A New Era in Politics: Time for Governance

It has become a cliché in the last week to state that we are now entering a bold new era in American politics, for reasons either racial (our first black president) or partisan (a progressive agenda finally ascendant in the federal government). I agree that we are on the cusp of a new political era, but I attribute it to neither of the two reasons just given. It does have something to do with Barack Obama, but it has nothing to do with the color of his skin or his ideological persuasion. It has to do with his intelligence and the fact that he grasps at an intuitive level the more profound truth about this new era: We are entering a phase of our national evolution, and indeed of world civilization, in which we have to rethink and redefine the very idea of what government is for. The old debates of "big government versus small government" and "conservative versus liberal" are tired remnants of the past, no longer relevant to a world vastly more complex than the age in which they first surfaced. And ironically, the best lens through which to see the nature of this new era is not any iconic speech by Mr. Obama or his acolytes, but rather the desperate fulminations of the right in the wake of the election.

The second post-election cliché is that the conservative movement is being split in two by a heated internal debate. On one side are the moderate Republicans, many of whom found Obama to be a reasonable and nonthreatening candidate, and some of whom even voted for him (the list of big-name conservative defectors is impressively long and has been dissected many times in the media). In this wing the mood is conciliatory and cooperative -- a recognition that their party is in dire straits and their interests would best be served by reaching out across the aisle rather than building a wall and hurling hot oil.

On the other side is the far right, the "true" conservatives by their own assessment, the unrepentant, unbowed, and unwilling witnesses to a landslide. I have had a chance to listen to several right-wing radio hosts since election night, and their manner of dealing with Obama's victory is at once pathetic and comical. They seem like lonely souls trudging through an echo chamber of cognitive dissonance. All they can muster are infuriated whines that Rahm Emanuel gives the lie to Obama's pledge of bipartisanship, and a pitbull-like insistence that Obama is a left-wing radical now savoring the chance to spring his revolutionary platform on an unsuspecting public. That he has duped the populace and will now commence his term as an underground Marxist. More stealing from the rich. More social programs. More big, bloated government.

It is certainly beyond question that the Republican party is battered and bruised. It is also undeniable that it is being roiled by in-fighting at the moment. But let this not mislead you into believing that they are on the verge of some great transformation. Pay close attention to both factions within the party and you'll see that the fundamental message is the same: let's regroup, let's rearticulate our identity, and let's reassert ourselves on the national stage. They want to reclaim the mantle as the party of ideas. The problem is, the world has moved on and their ideas are no longer relevant.

One of the chief sources of George W. Bush's disastrousness as a president was his extraordinarily simplistic view of the world. There were no nuances or complexities or contexts. There was us and them. Good and evil. Freedom-loving people and terrorists. Free markets and socialism. Everything is a zero sum game and the world exists in 1950s black-and-white clarity. And Bush's worldview is simply a distillation of the conservative ideology that dates back to the early 1960s, when the likes of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley first gave it form and respectability. Now, you can build a number of reasonable arguments against that philosophy, but at least it had a certain amount of relevance at the time it was first articulated. Even when Nixon schlepped it into the 1970s and Reagan resurrected it in the 1980s, it was still a worldview that addressed the context of those times. But. . . those times have changed. So when you hear the same refrain still being repeated nearly 30 years after Reagan took office by both the AM mouthpieces and even the once-respectable John McCain, the arguments and their arguers appear like dusty anachronisms.

