FALL SEMESTER November 18

November 8

We heard a very inspiring and educational presentation from Liza about Food Waste.


Diet for a Small Planet by Moore-Lappe

In her ground breaking book, Diet for a Small Planet, Moore-Lappe, contrast the terms starvation and food insecurity.

Moore-Lappe attributes world starvation and food insecurity to the existing of a the long historical processes of colonialism that has destroyed a traditional social system, and is responsible for the global scarcity of democracy. She points out that democracy carries within the principles of accountability, where people have a say in decisions that affect their well being. In a democratic state, leaders are kept accountable to the needs of the majority. Democracy protects its citizens’ most fundamental rights. She smartly points out that as long as this fundamental concept of democracy is absent from a countries economic life, people will continue to be powerless. Antidemocratic structures are those in which power is so tightly concentrated that the majority of the people are left without a saying, and leaders are only accountable to the powerful minorities.  These structures rob their people of power over their lives.

Her concept can be extended to other aspects of our current industrialized, global agri-food system and larger economy. Moore-Lappe outlines four main levels where democracy is scarcer by the day: at the family level, the food providers, mostly women, are losing authority over land use; at the village level, fewer and fewer people control more and more farm and pasture land; at the national level, nations are not owners of their own destiny in this global market economy, they are ruled by antidemocratic governments that answer only to wealthy elites; and last democracy is scarce at the international arena, where a handful of corporations dominate the world trade in those commodities that are the lifeblood of third world economies. 

 

FALL SEMESTER - October 28

October 28

An Ecomodernist Manifesto

I believe there are a lot of wholes in this Manifesto. The piece doesn't seem to be able to escape an Eurocentric, privilege elitist influence, in spite of its good intentions. 

Other people have looked at some of the human accomplishments in a different light.

This is not to say that any one is the correct, but it all depends where you're standing.

In his book, Collapse, Dr. J. Diamond’s major contention is that agriculture is the worst mistake in the history of the world.  In order to support his argument, Diamond outlines a series of archeological findings that compare the life styles of hunter-gatherers civilizations with the life styles of agricultural civilizations. Diamond draws comparisons between these two groups in terms of overall health and societal structure. Providing a series of archeological finding he shows how hunter-gatherers life styles exceed in quality those of agricultural societies. Diamond draws attention to the fact that hunter-gatherers have better health because they have more diversified diets, as compared to the highly starchy, low diversified diets of early agricultural societies. He also blames poor health in agricultural societies due to the grouping of large amount of people in cities, compare to small grouping of people in nomadic hunters and gatherers societies. Diamond also points out that agriculture’s heavily reliance on monocultures places the food sources at risk of been depleted by pests or unreliable weather conditions, as compared to the hunter-gatherers who are dependent on a variety of food sources.  Agriculture is also to blame for the introduction of class and sex disparities, among others.

By Diamond’s arguments, we as a species have lived as hunter-gatherers for most of our existence, as the result of us been able to adapt to our environment. During our time as hunters and gatherers, besides the fact that populations were growing, there wasn’t any major changes on the planets environment to make us favor agriculture to hunting and gathering. Even then, Diamond explains how there was an alternative to solve the issue of population growth by means of population control, however evidence shows that those groups who chose the hunter gatherer, growth control path where over run by the groups favoring agriculture. This and the fact that agriculture has brought about a large number of negative results, not only for ourselves but for the planet, might be indicating that we are trying to imposed an unreasonable demand on the environment, by asking the environment to adapt to our agricultural ways and not the other way around. In the face of all the social and environmental mayhem agriculture has brought about, perhaps the hunter-gatherer model is a better option or alternative for meeting our basic needs, and survive as a species.