Every day we make choices, and those choices often impact the world around us in bigger ways that we might think. As a student, I face the challenge of operating on a slim budget. I have very few dollars and must make frequent choices about what to buy with them. These choices are not always easy; I often find the toughest ones are those revolving around what I consume. Food is not something that finds itself very high on many students’ priority lists; very often, macaroni and cheese and ramen are the sorts of things students line their cupboards with. Sometimes we have to make do with what we have, right? The truth is, most of us don’t think about it much at all; eating can be this secondary thing we do once in a while as we dash from class to class and try and get our homework done. It is becoming apparent, however, that eating and the dollars we put toward it have much greater impacts than we may realize.
Well sure, you might think, nutrition is important; but nutrition isn’t the only consideration. For students of the natural resources, agriculture has massive implications for resource use. I study wildlife biology with the intent of working in conservation and management. It is certainly no secret that habitat loss and degradation are the number one threat to biodiversity worldwide; any good conservation biology text will espouse as much. So where is all that land going? It’s going to many things, but by and large the most acreage is devoted to agriculture. That in itself isn’t so horrible; modern industrial mono-crop agriculture, however, is another beast entirely. In the words of Aldo Leopold, “As for diversity, what remains of our native fauna and flora remains only because agriculture has not got around to destroying it. The present ideal of agriculture is clean farming; clean farming means a food chain aimed solely at economic profit and purged of all non-conforming links.” Leopold passed away in 1948, at the early rise of the Green Revolution, when synthesized fertilizers and man-made chemicals truly reached their height in modern industrial agriculture systems. Today, it has become a world-wide phenomenon, and truly threatens biodiversity and food security.
There are many of us who realize the dangers of “clean farming”. Many are outspoken about the injustices of modern agribusiness and are calling for a new way to grow, cook, and eat food. Many of us have gardens, and procure protein from nature with a hunting license. Farmer’s markets and community supported agriculture are on the rise. One of sustainable food’s most outspoken proponents, Michael Pollan, was recently interviewed on the subject (find the whole article at http://p2.to/19nf). He stated that “...we just don’t have the choice of continuing down the path of this highly industrialized, highly fossil fuel-dependent food industry, even if we wanted to. Food security... is endangered by having the food system we have. We have to figure out another way to do it. And to say the only alternative is the tiny artisinal farm is false. There are many ways to do it. All of them involve changing industrial agricultural, however.” This is all well and wonderful, but how about those of us with slim pocket books? The “food movement,” as it is often referred to, is frequently accused of being elitist, as organics in grocery stores can be more expensive and some farmer’s markets are as well. To that, Pollan responded, “A great many social movements in this country have begun with elites, with people who have the time and the resources to devote to them... go back to abolition, women’s suffrage, the environmental movement. The reason that good food is more expensive than cheap food is part of the issue we’re trying to confront. And has to do with subsidies, and the way we organize our society and our economy. Those are big systemic problems.”
We are merely students. We have projects and papers and finals to deal with; big systemic problems are too large and overwhelming for us to address. False. Every dollar counts. Every time we shop, every time we hand over a George Washington, we are voting. Our votes on ballots matter, too, and we must participate there. More importantly, we can make statements with our everyday choices. We may not be able to do it every time, but as often as we can, we should. “The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process... The mechanism of operation is the same for any ethic: social approbation for right actions: social disapproval for wrong actions.” Once again, Leopold provides a framework for us to build an ethic that supports life and diversity. This isn’t to say we should chastise ourselves or our friends for ramen on the shelf; that is not the message I wish to convey. I simply wish to provide a reminder that little things do make a difference, and conservation is not just about studies and papers, but about our personal choices as well.
