Since mid-September, actions inspired by the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York have awakened the imaginations of people [...]]]> This commentary by Brian Tokar will appear in the winter issue of Broadcast, the newsletter of SEEDS, the Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School, based in Seattle and Vashon, Washington:

At Foley Square, N17, © Eliot Tokar

Since mid-September, actions inspired by the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York have awakened the imaginations of people worldwide. Just as the movement approached its two-month anniversary in mid-November, several of the founding Occupations across the US fell victim to apparently highly-coordinated police raids. While the coming of winter was long-predicted to shift the focus of the Occupy movement, the expulsion of iconic tent encampments in New York, Oakland, and other cities has invigorated and intensified discussions about the movement’s next steps and its longer-term strategies.

Inspired in part by the Arab Spring events in Tahrir Square and beyond, the Occupy movement initially focused on the physical occupation of public space. But it’s always been about much more than that. The transcendent quality of the physical occupations was elaborated in a recent commentary by the Cincinnati-based author/activist Dan LaBotz, originally written for the journal New Politics. He described in rich detail how this fall’s Occupations resonate with the long history of popular revolts and occupations of public squares that, since ancient times, were often rooted in the utopian dimensions of the city itself. His outlook strongly resonates with social ecologist Murray Bookchin’s efforts, beginning in the mid-1960s, to reclaim the city’s historic legacy of freedom for today’s revolutionaries.

“We are witnessing something that goes beyond the symbolic,” LaBotz wrote, “something that both threatens the deep foundations of our social structure and, equally important-no, more important- something that touches our deepest spiritual yearnings. The occupation is utopian in the best sense. Whatever its political program, its practice says: ‘We will no longer live in hatred and competition. We will live in love and community.’”

Even the Occupy movement’s oft-criticized resistance to focusing on achievable, short-term “demands” speaks to its long-range, utopian character. Rolling Stone reporter and long-time critic of Wall Street’s excesses, Matt Taibbi describes how, after some initial skepticism, he was soon won over by Occupy Wall Street:

On the Brooklyn Bridge, N17, © Eliot Tokar

“Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become… We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.”

For some 30 years, the progressive Left in the US has been on the defensive. Against a unified, ideologically-driven assault against all of the social progress of the twentieth century, we’ve learned to fight one battle at a time, to “frame” our issues carefully and often circumspectly, and to try not to rock the boat too much. We have been up against a sometimes frightening confluence of neoliberal economic policies – privatization, deregulation, shredding safety nets, reorienting economies toward global trade – and a fundamentalist “culture war” that has mobilized significant numbers of disenfranchised people in a reactionary crusade to defend “traditional values.” We’ve insisted that “another world is possible,” but often only believed it in the most abstract of terms.

Now, for the first time in decades, the terms of the conversation are shifting. People are fed up, and no longer too timid nor too defeated to speak out loudly against the status quo, and for a different kind of society. We have learned that we can challenge financial elites, defend labor rights, call to overturn capitalism, and our numbers continue to grow. In cities large and small, we experience the exhilaration of direct democracy, of reclaiming public spaces, and of reinventing our future. And we know that we are not going to disappear when elites respond with too many police, or even with small victories.

This movement, with its unbounded creativity, is going to decide its own future. Some trade unionists, Move-On bloggers, and people tied to the Democratic establishment want it to be about the 2012 congressional elections and about reclaiming the long-discredited “American dream.” Some movement participants will, understandably, choose to become involved in the elections. But, for the first time in recent memory, the election may not turn out to be the center of our attention. Instead of a movement narrowing its sites to elect candidates, the candidates may just have to listen to the much farther-reaching demands of this movement. If they don’t – if they instead continue to harp on deficits, budget cuts, and reforms constrained by the demands of Wall Street – they’ll simply make themselves irrelevant.

Occupy Wall Street and its counterparts across the country and around the world have exposed the underside of an economic system that only benefits the wealthiest 1 percent – or less – and begun a new, potentially revolutionary conversation. With the coming of winter, it will evolve in many directions: toward occupying abandoned urban spaces, confronting politicians and CEOs, intervening against foreclosures, organizing university campuses, and more. The movement – and its emerging vision of a different kind of world – will continue to grow and evolve.

In a recent ZNet column, activist scholar Marina Sitrin described what it’s like in Spain today, in the aftermath of their summer 2011 uprising. “[W]hile the indignado movement no longer has encampments, its presence is felt everywhere,” she wrote, most notably in a new flowering of cooperatives in all spheres of life. It has evolved “to the point that in some places in Spain it is almost possible to live without having to depend on the resources hoarded by the 1 percent.” Perhaps not since the anti-nuclear power actions of the 1970s have we seen a movement so dedicated to uniting the oppositional and reconstructive dimensions of radical politics. As snow begins to blanket the North (and the rainy season arrives in the Northwest), we can already feel the anticipation of the Spring awakenings to come.

NOTE: This article was published in the August 2010 issue of The Organic Standard, an international on-line publication aimed at policy makers, certifiers and the organic trade, published by Grolink AB, a Swedish consulting company (www.organicstandard.com).

This is the [...]]]> Originally published at: http://chelseagreen.com/blogs/gracegershuny/

Part I – History of organic standard-setting and controversies

NOTE: This article was published in the August 2010 issue of The Organic Standard, an international on-line publication aimed at policy makers, certifiers and the organic trade, published by Grolink AB, a Swedish consulting company (www.organicstandard.com).

This is the first of a three-part series that The Organic Standard (TOS) will publish on the story of organic standards in the USA. The series will cover the earliest developments right up to the current situation, and it will examine the conflicts that have been always present in how ‘organic’ is understood to mean.

The story is told by Grace Gershuny, and is deliberately expressed from her perspective. Grace presents herself as ‘an early pioneer of organic certification and a leader at the national level, organising among grassroots organic farm groups in the US, then joining the NOP staff to help write the regulations that were so vehemently opposed by my former colleagues. For the past ten years I have worked as a policy consultant, teacher and organic inspector for various companies and organisations.’

When writing this series, which has been largely based on her own experience, Grace´s intention was not to present an ’objective’ report, but as a call to the organic community to reexamine their assumptions about the purpose and limits of organic standard-setting as a means of realising the larger organic principles.

Background and scope of this article

The organic community in North America has long been divided along philosophical and ideological lines. While the organic pioneers have mainly been identified with the ‘counterculture’ and its associated political and social movements, increasing mainstream acceptance has resulted in the engagement of more pragmatic and business-oriented players. Tension between the ‘grassroots’ (small-scale, locally focused organic farming advocates), and the ‘suits’ (middlemen, manufacturers and distributors seeking to profit from the rapidly growing organic sector) has been a continual factor in drawing battle lines over organic standards and requirements, especially with the onset of the Federal regulation.

Regulation of the organic label by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is now nearly universally recognised as a positive achievement with respect to stimulating growth of the market. Its introduction has pulled with it increased organic production along with increased investment in research and public recognition of the benefits of organic agriculture. However, there are those who regard government regulation of the organic movement with suspicion and even hostility, always ready to assume the worst and often finding their suspicions justified. This suspicion has been widely and repeatedly communicated within the progressive social activist community, which has long held as a given (not without justification) that the USDA is a captive of corporate industrial agribusiness interests. This suspicion has created a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, and is now threatening to undermine public confidence in the credibility of the organic label

Though the current economic recession has depressed the growth of the organic market, it is still expanding, growing by about 5% last year, while in comparison conventional food sales were flat or shrinking. However, while organic food (and non-food products) now comprises about 3.5% of the food system in the US, at less than 1% it still accounts for a tiny fraction of domestic agricultural production.

Many young activists, amplified by popular writers such as Michael Pollan, and his book ‘The Omnivore´s Dilemma’ and by films such as ‘Food, Inc.’, regard the USDA organic label as compromised at best, and possibly meaningless. There is also an increasing proliferation of – and confusion about – terms and eco-labels such as ‘natural’, ‘sustainable’, ‘green’, ‘fair trade’, ‘humane’ and ‘local.’ Some of these labels include transparent standards and third party verification, but most do not; many claim to be ‘beyond organic’. A long time administrator of a respected organic farming organisation recently confided that ‘it’s almost embarrassing to refer to ourselves as organic’.

This three-part article will explore the history of organic standard setting in the US, focusing on the role of social activist groups advocating for various forms of ‘alternative agriculture’, including family farm, environmental and consumer protection agendas. How has this activity affected the development of the USDA National Organic Program (NOP)? To what extent do misconceptions and misleading information circulated by self-appointed ‘watchdogs of organic integrity’ contradict the organic vision and work against the interests of small-scale organic farmers?

Organic Standards before the OFPA (US organic law)

Organic certification in the US began in the early 1970s, initiated through groups of like-minded farmers and would-be farmers in those regions, primarily on the West coast and a bit later in the Northeast, where the organic movement was seeking to define itself. Administration, inspection and decision-making were volunteer based, with the certified farmers approving standards and conducting peer reviews. Standards and certification procedures were borrowed freely from other organisations, and all had a local or regional focus.

Although there were some grain producers, particularly in Midwestern states such as Minnesota, the majority of certification in both western and eastern regions was for fresh produce. Initially there was little awareness of post-harvest or handling concerns, or involvement by middlemen or processors. Very little attention was given to livestock or dairy standards, though the importance of including some livestock as part of the farming system was considered key from the start.

Although the rationale for involvement in certification included market development and consumer assurance, consumers were rarely represented in early standards discussions. The focus was on what made sense ecologically in that region, as well as the practicality of different requirements for working farms. The scientific justification for a given practice was key, and it was believed that consumers would neither understand nor care about the technical details. The promise of ‘food you can trust’ was backed up by a system of farmers watching over each other.

In the Northeast, the first certification programme for the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) was developed in 1977. However, primarily due to a lack of market demand for certification those early years were characterised by a low level of participation – about five producers registering per year through the early 1980s.

Markets in this region were almost exclusively local food cooperatives, restaurants and small health food stores, as well as direct sales at farm stands and farmers markets. There were a few producer cooperatives and larger growers who dealt with wholesale markets such as cooperative distributors. Those who sold direct to consumers, including early community supported agriculture farms, generally saw no need for certification, although an early experience with fraud convinced many of its importance.

The pivotal year for the organic community in the Northeast and the whole of the US was 1984. Certification in the Northeast was substantially boosted by the arrival of a large organic produce wholesaler who sought suppliers from a different state and required certification. Under their sponsorship the Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA) was initiated as a pilot project. This became the first nationwide chapter-based certification programme to operate under a single set of standards.

It was at this time that IFOAM called a North American meeting of organic certifiers and businesses to consider developing unified standards. For the first time representatives of grassroots organic organisations and organic processors and marketers met to work together on common concerns. From this meeting the Organic Foods Production Association of North America (OFPANA), which later changed its name to the Organic Trade Association (OTA), was born. While the grassroots organic organisations played a central role in its formation, many of them have since abandoned the OTA, refusing to collaborate with ‘corporate organics’, whom they view as having control of the organisation.

OFPANA/OTA’s first project was to create unified ‘Guidelines for the Organic Industry’, which was to form the basis for evaluating and then accrediting standards and certification programmes. In the course of developing this document the standards from all known North American certification programmes, including the handful of organic programmes established by state agriculture departments, were compared. There was remarkable consistency among the standards, with only a few variations such as whether or not the use of Chilean nitrate was permitted and different lengths of the conversion period. There were regional differences in other aspects, such as allowance for livestock medications in the case of illness and use of some non-organic livestock feed.

These differences were generally covered under ‘grey areas’ that allowed use of ‘restricted’ or ‘regulated’ practices and substances under certain specified conditions. Farm plans were universally required to document what practices were used, provide justification for use of any ‘restricted’ practices (based on monitoring of conditions in the field), and describe how the farmer would move away from reliance on them. This system provided ultimate flexibility to allow consistent application of clear organic principles to different ecological conditions, in contrast to a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

Meanwhile the problems of multiple competing and inconsistent certification systems were mounting. Certifiers would not accept each others’ certifications, and states had conflicting labelling rules. Despite the similarities of their standards, every certifier claimed theirs to be the ‘highest’ or ‘strictest’, and mutual distrust was rampant. Producers often needed multiple certifications for different markets, and manufacturers of multi-ingredient organic products had huge headaches working with suppliers whose certificates were not accepted by their own certifier. It was, in short, a mess.

With a mission to unite the industry, OFPANA/OTA originally intended to develop an accreditation programme for mutual recognition amongst certifiers. This idea was later picked up by IFOAM, although the reciprocity part did not quite happen. Several meetings were held with the aim of promoting voluntary reciprocity agreements between certifiers, without success.

Polarisation and divisiveness in the US organic community has, sadly, been one of its defining features, despite various attempts at unity. The failure of this voluntary reciprocity effort led directly to calls for federal legislation to facilitate interstate trade in organic products under consistent national standards.

Part 2 – Organic standards become law

This part appears in the September, 2010 issue of The Organic Standard, at www.organicstandard.com.

The story begins with two controversies over organic standards that later determined the direction of the OFPA. The newly formed Organic Trade Association (OTA, then known as OFPANA), produced a set of “Guidelines for the Organic Industry” in 1986 (as noted in Part 1). These guidelines were based on three overarching precepts that distinguish organic standards from other types of standards:

1. Organic standards address the process of producing an agricultural product, rather than any measurable quality of the product itself.

2. Organic standards encourage the most environmentally sound farm practices, with flexibility to allow for geographic and site-specific differences, referred to as “agronomic responsibility.”