The very dichotomous terms that the right casts the argument in, desperately trying to get the American public to go along, are hopelessly out of date. Big versus small government. More social programs versus cutting spending. "Spreading the wealth" versus "spreading opportunity." The world today is vastly more complex than the one these trite, empty platitudes originally addressed themselves to. What does it mean to speak of "small government" in a world where military threats are multiplying, health care costs are spiraling beyond the means of all but the wealthy, and environmental crisis threatens the very foundation of civilization? What does it mean to speak of "cutting spending" when a financial meltdown is bringing the global economy to its knees? What does it mean to speak of "spreading opportunity" when the end of the fossil-fuel economy is in sight, the manufacturing sector is feeble, and at times the entire industrial edifice seems in danger of crumbling? I'm not arguing that modern times call for more government or higher deficits or less opportunity. What I'm saying is that these arguments are just too simplistic, they no longer address themselves to the realities of a highly complex and interdependent global society. It's like believing that the entire emotional, psychological, and logistical complexity of a modern-day family can be captured by how many times they eat dinner together. It's not that this isn't important -- it's just that it represents only one tiny part of the overall phenomenon.

What I believe the Obama victory represents is a shift from the age-old focus on government to a new focus on governance. That is the new era we have entered. To simply think in terms of government and how big or small, how involved or relaxed it should be, is to lock ourselves into a box and shut off other possibilities for fresh, creative, innovative policy making. Governance is not just about the power of the state, it is about creating synergies between government, business, and civil society to find real solutions to real-world problems -- not sloganeering aimed at cartoon problems. Governance has more to do with the decision-making process than the decisions themselves. Its keywords are transparency, accountability, responsiveness, and equitability. It stems from a recognition that a crucial ingredient for a healthy, progressive, peaceful society is not just economic or military or political outcomes, but the social relationships that shape and give rise to those outcomes.

The right does not seem to get this. In fact, it does not seem interested in process-oriented governance at all. It seems to prefer lobbing hate-filled bombs at some straw man called government. I believe that Obama does get it, and this is what his ascent to the presidency heralds. Damn right we need change, but it's not just about dissociating ourselves from the last eight years -- it's about preparing for the next one hundred.

Specialization and its Discontent: Two Responses to "A plea for the translucent university"

My good friend Marty and I have stated on our respective blogs^1,2 that what we are setting out to do -- each on our own at first, but with the long-term plan of synthesis between our two idea streams -- is carefully construct the full-fledged, holistic, complex argument for sustainability: what it is, what it is not, and how to go about achieving it. He and I have been lobbing arguments and counterarguments back and forth since we met some five years ago on a market garden in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and it only seems fitting that we continue the same pattern on our blogs. Given that we have decided to devote our blogging efforts almost entirely to intellectual exposition (skipping the cutesy photos of family and pets, reviews of our local Starbucks, and all the other flotsam that marks the blogosphere), and that we are essentially producing twin blogs on the same overarching theme, it makes sense that we turn our efforts to crafting a dialogue rather than separate monologues. So in the spirit of this endeavor, and as a tribute to his intellectual prowess, I offer two brief commentaries on Marty's most recent blog entry about overdevelopment and the division of labor in modern society.


I. The Drudgery Report

An underlying issue that makes several appearances throughout Marty's post, but is never the center of attention, is that of economic specialization, or what is often called in more technical terms the division of labor. It is certainly the case that the entire economic sphere in any advanced industrialized nation such as ours is marked by increasing specialization of skills and tasks. A graphic designer of long ago may have done a little bit of everything, from planning to drawing to execution to printing, whereas today an employee of a graphic design firm may only work on one specific software program to optimize one specific website widget for one specific corporate client. Or, to continue with the academic thread begun by Marty, a typical scholar of old -- particularly in the humanities and social sciences -- was a true polymath, entwining history, philosophy, and a dash of political economy or sociology into a compelling magnum opus. By contrast, today an academic can rapidly climb through graduate school and go on to achieve tenure without ever venturing outside the bounds of a single theoretical line (say, substantivist economic sociology) and a single methodological technique (for example, network analysis). Indeed, as Marty points out, the substantivist network analyst is all but compelled to stay within those narrow bounds simply to be able to wrack up the list of publications and conference presentations that counts for success in an increasingly fractionalized academy.

