As California voters prepare to vote on whether to label GMOs in food, we go to Berkeley to discuss Prop 37 and its implications for the broader food system with journalist and best-selling author Michael Pollan. Among the nation’s leading writers and thinkers on food and food policy, Pollan is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism. He’s written several books about food, including “The Botany of Desire,” “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual,” and the forthcoming, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.”
From California’s Proposition 37 initiative to New York City’s soda ban, journalist and best-selling author Michael Pollan argues that local efforts hold the key to challenging the agricultural industry’s stranglehold over national food policy. With companies like Monsanto influencing Congress and state legislatures, Pollan warns the United States risks falling into a “two-class food system,” where only those who can afford to live outside the industrial food system can access healthy ways to eat. Among the nation’s leading writers and thinkers on food and food policy, Pollan is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism and author of several best-selling books, including “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”
“In this video from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, ecologist David Holmgren traces the path of permaculture from its roots in the 1970s to its potential, in the future, to reshape how humans interact with the planet. He explains how its premise—working with nature rather than against it—will help us adapt to and survive in a resource-scarce world.”
A growing economy consumes natural resources and produces wastes. It results in biodiversity loss, air and water pollution, climate destabilization, and other major environmental threats.
(2) Economic Sustainability
A healthy environment is the foundation of a healthy economy. We need healthy soils for agriculture, healthy forests for timber, and healthy oceans for fisheries. Along with clean air for breathing and clean water for drinking, these are the building blocks of a prosperous economy and a good life.
(3) National Security and International Stability
When economic growth threatens the environment and economic sustainability, social unrest is the result, and national security is compromised. Economic growth was once used for building military power, but in an overgrown global economy, economic sustainability is more conducive to diplomacy and stability among nations. (more…)
It’s business as usual that’s the utopian fantasy, while creating something very new and different is the pragmatic way forward.
Cross-posted from YES! Magazine, where it was originally posted on July 6, 2011.
Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. Productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption: all must go continually up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It is widely believed that growth is always worth the price that must be paid for it—even when it undermines families, jobs, communities, the environment, and our sense of place and continuity.
The Limits of Growth
But an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again. Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for billions of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy hollows out communities and the environment; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing things that would truly make us and the country better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially.
We need to reinvent the economy, not merely restore it. The roots of our environmental and social problems are systemic and thus require transformational change. Sustaining people, communities, and nature must henceforth be seen as the core goals of economic activity, not hoped for byproducts of an economy based on market success, growth for its own sake, and modest regulation. That is the paradigm shift we seek.
by Downtowner, posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Working at a library I see all sorts of books pass through that I want to read – way more than I am going to be able to read in a normal lifespan – but this doesn’t keep me from checking them out and taking them home with the best of intentions. Some I get to, some I renew them three times (renewal limit at my library) and am forced to return unread. I could pretend that I make a list of this stuff to get back to, because that would be the logical thing to do, no? But I honestly don’t even try, because I have a constant stack of 30-40 library books making me feel guilty at all times.