3. Organic standards require producers to demonstrate continual improvement in the quality of their management system, as evidenced by improved soil and water quality, crop quality, biological diversity and other factors outlined in a farm plan.

The first of these came into question when a laboratory owner argued that the absence of pesticide residues, and possibly also nutritional analysis of a product, should be the primary focus of organic standards. Several OTA/OFPANA members drafted a position paper arguing that the organic nature of a product resulted from a holistic set of attributes and production methods which could not be based on laboratory analysis of product quality. This position was affirmed by the Board of Directors.

The second and more contentious issue turned on the question of whether the use of specific farm inputs should be allowed or prohibited based on their origin from either natural or synthetic sources, or whether the criterion of “agronomic responsibility’ was most important for evaluating farm inputs. This generated a heated debate, with the Board split fairly evenly. Proponents of the “origin of materials” criterion acknowledged that this was neither scientifically valid nor consistent with prevailing norms for organic production methods. However, they argued that consumers had come to expect that organic food was produced without the use of “synthetic chemicals,” and that this expectation should not be violated.

The membership was asked to vote by mail for the position they favored. By a narrow margin the tally resulted in a majority favoring “origin of materials” as the basis for organic standards. The OTA/OFPANA Board then changed the Guidelines to prohibit all synthetic materials, and to establish criteria by which some synthetics (for example, dormant oil for fruit trees) might be considered acceptable on a case by case basis. This approach was later enshrined in the OFPA, with the responsibility for determining which synthetics should be allowed and which “naturals” should be prohibited given to the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB).

Pressure mounts for legislation

Although a few members of Congress had previously sponsored organic labeling bills, none were supported by the organic community. Then, early in 1989 a popular television news magazine (60 Minutes) aired an exposé about the dangers of the synthetic growth regulator Alar, widely used on apples to allow harvest of the whole crop at once. Overnight, supermarkets started featuring displays of apples that were claimed to be “organic.”

What came to be known as “Alar Sunday” resulted in a clamor by consumer groups for legislation to protect the public from fraudulent organic claims. It soon became known that Senator Patrick Leahy, a strong supporter of sustainable agriculture, had taken up the task. With the threat of Federal legislation looming, the grassroots organic organizations that had developed and refined the system of organic certification saw the need to band together to help shape the bill to reflect the farmer groups’ understanding of what ‘organic’ really meant.

Under the aegis of OTA/OFPANA, a national meeting of the grassroots organic producer groups was held in December of 1989. Calling itself the Organic Farmers Associations Council (OFAC), representatives from producer groups all over the US met – many for the first time – to agree on common principles and definitions of organic agriculture and to dialogue with Senator Leahy’s staffer, Kathleen Merrigan, about provisions that should be included in the law. This coalition was hardly unanimous in its support for Federal organic legislation, but the leadership helped convince their members that if they didn’t get involved it would be drafted without them – a potentially disastrous situation for organic farmers.

A victory for the grassroots organic producers

As legislative language was being hammered out, OFAC put together a coalition of consumer and environmental groups, along with the organic farm constituency. Other players also got into the act, including a group of organic manufacturers and business people who hired an expensive Washington lobbying firm. Credit for the passage of the law, however, truly belongs to the grassroots organizing effort – phone calls, letters and personal testimony from organic farmers and consumer representatives from all regions of the US put enough pressure on key Congress people to force an unprecedented floor vote in the House of Representatives, despite the opposition of the House Agriculture Committee and the USDA (US Department of Agriculture).

The law that was finally passed includes a blanket prohibition on ‘synthetic’ substances and allowance for ‘natural’ ones, with the possibility of exceptions as discussed previously. It also assigned to USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) the task of implementation, including developing programs to certify organic operations as well as to accredit organizations who could carry out the certification program on its behalf. Despite a number of internal contradictions and errors in the law, no technical corrections were requested by USDA, which had opposed the law and therefore also requested no funding from Congress to implement it.

The law established the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) as a Federal advisory board charged with oversight of the National List of permitted synthetic and prohibited natural substances, as well as offering general guidance to the USDA. The first 15 member NOSB was not appointed until 1992, when the administration changed in Washington. With only one half-time staff person assigned to manage the new program within USDA, the NOSB’s volunteer industry representatives took the initiative to begin drafting regulations—a task normally assumed solely by the agency staff. They circulated drafts of all aspects of the expected regulation and held a series of meetings to receive public comment, resulting in a set of final recommendations that were submitted to USDA in 1994.

Creation of the NOP

With a more sympathetic administration, some resources became available to begin implementation of the National Organic Program (NOP). The first couple of full-time staff members were hired in 1993, and then in 1994 an additional handful were brought on – including one recruited from the organic community who was knowledgeable about organic principles and practices: this author.

The original few NOP staff members were career bureaucrats who had had some previous involvement in organics, and were committed to crafting a regulation that would honor the true spirit of the organic vision and be workable for small farmers, as well as being legally airtight. Not an easy task.

The author’s first assignment was to draft a set of organic principles, which was ultimately approved by the NOSB with minor amendments, and later condensed into a definition of “a System of Organic Farming and Handling” or SOFAH. This definition became the SOFAH on which the entire regulation was designed to rest, a yardstick for determining the compatibility of a given practice with the organic vision.

The first complete draft of the regulation took another three years to finish. In addition to the law itself (which, absent early technical corrections, included significant contradictory and ambiguous language), the NOSB’s recommendations and the OFPANA/OTA Guidelines were key reference documents.

Many battles were fought in the course of drafting the rules. Almost every agency within the USDA, as well as parts of US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was affected by and had to approve the document. In addition to internal struggles, the relationship between the NOP staff and some members of the organic community, including the NOSB, was adversarial from the start. There were many who never wanted the law to begin with, and almost everyone distrusted the USDA to get it right. Ironically, a common accusation was that USDA was trying to “take over” organic standards. This antagonism created more delays and frustration for everyone.

Finally, in June of 1997 a draft was approved by all necessary agencies, including the Secretary of Agriculture. The fight to prohibit both genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and irradiation for organic production – both of which were (and are) actively promoted in other branches of USDA – had been won. Unfortunately, there was one more government hurdle to overcome – the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). They had to approve any new ‘significant’ regulations and were unwilling to accept the prohibitions on GMOs and irradiation, also demanding several other changes that effectively gutted the organic vision embedded in the draft. The only option left to the staff was to make the changes required and request public comment about the now missing prohibitions. The proposed rule was published in December of 1997.

Although the staff had protested strongly at the changes and warned senior officials about the kind of response to expect, nobody was prepared for the onslaught of public outrage that followed. Self-appointed “watchdogs of organic integrity” spread distorted information that whipped up hysteria about corporate agribusiness-controlled bureaucrats seeking to undermine the meaning of organic and “water down the standards.” This was the first proposed rule to accept public comments via email, and it generated a record 275,000+ mostly negative messages – the majority of them form letters circulated through consumer networks and retailers. The personal attacks and utter nonsense coming from former colleagues and friends was crushing.

The uproar resulted in making scapegoats of the NOP staff members who truly cared about the organic vision and the impact of the new rules on small organic farmers. A new NOP Program Manager was hired in 1998, who responded to political pressure from the community by discarding the initial proposal and starting over. It took another year to create a new proposed rule, deleting the ‘SOFAH’ definition and substituting “practice standards” for more flexible criteria of compatibility with a system of organic farming and handling, among other changes considered to be “higher” standards.

With the USDA hierarchy now chastened by public anger, the path to finalization was much smoother than previously. In the Fall of 1999, OFPA author Kathleen Merrigan (today Deputy Secretary of Agriculture) was appointed AMS Administrator and was able to midwife the publication of the final rule at the end of the year, just before the next change of administration in Washington. Before an organic producer or handler could be certified in compliance with the NOP an initial group of accredited certifying agents would first have to be accredited—the new rule would thus not be fully implemented until 2002.

The repercussions of these events continue to be felt in the ongoing regulatory approach that accedes to public demands for “stricter” standards, to the detriment of small organic producers and, in this author’s opinion, the true organic vision. The third and final segment of this series will examine the development of the NOP since implementation, and the questions raised by younger generations of food activists as the organic industry appears increasingly dominated by global big business and incomprehensible regulatory complexity.

Part 3 – What is the future of organic?

The general message communicated by the activist community was that the new regulation was far from perfect, but acceptable, but that the NOP (and of course the rest of USDA) was still not to be trusted. Since then periodic action alerts have stimulated a flurry of emails and public comments to avert another “sneak attack” on organic integrity, usually by some corporate organic evildoer seeking to weaken the standards. A few ‘watchdog’ organizations have garnered substantial donations and foundation support to lead the charge to protect organic integrity by keeping the standards as high as possible.

Today the growth of the organic industry appears unstoppable. Despite the economic crisis and general downturn in sales of consumer goods, organic sales have continued to increase, albeit at a more modest rate. Unquestionably, organic has entered the mainstream, and can be found in virtually any conventional store, available to consumers who would never patronize a natural foods market. Research funds have started to flow to organic-oriented farm technologies, and conventional universities offer coursework and concentrations in organic and sustainable agriculture.

To many in the activist community, including some pioneering organic advocates, this success represents a defeat of the vision of transformation of the food system – a sell-out of true organic values to the globalized industrial monoculture system that drives out small farmers and mass produces uniform, lesser quality products that are processed and distributed via exploitive, profit-driven corporate entities. While they may admit that there is much to celebrate in increased numbers of small organic producers and support for local, artisanal foods, they see this improvement as coming in spite of, not as a result of, the federal regulation of organic.

Organic Expansion at USDA

The NOP today has evolved from a minor program in a small division of the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) to its own division, with its budget and staff doubling in the past year. Miles McEvoy, former Director of the Washington State organic program, is now Deputy AMS Administrator in charge of the NOP. Kathleen Merrigan, author of the OFPA and AMS Administrator during the last months of finalizing the NOP regulation, is now Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, and has created the high level position of Organic Program Coordinator to better integrate organic into every aspect of USDA.

NOSB (National Organic Standards Board) meetings are held twice a year, and the amount of time and effort needed by this all volunteer committee to keep up with its responsibilities mounts geometrically. In the aftermath of the first proposed rule, when the relationship between NOP and the NOSB was strained, the NOP made a political decision not to act on any standards-related issue until receiving a recommendation from the NOSB. There remains widespread public misunderstanding of the NOSB’s strictly advisory role, although the NOP-NOSB relationship has gradually become a more collaborative one.

One topic that continues to occupy endless hours of committee time, public input energy, and industry concern is the question of classification of materials: Should a given substance be considered synthetic or nonsynthetic? Agricultural or nonagricultural? As an example of the inordinate impact of these questions, the upcoming NOSB meeting agenda includes a recommendation to classify Corn Steep Liquor (CSL), a byproduct of the wet milling of corn, as synthetic. CSL is widely used as an ingredient in commercial organic-approved fertilizer formulations, due to its high nitrogen content, and classifying it as synthetic would make it prohibited as a fertilizer ingredient. Arguments hinge around the OFPA and NOP definition of synthetic[1] and the secondary definition of chemical change. The discussion involves fine distinctions about different types of chemical reactions. The question remains: How is this distinction relevant to organic agriculture?

Harvey Splits the Organic Community

Shortly after NOP implementation an organic inspector and blueberry producer named Arthur Harvey filed a lawsuit against the NOP, alleging that parts of the regulations were inconsistent with the law. Although the suit was at first overruled, Harvey persisted and convinced many of the grassroots organic and sustainable farm organizations to sign on as amici (supporters of his claims). An appellate court overturned much of the earlier decision and ordered the NOP to bring its standards and program into compliance.

The most significant impact of the Harvey victory was the interpretation that the law did not allow for any synthetic substances to be used as ingredients in or on organically labeled products. This was one of the parts of the law that contained ambiguous and contradictory language, about which the consensus of the community had been to permit some synthetic substances to be used in handling, and later make appropriate technical corrections to clarify the law. Examples of these substances, all approved by the NOSB for inclusion on the National List, are ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), magnesium chloride (used to make tofu), and leavening agents used as ingredients in baking powder.[2]

The previous consensus was thus broken by those groups who signed on as amici to the Harvey case, and who now came into direct conflict with the rapidly growing organic business sector, represented by OTA (the Organic Trade Association). Numerous organic manufacturers had by this time begun to market hundreds if not thousands of products legitimately labeled “organic” that would no longer be able to use the USDA organic seal. For example, most organic sugar is filtered to remove impurities, through the use of calcium hydroxide or slaked lime as a processing aid. The result of the Harvey decision would be that refined sugar could no longer be considered organic, but only represented or labeled as “made with organic ingredients.” This would then disqualify many organic products that contain a significant percentage of refined sugar, such as sweetened drinks, chocolates and cookies, from displaying the coveted USDA organic label.

Finally, OTA decided to do something about the looming catastrophe unleashed by Harvey, and lobbied successfully for a minor change in the OFPA in 2005. Once again the self-appointed ‘watchdogs of organic integrity’ unleashed a barrage of attacks, charging that allowing use of ‘synthetic chemicals’ in organic foods undermined confidence in the organic label and permitted the takeover of organic by corporate interests.

Not much later a genuine ‘sneak attack’ on the OFPA occurred when an amendment was inserted allowing up to 20% of nonorganic feed to be given to organic livestock. A poultry company in Georgia had asked their Senator to introduce this item via a routine budget bill, claiming it was necessitated by the high cost of organic feed grain. Senator Leahy (original sponsor of the OFPA) was again enlisted by the community, including OTA, to put the law back the way it was, but necessitating political tradeoffs such as allowing organic certification for wild caught seafood.