Now, the opinion one has about specialization depends largely on one's general worldview. To stick with the academic examples: economists by and large think it is the greatest gift that capitalism has bestowed on the human race, while sociologists tend to see specialization as the forerunner of increased outsourcing, class conflict, and inequality. From my own observations of cultural discourse, it seems that the general opinion among the public is closer to the economist's view than the sociologist's, if only because specialization is the handmaiden of economic "progress," and few dare criticize the progress that allows them hot showers, iTunes, and a wide selection of breakfast cereals.

There are, of course, more critical views of economic specialization. The most fundamental and damning is the one brought up by Marty: that the returns from specialization in the form of a general advancement of societal wellbeing have become increasingly marginal. When we went from people sewing their own clothes to textile workers making clothes for everyone else, few can deny that this level of specialization increased the greater good. When we have gone from a general level of autonomy and know-how in our daily lives to having "experts" manage our finances, our diets, our schedules, our children, and our marriages, then the trend has gone too far. The benefits to society are no longer worth the costs.

But I actually wish to focus here on a different critique of specialization, and it is one that is not often broached -- the only reason I can surmise being that it simply makes people uncomfortable to look the truth in the eye. My concern is not the rising level of helplessness that accompanies specialization, not the the loss of autonomy, not the proliferation of so-called experts, but the sheer drudgery of the workplace. When you're only good at a few things, then those few things tend to be all that you do. And when you only do a few things all day, every day, and increasingly come to be relied on by those above or below you to do exactly those few things, you have the recipe for anomie, boredom, and dissatisfaction.

The ranks of the generalists, the jacks of all trades, the polymaths, have thinned. The world is too complex for them to be effective anymore. Markets have expanded, rules and regulations have proliferated, the sheer amount of stuff grows unceasingly, and the quantity of information at our disposal has exploded. What the whole universe of work -- corporations, non-profit organizations, government agencies -- needs more than ever are 100 different variations of data managers, often entering and sorting and displaying data that is two or three levels removed from any real-world application, or at least any that truly matters.

It is bad enough to be little more than a cog in the giant industrial-capitalist complex -- but then again most of us are. But how much worse when your function as a cog is just a series of rote activities with minimal creativity and only the faintest connection to any form of social progress that seems significant or worthwhile. Think of the utilities technician, checking the same valves or filters or machines each day and marking their status on the same photocopied forms. Think of the tens of thousands of administrative assistants in college offices of development or medical clinics or public relations firms, inputting data into spreadsheets or assembling newsletters. Think of the accounting clerks, the legal aides, the web programmers, the lab assistants. Or for that matter the accountants themselves, the lawyers, the web designers, the scientists. More to the point, think of the number of people you hear about or know who tire of the rat race, who are harried and overtaxed, who derive no satisfaction from work but continue working because they can't see any other way to conduct a life.

And what satisfaction is there to derive? What is the most common refrain we hear from those individuals who do love their jobs? That it is varied, that they are never bored, that each day is different. But what about the rest? What about those whose work responsibilities compel them to do the same thing, if not each day then each week? The same reports to create, the same accounts to reconcile, the same training session to give, the same database to maintain. The human mind grows dull and atrophies with such repetition. Discontent grows as our specialized training pushes us further and further from creativity and spontaneity and a sense of ownership over the tasks we perform.

Let me insert here a couple of caveats. There are two things I'm not saying. First, I'm not saying that everyone in the modern working world hates their job. There are plenty of people at all levels of the labor hierarchy who love their work and are even driven by the competition and the deadlines and the stress of it all (though many of them simply haven't reached burnout stage yet). Anytime you offer up a radical critique of a societal norm you open yourself to the counter that "Surely some people are happy with the status quo." And some people surely are -- but exceptions do not a rule break. Second, I'm not arguing that in some golden past we all lived lives of endless diversity and diversion. Work and life were full of drudgery back then, too -- particularly for housewives, peasants, and slaves. What is unique about the present state of affairs relative to several centuries ago, I think, is how this drudgery, this sameness, this refinement of skills and narrowing of freedom in the workplace has now permeated all levels of the economic pyramid. Specialization may raise the narrowly-measured "standard of living," but I would simply ask: At what cost to our selves?

