Activism Across America

Cincinnati eaters, pay attention… and that would include, um… everyone in Cincinnati. Your city, on the border of Ohio and Kentucky, has access to a great diversity of local food, what with the southern hilly fields to the south, and the northern flat fields to the north.

There’s a great source for finding out about foods local to Cincinnati: The Cincinnati Locavore blog.

Local foods are great for the local economy, but they’re good for the national economy as well, because local foods cut down on waste, and leave consumers with more money to spend on stuff they actually need, rather than interstate transportation that doesn’t add any value to food (and actually takes a good deal of quality away, through aging and selection of produce varieties that don’t taste great, but deal with shipping well). Local foods keep our economy more diverse and complex, and thus more resilient to bad times.

Local food networks also support farms that are more likely to reject the industrial agriculture model of big monocultures of a very few varieties of produce or livestock. Local food keeps cultural diversity and biological diversity right along with economic diversification.

So, celebrate, Cincinnati. Eat up, and keep it local!

For the last century, Americans have been stuck in a simplistic mechanical model of prosperity: The more we produce, the more prosperous we become. One of the most profound refutations of that model is the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, a great area of the Gulf of Mexico, spreading from the delta of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, where no marine animals can live.

This dead zone is created by the great industrial agricultural push in America’s MidWest. For generations, farmers have been told by the government that they’ll be most successful if they fertilize their fields with fertilizers created, not through the natural decay of plant materials, but in factories far from the field. Those fertilizers then run off into streams that feed into rivers that feed into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. There, the fertilizers create such an intense bloom of plant growth in the water that the decaying plant material creates a vast stretch of water in the Gulf of Mexico that is starved of oxygen, and kills any animal unlucky enough to swim into it.

The maps below show the results of a recent study by the US Geological Survey, tracing these fertilizers, nitrogen and phosphorus back to the states upstream where they enter the Mississippi River watershed.

The following states have only 31 percent of the area in the Mississippi River watershed, but they contribute 75 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus that lead to the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone:
Illinois
Iowa
Indiana
Missouri
Arkansas
Kentucky
Tennessee
Ohio
Mississippi

That study ought to have been done by the US Department of Agriculture, given that it’s agriculture that delivers so much of the pollution into the dead zone. People ask what good organic, sustainable farming does us. This new USGS study makes it clear. Organic, sustainable farming could spare us dead zones.

No one disputes that the people of Kentucky know how to work hard. Kentuckians are willing to put in a hard day’s work for a good wage. The problem is that a job with a fair wage isn’t available for most people in Kentucky. Rich Republican politicians may say that all that people need to do to lift themselves out of poverty is to get a job, but the working families of Kentucky know better. They’re working, but too many of them remain poor in spite of their work.

The poverty rate in Kentucky, 16.8 percent, is among the highest in the nation. Kentucky’s child poverty rate is much higher than the national average too. The many children living in poverty across Kentucky - more than one quarter of the state’s child population - certainly are not to blame for their situation. Yet, right wing economic theory offers them no real assistance, beyond the advice that they should hope for better luck than their parents enjoyed.

Kentucky has voted Republican in recent presidential elections, with the idea that tough-sounding Republican economic policies would help Kentucky’s economy grow stronger. That just hasn’t happened. Right wing economic policies have left Kentucky in its poor state, fending for itself.

In 2008, Kentucky has the chance to vote for something different. While right wing politicians advocate government inaction, progressives support government programs to reduce poverty. The time is right in 2008 for Kentucky to wise up to the right wing shell game, and vote for a progressive presidential candidate instead.