Beating the Drum for Higher Standards

By the middle of the decade the NOP had grown considerably, but was still vastly understaffed as the industry it was charged with regulating grew by around 20% a year. Dealing with the Harvey lawsuit and the mandated changes to the regulation had drained significant staff time and again created an atmosphere of hostility, not only between the organic community and the NOP, but between different sectors within the community.

Since that time the activist sector has focused primarily on demands for stricter livestock and dairy standards. In 2007 a Wisconsin based advocacy group sued a large organic dairy producer, as well as the USDA, for mislabeling milk as organic because animals were not being managed on pasture as called for in the regulation. Aggressive publicity fanned consumer concerns by painting a picture of corporate friendly USDA allowing deceptive practices by large animal confinement operations, calling into question the trustworthiness of the industry in general as well as the regulators.

The NOP responded with a proposed regulation on access to pasture for ruminants that included some draconian requirements, such as requiring animals to be outdoors year round, with exceptions only for “hazardous” weather events. The tactic of forcing the community to request somewhat looser standards succeeded, with the final rule reflecting a much more moderate approach. The impact on small livestock producers remains to be seen, as the increased documentation of feeding practices and cost of verifying those practices is felt.

Conclusion: Questions to Consider

The pioneers of organic agriculture as well as the younger generation of organic producers continue to grumble about compulsory certification and USDA “stealing” the organic label. Many small organic producers have either dropped out of organic certification altogether or switched to concepts like “Farmers Pledge,” a form of participatory guarantee system. “Everything I Want to Do is Illegal” proclaims Joel Salatin, a Virginia farmer featured prominently in the film, Food, Inc., whose book by that title bemoans the encroachment of federal bureaucrats into regulation of the “O” word.

An article in The New York Times from April of 2010 describes the situation of some organic farmers in upstate New York, who “can’t make a living because it is so expensive for them to comply with the federal certification requirements for organic foods.” [3] Food system activists almost universally focus on promoting local foods and more direct farmer-consumer relationships. Some denigrate ‘corporate organic’ food that comes from far away or dismiss as not credible organic products obtained from large retail chains. An informal poll about perceptions of organic standards and regulation, conducted by the author in several classes and workshops, reveals that student activists who consider themselves well informed and concerned about food system issues generally agree that organic has been corrupted by corporate interests who have weakened the standards to the point of being meaningless.

Other food system activists aim to go “beyond organic,” and look to ecolabel schemes or social criteria such as fair trade, often denigrating organic standards for failing to include preferences for small farmers or requirements for labor conditions. Few question the assumption that more restrictive or complicated standards benefit smaller producers, although the reverse is generally shown to be true.

Besides the constant message of distrust of USDA organic, mostly from the political left, the opposition of conventional agri-business to government support of organics has also intensified. Organic producers are portrayed as relying on unscientific, outmoded methods that cannot feed the world’s growing population.

There are many questions to consider as the organic community and its regulatory mechanisms move forward. Does it make sense to restrict the organic label to only those who have the wherewithal to meet ever escalating bureaucratic requirements? Should consumer perceptions and expectations about organic purity and avoidance of ‘synthetic chemicals’ dictate standards? Can the social and ecological damage done by market driven system that has turned food into a mass produced commodity be reversed through a market-based strategy?

Without doubt organic agriculture represents an important part of the solution to the global climate crisis now confronting us, in addition to myriad other problems of environmental degradation and their human health consequences attributable to conventional agriculture. This potential can only be realized if organic production expands much faster than is currently happening, at least in North America, where still less than 1% of agricultural land is farmed organically.

Organic production alone cannot solve all the problems of the food system. Saddling organic producers and handlers with ever “higher” standards, and adding on desirable social criteria, creates unnecessary obstacles to solving the problems that organic production can solve. Activists who are outraged at large corporations getting involved in organics should ask themselves to what extent they are bolstering the argument, often made by conventional agribusiness, that organic can never be more than a small niche market that caters to the elite and the fanatic—and could never feed the world.

One corollary to the adage that we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, is that we should not make the good into our enemy because it is not perfect.

Notes:

[1] Synthetic is defined as “a substance that is formulated or manufactured by a chemical process or by a process that chemically changes a substance extracted from naturally occurring plant, animal, or mineral sources, except that such term shall not apply to substances created by naturally occurring biological processes.”

[2] Refer to Section 205.605(b) of the National List, Nonagricultural (non-organic) substances allowed as ingredients in or on processed products labeled as “organic” or “made with organic (specified ingredients or food groups(s)).

[3] Leonard, Devin: Green Gone Wrong, NY Times, 4/2/10

Links:

NOP Home Page: http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateA&navID=NationalOrganicProgram&leftNav=NationalOrganicProgram&page=NOPNationalOrganicProgramHome&acct=AMSPW

OFPA, as amended in 2005: http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/getfile?dDocName=STELPRDC5060370&acct=nopgeninfo

Organic Trade Association (OTA): www.ota.com

Many communities in New England have a tradition of town meeting, dating back to the American Revolution. In recent years, activists have brought campaigns to these institutions on a range of issues, including nuclear energy, climate policies, civil liberties, U.S. wars, and genetic [...]]]> (This article was published by Communalism: A Social Ecology Journal, Issue #2 Spring/Summer 2010)

Many communities in New England have a tradition of town meeting, dating back to the American Revolution. In recent years, activists have brought campaigns to these institutions on a range of issues, including nuclear energy, climate policies, civil liberties, U.S. wars, and genetic engineering. What have been the strengths and weaknesses of this strategy? And what can communalists around the world learn from this form of local organizing?

Just as there is a difference between efforts aimed merely at reforming society and efforts that aim for revolutionary transformation, there is also a difference between speaking out against the abuses of the current social order and building the political power of people to uproot its pillars. The aim of communalists is not only to “give voice” to marginalized peoples, ideas and political alternatives, but also to build political institutions that directly empower people to define and adopt policies guiding public matters of everyday life.

Searching for ways to practice this kind of politics, I have devoted a substantial effort to a variety of campaigns that I collectively refer to as town meeting advocacy. A town meeting advocacy campaign is one in which a committed group of citizens within a town uses the town meeting process to make a non-binding political statement (called a resolution) regarding a substantive and controversial political issue. This form of activism is related to a form of local government only existing in certain parts of the U.S. However, examining the potentials and pitfalls of town meeting advocacy can help inform the ongoing efforts of communalists around the world to root our political struggle in municipal institutions.

New England Town Meetings

Town meeting advocacy plays out within the venue of town meeting government, which remains the official municipal governance structure for a large number of municipalities in New England – especially Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. In Massachusetts, there are 302 municipalities governed by town meeting and in Vermont, there are 246. Town meeting is a face-to-face form of government that is potentially more open to public participation than federal and state representative bodies and city councils, which like the rest of the United States, are the typical governance structure for large cities in New England. The historical origins of town meeting lie in the forms of self-governance set up by early Puritan settlers in New England before the American Revolution.¹

Vestiges of the remarkably directly democratic political practices of these early American towns are retained – albeit in an attenuated form – in many New England towns today. In most towns governed by town meeting, anyone who is registered to vote there can still freely attend the town meeting, speak on matters pertaining to the meeting’s agenda (called the ‘warrant’), and make proposals (called ‘articles’) to be debated and acted upon. The procedures to do these things are often relatively simple. Depending on the regulations of the specific town, putting an article on the warrant is often as simple as collecting a set number of petition signatures. Once a group forms with an intention to put a resolution article before the town, passage can be relatively easy if political sentiments in the town are sympathetic to the petitioner’s aims.

The use of town meeting to make statements of political opinion on a range of controversial issues dates back to pre-revolutionary times.² During the 1980s, the anti-nuclear movement’s Nuclear Freeze Campaign used town meeting advocacy to promote its aim of ending nuclear weapons. In the early 2000s, there was a renewal of interest in some parts of New England using the town meeting advocacy strategy to mobilize opposition to genetically engineered crops, attacks against civil liberties,³ the military occupation of Iraq, federal inaction on the climate crisis, and the continued operation of nuclear power plants.

Campaigning against GE crops

My own experience working on these campaigns has included working with two different organizations seeking to raise awareness of the dangers of genetically engineered crops as a way of building an oppositional movement to their continued use and proliferation. GE crops are an ecological threat in part because they are designed to further necessitate the use of toxic chemicals in agriculture. The most common trait of commercialized GE crops is resistance to the herbicide, glyphosate, making the chemical and the GE seed two parts of a single package. A multiplicity of studies demonstrates the toxicity of numerous GE crops, and many studies showing the opposite have been exposed for their methodological flaws and ideological biases towards the biotechnology industry.⁴ Moreover, compelling science strongly suggests that the method of genetic engineering is inherently disruptive to the genetic function of plants.⁵ The global distribution of these crops poses serious ecological threats to the genetic integrity of biological organisms and health threats to human beings and animals. GE crops are also tied to the legal and political threats of global seed conglomerates, like Monsanto, that use their legal patent rights on the novel genetic alterations of these crops to sue farmers that do not sign the companies’ license agreements.⁶ Such suits have played an enormous role in expanding the power of these companies at the expense independent family farmers.

As part of the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, I worked with local activists in several towns in 2002 and 2003 to help them bring resolutions against agricultural genetic engineering to their town meetings – we called it The Town to Town Campaign on Genetic Engineering. The demands we made included: 1) mandatory labeling of all GE foods by manufacturers; 2) strict liability protection to strengthen farmers’ legal rights when dealing with biotechnology corporations; and 3) a moratorium on further growing of GE crops until independent scientific evidence proves them to be safe, and they can be demonstrated not to harm family farms.

In January 2006, I began working as an organizer for the Northeast Organic Farming Association/ Massachusetts Chapter, which had decided to adopt the model of organizing in Vermont where by 2005, 85 different towns and cities had passed resolutions against genetic engineering. For two consecutive years (2006 and 2007), I organized activists concerned about genetic engineering who were willing to speak publicly in favor of anti-GE resolutions at their town meetings. During those 2 years, I worked with people in 18 different towns – mostly in Western Massachusetts – that successfully passed resolutions opposing GE crops, bringing the total number of municipalities in Massachusetts that have taken such measures to 30.⁷

Democratic Yearnings in an Undemocratic Society

So what are the potentials and pitfalls of this organizing strategy? I believe we can begin to understand this through what I see as an uneven tension between yearning and reality that is inherent to town meeting advocacy campaigns. On the one hand, activists doing this work celebrate town meeting resolutions as the expression of participatory democracy, but, on the other hand, the town meetings have extremely limited powers on issues of importance for the everyday life of people in this region of the U.S.

In the first moment – that of yearning – town meeting government is a relatively accessible sphere of public discourse where it is possible for matters of local and global import to be debated, voted, and acted upon through a participatory process. Although town meetings have relatively little power and narrow jurisdictions, at their best, non-binding resolutions enable a form of speech and education that is unique for its ties to an actual governing institution. More importantly, political action of this kind highlights the civic and humanistic identities of a democratic citizenry, in a way that can countervail rampant and corrosive trends toward isolated consumer identities.

One cultural factor that nourishes this moment of democratic yearning, is that many people throughout New England still revere town meeting as a site for the democratic practice of regular people. Notwithstanding town meetings’ limited jurisdictions and oftentimes low levels of participation, town meeting advocacy has lent moral authority and institutional legitimacy to public dissent because of the generally favorable impressions people have of the institutional venue in which it is carried out.

In the second moment – that of the realities of our undemocratic society – town meeting advocacy can also be seen as a dead end for a radical agenda. Passing a town meeting resolution is regarded, with some justification, as institutionally irrelevant to the decision making processes that really determine crucial matters like war, civil liberties, food safety, and agricultural and energy policy. Indeed, the relative ease with which town meetings can express opinions on these matters is matched only by the ease with which these measures can be ignored by the state and corporations, where power in its present institutionalized form – not just its potential form – largely resides.

As governing institutions, town meetings primarily administer policies on taxes, education, land-use, and infrastructure that come from the centralized state. The political domination of the municipality by the state narrowly contains virtually every decision that that the former makes, no matter what articles local citizens put on their local warrant. A common argument I have heard people make against non-binding town meeting resolutions, for example, is that they distract from the immediate (and often perfunctory) business that town meeting is required to do by law.

That is also why town meeting advocacy takes place on the periphery of the town meeting itself. At least in recent history – town meeting advocacy campaigns are almost always initiated by social movement organizations, rather than by the many committees and boards of town meeting government which are more concerned with generating articles such as zoning changes and budgets. Although the structure of town meeting allows for internal town meeting advocacy, getting people engaged at their town meetings on specific issues on a large scale usually requires the coordination and support that only a state-wide organization or coalition can provide. One reason for this is that support for taking a stand on issues that challenge the State or corporations – or that simply addresses controversial matters outside of strictly local politics – is notably lacking within most local governments since they are not independent entities. Another reason is that statewide advocacy organizations may be the only available way to meet people’s need for support from others when doing political action. The need for statewide political organization on the basis of individual issues is a sign that town meeting resolutions express the political aims of those organizations more than the self-directed will of the town meeting itself.