II. From Diverse to Perverse: The Trajectory of Modern Farming

My second commentary flows directly from the first but hones in on one specific sector of the workforce: farming. Few economic actors display the consequences and the tragedy of hyperspecialization like that of the modern-day commercial farmer.

The trajectory of American agriculture since World War II, and particularly since the 1970s, is marked by two intertwining phenomena: the vast expansion of the scale of most farms coupled with the contraction of their scope. The typical conventional farmer of today plants crops on far more acreage or raises far more heads of livestock than did his grandfather, but produces far fewer kinds of products. Row crop farmers grow one or two grains and have no livestock; dairy farmers raise one or two breeds and feed them grains grown by the row crop farmers; chicken, hog, and apple farmers do nothing but raise chickens, hogs, and apples. By contrast, a typical Midwestern farm prior to WWII might raise cattle, a few hogs, a small flock of chickens, grain for the animals,vegetables for self-consumption, and a handful of apple trees as an afterthought (for some fascinating indirect evidence, see page 25 of this report). Not only the tasks performed by the farmer but the actual crop or animal at the receiving end of those tasks would change week to week, if not day to day. The farmer's labor cycle was marked by diversity rather than sameness. Was it a land of milk and honey in which farmers were the most blissful souls in the country? Not by a long shot -- but that has more to do with political economy, commodity prices, and the urban-rural divide than the so-called drudgery often attributed to earlier eras of farming. The small diversified farmer almost by definition has a more varied work week because she is not tied in to a single crop, and the effects of that variety on the human psyche are subtle but powerful. By contrast, modern commercial industrial farming epitomizes the specialization that has crept into nearly every sector of the economy. I am compelled here to pull a quote from Leopold Kohr directly from Marty's blog entry. This passage would have been equally appropriate as part of the first commentary above, but I find it particularly apropos when discussing the beleaguered farmer:

"Our life's experience is confined to a narrow segment whose borders we almost never cross, but within which we become great single-purpose experts.... Instead of experiencing many different things within surveyable limits, as did our enviable ancestors, we experience only one thing on a colossal plane."

From a stark economic perspective, this phenomenon is entirely positive. Industrialized, specialized farming has allowed fewer individuals to provide more food on less total farmland than once thought possible. There is no doubting this basic fact of production -- but are there not a number of more insidious consequences?

First, related to the point made in my first commentary, this level of specialization takes a lot of the joy out of farming. Your average city-dwelling nonfarmer may find it hard to believe, but farming has traditionally been an occupation that its practitioners found so deeply fulfilling that they would claim it was "in their blood." As the classic literature on agrarianism will tell you, despite the exacting physical labor, farming has long been experienced as a deeply fulfilling activity. But ah, times have changed. Some of my own research among farmers in Wisconsin reveals how the satisfaction of farming a small piece of land has turned into the repetitiveness and stress of farming massive acreage with industrial machines. Farmers told me that their occupation was no longer a lifestyle but "just a business." One identified himself not as a farmer, but as a "risk manager." And another told me quite plainly, "It's just not as fun as it used to be."

A second consequence is ecological, for the handmaiden of specialization is monocropping. It is not just that corn and bean farmers only grow corn and beans -- it is that they grow them in vast fields of a single variety, laying out an agronomic grid that runs completely counter to how natural forces operate and keeping those forces at bay with liberal doses of biocides. When you shed the cows and the chickens and the small grains, you only need a few machines to accomplish your farming system; and when you only have machines for planting and harvesting corn and soybeans, guess what you grow? One extreme version of this monocrop specialization is potato farming, which dispenses with any crop rotation at all and simply grows potatoes this year, next year, and every year until the system buckles. What is the ecological response to this form of agronomic specialization? Massive disease buildup in the soil, which explains the fact that potatoes are among the most pesticide-intensive crops grown today.

