MLT NEWSLETTER

Fall 2012

Cultivating Resilient Communities

Today, October 25, we went bicycling in the sunny 80 degree weather. The leafless trees reminded me of doing the same back in March in similar 80 degree weather. A period between included a quite severe and widespread drought. I'm not going to attribute this warm weather to anything since I have memories of other “abnormal” weather. I remember one spring in 1977, swimming in a warm lake in mid April, I remember the heat and drought of 1988 which I associate with having our pond dug that same summer. I don't recall any recent really harsh winters like the one in the 1980's when Bobbi started getting white areas on her nose(beginnings of frostbite) while crossing Rainey's field in -10º weather. Again, I'm not going to attribute any change in weather as evidence of global warming since one person's experience suffers from the criticism of prejudice or bias. But heat records seem to be broken quite regularly these days. As evidenced by the disappearance of the topic of global warming from todays psychotic (as in: disassociated from reality) election “content”(it has been a campaign topic in every other election since 1988), it seems like it's reality is not being realized by the general populace. But that assumption is again, just my bias.         Jon Towne

By Rita Bober

If you live on or near a lake, you may be familiar with cattails. They are one of North America’s best known native plants. Cattails grow on wet ground at or near the water table. They grow from 5-9 feet tall with all the leaves standing very erect. The leaves are long and sword-like. The plant has inconspicuous flowers and later, the hot dog like seed heads which last through the winter. I recently attended a workshop on cattails and learned a significant amount of new information about them.

Did you know that the Miami People used cattail leaves to cover their homes and the cattail stems (center core) were used for doors and room dividers? In the workshop, we practiced making each of these and realized what a job it was to transform cattails to these workable products. We also learned to make cordage with the leaves. Cordage is long, slender, flexible material usually consisting of several strands (as of thread or yarn) woven or twisted together similar to rope. In the natural world, cordage can be made from various plant materials such as cattails leaves, stinging nettle, dogbane, milkweed stems, as well as the inner bark of basswood and cedar. This long cord is very strong and can be used for numerous purposes especially for tying things together; wherever you would use thread, twine, or rope. Fluff from the seed heads was used as baby diapers. The mature cattail heads can also be used as insulation materials for mittens, blankets, and clothing.

Besides all the uses described above, cattails also have a number of edible qualities. In the spring, the leaf hearts or shoot cores can be collected from the time the cattail buds begin to grow until about the middle of summer before the flower stalks are formed. I have tried these stir-fried in butter as well as pickled. They were pretty mild tasting but enjoyable. I learned that the spikes form in the early part of summer make a decent vegetable (only the top (male) section is used). You can eat them raw or boiled. They have a taste like corn-on-the-cob and mushroom.

If you leave the spikes alone, they soon develop pollen. The pollen can be collected and used to make muffins, breads, and other baked goods (but it must be mixed with wheat flour because it is not sticky by itself). Make sure to shake it through cheesecloth or a screen to sift out insects and woolly fibers, and dry before storing for future use. Cattail flour can be made from the rhizomes. This involves a labor-intensive process which won’t be described here. Combined with other flours, it can be used in pancakes, tortillas, etc.

This plant is also food and shelter to many animals. Muskrats think the early spring shoots are good food. If you are investigating a cattail marsh, you may see snapping turtles lurking in the muddy shallows, mallards raising their young or a great blue heron looking for anything small enough to swallow. Perhaps you might even see frogs and snakes.

If you have cattail plants growing in your pond or in a nearby lake, be sure to take note and begin exploring this outstanding plant that has many uses and is a valuable edible wild food source.

Resources:

Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places. “Wild man” Steve

Brill with Evelyn Dean, 1994, William Morrow and Company, New York, N.Y.

The Forager’s Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants. Samuel Thayer, 2006, Forager’s Harvest, Ogema, WI.

The Spirit of Healing: A Journal of Plants & Trees. Osahmin Judith Meister, 2004, Minaden Books, Hillsboro, WI.

Edited article originally published in the September 2012 issue of the Lawton Free Reader.

Lots of Food Webs and Safety Nets – and Maybe a Few Food Hubs:

Strategic Food System Planning for SW Michigan

By Ken Dahlberg

Introduction: Southwest Michigan is a gem in terms of climate, diverse soils, habitats, crops, towns, cities, ethnic groups, and livelihoods. As we seek to maintain and enhance this diversity through our work on regenerative food systems, we need to frame our shorter-term plans (5-10 years) within the constraints, challenges, and opportunities of larger and longer-term (20-30 years) threats. Four are crucial in my view.

Major long-term threats that require inclusion in strategic food system design and planning:

I. Climate Change: A 2009 Union of Concerned Scientists report summarizes the challenges facing Michigan. It includes some nice graphics of Michigan “migrating” southwestward over the coming decades. View at http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/climate-change-michigan.pdf.

II. Escalating resource and energy costs: General fossil fuel prices as well as those of the energy- intensive chemical inputs of industrial agriculture (nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates) will escalate in the next few decades. Global phosphates reserves are becoming increasingly depleted and its cost may escalate even more than other inputs. The environmental costs of industrial as compared to organic agriculture should also be included in any assessment of resource and energy costs.

III. The threats and costs to public health from the overuse of antibiotics in confined animal facilities (especially “super bugs” like MRSA) should be assessed along with the threats and costs to the health of farm soils from the extensive use of GMO pesticide and herbicide (glyphosate) crop packages. These include the high costs of trying to control numerous “super weeds” that have become glyphosate-resistant. Dow Chemical now wants EPA approval to use for farming a genetically modified soy bean variety that is resistant to the very dangerous pesticide 2,4-D. This should be strongly challenged given its clear threats to public health, the environment, as well as its certain creation of even more “super weeds.”