The tension between yearning and reality is also a source of confusion and contention among those involved in town meeting advocacy campaigns. The primary aim of these campaigns is normally to petition state and federal governments with symbolic political demands, as was the case in both of the campaigns against genetic engineering in Vermont and Massachusetts. Many of the activists involved failed to distinguish between speaking out against genetic engineering, and doing something about the powerlessness of town meetings to stop the proliferation of GE crops. It impressed me, for example, how frequently new and inexperienced participants in the town meeting advocacy campaigns, would initially make the assumption that we were campaigning to directly ban the growing of GE crops in a town. I understood this common first reaction as an encouraging sign that people who understand the threats posed by GE crops are looking for concrete steps to stop them. Paradoxically, the campaigns were not prepared to make demands that could give town meetings legislative powers on such issues. The majority of anti-GMO organizations in our coalition, moreover, did not want to make such a demand based on the belief that the state was the rightful actor in containing the threat of GE crops. Those of us connected to the Institute for Social Ecology, on the other hand, viewed the state not only as captured by the biotech industry, but also as a main instigator of the modern biotechnology era.⁸ We were trying to open up the possibility of pushing for a local ban out of the understanding that we couldn’t wait for the state to do it for us, but we recognized that most of the communities we were working with were politically unprepared to successfully enforce and defend such a local decision.

Much like new recruits to town meeting advocacy campaigns against GE crops, many opponents of the resolutions incorrectly assumed that activists were promoting a local ban on GE crops. One indication that our dreams of enforceable GE-free zones developing all over our region would face an uphill struggle was when anti-GE allies sought to diffuse the disapproval of local opponents by arguing that a local resolution would only make a request to political representatives and would not have any concrete impact on farmers. This unwillingness of my own allies to take risks in exercising what little power they actually do have was circumscribed by their assumption that the state’s legislative process is the only legitimate and effective way to make change on the issue of genetic engineering. Instead of taking action to directly bring into being the world we want to live in, we were contenting ourselves with the utterance of requests for distant superiors to do it for us.

Pitfalls of Petitioning the State

Grassroots social movement organizations regularly petition higher – and increasingly out-of-reach – levels of government such as state and federal governments for change. Whether or not individuals in these movements believe in it, the notion that the state is susceptible to such petitioning is implicit in the strategy behind such efforts. One lesson that organizers are teaching to other activists in town meeting advocacy campaigns, insofar as they primarily focus on petitioning, is that although the state is failing on certain issues it can be reformed through pressure. The oftentimes crucially missing lesson from this organizing process is that there are deeply ingrained economic, ideological, and political reasons for why the state is not responding to people’s needs – and why political action by the people that is independent of the state is needed in order to address common problems.

By arguing that we are merely calling for change at “higher” levels of government “where the decisions really get made,” activists avoid important and contentious conflicts over who gets to make decisions and who doesn’t. A representative government, at best, promises to consider the desires of the people when candidates plan their next electoral campaign, but the system never promises substantial political empowerment for the people to have a direct say in policy. By arguing that critics should not oppose a new initiative because the proposed resolution will have no concrete impact on anybody, we become complicit in maintaining the political disempowerment to which we have become so woefully accustomed.

Although the Institute for Social Ecology galvanized the state-wide coalition that carried out the Town to Town-campaign in Vermont in 2002 and 2003, it was the only organization in the coalition that publicly argued that town meeting resolutions could mean something more than merely a request for legislation. Other coalition members – organizations working for environmental and consumer protections, and small farmer rights – approached these efforts primarily as a way to petition the Vermont State Legislature. They participated in the town meeting campaign only insofar as they saw it leading to statewide legislation in Vermont regulating GE crops. Thus, it was not surprising that the organizers who held this position would come to prioritize legislative advocacy and lobbying over grassroots organizing once the town meeting advocacy campaign was seen to have served its purpose of making community level political action open the debate at the state legislative level.

Following the approach of petitioning higher levels of government has achieved some partial successes. In Vermont, the advocacy of town meetings strengthened the position of coalition members who were working to enact statewide legislative changes. It was due in large part to the 85 towns in Vermont that passed resolutions against genetic engineering that in May 2006, the Vermont House and Senate passed unprecedented legislation permitting farmers to sue GE crop developers under private nuisance law. Supporters of the bill (including myself) were seeking to institute legal protections for farmers from companies like Monsanto that have sued farmers in some parts of the country for patent infringement when the companies’ patented genetically engineered DNA shows up in the fields of farmers who have not paid the licensing fee. We also sought economic protections for organic and non-GMO farmers. Farmers in Vermont who grew GE crops showed up in large numbers at the Vermont statehouse during key votes to voice their opposition to the bill. They said that Monsanto had told them that if the bill were to pass, Monsanto would stop selling GE crops to them. The Vermont governor eventually vetoed the bill. Then, left without a credible legislative strategy, the coalition that had formed four years beforehand around this campaign fell apart, leaving activists to join other causes.

In one sense, by petitioning higher levels of government as institutions, Vermont town meetings spurred legislative debate and action that would not have otherwise occurred. Meanwhile, local town meeting governments transformed themselves into lively venues for discussing important issues that would otherwise be seen as outside of their purview – at least for a brief time. The experience was meaningful for its educational value – both about the specific issue of genetic engineering and about the function of local governance. In another sense, the choices of the majority of coalition members in the Vermont Town to Town-campaign to use town meeting advocacy primarily as a method to strengthen narrow strategies of petitioning the state helped stagnate their efforts: When the legislative effort fell apart, activists had not been taught through the organizing process how to act independently to attain their goals.

When the town meetings engaged in petitioning higher levels of government, they took on the function of intermediary between the people and their supposed political representatives – a function that was already satisfied by endless websites and e-mail lists with contact information for elected officials. Indeed, insofar as proponents viewed resolutions entirely within the framework of petitioning the state, a reasonable argument made by local critics of the resolution campaigns was that since town meetings are capable of managing their narrow purview with considerable democracy, they should not have to consider matters outside that purview, when petitioning can also be done in other ways.

Despite the limitations of the resolutions and the apparent reasonableness of certain procedural objections to them, there is a substantive difference between an individual letter and a town meeting resolution, which I think makes the latter worthwhile. A letter expresses only the resolve of an individual, whereas a resolution can involve the deliberations and debate of all the town meeting participants. Town meetings define a public sphere in the communities that have them, which is not reducible simply to the particular social, economic, and political interest groups that have influence in a community. Their resolutions are qualitatively different than, for instance, those of a membership organization rallying around a particular issue, because they have been adopted through a public process in which any registered voter in the town has a right to participate. Still, when faced with the criticism that town meeting advocacy campaigns push agendas that are peripheral to the governing institution itself, the best reply starts with acknowledging the actual limitations of the current strategy. The next step is to argue for transforming the strategy so that it integrates the aim of expanding the power and jurisdiction of local town governance so that symbolic advocacy statements have a way of becoming actual policies.

When the state is so irresponsible and unresponsive to popular demands, we are right to respond with the urgency of the causes we champion, and we are right to stress the need to act with whatever means are available and consistent with our principles. But if the strategy of those doing municipal political action is limited to getting more town meetings to debate more single-issue advisory resolutions, we will have missed an opportunity to open new spaces for the radical potentials of town meeting advocacy to be realized. We must find paths to the next logical step: opening up municipal governmental institutions in ways that enable new modes of political action through which people can exercise enlightened reason to solve the problems that we face. Through institutional venues such as this, there lie unexplored opportunities to undermine regressive state policies and to provide alternatives.

The Potentials of a Communalist Program

The transformation of town meeting advocacy to an effort for more radical change would begin by recognizing our common condition of substantial political disempowerment. We must not pretend that mechanisms for enacting change exist where, in fact, they do not. For instance, a campaign will fail if it simply tells town meeting members to vote to do things that they do not have the power to do yet. Once people are aware of their real disempowerment, if they are sufficiently unhappy with it, they can become prepared to claim a type of power that they have never even tasted before: The power to make binding decisions on public matters that affect everyday life. To actualize this vision, we need to identify existing mechanisms of power within town government that lie under-utilized, create them where they do not yet exist, and then exercise them to the maximum extent possible. The challenge for communalists in general, is to foster strategies of participation in local municipal institutions that expand their capacity to realize concrete changes on particular issues – thereby opening up those institutions as venues of struggle for more radical transformations of society.

The framework of a maximum, minimum, and transitional program provides a way to think through the potentials that lie in the town meeting advocacy campaigns that have begun in New England. As a revolutionary political theory and practice, Communalism seeks to build a program through these three phases that achieves concrete political objectives that genuinely improve people’s everyday lives while opening up even wider horizons of social transformation⁹. This framework is a way of thinking beyond the narrow political options that are most easily presented to activists: Advocacy for reforms that lack a plan for deeper social change, and moral protest against the outrages that surround us. This is a framework that seeks to stimulate the revolutionary imagination so that movements may one day be able to organize to transform the fundamental structures of our existing society. I would argue that key to what distinguishes Communalism, is that the specific kinds of action undertaken by a communalist movement flow out of a logic that starts with a maximum vision.¹⁰

A maximum vision concerns what kind of world we ought to live in. For politics to be grounded in an ethical framework rather than grounded in the immediate reality before us, the question of how our society, its institutions, and its practices should be comes before the question of what is already possible. What makes a maximum vision more than an abstraction are the concrete minimum and transitional programs for bringing that vision, or at least aspects of it, into reality. Minimum demands mobilize people around questions of immediate concern in ways that make it possible for them to imagine and fight for transitional demands. Transitional demands, as they are realized, create new kinds of institutions in society that contest the power of state and corporate entities. A transitional program puts into place the new structures that enable revolutionary transformation to occur. Without a maximum vision that expands people’s imagination beyond the dreary reality before us, a minimum program will likely wander into mere reform of the existing social order.

A maximum vision that would deepen the meaning of municipal advocacy against GE, for instance, would involve a reciprocal food economy. Instead of a faceless market controlled by heartless corporations that drive down commodity prices for their own private profit, communities would directly and reliably support agricultural labor and value farming for its contributions to ecological and human health rather than merely for its “efficiency.” Moreover, the food economy would be structured to assure that the needs of members of a community (as well as troubled communities elsewhere) would be met in a way respectful of people’s dignity. Such a maximum demand stated in the realm of food would beg the question of why not make the rest of the economy a reciprocal one as well – a world in which the production and distribution of goods is done, not for profit, but for the benefit of all and for the healthy longevity of the ecosystems we depend upon.

A minimum program’s aims are short-term, readily achievable, and generally won within the existing mechanisms of political power. It must be stated that the political struggle in town meeting advocacy has generally not been part of a revolutionary program. Resolutions can be important achievements when connected to broader demands, but they are largely educational and symbolic and not about reclaiming political power. What distinguishes an initiative as part of a minimum program is that it takes back some measure of power by which policies are actually determined and enacted, even though such demands would appear as reforms and not as an immediate break with the entire social order.

On the issue of genetic engineering, in the context of New England, an example of a minimum program would be, for example, to mandate that on all land that is owned by the town for farmland conservation, the use of GE crops would be prohibited. Another demand would be to ensure provision of GE-free lunches to kids at public institutions such as the local schools. Such demands could easily be paired with efforts to get schools to change their menu away from the cheap highly-processed foods offered in most public school lunch programs towards fresh and healthier foods that have been grown locally. Such a decision would affirm the right and duty of the town meeting to make ethical decisions about matters that affect public life. Minimum demands do not have to immediately create structural change in order to achieve their purpose, but they do have to be consistent with a future in which structural changes are achieved, and they have to mark a meaningful improvement in people’s lives. In these two examples, for instance, the focus is on local public institutions in which regular citizens at town meeting ostensibly already have the power to change the priorities.

Such is not the case with private landowners carrying on legal activities such as planting GE crops. As I argued above, there is no potential for movement development by explaining to concerned farmers who currently plant GE crops that the non-binding nature of these resolutions will not immediately affect them. But as part of a minimum program, we can imagine a process of community discussion that seeks out the involvement of the farmers themselves, in which a variety of measures could be taken by municipal movements to carry out their determination to eliminate GE crops from their environs. Through a process of directly democratic deliberation, communities would begin to consider a range of specific economic factors affecting farms including development pressures and commodity prices. Assuming that the preservation of arable land is important in itself, communities would need to consider the realities of how farm enterprises can be economically viable. They would also have to consider technical questions such as how to maintain a functioning farm economy with ecological practices that do not involve GE crops or toxic chemicals. Movements could press for local governing institutions to create new departments of ecological agriculture that would be charged with administrative activities aimed at facilitating practical and ecological alternatives to GE crops and chemical agriculture.

A minimum program should also illustrate the state’s failure to live up to its promise of protecting the public – a function that is incipient but unfulfilled in a symbolic resolution’s demand for policy changes. For instance, the case must be made explicitly that the reason why a community would consider banning GE foods from the meals it serves its children is not simply because of some whimsical preference of the community, but rather because the federal government is so controlled by the biotechnology industry that it has failed to protect the public from a truly dangerous technology. Having large numbers of people visibly demanding local control over such matters, even of a minimum sort, would create a greater sense of political pressure on the state than would polite petitioning, if those demands were recognizably fueled by popular anger at the state for failing to protect public health and safety.

The true depth of the state’s failure is not implicit in a measure that merely calls on the state to reform itself, but becomes apparent when expectations of political freedom are raised beyond the dead ends of cynicism and resignation. People must first come to believe that they have the right to self-govern; then the tension between their aspirations and what is allowed to them within the existing system can begin to illustrate the need to transcend the state. Raising expectations involves people being willing to make their town governments do things they do not normally do – like stepping outside municipal governments’ primarily administrative function to enacting bylaws or ordinances that reflect the community’s ever widening desire for political freedom. In a minimum program, it is possible to creatively work within the established parameters of town meeting government so that boundaries of power are being challenged even as the existing law is being followed. The crucial goal of this stage of organizing is to open up a space in which the citizenry of a municipality can consider and openly debate specific measures that begin to address concrete problems facing their community. These small steps toward saner community policies, moreover, can provide a training ground in which people practice an enlightened public life: one that seeks out the betterment of the common good.

