic stuck in an urban apartment? I take pictures of the beautiful Texas sunrises over the skyline of downtown Austin out my bedroom window. I grow some plants on my balcony and watch the clouds and the birds in my little patch of sky over the courtyard of the apartment house I live in. It’s a nice place as urban apartments go and I know I’m lucky. But I really miss the night sky far away from cities where the stars come down to the horizon and touch the earth and you can hear the soft wind and the early morning bird song.

I’ve been grounded by environmental illness. My respiratory system has been so damaged by environmental toxins that I am unable to live without supplemental oxygen and filtered, climate-controlled air. I also have chemical sensitivities to the point where I can’t be around any fragrances, VOCs, pesticides, cleaning agents, smoke, fumes - you name it, I react to it. There’s more and more of us these days as toxins in the environment accumulate and people’s immune systems go haywire under the stress.

Right now, my apartment is my “bubble.” I can’t even go out on my balcony most of the time because of the urban air quality. A lot of people with chemical sensitivities have portable bubbles. They have customized RVs or live as far away from civilization as they can get, sometimes in Airstream trailers which, because they are made with quality, non-toxic materials, are very popular. Having an Airstream and living where I can be closer to the natural world again is my dream.

I have been blessed in my life to live in some really beautiful, remote places. As anyone who has done this knows, it was accompanied by plenty of exercise, otherwise known as chopping wood, carrying water. And, for me, growing food, learning a craft and living a subsistence/barter lifestyle. I’ve also been able to write things and publish things and travel a lot. I’ve baked bread and sold it, was a partner in a cafe/gallery for awhile, worked in one of the most wonderful little bookstores you could ever find - and met all kinds of amazing people.

From 1995 until 2001 I traveled with my partner, Woodstock, on our bus, Even Further, back and forth and all around the country and now I’m writing a book, “The Bus People,” and putting in my two cents worth with this blog. I read a lot and I try to pass on things that I think might be helpful.

I get my news from a broad range of sources. On the internet I read the New York Times and occasionally other newspapers like the St. Petersburg Tribune, the Boston Globe, the LA Times and the Washington Post. I also read the Norway Post, Upside Down (Central and South America), a newsletter from Canada called rabble and the China Dialogue. I watch the News Hour on PBS and other PBS news programs like Washington Week, Frontline, Now and Bill Moyers. Through my email I get Grist magazine, Common Dreams, TomPaine and AlterNet. I also read online Orion the beautiful magazine of nature writing and activism, the European magazine Ode which features real life stories about positive change and the Ecologist to see what the folks in the UK are doing. I read The Bear Deluxe, the dynamic little magazine out of Portland, Oregon, that “explores environmental issues through the creative arts” and occassionally publishes something from me.

I get newsletters and participate in forums on environmental issues, disability rights, environmental illness support groups, progressive politics, civil and first amendment rights organizations, nature writing and radical poetry. I try to distill and pass on from these sources and my own experience what I think might be helpful. I know most people don’t have time to do all this reading so I hope to make my blog a place where people can come for some useful ideas, some inspiration, some connections.

When my friends and I started our first alternative newspaper 35 years ago we decided that there would be no anonymous, pseudo-objective reporting. The corporate media will tell you what a few faceless shareholders want you to know. It was understood that we had to be for real; we had to say who we were and where we were coming from and that’s what I love about the grassroots media; it’s just us.

I believe we can get rid of corrupt politicians, end the war and stop global warming. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to take awhile but it’s possible. Will we do it? Will we do it in time? If it’s just us, who else will do it?

I would love to find a big old live oak tree and an Airstream trailer and hang out with my grandchildren, tell them all my stories and teach them everything I can to help them build a better world. . . . . and keep writing about it. And I’d love to hear from you wherever you are.