Thursday, April 29, 2010

Organic Pt. 3

I'm trying to articulate, hopefully once and for all, the reasons for not jumping on the certified organic wagon. There are a lot of things that one just inherits from an agricultural upbringing - ways of perceiving, thinking, making decisions - that are ingrained into one's very consciousness and therefore hard to develop into words and arguments. I'd like to get it out and move on, really.
I don't want to go the organic route because the scale is all wrong for me. It seems like a micro-solution to a micro-problem. Part of the scale-thing is that we ranch on 10,000 acres, a good part of it infested with an invasive weed - the dreaded popoki - that sports poisoned talons on every milimeter of vine, twig, merest wisp of leaf. I reserve the right to retaliate in kind, even if it is bad karma. (Yes, I do have a Republican streak.)
But the other part of the question of scale has more to do with re-thinking our present paradigm. To go organic I would have to focus on technical questions, on figuring out how to do what I do with the products listed by the OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute). And, honestly, we've got bigger problems coming at us like a freight train in a tunnel. Or worse coming at our kids. Organic is going to be a moot point a whole lot sooner than we'd all like. The big question for me is not whether my own deal is or is not organic, it's whether we can think through the post peak-oil, post-global structural questions with nimble wit and gutsy fortitude in time for our kids to have a good kind of world. So that's what I'm going after. And organic, heirloom tomatoes will be in there someplace, I dearly hope.

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