In the longer run, stopping the spread of GE crops (and war, governmental corruption, rampant pollution, etc.) would be best served by structural changes leading to greater empowerment of directly democratic municipal governments. A transitional program is one that could bring about the changes in political structure needed for an ecological and socially just society. Such changes would be made at the expense of the power of the state.¹¹ The crucial structural change needed is to empower municipal governments and to substantially re-distribute that power within the town in a directly democratic way. To imagine what a transitional program could look like with respect to GE Crops, towns could organize themselves to be GE-free zones by enacting and enforcing bylaws prohibiting the use of GE crops in the town.

One town in Maine has earnestly attempted to do this. In March of 2006, the citizens of Montville voted to amend their town plan to prohibit growing of GE crops. This was the first such municipal action to carry the force of law in any New England town, and it has yet to be tried more widely in New England. There is, however, one recent example in Barnstead, NH where the town made it illegal for corporations to privatize the town’s water supply and nullified the rights of corporate personhood.¹² Although the citizens of Montville were just doing what made sense to them after having considered competing arguments at town meeting, and although they did not think of their actions as a “transitional program,” their decision and follow-through demonstrates one way a political struggle could be waged. It also demonstrates that at least in some parts of the United States, there are places where people believe in their own right of self-governance. Following many other states, lawmakers in Maine are already trying to enact preemption legislation that would prevent towns from legally enacting such laws.¹³ We have yet to see what grassroots movements will do to protect and win back the right of self-governance in the face of these assaults.

A transitional program, fully developed, is not tied singly to any one single issue. Rather it is tied to a programmatic set of actions designed to take power away from the state and vest that power in new free institutions. As a part of a transitional program, we can imagine the flourishing of new kinds of institutions at the local level that coordinate some of the complex features of a local agricultural economy including the use of land, the provision of agricultural equipment, the sharing of seeds, the distribution of soil amendments, the management of organic wastes flows, and the training of people to work with the soil. Such institutions concerned with food would be accountable to the community as a whole. Like some already existing cooperatives, they’d be a countervailing force to the profit imperatives of the corporations that fulfill many of the functions of our food economy. Unlike most existing cooperatives, institutions like this would consciously integrate their activities into a broader process of revolutionary transformation and struggle.

Transcending Liberal Community Organizing

Town meeting advocacy efforts have not yet been able to effectively mobilize much support for a revolutionary political program, but they have pointed attention to local municipal institutions where such programs could be tested. The story of town meeting advocacy shows that narrowing the scope of municipal activism to petitioning the state misses an opportunity to organize people in ways that prepare them for self-governance in directly democratic municipal institutions. Once a town meeting’s instrumental purpose of affecting the internal machinations of statecraft is achieved, the people who once ran the local committees of the town meeting advocacy campaign are demobilized from community organizing and remobilized as political actors that are intelligible to politicians: lobbyists, interest groups, and disaggregated individual voters. When the re-organized campaign sees its chances of legislative victory dim, it loses a reason to persist, because people can’t see how continued participation would lead to realizing any of the goals that first thrust them into action.

The assumption that the only meaningful change is that which goes through the official order of the state is the pitfall of liberal ideology to which town meeting advocacy, as I have seen it practiced, has mostly succumbed. Transcending the limitations of this organizing model depends in large part on imagination to think beyond the terms of liberal statecraft. Indeed, it takes imagination to entertain the possibility that dedicated municipal organizing could transform local governing institutions, which primarily administer state policy, into the very instruments by which political struggle can be waged against the state.

To transcend the liberal ideology that has so circumscribed our community organizing, it is not sufficient to replace it with a radical utopian ideology or to simply underscore the necessity of doing so. Still, the work of envisioning a maximum vision that dramatically contrasts with our realities is an indispensable guidepost for how our political work proceeds, and we desperately need organizing strategies that can fundamentally challenge capital and the state. But for such visions and strategic outlooks to meaningfully affect how people live right now, the organizer must identify those aspects of already existing reality that can be broadened to reveal new openings for struggle. The challenge for organizers is to truthfully examine the context in which we work, and to craft minimum demands and programs that address meaningful and concrete problems of everyday life in ways that expand people’s horizons for yet more substantive forms of freedom. An aspect of this context is the feeling of real powerlessness, and that feeling must be addressed directly. A minimum program is important partly for it’s ability to achieve gains in ways that reveal to the protagonists of struggle what real power – embedded in an ethics of non-hierarchy – tastes like.

It is very important to attempt what, in the idiom of modern pragmatism, is practical (i.e., possible), because we are interested in action in large part for its immediate results. But it is yet more important to adopt a political program that is capable of identifying minimum steps that once achieved, make doable what our smothered minds may not yet be able to imagine.

NOTES

1 Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era, (New York: Cassell 1996), p.151.

2 Ibid., p.152.

3 One of the most galvanizing events in recent U.S. history for town meeting advocacy to protect civil liberties was the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, a massive piece of legislation passed shortly after September 11, 2001. The law abrogated nearly all of the constitutional rights enumerated in the U.S. Bill of Rights in the name of protecting the country from terrorism. Hundreds of nonbinding resolutions all over the United States were passed at the local level, calling

for restoration of constitutional rights.

4 Jeffrey Smith, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, (Fairfield, IA: YesBooks 2007).

5 Allison Wilson et al., Genome Scrambling – Myth or Reality: Transformation-Induced Mutations in Transgenic Crop Plants (Brighton, UK: EcoNexus, 2004), http://www.econexus.info/pdf/ENx-Genome-Scrambling-Summary.pdf.

6 Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers, (Washington, DC: Center for Food Safety 2007), http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/Monsantovsusfarmersreport.cfm.

7 Ben Grosscup, Mass Movement: Genetic Engineering becomes question of Democracy at Massachusetts Town Meetings, (Cambridge, MA: Gene Watch, 2007).

8 For a discussion of how the U.S. government invested massively in biotechnology during the 1970s as a strategy for opening new markets to U.S. corporations, see Chaia Heller, “McDonald’s, MTV and Monsanto: Resisting Biotechnology in the Age of Informational Capital,” In Redesigning Life?, Brian Tokar ed., (New York: Zed Books, 2001).

9 Eirik Eiglad, “Libertarian Municipalism and the Radical Program,” Communalism, Issue 7, October 2005, http://www.communalism.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=184:libertarian-municipalism-and-the-radical-program&catid=84:movement&Itemid=2.

10 For an excellent discussion of how the politics of social ecology flow dialectically out of a logic, see Chaia Heller, “Illustrative Opposition: Drawing the Revolutionary out of the Ecological” in Ecology of Everyday Life: Re-thinking the

Desire for Nature, (Black Rose Books: Montreal, 1999), pp.149-171.

11 Eirik Eiglad, “Bases for Communalist Programs,” Communalism, Issue 6, March 2003.

12 For the ordinance see http://www.celdf.org/BarnsteadAntiCorporateWaterWithdrawal/tabid/132/Default.aspx.

13 For more info on this national trend, see http://environmentalcommons.org/seedlawbackgrounder.html.

The summer and fall of 2009 will surely be noted in the annals of environmental history. This period could be remembered as the time when the world’s elites slowly began to crawl toward a meaningful solution to the threat of accelerating global climate disruptions. But if events continue along the [...]]]> For Z Magazine, September 2009

The summer and fall of 2009 will surely be noted in the annals of environmental history. This period could be remembered as the time when the world’s elites slowly began to crawl toward a meaningful solution to the threat of accelerating global climate disruptions. But if events continue along the path of recent months, it could mark the beginning of an inexorable slide toward an increasingly unstable planetary climate regime, an unstable and chaotic world that our ancestors would barely recognize.

Relying on the mainstream media for news, you’d think the outlook was fairly rosy. For example, a somewhat cautious note of triumph accompanied the G8’s pronouncement in early July that the world was committing to holding the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. The obstacle? “Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants,” proclaimed the New York Times headline.

You had to read through most of the article to discover that the main objection of those pesky “developing nations” representatives was to establishing a long-range goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (50 percent by 2050), without proportionate commitments from the major industrialized countries to nearer-term commitments—at least 20 percent reductions by 2020, as accepted by most European governments—that would facilitate meaningful progress toward the more distant goal. One astute European activist pointed out that the G8 outcome was “nothing but hot air,” akin to pronouncing that there would be luxury resorts on Mars by 2050. With no intermediate goals nor tangible steps toward implementation, politicians can pledge to do anything at all 40+ years into the future.

What, then, does 2 degrees of global warming mean? Last April, following a series of articles in the prestigious journal Nature that offered some important new revelations about the state of our climate projections, the climatologists who edit the indispensable scientific blog, RealClimate.org, wrote, “We feel compelled to note that even a ‘moderate’ warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, calling 2°C a danger limit seems to us pretty cavalier.”

Two degrees also turns out to be a rather daunting goal, in terms of the current world economy. At pre-recession rates of economic growth, with CO2 emissions increasing 2 percent per year, we are almost certain to exceed 2 degrees of warming by 2100, according to the European researchers whose results were reported in Nature last spring. To keep the odds below 50 percent, developed countries would need to reduce their emissions by at least 80 percent over the next 40 years, but there is a large uncertainty in that prediction, depending on the vagaries of the global carbon cycle and other hard-to-predict factors. The only reliable way to meet such targets for minimizing the global temperature rise is for cumulative world emissions to be kept below a rather austere target, equivalent to a total of 400 billion tons of carbon between 2000 and 2050. Emissions since 2000 “have used up almost a third of that allowance already,” according to a commentary by one of Nature’s US editors. And for all the trading and offsetting of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, only the past year’s economic recession has led to substantial reductions in those emissions. The Kyoto agreement, which required wealthy countries to reduce their emissions by 2012 to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels, “has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions, or even in anticipated emissions growth,” according to a widely quoted report published in Nature in 2007.

In the diplomatic sphere, the world’s hopes for an agreement to curtail emissions and forestall more catastrophic climate changes currently rest on the outcome of the next UN climate summit, scheduled for December 7-18th in Copenhagen. While some are hoping for a breakthrough in back-channel discussions between the US and China, together responsible for 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the US continues to play a largely obstructive role in the negotiations leading up to the Copenhagen summit. So does Japan, which announced in June that it would only aim to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions another 2 percent beyond its Kyoto Protocol obligation over the next decade.

Following the latest in a series of UN meetings in advance of Copenhagen, Martin Khor of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, a decades-long participant in the UN process, wrote “not only is the climate in crisis, the climate talks are also in crisis.” Corporate representatives have been hovering like vultures over UN climate meetings, seeking to define the terms of what they hope will be a rapidly expanding market in tradable carbon allowances, and the World Bank is jockeying to control the funds to curtail deforestation, which is responsible for as much as a quarter of current global warming. Given the pivotal role of the US in these upcoming proceedings, it is important to understand what is wrong with the current domestic debate on global warming, now playing out in the US Senate.

Climate Politics in Washington

Even more than the G8 discussions on climate, the US House of Representatives’ passage of a significant global warming bill in late June was received by the mainstream press, and many environmentalists, with a palpable sense of triumph. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, one of the bill’s two main sponsors, called it a “decisive and historic action,” and President Obama described the bill as “a bold and necessary step.” Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, among the most corporate-friendly of the major environmental groups, called it no less than “the most important environmental and energy legislation in the history of our country.”

Environmental Defense, along with NRDC and the Nature Conservancy, played an important role in the development of the bill. As members of the US Climate Action Partnership, a collaboration with corporations such as Alcoa, BP, Dow, DuPont, GE, and the former big three US automakers, among others, they helped articulate what would become the bill’s broad outlines: an emphasis on long-range goals, trading of emissions allowances, initially free distribution of those allowances, and a generous offset provision that permits companies to defer significant pollution reductions well into the future.

While many environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief, and suggested that any step in the direction of regulating carbon dioxide and other climate damaging greenhouse gases is better than nothing, others remained skeptical. As the bill meandered its way through various House committees, groups like Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and Greenpeace issued sharp critiques. Even more scathing were analyses from smaller independent groups such as Chesapeake Climate Action and the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). The bill that passed the House falls far short of international standards in mandating a meaningful level of reductions in global warming pollution, and seeks to implement decades of emissions cuts through the market-based device known as “cap-and-trade.” It also contains a number of Trojan Horse provisions that could ultimately forestall, rather than encourage, genuine climate progress.

By the time the bill had passed through the relevant committees, as well as last-minute horse-trading on the House floor, the loopholes were staggering to behold. Recall that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions on the order of 20-40 percent are needed in the next decade or so to prevent a slide toward uncontrollable global climate chaos, with reductions on the order of 80-95 percent by the leading industrial economies required by mid-century. The House bill—cosponsored by Reps. Waxman of California and Markey of Massachusetts, and now up for debate in the Senate—first attempts to shift the terms of the discussion by measuring emissions relative to 2005 levels rather than the accepted Kyoto Protocol benchmark of 1990. It promises a 17 percent reduction by 2020, relative to 2005, which only translates into 4 or 5 percent less global warming pollution than the US produced in 1990. The much-touted cap-and-trade provision of the bill accounts for about a 1 percent reduction by 2020, according to the Center for Biological Diversity’s analysis, with the remainder coming from regular, old-fashioned performance standards for smaller pollution sources, including automobiles, and from a controversial USAID effort to reduce deforestation in poorer countries. For comparison, recall that most wealthy countries agreed over a decade ago in Kyoto to reduce their emissions by 2012 to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels.

