Daily Budget

I've been thinking about this concept of "green" a lot lately. I'm starting to get it. For a rural agricultural producer the "green trend" is a little puzzling. Especially the part where people who would starve to death in a month if the oil got shut off recommend earnestly that you go "organic."

The green trend seems to be a consciousness-raising campaign for consumers - all the people who work in offices and who sip lattes and have no idea where the coffee, milk and paper-cup came from.

At it's best "green" seems to be shorthand for "lessen mindless waste of resources and yet not give up any of the comforts of being a privileged citizen of the first world."

Here's the part where it gets dicey. I saw a clip of "Food Inc." where someone says "consumers have to demand healthy food!" That word "demand" bothers me. We've created a "consumer society" in the US. So demanding something as a consumer can be very effective in the short run. And healthier food is certainly a valid issue as 90% of the stuff in the average store (even health food store) is rubbish. Convenient rubbish. But demand only works if : 1. there is a solvent company/business model/ food system to make your demand upon, and 2. you support your demand by buying the healthier products and keeping the company/supply-chain that is trying to cater to your demand afloat. That word "demand" assumes a whole lot of work, organization, and management. Demanding is not enough. Everyone needs to look at their own lives and see what they are producing.

I've been reading a brain-candy-ish book on the oil industry "Oil on the Brain." The writer takes us on an oil-themed tour of the world: LA gas station, Long Beach refinery, East Texas oil rig, US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, NYMEX oil exchange, Venezuela, Chad, Nigeria, China, and back to the gas-station. None of it is very pretty. And yet this is what we are. It's how our lives work. We've all been eating oil for decades. What are we creating with it? I hope that it is more than a consumer lifestyle, which we will somewhat mitigate by being green. What is the point of all of our busy lives? How will we balance the budget of our own daily lives, so that we all produce or create a little more than we consume?

So I took my annual trip out of Hawai'i to the "mainland. I went to Albuquerque. I like Albuquerque quite a bit. First of all there was a lot of empty land all around the city. Desert for miles, punctuated by occasional geometries of green - irrigated alfalfa fields I'm assuming. Flying into the city there were more fields of green, this time with buildings and house interspersed. From the direction we took flying in, there were none of those tracts of pretentious houses built in the great Housing Bubble of the last 2o years. There were some pretentious country manor-type houses fronted by 5 acres of horse pasture, mixed in with fields of row crops and more alfalfa. This was a city with it's toes still in the country, which for me is a very good sign. I was visiting Albuquerque for the trienniel meeting of the National Association of Resource Conservation & Development Councils - a kind of NGO sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture.

I got to the conference late but just in time to hear the keynote speaker, Dr. Lowell Catlett, a agricultural economist, futurist, and Dean of the Department of Agriculture at the University of New Mexico. I fell in love instantly. Dr. Catlett took us on a roller-coaster ride of ideas and stories. Here's the refrain: "You cannot have healthy humans if they are separated from plants and animals!!!

He was preaching to the choir, of course. If there was one thing that binds the group of 800 representatives from councils across the country, it was that all of us, despite all societal clues and suggestions to go for the easy money, have chosen to live in the most intimate and strenuous relationhip to plants and animals possible - that of farmers and ranchers.

But Dr. Catlett made this point: science and the public are catching up to us. His speech was titled "The Greening of America." The largely instinctive choice we all made decades ago to attend to the plants and animals is now being played out as a national "green" trend.
This trend rides an inarticulate longing and a massive accumulation of wealth - "I want a farm - I don't know why." This presents, in Dr. Catlett's view, a huge opportunity for those in agriculture and conservation to provide these born-again farmers and ranchers with the services they need to fulfill their dreams. Interesting...