Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Brianne Goodspeed has biked solo through rural France, worked with farmers in West Africa, and hiked the Appalachian Trail. She now lives in Vermont and rarely finds reason to leave.

http://briannegoodspeed.com

This author has contributed 29 posts.

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The War on Bugs

3 Comments

03/12/08

For anyone else who digs on books that examine how PR shapes public perception, Will Allen’s new book, The War on Bugs is the latest in a genre that includes The Best War Ever and Toxic Sludge is Good for You. Instead of the now-tired observation that much of our food supply harms our bodies and destroys the land, Allen looks at the historical connection between advertising and agriculture and how toxins were marketed and sold to farmers to create The War on Bugs. (Fans of The Lorax might be surprised to see how else Dr. Suess put his talents to work — shilling for DDT and Standard Oil — before he spoke for the trees.)

Here’s an excerpt from a Q&A with Will Allen that I did for Chelsea Green.

BG: You’re an organic farmer, but you’re also an ex-Marine – and you were arrested and sentenced to a year in jail during the early 70s for civil rights and antiwar activism. That’s not a one-track life. Were there noticeable turning points for you?

WA: A turning point for me came during my time in the Marine Corps when I was dispossessed of the belief that as Marines we were protecting democracy, liberty, and freedom. I learned we were mostly protecting corporations. Some of our military actions while I was a Marine were in Lebanon, Cuba, and Vietnam. In Lebanon, we protected American corporations in the mid-East and mid-East allies, no matter how corrupt. In Cuba, we protected American businesses, a dictator, the ruling class that fled to Miami after the Revolution, and the Mafia drug cartels. In Vietnam we protected business interests, rice interests, illegal drug interests – the opium trade – and religious interests. We installed a Catholic president in a nation where 95% of the population was Buddhist and were shocked when he was assassinated. By 1963, I was protesting the Vietnam War in Chicago rallies and campus teach-ins.

…

BG: Do you see any similarities in the way that wars are spun and sold to the American public and the ways that toxic chemicals are spun and sold to American farmers?

WA: Advertising agencies made a quantum leap during the First World War. They did contract work for the government to sell the war and recruitment work for the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. The country was isolationist at the time and not interested in getting into another of Europe’s seemingly endless string of wars. Advertisers were able to get enlistments up and the public to buy war bonds. The themes were: a “can do attitude”, (such as, if America enters the war we will win it), a patriotic obligation, and protecting the civil rights of occupied countries.

When the same advertising agencies sold chemicals to farmers and householders, their pitches were similar. We are at war, be patriotic, and “a can do attitude.” That attitude encouraged such boasts as “. . .We can grow more than any other farmers in the world”, which led to the common belief that American farmers are feeding the world.

BG: On the flip side, do you see similarities in your resistance – resistance to war and resistance to toxic chemicals?

WA: I think that when someone becomes as anti-war as I am, then whatever one does – whether it is organic farming or something else – the irrationality and injustice of war is never far from their consciousness. While farm wars and military wars are of a different scale, many of the chemical and mining corporations that make fertilizer and pesticides are also manufacturers of bombs, and other military hardware and software. I think the sooner we can stop the chemical and genetic war on the farms, and the mindset that we are at war with nature, the better we will be as a species. In a sense, it is hard to not think of the war every time I fire up a tractor or pump or generator or heater that runs on gas or diesel from war zones around the world, especially Iraq. For that reason, we are looking at all the alternatives to fossil fuels for moving vehicles and for stationary heaters and generators.

War is not what is going on at Cedar Circle Organic Farm (in East Thetford, Vermont). We have struggles with pests, including woodchucks, voles, birds, worms, fungi, insects and weeds. We develop and copy strategies that are softer, non poisonous, and often very effective, and sometimes those adopted strategies are not effective. It is a process. We don’t have all the answers, but we have a lot more now than when we started in the 1960s.

activism, agriculture, birds, book, books, business, car, corporations, diesel, Europe, farm, farming, farms, Food, gas, insects, military, oil, Organic, SPUN, Tea, Toxins, trees, wood

Eco-Chick Does Mountain Jam

2 Comments

05/31/07

With festival season upon us, my friend, Amy, called a few weeks ago to tell me that I was going to meet her and her friends at Radio Woodstock’s Mountain Jam in Hunter, New York on the first weekend in June.

