Reclaiming the Island
I responded this morning to a simple minded, conservative apologist railing against local food production. He’d posted some of his drivel on the Abbeyweb, and while thinking of what to say to him, I recalled a quote from Turtle Island:
“The return to marginal farmland on the part of longhairs is not some nostalgic replay of the nineteenth century. Here is a generation of white people finally ready to learn from the Elders. How to live on the continent as though our children, and on down, for many ages, will still be here (not on the moon). Loving and protecting the soil, these trees, these wolves. Natives of Turtle Island.
A scaled-down, balanced technology is possible, if cut loose from the cancer of exploitation-heavy-industry-perpetual growth. Those who have already sensed these necessities and have begun, whether in the country or the city, to ‘grow with less,’ are the only counterculture that counts.”
No one I know proposes a community model based entirely on local production. Especially for a nation with over 300 million swarming humans.
The indigenous people of this continent traded between bioregions for thousands of years. This includes the Chickasaw of my own bioregion, so I see no reason why that can’t continue, especially for critical supplies. But I don’t need California figs in October in the Mississippi Delta, and do believe the majority of what is needed can be produced and consumed locally.
Whether people like it or not doesn’t matter. The cold sober fact of the matter is the current system, propped up by inexpensive fossil fuel cannot continue ad infinitum.
People can face the facts, change behaviors or cease to exist.