BioDiverseCity Land Co-op

Joel Salatin is a great teacher on the topics of healing and rebuilding the soil, pastured animal raising, and organic farming generally. I enjoyed the book You Can Farm a great deal and found it full of useful insights–for example, that aspiring farmers ought not aspire to living a debt-laden fully suburban lifestyle like their neighbors down the road.

However, I have some issues with this essay “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal” by Salatin. (The essay title is a link; you can go read it and come back here and we can chat a bit on that topic.) This is important because I’ve been told that Salatin has also endorsed Republican Ron Paul for president. In fact a lot of people have fallen for the notion that Mr. Paul is a “libertarian” and if you’re libertarianly inclined, you should join the Republicans and vote for this guy. More on that later.

Whenever I read a sharp social critique such as Salatin’s, I look toward the end to see what sort of action steps he proposes that we ourselves, as individuals, in our own small sway, can take to right these wrongs. In the case of “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal (we’ll abbreviate it EIWTDII), here is the central action step you can take. This is your Gandhian chance to “be that change you want to see in the world:”

“Those of us who would aspire to opt out — both consumers and producers — must pray for enough cleverness to circumvent the system until the system cannot sustain itself. Cycles happen. Because things are this way today does not mean they will be this way next year. Hurrah for that.”

All right, then the EIWTDII action step is that we should opt out of Babylon. Since Salatin is a farmer, and has confronted all these global injustices of the corporate capitalist state, this is what he is advising you, the aspiring farmer, to do: opt out. However, since the system is overwhelmingly powerful, we consumers or producers are resigned to praying for cleverness to circumvent the system until it more or less crashes (can’t sustain itself).

This strategy has not worked well for medical marijuana growers even in a state like Cali where it is legal. Many of those folks trying to cleverly circumvent instead ended up subjects of the Prison-Industrial Complex. Let us pray for a better strategy than clever circumvention.

By the way, one of the accusations leveled at us “Peak Oil Doomsayers” like me is that we sit around waiting for the system to no longer be able to sustain itself, so we can leap up amid the wreckage and say “told ya so”; we’re short on action ideas to make things better, it is said. (Yet, many of us are busy working at things like the local food movement, changing local government, urging cities to change to “eco-municipalities” etc.)

One of the major complaints in EIWTDII is the zoning system which prevents Salatin from building the kind of house he’d like, or use of his farm for purposes which stretch the “agricultural” zoning designation. Yet zoning is a mostly local affair. Here in Wisconsin, the counties have the most to do with zoning. I have a hard time believing that a man of Salatin’s stature could not mount a campaign to change the composition of the County Zoning Board, or perhaps the entire County Board, toward people who share his beliefs. He can crisscross the country, but can’t crisscross the County?

You see, “opting out” is not an option in globalized corporate capitalism and its state. You do have to interact with this system. If you wish to change it, as Salatin certainly does, you will need to apply some people-power to that enterprise. There is a big problem with Libertarianism and where this movement purports to lead us: If we “opt out” what are we “opting into?” Good old-fashioned “laissez-faire capitalsm?” This seems to be the Holy Grail Quest handed down since Ayn Rand was in her heyday writing hectic books that managed to diss every known philosopher prior to, of course, her.

Ron Paul carries the false libertarianism to its logical conclusion: privatizing everything, eliminating worker protection such as OSHA, abolishing the EPA, letting the resource corporations take their best shot at stewarding our old-growth forests and wildlife areas, and so on. I think I’d rather have “broken government” than the no-government of Mr. Paul. [Of course, while meat packers would be free to dish out whatever foul spoilt meat they saw fit, he'd still have a military-industrial complex running his show; don't ask me how you'd get that monster off the tax-and-deficit rolls.]

Trouble is, there never was a golden heyday of “laissez-faire capitalism” in the USA, and trying to lead American small farmers down that dead-end road is a trip to Utopia, which literally means, “no-where.”

I’d much rather see us embark on a trip to “Eutopia,” meaning “good place.”

Locally, our “eco-municipality” movements in Wisconsin are an attempt to get government going in the right, eutopian, direction, not to “opt out” of it. Because it starts with a level of government easily accessible to small, grass-roots groups, it offers an action step that is not impossibly huge such as trying to change the US Government farm bill. Many of us in the local food movement and the peak oil preparedness movement (is there one?) are ourselves employees of government, whether they be UW-Extension workers or teaching staff at the University, or others associated with that “government” which Salatin wants us to have no part of.

I totally agree with Salatin that our modern agencies are as he describes: “these agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.” I think the way to cure this is by starting a movement of co-operation that is fully connected, Gaian (global and ecological), indigenous-enlightened, community-centric, multidisciplinary and uncompartmentalized, adapted to complexity, holistic, and completely non-linear and synchronicitous (recognizing of novelty) in its thought process.

More like, “everything I want to do requires grassroots re-design and rebuilding.”

Opting in,

b.g.

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