A final consequence I want to touch on is the loss of biodiversity. Vast fields of a few varieties of corn, soybeans, wheat, canola, etc., completely destroy the floral diversity that once graced our farms. Farmers choose their seeds from an ever-narrowing genetic base, a situation that some term "genetic erosion." Specialized apple farming -- or more properly, the cessation of apple cultivation on individual farmsteads nationwide -- has helped reduce the total count of named apple varieties in the US from 8000 at the turn of the last century to about 700 today³, and of these 700 we see only a small handful with any regularity in the marketplace. Or how about this statistic? 99 percent of all the turkeys in the US are the same breed -- and it is a breed that cannot even sexually reproduce on its own because it has been bred to be so meaty!⁴

^----

You cannot really come down and say that specialization is "good" or "bad" -- it is a matter of degree. The division of labor was a great thing at a certain, early point of human economic development. It was a great thing, for example, at the time when Adam Smith was writing. It is a fine thing when it frees us from certain tasks (mending our own shoes; building our own vehicles) and creates more time for leisure, for social interactions, for pursuing meaningful hobbies. But the kind of specialization which marks our work lives only seems to have caused us more stress, less leisure, and less quality time with family and friends. The academic narrowing that Marty references is part of this larger societal trend, and as in all other sectors it is questionable whether more and more specialization continues to yield positive outcomes for humanity. Historically specialization tended towards more noble purposes, but the declining returns being won from an overspecialized economy are a signal that things have swung too far in the opposite direction. My intent in this response essay was to discuss a few of the ways that specialization affects us where it counts the most: at the personal, human level, at the level of our lived experiences and our very happiness. It's time to become specialists at being generalists.

The Shape of Things to Come (on this humble blog)

Despite the schizophrenic subheading of my blog, I do in fact intend for this outlet to have a fundamental and integrated theme, though it may not be present in all of my posts. Observations on fatherhood or secondary education or the evolution of one's emotions over time, all of which are stored somewhere in my brain and will someday make their way to the blog, may have little to do with the theme, but writings on agriculture, gardening, food preservation, work, and other topics certainly do. This theme, to sum it up in a single though inadequate word, is sustainability, by which I mean not only sustainable agriculture or sustainable development but societal sustainability in the largest sense -- the kind discussed at great length in works such as Jared Diamond's Collapse (another good review here) and Joseph Tainter's superior (here's a brief discussion why) but underacknowledged The Collapse of Complex Societies. Indeed, a truly sustainable agriculture (which is to say, not the mere existence of a handful of ecological farms across the country, but an entire landscape of sustainable farming) requires a sustainable society in order to flourish, just as a truly sustainable society rests most fundamentally on a sustainable agriculture.


Thankfully that's as much as I need to say in order to demonstrate why this is such a crucial topic, because my friend Marty over at 'Plants Are The Real Capitalists' has already accomplished this with more lucidity and brio than I could have managed. Read his post if you want the full justification for why a project such as his and mine matters (and I'm stretching the meaning of the word 'project' in applying it to such a meager output to date). What I wanted to say in this post is far more prosaic.