It’s important to note that the deforestation provisions of the bill mirror a highly controversial international climate mitigation strategy, promoted by the UN and the World Bank under the name of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries (REDD). REDD mainly targets intact forested lands, largely occupied by indigenous peoples, which are threatened with privatization for use as carbon offsets. Soon after the current US bill passed the House, an Anglo-African brokerage firm announced that it would sell “avoided deforestation” credits to buyers of voluntary carbon offsets in the US, threatening a wave of corporate takeovers of African forest lands.

Cap-and-trade, of course, is the latest catch phrase for attempting to control pollution by establishing an artificial market in permits to emit carbon dioxide. Since George Bush Senior’s Acid Rain Program of the early 1990s, advocates have aggressively promoted the idea that the most efficient pollution reductions come from the government setting a cap, and then allowing companies to freely trade pollution permits in order to nominally encourage development of the most cost-effective technologies. The Acid Rain Program succeeded modestly, but mainly because still-regulated electric utilities (this was the pre-Enron era) were mandated by state officials to hold true to their obligations and actually reduce their output of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide. Trading contributed only marginally to the 50 percent pollution reductions from that program. An effort to reduce air pollution in southern California by a similar scheme appears to have mainly delayed the installation of emission controls, and the region still has the dirtiest air in the country. In Europe just three years ago, the value of tradable carbon dioxide allowances plummeted and the carbon trading system almost collapsed under the weight of excess permits that were freely granted to favored industries.

Under the House bill, some 7400 facilities across this country would be given annual allowances to continue emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. As many as 85 percent of the allowances would initially be given to polluting companies for free, reversing Obama’s campaign pledge that they should mainly be auctioned off. (In Europe, utilities routinely bill their customers for these newly acquired credits.) Meanwhile, the quantity of available pollution allowances would actually increase through 2016, only falling gradually thereafter, and companies would be allowed to indefinitely “bank” them for future use, borrow from their future allowances, and finally trade them with other regulated companies as well as with Wall Street firms and an emerging cadre of brokers in carbon futures. If all this reads a little too much like the financial machinations that nearly brought down the world’s financial markets in 2008, consider that carbon market boosters are projecting a worldwide trading system ultimately valued at $10 trillion a year—perhaps launching the next major financial bubble. All this potential for increased financial fraud and manipulation is for a mere 1 percent in CO2 reductions over the next decade, and a questionable promise of 70 percent by mid-century.

Many argue that, for all their uncertainty, these highly manipulable financial dealings are worth the risk because they facilitate the phase-in of an enforceable cap on global warming pollution. But the legislation replicates another of the most egregious features of the largely failed Kyoto Protocol: a virtual “hole in the cap,” in the form of an offset feature that allows companies to meet their obligations by investing in pollution control projects anywhere in the country, and even overseas. Companies could satisfy their full obligation to reduce CO2 by buying offsets until 2027; those familiar with the bill’s fine print suggest that companies could stretch this out for 30-40 years.

An entirely new global mythology has arisen around the idea of carbon offsets. Nearly every time you buy tickets for an airplane flight, or for some major cultural events, someone is out to sell you offsets to alleviate your contribution to global warming. Carbon offsets have become the postmodern version of the indulgences the Catholic church used to sell in the Middle Ages to buy your way out of sin. But on a global scale, with corporations instead of individuals as the main players, they have become a scam of gigantic proportions. Rather than promoting innovative measures to reduce energy use in poor countries, as they are usually advertised, carbon offsets are subsidizing the already routine destruction of byproducts from China’s rising production of ozone-destroying hydrofluorocarbons, minor retooling of highly polluting pig iron smelters in India, and methane capture from a notoriously toxic landfill in South Africa.

One of the most notorious cases is that of the French chemical company, Rhodia, which is anticipating a billion dollars in carbon offset credits in exchange for a $15 million investment in 1970s-vintage technology to destroy the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide in its facility in South Korea. Carbon offsets have become the company’s most profitable line of business. Major hydroelectric projects, mainly in China, India and Brazil, represent a quarter of applications for offset credits, and nearly all of these projects are already under development before applying for the credits. As the International Rivers Network and others have pointed out, large-scale hydro, far from being green, is responsible for huge quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases. A German study of UN-approved carbon offset projects in 2007 reported that as many as 86 percent of offset-funded projects would likely have been carried out anyway. This runs counter to the Kyoto Protocol guidelines requiring that projects granted emissions offsets must be “additional,” that is they cannot already have been planned.

Allowing companies to postpone their own greenhouse gas reductions by buying offsets is one Trojan Horse provision in the climate bill that could forestall future progress against the continued disruption of the climate. Another such measure largely prohibits the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to impose future regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Recall that it was a 2007 Supreme Court decision allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant that forced the Bush administration to finally start talking about global warming. Removing this authority represents a massive concession to polluting industries, one that would essentially remove the teeth of enforcement from future measures to forestall climate chaos.

Along with these systemic measures to weaken the climate bill, politically powerful industries wrote in further concessions of their own. (The Center for Public Integrity reported in February that some 2340 lobbyists are working in Washington on this issue.) The coal industry gets until 2025 to have to comply with the bill’s mandated pollution reductions, with ample means for gaining further extensions. Agribusiness, which is responsible for as much as a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions, is exempt from most of the bill’s provisions, but large scale farmers who may, for example, reduce tillage by growing crops genetically engineered to withstand megadoses of herbicides, may be eligible for offset credits. Assessments of ethanol’s eligibility as a “renewable fuel” are to exclude its effects on land use, a factor that researchers from Princeton and the University of Minnesota proved decisive in a pair of landmark studies last year, which showed that industrial biofuels are often net contributors to global warming. Finally, the nuclear industry promises to be a leading beneficiary of the bill’s free allocation of emission allowances; a memo leaked to the Huffington Post reports that Exelon, currently the largest US nuclear power company, expects a $1-1.5 billion annual windfall from the bill in its current form. This despite the fact that nuclear power is yet another false solution to climate change that results in huge greenhouse gas emissions throughout the nuclear fuel cycle.

With horse-trading continuing on the House floor right up to the time of the vote, the bill ultimately included “billions of dollars in special interest favors,” according to the New York Times. These included $1 billion for green job creation job training in low income communities, viewed as a relatively minor concession by many inner city activists; the biggest giveaways were clearly to oil, coal and gas producers. Requirements for utilities to invest in truly renewable energy were severely curtailed to satisfy some southern Democrats. Still, despite all these concessions, Senators beholden to major polluting industries are already jockeying for much more, threatening to hold up the bill indefinitely if they cannot win even bigger concessions. A bill that passed the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, just a week prior to the final vote on the House bill, would open large new tracts of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling, fund a new gas pipeline in Alaska, and increase funds for scientifically dubious efforts to permanently capture and store CO2 emissions from coal-burning power plants.

Toward a Movement for Climate Justice

At various venues around the world, activists have been meeting for over a year to plan a concerted grassroots response to the upcoming UN climate summit. Anticipating that the forthcoming Copenhagen agreement is likely to fall far short of what the world needs to prevent unprecedented climate disruptions, their focus from the outset was to highlight the limits of business-as-usual and the need for direct action against the root causes of climate change, while demonstrating just and sustainable alternatives. At a meeting this summer of the emerging Climate Justice Action network, participants from more than 20 countries, including several from the global South, agreed on an ambitious alternative agenda to the business-dominated deal-making at the UN level.

“We cannot trust the market with our future, nor put our faith in unsafe, unproven and unsustainable technologies,” the meeting’s declaration reads. “Contrary to those who put their faith in ‘green capitalism,’ we know that it is impossible to have infinite growth on a finite planet.” The statement calls for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, popular and community control over production, reducing the North’s overconsumption, respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights and, notably, reparations for the ecological and climate debts owed by the richest countries to those who are most affected by resource extraction and climate-related disasters. The emerging issue of climate debt will be the focus of an entire day of action during the Copenhagen summit, as part of a full week of actions around the summit site. Climate Justice Action has already stirred controversy among European activists for suggesting that they may choose to occupy the summit locations to challenge false solutions and rising corporate influence over the UN proceedings.

The emerging discourse of climate justice reflects a growing understanding that those most affected by accelerating climate-related disasters around the world are usually the least responsible for causing disruptions in the climate (see Z January 2008, February 2008 and February 2009 for more background). Thus any movement seeking an adequate response to global climate changes needs to clearly face this discrepancy and prioritize the voices of the most affected communities. Many people around the world are simultaneously impacted by climate disruptions and by the emerging false solutions to climate change, including carbon trading and offsets, the destruction of forests to create biofuel (agrofuel) plantations, large-scale hydroelectric developments, and nuclear power. Corporate “solutions” to global warming often expand commodification and privatization, whether of land, waterways, or the atmosphere itself, largely at the expense of the same affected communities.

This outlook was first widely articulated following a meeting in Durban, South Africa in the fall of 2004. Representatives from groups (including social movements and indigenous peoples organizations) based in Brazil, India, Samoa, the US, and UK, as well as South Africa, drafted the Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading, which has since gained over 300 signatories from around the world. The Durban Group has helped bring people to the sites of various UN meetings to represent those affected by increased resource extraction over the past several decades, as well as the accelerating conversion of forests to monoculture plantations that is partly justified by the North’s desire for carbon offsets. In discussions following the December 2007 UN climate summit in Bali, where representatives of affected peoples made a strong showing both inside and outside the official proceedings, a more formal worldwide network emerged under the slogan, “Climate Justice Now!”

In the US, this effort is increasingly led by environmental justice activists, mainly from communities of color that have been resisting daily exposure to chemical toxins and other environmental hazards for more than 20 years. An important two day conference in New York City last January, organized by West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT) brought together inner city activists, community and youth organizers, indigenous representatives, and farmworker advocates with students, environmental lawyers, scientists, public health advocates and government officials to discuss the relevance of the climate justice framework for communities of color and their allies across the US.

Throughout this event, speakers of widely differing backgrounds and perspectives articulated a sharp critique of carbon trading and offsets. This despite the efforts of a handful of mainstream environmental representatives to paint ‘cap-and-trade’ as a moving train that activists either had to board, or else be excluded from important debates around its implementation. A physician from Los Angeles described carbon trading as yet another means of “redistributing wealth from the poor to the wealthy,” and José Bravo of the Just Transition Alliance suggested that “when we put a price on every square inch of air, there are some of us who won’t be able to afford to breathe.” Many speakers described the emerging climate justice movement as a continuation of the civil rights legacy, and of the continuing “quest for fairness, equity and justice,” to quote the pioneering environmental justice researcher and author, Robert Bullard. Others explained how, in recent years, the environmental justice movement has broadened its scope to areas of food justice, housing justice, and transportation justice. Hence their embrace of the emerging global climate justice agenda is a logical continuation of a vital living legacy.

In the US and around the world, an impressive array of interests is coming together to contribute to shaping the climate justice agenda. First among these are the opponents of mountaintop removal coal mining, who have put their bodies on the line repeatedly to expose the profound hazard posed by this exceedingly destructive practice. Growing numbers of people in coal-dependent communities in Appalachia are expressing the need for an alternative development model that relieves the stranglehold of the coal companies over their communities, protects people’s health, and facilitates the phase-out of the single most climate-destructive form of energy production. Indigenous communities, many organized under the umbrella of the Indigenous Environmental Network, are resisting increased mining of coal and uranium and advancing educational initiatives on the false solutions to global warming. An emerging youth climate movement is carrying out creative direct actions, not only at coal mining sites, but also at corporate headquarters, industry conferences, and even the headquarters of corporate-friendly environmental groups such as Environmental Defense (see risingtidenorthamerica.org).

Internationally, people from Pacific Island nations, in some cases already losing land and groundwater to rising seas, have been in the forefront of calls for immediate action. The worldwide confederation of peasant movements, Vía Campesina, with affiliated groups in more than 80 countries, has joined the call for actions in Copenhagen, challenging the status of carbon as a newly privatized commodity and arguing that the UN climate convention “has failed to radically question the current models of consumption and production based on the illusion of continuous growth.” Critical civil society organizations, many working within the framework of Climate Justice Now! continue to challenge the status quo inside the UN negotiations. Further, hundreds of cities and towns in the US have defied the federal government’s 20-year trend toward inaction and committed to substantial, publicly-aided CO2 reductions of their own.

In the fall of 2008, U.S. organizations actively working for climate justice both nationally and internationally, including Indigenous Environmental Network, Global Justice Ecology Project and Rising Tide North America, launched the Mobilization for Climate Justice (MCJ, see actforclimatejustice.org). The Mobilization was founded to link the climate struggle in the US to the growing international climate justice movement, with an eye toward building for actions around the Copenhagen climate summit and beyond.  Its objective was to provide a justice-based framework for organizing around climate change that opened space for leadership by representatives of communities in the US that are most impacted by climate change and the fossil fuel industry.

