Chris Newman
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

I don’t think this article is advocating forfeiture of socioeconomic progress; I’d honestly say it’s the opposite. Socioeconomic progress and quality of life cannot exist if agriculture depends on methods that exhaust our natural resource base — if we don’t get agriculture right, nothing else will matter.

When talking about Local in this article, I should probably make a distinction between “microlocal” and “macrolocal.” The former is what most people think about today — farmers markets and pricey produce being slung from market stands. That’s not what I’m talking about.

“Macrolocal” is the idea of making foodsheds regional rather than global so that the food being produced in an area is food that ecology can produce with minimal disruption to the surrounding environment — thus making it economically sustainable. It’s the idea that natural grasslands should be producing pasture-based proteins, temperate floodplains producing grains, temperate forests producing the dozens and dozens of crops that can be cultivate in (e.g.) oak heath forests, arid regions producing ranged animal protein, tropical rainforests producing the myriad food crops that grow well in rainforests.

Macrolocal does not preclude the idea of surpluses or the existence of a global marketplace for food (even ancient indigenous America had trade routes that coursed through the entire hemisphere for the purpose of international trade); but it does rethink the role of that global market — namely to make it secondary to local and regional markets in the interest of preserving the productive capacity of the land, enhancing nutrition, and making regional foodscapes ore resilient and profitable.

This, of course, happened before — regional markets once enjoyed primacy over global/international ones; this relationship was inverted purely in the interests of economic efficiency… but not one stopped to consider the consequences until now that we’re having to deal with things like global deforestation — a key driver of climate change caused in large part by an insatiable worldwide demand for meat (and the crops that feed meat).

I’m all for preserving all or most of our quality of life; but defining “progress” as necessarily excluding the past or shifting our expectations would be tragically unimaginative.

    Chris Newman

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    Working toward a sustainable future with Sylvanaqua Farms, the Accokeek Foundation, and GreenMaven. Support it all here: https://www.patreon.com/farmermang