An awful lot of ink has been spilled writing about sustainability -- what it means, what are its main tenets, the different forms of sustainability, etc. It is certainly a positive thing that the word and the concept have gone from fringe to mainstream in only 20-odd years, but one result of all that ink is that there is little consensus on what sustainability stands for, and even less on how we would actually go about achieving it. And all the time, more and more ink keeps getting spilled (here's a good example). Yet I would contend, and I hope to show via this blog, that sustainability does not have to be so complex after all -- that it essentially comes down to a discrete number of ideas or, if you like, principles. What I have found over the years as I have given a lot of thought to sustainability and its connection with agriculture is that no matter how many different angles I take on the topic, no matter how many different tangents I run off on, no matter how many different facets of sustainability are brought to my attention, they always link back to a set of core concepts. Oftentimes an idea will strike me and stick with me -- an idea perhaps worthy of being blogged -- and as often as not I realize later that the idea basically "reduces to" one of these core sustainability principles. And it is my belief that these concepts can essentially be mapped out with a series of essays, each one concentrating on a different principle of sustainability and the sum total comprising the full-fledged depiction of what sustainability is, why it's important, and why it is basically synonymous with what Marty and others have called "a new agrarianism." So, as if the subheading of my blog were not overambitious enough, my intent over the life of this blog is to be that mapmaker -- to lay out my axioms of sustainability and agrarianism through a series of essays. This will seem especially laughable when considering the tiny handful of people who might actually read the blog (I believe I've shared it with four individuals to date), but that's not really the point. If an idea has intrinsic worth then it doesn't matter how many people come into contact with it -- its worth remains. And there is no intellectual idea more worthy of our attention at this point in the history of our species than how we will sustain ourselves in the immediate and not-so-immediate future. First and foremost we have to feed ourselves. But I'll get to that later . . . . .

Locality and Ecology: A Reflection on Local Food, Ecological Stewardship, and the Logic of the Market

To sell at the farmers market or not to sell at the farmers market? As spring descends in full force and I contemplate the imminent gardening season, this is the question that has me staring at the ceiling each night. But why?

My family of three moved onto our little country property at the end of April last year, just in time to plan and plant a garden. And as we did so we also made a spontaneous decision: with only a few years of gardening experience between us, including two years as a market garden intern under my own belt, we were going to purchased a vendor’s license and sell our produce at the local farmers market. We were small scale to be sure, but we happily tended our few rows of lettuce, spinach, and potatoes, and each Saturday even more happily sold them. It was a smashing success: we made friends, we established relationships with clients who came back to our stand week after week, we came home with cash in our pockets, and we felt like we were part of a small but vibrant local foods movement in our little corner of northeastern Ohio. Most importantly of all, we loved the actual experience. Every Saturday the four hours of the market flew by as we chatted with new and old friends and hawked our wares, and at market’s end we were tired but already looking forward to the next week. So why, half a year later, would I be wavering over whether or not to repeat the whole experience? There’s a simple answer to this question, and then there’s a more complex answer that has as much to do with the state of small-scale sustainable farming today as it does our particular circumstances.

The quick answer is that we simply have a lot on our plate. We just had our second child in December, my wife has a small but budding crafts business, and I myself am knee-deep in a doctoral dissertation. At times it’s a challenge just to get the dishes and the diapers washed – how are we possibly going to find the time to do the planning, seed starting, planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, processing, and selling that a market garden requires? For all its benefits, the whole process would take away precious time and add additional stress to our lives. Why not simplify by taking a year or two off, at least until the children are older and don’t need constant supervision? It would sting a little to remove the proud label of Local Food Vendor, but at least we wouldn’t have to choose between farm time and family time.

But as I lay in bed the other night, staring up at the ceiling, it struck me that the dilemma was more complex than that. It ran deeper than a simple question of work and free time. After all, plenty of other farmers and market gardeners find themselves even more time constrained than us and still manage to carry on farming. Certainly the majority of vendors at our market farm on the side while holding down full- or part-time jobs. And furthermore, whether we sold at the market or not, we would still be planting a garden, and even a poorly tended backyard veggie patch requires some amount of planning, planting, watering, weeding, etc. The only difference would be the destination of the produce – our clients’ tables or our own. And there, I realized, was the crux of the problem.