I’d already seen the lineup (with Gov’t Mule and Phil Lesh & Friends headlining) and would have gone for Michael Franti and Ozomatli alone, except that I now spend my Friday and Saturday nights squinting over IPCC reports, wondering if apocalypse is upon us or merely looming. At some point during George Bush’s tenure, I got incalculably old.

Ozomatli

Amy told me that if I didn’t meet her in New York, she was going to come to my home and kidnap me. I knew she wasn’t kidding. I met Amy ten years ago when we were both Americorps volunteers working and traveling through the Deep South for ten months. We spent the first nine months in mutual antipathy, as we worked side by side in Little Rock, Charleston, and the mountains of eastern Tennessee. I wondered why this Philly girl was so obnoxious—she never stopped singing—and she wondered (out loud) why New Englanders were so uptight. Then, I think it was on a balmy evening in July when we both went to pay our respects at Duane Allman’s grave in Macon’s Rose Hill Cemetery that Amy and I finally discovered we had more in common than we realized.

I was 19. She was 20. And during our final month in Dixie, we raised hell.

So, when she called a few weeks ago, I didn’t actually take much convincing. It seemed fitting that a show produced by guitar legend Warren Haynes (Allman Brothers and Gov’t Mule), would reunite a pair of (now old) friends. I hustled up a Prius, hosed down the cooler, and told Amy that I would meet her there, adding that I had to do some work by reporting back for Eco-Chick on the environmental vendors and the festival’s green initiatives. Now in its third year, Mountain Jam is partnering with Community Energy, which will donate wind energy credits to offset 100% of the electricity used at the show, and Rock the Earth will be on hand to educate show-goers about environmental issues.

Amy just laughed. “Uh-huh. Well, if you get to meet Michael Franti, you’re taking me with you. I don’t care what I have to do. I’ll take all my clothes off. I’ll get naked right there.”

So Mountain Jam is this weekend and tickets, as of right now, are still available. Stay tuned for Eco-Chick dispatches, and if you see me there, give me a holler. I’ll be the blue-eyed girl with the notebook and the naked friend.

book, Bush, car, clothes, community, Easter, Eco-Chick, electric, electricity, Energy, farm, Home, prius, produce, spa, travel, wood

Is Green Too White?

4 Comments

04/28/07

In a recent article, “Beyond Eco-Apartheid,” Van Jones of Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights asks, “Is the environmental movement too white?”

According to Jones, “The LOHAS (lifestyles of health and sustainability) sector is growing like crazy…but unfortunately [it] is probably the most racially segregated part of the US economy.”

The article was originally written for Common Ground, but I found it posted at Truth Out, which collects lots of good cultural critics including Jessica Valenti, Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben & Bill Moyers.

(Acknowledgment: Thanks to the man paddling a canoe to Carl Ross Key island…)

car, health, mckibben, Michael Pollan, style, sustainability

Local Economy: Lost In Translation

2 Comments

04/16/07

Plato: Eco-Hunk

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts, I wiggled into a two-semester Greek class at Smith College. Although I had to deal with occasional condescension from the bona fide Smithies, the hours I spent reading Plato in the original Greek are among the things I miss most about college. (Actually, there are a few other things I miss too.) It makes me sad that Greek and Latin are considered outdated and irrelevant; the classics have so much to teach us.

Case in point: “Local Economy” — The word economy comes from the Greek oikos which means home. Economy, at least etymologically, refers to household affairs, so the idea of a local economy is redundant. The idea of a global economy, on the other hand, is etymologically nonsensical unless you consider the Whole Earth your home. But maybe that’s the whole point. We don’t have a sense of our roots.

Ecology, I think, has the same root. Home.

(Disclaimer: There is a good argument that Plato was not, in fact, an Eco-Hunk because of his ideas about the disconnect between the spiritual and the material world. If I remember correctly, David Abram wrote a book called Spell of the Sensuous which talks about this. Stephan Harding’s Animate Earth deals with this briefly as well.

Amazon, book, farm, Home, local, Tea

Castro on Climate Change

8 Comments

04/10/07

Eco-Hunk Fidel Castro

This might be old news to everyone by now or it might never have been news at all, but Fidel Castro recently wrote a piece called “Where Have All the Bees Gone?” following Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lulu da Silva’s meeting with George Bush at Camp David earlier this month. The piece is posted at Alexander Cockburn’s reliably contentious Counterpunch.

I have no comment about the Castro piece except to say that I recommend reading and considering it.

(Thanks again to my man on the street with his ear to the ground. You’re better than a press release.)

Brazil, Bush, climate change, farm, News