The MCJ issued a broadly focused open letter to potential allies, calling for “a radical change in direction to put climate justice, ecological integrity and people’s rights at the center of international climate negotiations,” and is working toward a nationwide day of action on November 30, a week before the Copenhagen talks begin—and coincidentally the tenth anniversary of the mass demonstrations that successfully confronted the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. Activists confronting the toxic legacy of Chevron’s refinery complex in San Francisco Bay city of Richmond, California are already developing action plans for that day, and gatherings in Chicago and Pittsburgh this fall will focus on developing plans for other regions of the country. In Pittsburgh, a climate action camp, modeled on similar camps in the UK and across Europe, will begin during the Pittsburgh Coal Conference (September 21-23), and continue through the September 24-25th meeting of the G-20 heads of state, also in Pittsburgh. The climate camp and subsequent protests against the coal conference and the G-20 will bring together climate justice advocates from throughout the eastern US to build pressure on the Obama administration and others to commit to real and just action on climate change in Copenhagen. Other groups are focusing their efforts on dates throughout the fall, including the annual commemorations of Indigenous People’s Day on October 12th (see ienearth.org), and an international day of climate actions on United Nations Day, October 24th, initiated by prominent environmentalists including Bill McKibben and David Suzuki (see 350.org).

The increasing urgency of the climate crisis has clearly hit a nerve among people of many walks of life, all around the world. While the outcome of this fall’s events remains highly uncertain, it is clear that such a flowering of creative and determined popular responses is precisely what is needed to reverse decades of willful inaction by the world’s elites and reach beyond the limits of politics-as-usual.

Brian Tokar is the Director of the Vermont-based Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org). His books include Earth for Sale , Redesigning Life? and the forthcoming collection (co-edited with Fred Magdoff), Crisis in Food and Agriculture: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review Press). Thanks to Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle for helpful suggestions.

The previous panelists have offered thoughtful perspectives on how US agricultural policies profoundly alter the lives of people around the world and how [...]]]> - From C. Armiger, P. Palmiotto, J. Estes, eds., Banking on Biodiversity: The ecological and socio-economic dimensions of sustainable agriculture, Keene, NH: Antioch University Center for Tropical Ecology and Conservation (in press)

The previous panelists have offered thoughtful perspectives on how US agricultural policies profoundly alter the lives of people around the world and how people in tropical Central America are beginning to reclaim sovereignty over their food supply. I’d like to bring the discussion home by addressing the problem of increasing corporate control over our own food, and exploring some ways we can begin to bring our food economy back home. This discussion is in many ways an outgrowth of my research on the science and politics of genetic engineering in agriculture. For a variety of international perspectives on the relationship between genetic engineering and global trade policies, please see my 2004 book, Gene Traders, published by Toward Freedom in Burlington, Vermont.1

Once upon a time, my home region-the hills and valleys of north-central Vermont-was considered to be the breadbasket of New England. The Champlain Valley was an important wheat-growing region, and modest hill farms scattered among the foothills of the Green Mountains grew much of New England’s oats, barley and rye.

Today, Vermont, and northern New England as a whole, is overwhelmingly a net importer of food. Bill McKibben reported a year ago in the Vermont Commons newspaper that Vermont’s food imports are worth half again as much as what we export, and two-thirds of these exports are dairy products.2 Even foods we can grow in Vermont are largely imported. A Rodale Institute study of food self-sufficiency across the US, published in 1982, showed that Vermont even imports 70-80 percent of its carrots and apples.3 A recent University of Vermont study projected that only 10-15 percent of our food budgets are spent on locally grown products, but offered a hopeful assessment of the potential to significantly increase this percentage.4  David Timmons, a recent Masters degree recipient from the University’s Program in Community Development and Applied Economics, calculated that Vermont presently has the capacity to grow 38 percent of its food, based on current levels of agricultural production in nine major categories, including foods we mainly grow for export. New Hampshire, unfortunately, comes in at a disappointing 6 percent.

How did it come to this? And, even more importantly, in an era of rising fuel prices and wars for oil, how do we begin to change the situation?

Many factors contributed to the loss of Vermont’s traditional agricultural base. From the westward migrations of the mid-19th century, to the coming of the railroads and the creation of a national grain market, the huge surpluses generated by Western farms drove prices down and rendered New England growers economically marginal. Expanding commodity-based agriculture increasingly trumped the ethic of self-reliance that our region was said to be built upon.

In the 1950s, when Americans spent more than 30 percent of their household income on food, policymakers decided that food had become too expensive for the emerging consumer lifestyle, and that too many people were trying to make their living in agriculture. Subsidies were structured so as to create new export markets for agricultural commodities, and to encourage people to sell their farms and migrate to the cities to find work.

This policy has reverberated many times over the past half century, with repeated “farm crises” through much of the country, and prices declining to the point where we now spend only 15 percent of our income on food. A vanishing share of our food dollars actually goes to farmers, and we are often reminded that food items travel an average of at least 1500 miles from farm to table, a figure dating back to the late 1960s. Vermont lost nearly 90 percent of its farms in the past half century, and many agricultural areas of the central United States faced significant depopulation. Transnational chemical companies, food processors and grain traders, rather than farmers, came to decide how our food would be grown, shipped and processed. Today, the United States has more people in prison than are earning their livelihood growing food.

Today, a shrinking number of transnational corporations control the world’s supply of seeds and other agricultural inputs, as well as food processing, distribution and marketing. This process of corporate consolidation began with the rapidly increasing use of agricultural pesticides in the decades immediately following World War II. US pesticide sales increased ten-fold between the 1940s and 1970s, and another ten-fold since then.5 Pesticide manufacturers such as Monsanto, Dow, and their European counterparts gained unprecedented control over how our food is grown during this period. In the 1990s, they attempted to heighten and consolidate that control through the development of genetically engineered seed varieties, 80 percent of which are engineered to withstand large doses of those companies’ proprietary weed killers.6 To assure market acceptance of genetically engineered crop varieties, Monsanto and other agrochemical giants spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring the world’s leading seed companies.

In 2005, Monsanto became the world’s largest seed company with its takeover of Seminis Seeds, a Mexican company that had grown to become the largest supplier of vegetable seeds in the Western Hemisphere. A generation ago, seed production was as dispersed as milk production, if not more so; the idea of companies having global market share in seeds was virtually unfathomable. Today, ten companies control half of a global seed market estimated at $20 billion annually (see Figure 1).7 Four of those companies, Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont, are also among the world’s largest pesticide producers, and are responsible (along with Dow Chemical) for essentially all of the genetically engineered (GE) seed varieties being aggressively marketed around the world today (Figure 2).

Genetic engineering is a technology that has significantly helped drive corporate consolidation in agriculture. Monsanto alone controls the germplasm, or genetic makeup, of 88 percent of the world’s GE crop acreage.8 Bayer, best known for aspirin and other common pharmaceuticals, is the world’s largest insecticide producer. After the Starlink corn scandal of 2000-’01 cost the food industry $1 billion-and forced the recall of hundreds of name brand corn products due to contamination with a GE variety never approved for human consumption-Bayer bought the former “CropScience” division of the pharmaceutical giant Aventis. Syngenta is essentially a synthetic company, formed from successive waves of mergers, divestments and re-mergers of chemical companies from Switzerland, Britain and Sweden; they are number two in pesticides overall and the largest producer of herbicides. Monsanto is number two in herbicides; thus it is no coincidence that herbicide tolerance is by far the leading genetically engineered trait in commercial agricultural production today.

Corporate giants like Wal-Mart-now the world’s single largest corporation, having overtaken all of the big automotive and oil companies-have come to control a third of the world’s retail sales of food (Figure 3).9 Other companies in the global retail top 10 that are active in New England include the Dutch conglomerate Royal Ahold (owner of Stop & Shop), Albertson’s (owner of Shaw’s), and Costco. The unprecedented market power of Wal-Mart and other huge corporations has also driven consolidation among food processors, with increasing numbers of medium-sized companies-including many of the best known natural food processors-being purchased by the likes of Heinz, General Mills and Mars Candy.10 Added to these is the massive market power of the grain processing giants, especially Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, which together control two thirds of all the world’s shipping, distribution and export of bulk grains, and thoroughly dominate the crushing, milling and processing of soybeans and corn, the two most widespread genetically engineered crops.11

These facts and figures may appear insurmountable, but all around the world, people are saying no to corporate food, reclaiming the ability-and the right-to make basic choices about how our food is grown and how we obtain it. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become a leading symbol of this resistance, with farmers’ organizations around the world often leading the opposition. In much of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, GMOs are at the center of highly visible and persistent public controversies, and more than 30 countries have adopted labeling rules and import restrictions, resisting pressure from the US and the World Trade Organization (WTO) to step back and simply accept this disruptive and dangerous technology.12

It is no accident that Vermont has been a leader in resisting genetic engineering in the US. Vermonters are very concerned about the quality of our food, and share a concern and identification with those who grow our food that has been all but obliterated in much of the US. Indeed Europe’s distinct food cultures have largely driven the resistance there to GMOs and agribusiness control. In this respect, by moving toward a more conscious cultural identification with the sources and character of our food, Vermont may have more in common with Europe than almost any other place in the US. Eighty five Vermont towns are on record supporting GMO labeling and in most cases, a moratorium on growing these crops, a distinction we share with more than 25 towns elsewhere in New England, as well as three northern California counties, where comprehensive bans on raising GE crops and livestock have been voted into law.

In the countries of the global South-the so-called “developing world”-agriculture remains far more central to people’s everyday experience, livelihood, and traditions. From India and Korea to Brazil and parts of Africa, militant farmers’ organizations have emerged in recent years, and joined with farmer activists from Europe and North America to create a global “peasant movement” known as La Via Campesina. Via Campesina has intervened in numerous international fora over the past decade, and has pioneered the concept of food sovereignty as a centerpiece of their demands toward various international agencies.

Food sovereignty is defined by Via Campesina as people’s fundamental right to define their own agricultural and food policies.13 This includes prioritizing agricultural production to feed people, rather than for export; protecting farmers’ right to land, water, seeds and credit; and granting countries the power to protect local agricultures from the common practice of food dumping. Since the 1950s, agribusiness companies, mostly from the US, have been unloading, or dumping, surplus commodities on international markets, thereby undercutting the value of local food in the recipient countries. Food sovereignty advocates support fair trade and have been in the forefront of resisting the myths of “free trade” advanced by the US government and the WTO.

Just as the sum of many small, local efforts have helped restrain the unchecked spread of genetic engineering and other excesses of corporate globalism, a similar convergence of local efforts can help us grow toward a healthier, more sustainable future at home. A year after Mendocino County in California became the first county in the US to completely ban the raising of GMOs, people in the town of Willits and neighboring communities launched a regional “Economic Localization Project,” inspired by awareness of the looming peak in world oil production.14 For many people across the US, “peak oil” represents the end of the unchecked expansion of the petroleum-based economy and an urgent imperative to create a way of life that can withstand what arms industry analyst Michael Klare has termed the “permanent energy crisis.”15

The WELL (Willits Economic Localization) meets biweekly, and has encouraged the creation of over a dozen projects to further the aim of energy and food self reliance in central Mendocino County. They are developing community gardens, a barter market, a school gardens project, and an effort to green their new community hospital. Other towns in the region have formed a biodiesel co-op, organized bulk purchase of fruit (and olive!) trees, and even started a yak cooperative. They’ve brought renewable energy technologies to area schools and organized local food tastings, along with a wide array of other educational and celebratory events. In 2005, Jason Bradford, one of the founders of WELL, produced a detailed study of his town’s food needs and how they can be met locally.16

Of course, food self-reliance is a more easily achievable goal in northern California than in Vermont or New Hampshire, but we are also beginning to see some heartening steps in that direction. A year ago, one group of 20 Upper Connecticut Valley residents pledged to only eat foods grown within a 100 mile radius for the entire month of January. They relied on a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, Luna Bleu, that provides stored produce all winter, on Butterworks Farm’s dried beans, wheat, corn and sunflower oil, and on diverse local sources of dairy products, bread, maple syrup, honey, and meats. It helped, of course, that they had planned ahead and put by an ample supply of produce from the past year’s gardens. They also relied on the active support of the Upper Valley Food Co-op in White River Junction, whose manager, Kye Cochran, is renowned as a dedicated local food and GE-free advocate. This “Localvore” movement has spread like wildfire throughout Vermont over the past year.

Another effort, the Addison County Relocalization Network (known as ACORN), has undertaken a detailed mapping of their county’s energy and food needs. They are working toward online partnering of growers and buyers, innovative ways for food producers to share needs, and an effort to strengthen agricultural zoning.17 One aim is to make it more difficult for prime agricultural land to be converted to other uses, a problem that has become epidemic in recent decades through much of the Champlain Valley.

Vermont has a vital network of farmers markets and CSA farms. Many growers plant a little extra every year to supply local food shelves. Burlington’s Intervale features some of the most vital and collaborative urban farms in the entire country. NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association) and the Vermont Grass Growers are helping struggling dairy farms transition to more sustainable methods. Thanks to FoodWorks in Montpelier, many Vermont schools have active food gardens and horticulture programs. But much more is needed. Even a couple of decades ago, there were many more local canneries for local produce, and freezer lockers and slaughterhouses to serve those who raise animals for meat. Today we have more artisanal cheesemakers than ever before, but Vermont’s single largest cheesemaker, Cabot, has been steadily moving its production out of state since it was purchased by the regional giant AgriMark in 1993.

Two policy initiatives debated in Montpelier during the 2006 legislative session aimed to help further the goal of increasing food self-reliance. One bill was passed (H. 456), providing small grants to schools to develop working relationships with local farmers and food processors; the original bill also included training and processing assistance for school food service personnel to bring more local products into their kitchens. Another bill (H. 654) addressed the link between food self reliance and emergency management, and would have brought together emergency planners, municipal officials and regional planning commissions in a coordinated effort to strengthen and expand local food and energy supplies in preparation for potential future shortages.18

Another crucial policy area is helping farmers through the costly transition to organic and sustainable production methods. Vermont’s recently retired Secretary of Agriculture, Steven Kerr, paid significant lip service to the idea of state aid to farmers who wish to transition to organic production. This idea languished over his four years in office, but needs to be a central element in any meaningful plan to help sustain our farms and farmers. In Europe, public support for organic transitions has been widely available, and has hugely benefited the land, farmers and consumers. In Austria, 10 percent of the farms are organic (50 percent in the alpine Salzburg province), with a ten-fold increase during the 1990s after state support became available for organic conversions.19 Vermont and New England should be able to do this as well.