It goes back to a more fundamental question: What are our ultimate goals in living this country life, in managing this little piece of land, in growing food? For us, moving to a small rural acreage was so thrilling because it would allow us to realize a singular dream long in the making: to be the stewards of a property, to manage a tiny piece of the earth respectfully and intelligently and productively. Not just to enjoy a woods but to care for a woodlot. Not just to have a lawn but a living meadow. Not just to landscape the driveway but to plant a living hedgerow with fruit and nut trees. And not just to grow food but to produce vegetables and fruits of the highest quality while increasing the fertility of the soil. In short, the garden itself was just one piece of a larger puzzle, a larger project which I will call ecological stewardship – to manage the land, the flora, the fauna, and even the property’s physical infrastructure so that it provides a satisfying lifestyle while paying respect to the forces of nature. What I realized while lying in bed is that our primary goal in living and working on our property is not producing “local food” or selling at the farmers market, it is ecological stewardship in a much larger sense. And producing food for sale at the market is simply a happy outcome – a positive externality, if you like – of that larger goal.

So time is still the limiting factor. Like all people, my wife and I have a finite set of hours available to us each day. A large portion of those are already acounted for – by eating, by sleeping, by caring for our kids, by my wife’s business in her case and my schoolwork in mine. Whatever’s left over will be allocated to the farm. But the question is no longer whether there is enough time left over to run a market garden without adding too much stress to our lives, it is whether there is enough time to have a market garden and still fulfill the vision of ecological stewardship. The dilemma is not one of having to choose between farming and family, it’s having to choose between different visions of farming.

If we allocate our spare time to producing for the market, then the market takes center stage. We invest more in capital costs in order to produce with greater precision and efficiency and on a larger scale, and return on investment becomes the paramount concern. The logic of ecology and sustainability loses ground to the logic of productivity. In a backyard garden a few heads of lettuce can be sacrificed to the slugs or can go to seed with little feeling of loss, but in a market garden every head represents a certain potential for income. That lettuce no longer stands just for food, it stands for money, so the slugs aren’t just eating into a leaf of Red Sails, they’re eating into our profits. If time is the limiting factor and profit the immediate goal, we will maximize the efficiency of our labor output. Instead of gardening for maximum diversity we will choose a handful of the most profitable varieties and grow them in larger quantities. And varieties would not be selected according to our personal preferences, but to those of the market. Long rows of the same crop would replace shorter mixed beds. Landscape cloth instead of organic mulches. Purchased fertilizers instead of an on-farm composting system. And I am not just speaking hypothetically here – these are some of the real dilemmas we are mulling over at this very moment as this year’s growing season beckons. And they are precisely the sort of outcomes I have witnessed on multiple market garden operations, where even the most well-intentioned farmer must at some point bend her ideals to fit the ethos of production.

And all of that is just the garden. The real tragedy – the one that keeps me up at night – is what would happen, or more properly what would not happen, on the remainder of the property. If our free time is devoted to the exacting task of growing food for other people, will we find the time to develop a meadow or manage a pasture for a small flock of livestock? Producing our own eggs with a small flock of hens, as we do now, is very gratifying but it also imposes a time demand and some capital outlay. In full production mode perhaps we would simply scrap the flock and revert to buying our eggs again. The lofty goal of managing fencelines for supplemental production of fruits, nuts, and firewood would likely be abandoned altogether. Or, getting back to the garden again, let me take this a step further: will we even have time to grow food for ourselves in a proper manner? If we’re growing carrots for the market and peppers for our own fridge and it’s Friday evening and both rows need to be weeded, which do you think will get our attention? Local food production is often spoken of as a natural vehicle towards a more sustainable farming system, but, shocking as it sounds, growing for local markets and managing a farm holistically may at times be incompatible.

What all of this comes down to is a fairly simple question: Is local food production an end in itself, an inherent good? Or is it merely a means – and one possible means of many – towards the larger goal of maintaining a sustainable, agrarian landscape? In the popular press’s account of local food, the locality alone is usually treated as the goal in and of itself. To take just one example, practitioners of the well-known “100 mile diet” do not rank order the farms they patronize according to any kind of ecological logic, they simply try to source as much of their food as possible from farms as close to them as possible. I, however, would argue something different. To my eyes, local food production is not an end in itself, and it is not even the means towards an end. It is rather a secondary benefit, a happy byproduct of the more fundamental vision of ecological stewardship.

