Prairie Fest: Quotes and Notes

This weekend was the perfect weather for camping, resting, bonfires, singing and learning. What a peaceful time with old and new friends. Here are a few quotes/ideas/phrases I liked from a handful of speakers. And a picture of us- sprawling on the grass.

P. Sainath

Food is a source of wealth. Food production is a source of misery. [drawing from Norman Borlaug]

More money is spent on bottled water than on iPods or movie tickets in the U.S.

We need to think of agriculture not in terms of output and export, but of livelihood.

The dream of the Indian farmer is to be born a European cow.

-told stories of having incredible amounts of peoples deemed ‘hungry’, but then exporting rotting grain to Europe for feeding cattle.

 

-cheap land in Less Developed Countries entices foreign farmers to move in, because they are able to get better tariff options when exporting to Europe.

Wendell Berry

Right now, agriculture is market determined and technologically limited.

Referenced Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village and David Kline (Amish farmer) and A Ploughman’s Folly

Keep the ground covered- all her best speakers say so. (talking about winter ground cover)

Annuals are nature’s emergency service- where there is trauma, nature will provide annuals. You can’t run an environment on emergency. We need perennial plants and perennial people.

Wes Jackson’s idea of eyes to acres ratio should still be the standard.

People who don’t know enough to care, or care enough to know, don’t have the eyes to watch.

The only thing you can do about the future is to do the right thing now.

We need an informed imagination.

We need to ask these questions: What is here? What was here? What is now gone from then? What should be here now? What should we who live here now, be doing now?

The Tobacco Program bears the stigma of its first name. Positive- price supports with production controls. Problem- protected only one crop so diversification wasn’t rewarded.

One of the hugest gaps in the human existence is the gap between people dependent on the weather and people dependent on salaries.

The conversation about pessimists and optimists isn’t worth having. Pessimists are leading relaxed lives. Optimists get disappointed and become pessimists. Both pessimists and optimists can find reasons to be. Something to land on is HOPE.

No matter how bad things get, a person with goodwill and some ability can always do something to make things a little better.

Mary Berry

CFA and the Berry Center

Referenced Cultivating an Ecological Conscience and the Dominican Sisters of Peace (St. Catherine’s school in Kentucky)

We need to not educate students for export, but to contribute at home.

Daddy says I can’t be optimistic, because that implies a plan- and I don’t have one.

David Orr

If you’re optimistic, you don’t know enough. If you’re in despair, that’s a sin- you don’t want to stay there. The middle ground is hope. Sitting in optimism and despair aren’t options- we need to ACT.

The US ended slavery by rewarding slave owners, not slaves. [talking about the relationship with the environmental movement and corporations standing in the way]

Talked about the Oberlin project. Partnered with the city, Bob Berkable? (architect). Aiming for carbon neutrality. ‘Anthropo scene’

We need a change in education. Young people aren’t educated to be farmers.

We need a movement powered by science and sunshine.

The more immediate the goal, the less idealistic it is. Somewhere in between the immediate and the far away future, things get too idealistic and people don’t act.

He suggested expanding our view of debt to include ecological debt.

Linked the abortion issue to ‘pro-life’ across the board. ie: Our priority should be children that won’t be born because we ‘abort’ the environment that supports human life.

Corporations are an abstraction. No matter what they do [good/bad], they can’t be thought of as individuals, and therefore aren’t included in the constitution. [and shouldn’t be protected by it]

Plutocracy

Quoted the MLK Speech A Time to Break Silence

            Procrastination is still the thief of time….time is deaf to every plea, and rushes on. 

Eric Gimon

abundace and variety of all organisms

body of nature

conditions of the struggle for existence

the secrets of the universe and all its Gnostic appeal

The irony is that energy is too cheap to change behavior, but people claim there is too much money at stake to make sustainable change.

Switch- film about energy at the Environmental Film Festival

net meter ie: California system