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I The Orange

The Illicit Greenhouses of Sonoma County

September 22nd 2006 00:29

In northern California, sometimes referred to affectionately by residents as ‘nor cal’, there exists an abundance of farmland. Should you drive north on highway 101 past San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and through the wealthy suburb of Marin county itself, you will soon find yourself in the luxurious green pastureland of Sonoma. Here there exist cattle ranchers, sheep ranchers, and a plethora of wineries whose crop are world-famous, and a minority of farmers whose crop is more often known as “world-infamous.”

These gentlemen and ladies simply refer to themselves as “growers”, and as their crop as “the crop”. For several generations now, growers of the crop have banded together as a semi-underground society of agrarian semi-outlaws, some arguing with the government over jurisdiction of marijuana, others operating entirely legitimate businesses that transact with doctors who may prescribe the crop to patients in need.

Reggae music is also popular in this part of the world for some reason. During my sojourn to Sonoma, I stayed on a permaculture farm whose main crops were wine grapes, tomatoes, and an exotic lime from New Zealand whose name I have forgotten. But a few miles’ drive into the various downtowns in the evening often yielded the steady skank of reggae music emanating casually from the local taverns.

In fact, the entire swatch of coastal land from Sonoma county north to Portland can somewhat be described as a neo-agrarian paradise with what one can assume reggae (or sometimes it is heard as ‘dub’) to be just a thematic element. Or is it merely thematic? One of the largest reggae gatherings on the West Coast (and possibly, the world) takes place just over the state border in Oregon at a festal little backwoods town each year.

One thinks of the greenhouse as a larger metaphor – a place where certain delicate plants can grow. How delicate now is the life of a farmer in America, that is, of any farmer who seeks to conduct a profitable enterprise outside of the major wineries of Napa county (next-door) lovely as they are, or the agribusiness monolith Monsanto? Where there are restrictions a farmer may hope for freedom, where there are prohibitions one can hope for legalization.

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Principle II - Make Friends

September 18th 2006 03:45

The second principle of sustainability is what loosely can be called “cooperation.” Why should this be so difficult?

Economics is sometimes referred to as “the dismal science”, and it’s only because what they are dealing with that is so dismal are problems of scarcity: how to best allocate resources in a scarce world. In the Western world, which can include Aus/NZ, we live lives of abundance. We have plumbing, air conditioning, safe drinking water, hot water, reliable refrigeration, and ample food supply.

But, not everyone in the world can live the way we do. In fact, if the teeming masses of China, India, Africa, Arab peninsula, etc, all lived to the standards of the “American dream” (house in suburbia, picket fence, two-car garage, two college-bound kids and dog) we would simply burn down the planet ecologically. Or more accurately, we would smoke it. This is what “new media” of the 90s has really been able to show us, exactly the magnitude of suffering of the have-nots, and now we are aware also of the lack of combustible fuel to go around.

So how important is cooperation in light of these discoveries?

Currently, there are a few pieces of legislation proposed by American representatives to attempt to alleviate the problems posed by dependency on fossil fuels. California senator Dianne Feinstein, for example, has recently introduced the “10-in-10 Act” that would raise fuel economy for vehicles from their current average of 25mpg to 35 mpg by the year 2017. If successful, this would save 2.5 million barrels of oil per day, which is about what’s imported from the Persian Gulf every day.

The human being in general has occasional trouble cooperating because of our evolutionary history. Humans and chimpanzees share over 98% of their genetic information. Technically, typical human and chimp homologs of proteins differ in only an average of two amino acids. )(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Chimpanzee)

The study of evolutionary history has shown us that for thousands of years, human ancestors and chimpanzees shared spaces and habitats (or, it’s better to say that they lived among each other) and they also needed to share space and food supply with gorillas. All of the primate species that had to share space with gorillas have developed certain aggressive tendencies that include: aggressive male coalitions, occasional rapes, beatings, and hierarchical political structures based on force.

Bonobos are a primate species that shows much more cooperative behavior – they evolved apart from the gorillas, chimps, and larger species. They now occupy the left bank of the Congo River, according to Dr. William Calvin of the University of Washington. (http://williamcalvin.com/teaching/bonobo.htm)

In the bonobo society, the females occupy an equal standing with males. Typically, groups of females make what can be called political decisions.

The important question is: can humans learn to cooperate long enough, so that investigations of sustainable environmental practices can succeed in getting the attention of decision-makers, who can then act? There are reasons to be optimistic. Forums such as the World Cup and the Olympic games allow for the mediation of nationalistic passions. There are also international political bodies like the UN or ECO, which while seemingly stumbling and ungainly, are occasionally effective at resolving disputes. And there are the acts of private citizens such as Bill Gates and George Soros, who donate millions of dollars to philanthropic and educational causes.

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Sustainability Principles

September 15th 2006 00:32

What practical definition can we give to the word “sustainability”? It is a relatively new, “gaia-like” concept, but it can easily conjure images of, at least in the American mind, Native American life before the onset of Manifest Destiny. It brings us into the more holistic, non-dualistic expression of territory, and territorial claims. While the political questions that may arise from some investigation of these views may complicate whatever agricultural angle this blog is meant to emblematize, a holistic interpretation of Man’s Role in Nature can of course, lead us there…

But for now, let’s consider a principle, before I get into “the practice”: sustainability means that we are connected to nature, part of it, inseparable from it, not “above” it, beyond it, “masters” of it, not even “stewards.”

We are more like farmers, in most nearly every concept of human life. If we bring to the greater ecosystem that which it requires, we will be rewarded in turn with the fruits. Soil has demands, requirements, it is yielding, and yet unyielding. In the era of Soviet Russia, a man named Trofim Lysenko became the figurehead for a policy that nearly destroyed Russian agriculture. His simple idea, backed by the infamous force of the government, was that Ideology could stand over Science. In other words, if the state required 10 million acres of potatoes, it was going to get it, even if they had to destroy pine forest in order to create room for the new crop. But it only took a generation of “experiment” to prove this false. One cannot plow the taiga to plant potatoes, (the ground is too acidic) no matter what the Politburo says.

It has occasionally also been difficult for the American government to perceive this principle, which is how I would define a primary principle of sustainability: Science before Ideology. It sometimes brings the mind uncomfortably close to a like proposition: Changeability before Fixedness. But we have had our moments when at least the spirit of preservation held sway, such as the creation of the Forest Service by the outdoorsman president Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.

If we looked at the world through scientific eyes, if each of us had a fundamental scientific education – which I can suggest here as at least two courses beyond the high school level in evolution, ecology, biology and critical thinking, than the concept of sustainability would become easier to grasp. Only through science can we achieve exactness and accuracy in understanding the world, all ideology is only an approximation.

The next principle is to share what you know. This itself can be a great difficulty.

-ITO