The temptation to sell at the farmers market remains for us simply because it is both a gratifying and an enjoyable experience. But if producing for the local market actually interferes with the ecological stewardship of our land, then something has to give. If “get big” has more recently given way to “get local,” we might still choose to just get out.

Obama Optimism

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE: Clinton supporters will vote for Obama in November

I just read a two weeks old but still uplifting post over at Ink, in which the author makes the case that Obama is on the upswing again after flirting with 'pastor disaster.' It's surely an opinion shared by many, but I still found it uplifting because, for all his positive attributes, for a pessimistic political progressive like myself Obama's campaign has that air of fragility about it that one comes to expect from all things hopeful. It is not that he or his message are fragile per se, but that the world is a mean place and messages of hope tend to get chewed up and spit out by an unforgiving political machine, especially when they have to hold their own for months on end before being validated, as in the case of a long election year. But Ink's post got me thinking about another reason for Obama optimism, and it is the precise opposite message that we are presently hearing from the media corps. At first I believed their gloomy prediction too, particularly the first rumblings of it that came to my ears: a convincing commentary by NPR's Ted Koppel right after Clinton's still-hanging-on-by-the-fingernails_a.k.a._"comeback" victories in OH and TX on March 4. And the message only got more convincing the more that others repeated it: the Democrats are being riven by infighting and bitterness, we are creating long-lasting internal animosities, the party needs to choose a candidate now so they can begin duking it out with McCain instead of with one another. Particularly troublesome are the poll results we repeatedly hear that x% of Clinton supporters say they would vote for McCain over Obama, and y% of Obama voters say the same about Clinton. But . . . I am no longer buying it.

I have been mulling this over and I've come to the conclusion that it is nonsense. A staunch supporter of a liberal democrat would vote for a white, male, pro-war Republican over a different liberal democrat, just because their liberal democrat of choice did not get the nomination? Nonsense. This is a classic case of one of the flaws of polls -- people answer a question about the future ("Who would you vote for in November?") based on their feelings in the present ("If Hillary loses the nomination my world will end"). [See the similarity here to one of Daniel Gilbert's theses, about our inability to predict how we will actually feel when a future event comes to pass, in his for the most part excellent book Stumbling on Happiness. The truth is that, whoever gets the nomination, their rival's supporters will be pissed off for a few days, maybe a few weeks, but then that will fade and they will come to their senses and continue to vote Democrat in the general election. If you want proof, just look across the aisle: I recall listening to conservative radio talk shows a few months ago when the Republican nomination was still an open question and being just amazed at how vicious was their hate for McCain. We all heard Ann Coulter's silly comments about campaigning for Hillary if it came to McCain versus her. And now where do all those talk show hosts stand? They may not like McCain, but they sure as hell aren't talking trash about him anymore. And they will all vote for him in November, because who else are they going to vote for? Ralph Nader?

I like the way one friend of mine put it -- if you are a Hillary supporter and you truly would vote for McCain over Obama, the reason could only be either (a) racism or (b) a complete misunderstanding of your own stated political philosophy. There may be a small segment of either camp that would actually remain bitter enough after their candidate loses to vote for McCain, but they will be a tiny percentage. And I believe this is particularly the case for Clinton supporters. Many Obama supporters genuinely dislike Clinton and the Clinton Machine, for various reasons whether justified or not, and perhaps they would vote for McCain -- or simply not vote at all -- out of this genuine dislike. But most Clinton supporters can say nothing worse about Obama than that he's not as "experienced" or "qualified" as their gal. Sorry, despite the vigor of their support for Clinton, that is not a feeling strong enough to make them switch parties in November.

Here's how I call it -- Obama gets the eventual nod; Clinton supporters bitch, moan, and seethe for a little while; then the dust settles and people come to their senses. Obama takes McCain handily. I remain at heart a political pessimist (how could you not be after the last 8 years?), but at present I am riding a tide of optimism: Obama Optimism.