This Year At Bioneers: Michael Pollan

MICHAEL POLLAN

With the onset of escalating climate change, our misconceived industrial food system is one of our greatest vulnerabilities. It’s dangerously fossil-fueled, centralized, monocultural, toxic and unhealthy. It’s an accident waiting to happen, except that it’s no accident.

The countervailing and rapidly spreading locavore movement will become a matter of survival and resiliency in the face of radical environmental disruptions. Creating a far more decentralized, diverse, locally self-reliant food system is also a critical path to building prosperous local economies that bestow local jobs and more secure food systems.

But what will it really take to build more localized foodsheds?

Bioneers has been looking at that question with our Dreaming New Mexico project, and here’s a taste of what we’ve been learning.

• Think like a foodshed. Map the land according to agro-ecoregions. Different places are appropriate for different crops, both biologically and culturally.
  
  
• View each agro-ecoregion through a climate change lens as to its capacity and vulnerability. Consider agro-ecoregions for their abilities to sequester carbon, to rely on groundwater during drought, and to diversify and perform ecosystem services.
  
  
• Scale up green greenhouses for larger-scale, integrated systems such as produce, fish and mushrooms that can support communities or regions.
  
  
• Distinguish small, medium and family farms from corporate farms and tenant farmers as measures of a strong food system.
  
  
• Define local. Is it locally grown? Processed? Manufactured? Marketed? Sold? Within what range of food miles?
  
  
• Look beyond farms and farmers at the whole system of food entrepreneurs, processors and manufacturers, distributors, training and educational infrastructures, capital flows and investment incentives, and marketing. It takes a village to feed a village.
  
  
• Institute Fair Food Trade policies and certification at the city and state level. The vast majority of communities and regions cannot be food self-sufficient, and local farmers also need to export. Fair Trade policies make trade a positive. Expand Fair Food Trade criteria to include: climate change impacts, food security, biosecurity, food safety, biodiversity conservation, food sovereignty and the protection of important sectors, fledgling industries and people in society. Such policies can reduce poverty; create living-wage jobs; protect workers' rights; protect environmental and public interest laws and regulations; and support family farmers and food security.
  
  
• Make the food economy a bright-line local political issue for candidates and public servants. Develop and support political leaders who advocate for a local food economy, including using city, county and state institutional purchasing power to supply local food products to schools, hospitals and health-care institutions.

Michael Pollan has done more than perhaps any other single national figure to serve up food for thought about our food systems and diet. Michael has the rare gift of being able to shift our perception those subtle few degrees that reveal the world anew. As a journalist and author, he has courageously ventured into some of the most controversial thickets of American food culture. Perhaps part of his secret is that, as a passionate gardener, he gravitates to the pragmatic and empirical. Securely grounded in the literal and factual, he can subversively entertain the lyrical and visionary.

Michael is the author of several award-winning books, including the current best-seller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, a masterpiece on the ethics and ecology of eating. The revised edition for young people has just come out. He also wrote The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World, where he shape-shifted into a plant for a keen look at how plants might be calling the shots in their co-evolutionary dance with unsuspecting human beings.

As a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, he has expertly covered polarizing topics ranging from genetic engineering and animal agriculture to the co-optation of organic farming by agribusiness. He has written for Harper’s, where he served for many years as executive editor, as well as for Mother Jones, Vogue, Gourmet and House and Garden. His journalism has won numerous awards, including the Reuters-I.U.C.N. Global Award for Environmental Journalism, and the American Humane Society’s Genesis Award.

 Michael grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Bennington College, Oxford University and Columbia. Currently he serves as the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as the Director of the Knight Program in Science and the Environment. He is helping students and professionals shift the state of science and environmental reporting those few critical degrees that help us understand our food choices and see the world from Earth’s point of view.

 Please join us and Michael at Bioneers 2009.