Can these efforts toward increased food self reliance in our region meet the dual challenge of responding to future crises and sustaining a high quality of life for everyone? Can local alternatives challenge the influence of agribusiness giants like Monsanto over all of our lives, and also meaningfully serve those who are unable to pay more for high quality local food? One of the strengths of the GE-Free Vermont movement over the years has been its insistence that we will not encourage the creation of a niche market for safe, healthy food while those who are less fortunate among us are limited to increasingly hazardous corporate-processed food. A sustainable future-a future of genuine food sovereignty-is only possible if healthy, local food is available to everyone, regardless of their economic status, family history, or access to land. In the best New England tradition, we can work collaboratively with our neighbors to create a greener future for us all.

__________________________________________________

Brian Tokar is the author of four books on environmental politics and issues, including Earth for Sale (South End Press) and Gene Traders (Toward Freedom). He directs the Biotechnology Project at the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, and extends his gratitude to Steve Chase and Christine Arminger for the opportunity to participate in this symposium.

Notes:

1 Brian Tokar, ed., Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade and the Globalization of Hunger, Burlington, VT: Toward Freedom, 2004.

2 Bill McKibben, “Can Vermont Feed Itself?” Vermont Commons, October 2005.

3 Cornucopia Project, “The State of Your Food: A Manual for State Food System Analysis,” Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1982

4 David S. Timmons, personal communication, February 2006; David Timmons and Qingbin Wang, “Measuring Local Food,” draft manuscript, University of Vermont, March 2006. See also David S. Timmons, Measuring and Understanding Local Foods: The Case of Vermont, MS Thesis, University of Vermont Program in Community Development and Applied Economics, May 2006.

5 Thomas R. Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens and Public Policy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981; John H. Perkins, Insects, Experts and the Insecticide Crisis, New York: Plenum Press, 1982; Paolo Palladino, Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in North America, 1885-1985, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996.

6 See, for example, Brian Tokar, “Monsanto: A Profile of Corporate Arrogance,” in Edward Goldsmith and Jerry Mander, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy, London: Earthscan Publications, 2001. An earlier version of the article appeared in The Ecologist, Vol. 28 No. 5 (September/October 1998).

7 ETC Group Communiqué No. 91, Oligopoly, Inc. 2005: Concentration in Corporate Power, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: ETC Group, November 2005; ETC Group Communiqué No. 90, Global Seed Industry Concentration-2005, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: ETC Group, September 2005.

8 ETC Group, November 2005, ibid.

9 ETC Group, November 2005, ibid.

10 Phillip H. Howard, “Organic Industry Structure: Top 25 Food Processors in North America,” Michigan State University, November 2006, at http://www.msu.edu/~howardp/.

11 Corporate Watch, Cargill:  Arrogance Incorporated, Oxford, UK: Corporate Watch, 1999; Brewster Kneen, Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies, London: Pluto Press, 2002.

12 Center for Food Safety, Genetically Modified Crops and Foods: Worldwide Regulation, Prohibition and Production, Washington, DC: Center for Food Safety, 2005; see also Brian Tokar, “WTO vs. Europe:  Less-and Also More-Than it Seems,” at www.counterpunch.org/tokar02182006.html.

13 La Via Campesina, “What is Food Sovereignty?” January 2003, at www.viacampesina.org.

14 Willits Economic Localization Project Overview, at www.willitseconomiclocalization.org/MoreAbout.htm.

15 Michael T. Klare, “The Permanent Energy Crisis,” TomDispatch.com, February 2006, at www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=58126.

16 Jason Bradford, “Food Security Report for Willits, November 2003,” available from www.willitseconomiclocalization.org.

17 The efforts of ACORN and kindred groups across Vermont are profiled online at vtpeakoil.net.

18 Full texts of bills debated by the Vermont legislature are available at www.leg.state.vt.us.

19 Christian R. Vogl and Ika Darnhofer, “Organic agriculture in Austria,” The Organic Standard (Höje, Sweden), No. 34, February 2004.

(This interview was originally posted at http://www.ecoclub.com/news/101/interview.html)

ECOCLUB.com: What is Social Ecology and in what key ways does it differ from the mainstream environmentalism of the big US & International NGOS?

Brian Tokar: Social ecology offers a coherent radical critique of current social, [...]]]>

(This interview was originally posted at http://www.ecoclub.com/news/101/interview.html)

ECOCLUB.com: What is Social Ecology and in what key ways does it differ from the mainstream environmentalism of the big US & International NGOS?

Brian Tokar: Social ecology offers a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and environmental problems, as well as a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society. We view environmental problems as fundamentally social and political, and seek systemic, long-term solutions, in contrast to the incremental policy adjustments generally advocated by the large NGOs. We advocate fundamental changes in political, economic and social systems, envisioning an outlook that reharmonizes human communities with the natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and freedom within human communities.

ECOCLUB.com: What criteria should Tourism meet, assumed that it can, so that it could be genuinely ecological and compatible with social ecology?  In other words, could there ever be a Social Ecological Tourism?

Brian Tokar: Several of our students over the years have sought to address the problems of tourism and eco-tourism from a social ecology perspective. The fundamental problem with tourism today is that it transforms communities and important natural areas toward serving the desires and perceived needs of more affluent people who come to visit from other parts of the world.
A more genuinely ecological tourism would necessarily begin with the genuine needs and lived realities of the host community. Visitors would participate in ongoing community activities and voluntary forms of service to their hosts. Facilities would necessarily be owned and managed by local people and genuinely reflect the community’s lifeways, rather than some idealized or repackaged version of those. The problem, of course, is that in a competitive, capitalist context, and in a world burdened by vast discrepancies in wealth and privilege, communities that offer visitors their lived reality as it is may have a difficult time competing with locales that offer visitors a more idealized fantasy of their existence.

ECOCLUB.com: What is your view of tools such as carbon offsetting of travel emissions, voluntourism and traveller’s philanthropy, do they advance the social ecological agenda, or are they just ‘humane’ forms of green capitalism in travel?

Brian Tokar: We are especially skeptical of carbon offsetting for travel. Offsets may help absolve individuals’ personal guilt for their excess carbon emissions, but the actual benefits to the climate are often difficult to measure. For countries that aim to meaningfully cap their emissions, offsetting emissions through investments in projects elsewhere in the world represents a “hole in the cap” with results that are difficult to monitor and verify. Authors such as Larry Lohmann from the UK have demonstrated that many carbon offset projects ultimately do more harm than good. I am new to the concept of ‘voluntourism;’ as I’ve outlined above, it all depends on how it is carried out, and how genuinely it meets the needs of the host community.

ECOCLUB.com: How optimistic are you about the Obama administration delivering on its promises for peace and the environment?

Brian Tokar: After 30 years of virtually uninterrupted right wing hegemony in the US, most progressive-minded people are hopeful about the ‘change’ that Obama represents. However his policies have a long way to go in living up to his promises for change. The escalation of US military activity in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the very slow withdrawal from Iraq reflect more continuity with past policies than meaningful change. In environmental policy, Obama’s top appointees are consistent in acknowledging the need for effective science-based responses to problems such as the potentially catastrophic global climate disruptions that we are facing. On the other hand, they appear quite wedded to status-quo false “solutions” to global warming, including the potential expansion of nuclear power, trading of carbon dioxide emissions permits, and the myths of “clean coal” and “advanced” biofuels. We may be seeing as much change as is possible within the constraints of the current structures of political power in the US, but this is clearly not enough in the face of mounting ecological and economic disruptions.

ECOCLUB.com: Should the Green movement search for short-term solutions to the current economic crisis (of capitalism) or should they just let the system collapse and develop a really alternative one, not based on money & profit, that it can replace it?

Brian Tokar: Short term solutions are inherently limited, but necessary. Crises, both economic and ecological, disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people, while the most affluent are best able to shield themselves from the most serious consequences. It is the responsibility of any society that believes in justice to compensate for these short-term effects and allow everyone to participate in the recreation of a social order that fully meets the needs of the people and the planet. Short term solutions should not become ends in themselves, nor allow us to become complacent, but rather help set the stage for the much bigger changes that are necessary.

As an aware consumer imploring American farmers to “put away that DDT now,” singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell sang back in the 1970’s, “give me spots on the apples, but leave me the birds and the bees…please.”

Once upon a time, when I was an activist and small organic farmer, [...]]]>

As an aware consumer imploring American farmers to “put away that DDT now,” singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell sang back in the 1970’s, “give me spots on the apples, but leave me the birds and the bees…please.”

Once upon a time, when I was an activist and small organic farmer, organic standards were a self-imposed system of rules developed primarily by organic farmers, those who had to work with them on the ground. Consumer expectations were always figured into organic standards, but we understood that consumer perceptions of what is “pure and natural” do not always fit the reality of organic farming, let alone food processing. While consumers might be ignorant about farming and food production, we believed they could learn—it was more important to support farmers who did the right thing than to pander to consumer fears. Just as the immortal Ms. Mitchell learned to ignore those spots on the apples.

Today, no one seems bothered by the assertion that consumer expectations, even those grounded in ignorance, are all that matters. Add to that the marketing myth that consumers cannot understand and could care less about the nuances of organic methods, and only want to be assured that organic products meet the toughest possible standards. What it often adds up to is unparalleled hypocrisy, and betrayal of the early vision of organic in the name of an ideological anti-corporate agenda that actually works against the interests of both small farmers and “ordinary” consumers.

The gist of the problem is this: Most of the grassroots farm and consumer activists have had it wrong all along. They believe that the only way to fend off the takeover of organic by global corporate evildoers is to make the standards as tight, strict, rigorous and undiluted as possible, and use consumer perceptions as their rationale. This is in part due to the mistaken assumption that regulation of the organic label is comparable to regulations that prohibit misdeeds by corporate polluters. Not true.

The difference is one that very few outside of government and some rarified academic fields understand, but which immediately makes sense to most people when it is explained. Unlike a traditional environmental or consumer protection regulation that keeps giant corporations from threatening the health of consumers and the environment, the NOP (like any other government organic labeling program) is a marketing program that establishes minimum requirements for those wishing to enter the organic market.

Marketing programs are generally there for the benefit of the regulated industry, not as watchdogs to stop them from harming the public. Established players want to tighten their standards to limit competition by potential new entrants. It has nothing to do with protecting consumer interests, and works against consumers by maintaining high prices and limited supply for products that may not be demonstrably superior. For example, spotless apples that meet cosmetic standards as “fancy” may still be drenched in pesticides, and milk from a cow that was treated with antibiotics when she was a calf cannot be distinguished from milk from a cow has never been treated with antibiotics (as required under the NOP), if other factors such as feed quality are the same. Marketers point to consumer preferences for qualities that the marketers themselves have told them they should prefer. Tighter organic standards also do nothing to protect the environment or improve product safety. Tighter rules mostly serve to create more paper work, a bigger obstacle for small operations than for large players, who are accustomed to meeting bureaucratic requirements and have paid compliance staffs.

Unfortunately, the activists often have more power than they realize. Everyone connected with the organic industry–from the NOP administration to the companies, large and small, who are trying to make a buck and save the world at the same time (never mind if the two may be mutually contradictory—that’s another discussion)—live in fear of being publicly accused of trying to “weaken” the standards. The charge (endlessly repeated even by people like Jim Hightower, with the aura of accepted truth) that USDA has been trying to dilute organic standards at the behest of corporate agribusiness, while plausible to any activist who has battled corporate owned environmental regulators, is completely wrong.

This has had unfortunate consequences for the original vision of organic, most clearly seen in the public reaction to the NOP’s first proposed rule in 1998, when the only staff people who truly cared about small organic farmers and the organic vision were immediately sidelined from the program. The new management then instituted a politically driven policy supporting the strictest possible interpretation of the law. The most recent examples of this can be found in discussions about the NOP’s proposed rule on access to pasture and in some public comments about the NOSB’s proposed standards for organic aquaculture.

The proposed rule for access to pasture is generally acknowledged to be excessively prescriptive in its requirement for year-round outdoor living for organic livestock in any climate. Many of the comments agree that, if implemented as written, the rules would likely eliminate a large number of small organic dairy farmers, as well as most organic beef producers. To this extent the NOP’s strategy has succeeded: Activists are now being forced to ask that USDA make its rules just a wee bit looser. But they continue to cling to the delusion that tougher rules benefit small operators, and threaten those who disagree with public relations nightmares.

Another case in point is the recommendation on standards for organic aquaculture that was just passed by the NOSB. It was opposed mainly by consumer groups, who consider fish farming as it is practiced by conventional agribusiness concerns to be an ecological and health disaster—as well they should. But does it make any sense to oppose the possibility of environmentally sound fish culture because consumers have been convinced that organic means “pure and natural?”

With the myriad crises we face, not least of them climate change, why on earth would anyone want to limit the possibility of the broadest possible transition to organic methods, without delay? There’s much more I could say, especially about what organic does mean, if not “pure and natural.” Lets continue the discussion.

Grace Gershuny

GAIA Services

Barnet, Vermont