"Eating Off Trucks"

Getting bogged down in the details of this project – what do to about those green bugs, that marauding squirrel – it’s easy to loose sight of what got it all started.

I guess it started with personal responsibility. Brian and I feel a deep commitment to freedom and opportunity. Of course, it is the way we conceptualize these principles that define our politics. While so many of our perspectives are similar and have coevolved over the years, I’ll try to speak, here, only for myself.

The usefulness of labels is surely limited, but for the sake of brevity I identify my ideological home among social justice advocates. For many people with this perspective, we look at the institutions which might expand or limit people’s opportunities. As opposed to many on the Right, we don’t think the state is the only source of unjustified coercion. Economic systems, among other things, do much to determine the range of choices available to people all over the world.

As I began to understand, as a younger woman, how my choices impact people on the other side of the world, I came to see how the personal is political. Our own daily choices (…Do I hop on my bike or drive the car to work?...Do I buy that sweat-shop made gap sweater – it’s sooooo pretty – or wait for Kristie to give me her hand-me-downs?...Do I buy that mocha even though the espresso beans weren’t fairly traded?...) shape the world we share with our global neighbors. But so many of these choices – which amount to important decisions about our world – aren’t decided democratically. Many of them, which determine the environmental and occupational conditions of millions of people, are decided by the design and practice of our economies. That puts a lot of pressure on us consumers.

The rich world’s massive consumption of fossil fuels underscores the impact of our daily choices. It’s no longer just left-wing crazies claiming that our culture won’t stop at war to secure our access to cheap, climate changing fuel. It’s becoming increasingly clear that if the market captured the full cost of so many of the seemingly cheap things we’ve come to like, the price would be prohibitively high. (NOT that many of these costs could ever be compensated for with any number of dollars.)

So what to do? First, we hopped on our bikes. (“Look ma, no gas!”) Man, what a fun way to feel self-righteous. Despite taking a huge chunk out of our direct gas consumption, we knew that we’re still consuming fossil fuels through the transportation requirements of everything else we buy. So we bought less.

Food, however, I couldn’t cut out. Moving to Carbondale, Colorado last year, I met Brook LeVan. Brook is the director of Sustainable Settings, a whole-systems learning center. Brook, too, thinks that our standard of living shouldn’t come at the cost of other people’s ability to live safe, healthy lives. I suppose this is part of his interest in local food systems. Brook wants us to stop, “eating off trucks.”

For one thing, peak oil is threatening our ability to count on trucks in the first place. Two winters ago, massive storms closed I-70, isolating Carbondale from the rest of the world. The trucks that usually brought food to the Roaring Fork Valley couldn’t get there. During the holidays, grocery store shelves were sparsely stocked if not empty. This time, it didn’t become a crisis. The snow was cleared and the trucks eventually came. Nonetheless, the event underscored the dependence Carbondale had – for its very survival – on good weather, operating trucks, ample supplies of cheap gasoline and food distributors willing to trade their life-giving goods for an affordable price. If just one of these factors, among many others, isn’t fulfilled, Carbondale is in big trouble. Minus the severe winter weather, most of the rest of the country is in the same shape. So what happens when we run out of oil? When I asked myself this question, I realized that petroleum doesn’t just “keep America rolling.” It’s much more powerful than that. Our food system, and its infrastructure, requires petroleum – without it, we don’t eat. On that happy note…

…It’s time to play, I’ll continue in an upcoming post. Thanks for reading!!