IV. A meltdown of the Palisades nuclear power plant. With the most brittle containment vessel and the fourth worst safety record in the U.S., a meltdown would result in a lengthy disaster for the people of SW Michigan and its rich natural and agricultural heritage. I would not be at all surprised if the disaster response plans currently on the shelf are outdated and inadequate at every level, from the federal on down to the local. The status and adequacy of these plans should be assessed. For a fascinating review of how vibrant local food webs and CSAs in Japan significantly helped it through the earthquake/tsunami, nuclear plant meltdowns, see: http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/citywatch-japan-earthquake/

Major evaluative criteria/goals:

I. Maintain and enhance the health and regenerative capacity of the region’s living systems at different levels over different time horizons.

II. Gradually increase local and regional energy, resource, and economic self-reliance.

III. Ensure that legal and regulatory requirements are matched to the scale of the food webs, safety nets, and hubs that are needed to achieve the above.

Enhancing Major Design Concepts:

I. Food Safety Nets: Examine the various types and how they can be designed to provide more effective emergency responses; food security; and the prevention of further declines in public health and the health of natural systems at all levels from soils on up.

II. Food Webs: Examine the various natural and socio-natural systems that provide restorative and regenerative food and ecosystem services. Whether they have naturally evolved or have been designed, explore how they provide healthy, diverse, and adaptive communities. Draw on ecosystem analyses of different trophic levels - from the level of micro-organisms to habitats, to watersheds and foodsheds, to biomes, etc.

Also draw on the work of analysts of socio-natural systems (agroecologists and anthropologists, for example) exploring the different levels of human food systems/webs from the field, to the farm, to the watershed, to foodsheds, to different scale fisheries, to different type forestry systems, etc.

A soil food web graphic is at: http://enviroinnovators.com/assets/images/SoilFoodwebDiagram.jpg

A useful article with a good graphic is at: http://eap.mcgill.ca/MagRack/AJAA/AJAA_4.htm

III. Food Chains: Conceptually ecologists tend to describe/categorize these in terms of the flows of energy from primary producers to the top predators - that is, from one trophic level to the next. There is a similar flow/level analysis found in the economic concept of “supply chains.” Sadly, economics does not have a concept comparable to food webs since they give little attention to systemic/community relationships - especially informal ones - at any given level, much less how such relationships interact between different levels.

Some Observations on the USDA Regional Food Hub Resource Guide:

Overall, this is an excellent and encouraging report with lots of substance. It is available at: http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/getfile?dDocName=STELPRDC5097957 . Understandably, there is generous use of terms relating to jobs, entrepreneurship, etc. There are three concerns that I have - each of which reflects common cultural assumptions that pose threats to reaching the full potential of developing regionally adapted - and adaptive - food safety nets, food webs, and food hubs.

First, our uncritical acceptance of the “neutrality of technologies” myth (which somehow leads to “progress”). This acceptance avoids technology assessments which identify the inevitable trade-offs and winners and losers associated with new technologies. No surprise that the Office of Technology Assessment of the US Congress, which was set up in 1972 to provide Congressional members and committees with objective and authoritative analyses of the complex scientific and technical issues, was defunded in 1995 as part of House Chair Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.”

Second, the minimal awareness of the inevitable trade-offs involved in “scaling up” (or more rarely, “scaling down”). We fail to see the parallels with trophic levels in food webs, where the types of species and their capabilities and limitations change between trophic levels. With human food webs, “scaling up” beyond a certain point will risk loss of community by requiring more standardization and more formalized and hierarchical management.

A third - and related risk - is that of seeking to expand beyond our natural boundaries and capacities by seeking “partnerships” with multi-state and national corporations. Very often, such partnerships end up with the smaller and weaker partner being co-opted by one of the many large corporations that dominate our unsustainable industrial food system. Such co-option reinforces exploitation rather than encouraging community, sharing and food justice. For some useful infographics on corporate concentration, see: https://www.msu.edu/~howardp/infographics.html

Book Review: The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism For The Twenty-First Century. By Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige. University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2011. By Rita Bober

In the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, Norm and I lived in the city of Detroit and were involved in the civil rights movement. I don’t remember hearing about Grace and James Boggs then, though Norm remembers hearing that they were considered radical. We thought our ideas were pretty radical but after we moved to Washington, D.C., then to southwest Michigan, we weren’t sure what radical meant anymore. I was delighted to hear of Grace’s new book, The Next American Revolution. Here are some of my thoughts on its content.

When the book was published, Grace was 95 years old. Throughout her long life, she has been influenced by such “humanity-stretching” movements as the civil rights movement, labor movement, women’s movement, Black Power movement, Asian American movement, and the environmental justice movement. These have all influenced her philosophy of life. In her early years, she was a committed Marxist but focused more on the human and spiritual contradictions that arise from a rapidly evolving technology versus the economic stages from feudalism to capitalism to communism. She reminds us that Marx was born in 1818. He had not experienced all the human dissonance that is part of our current reality, a reality that is constantly changing. “These two notions – that reality is constantly changing and that you must constantly be aware of the new and more challenging contradictions that drive change” - is the core of her thinking.

Another key to her philosophy is the difference between rebellion and revolution: “rebellions break the threads that have been holding the system together. They shake up old values so that relations between individuals and groups within society are unlikely ever to be the same again . . . but rebels see themselves and call on others to see them mainly as victims.” James and Grace came to view revolutionaries as going “beyond ‘protest politics,’ beyond just increasing the anger and outrage of the oppressed, and concentrating instead on projecting and initiating struggles that involve people at the grassroots in assuming the responsibility for creating the new values, truths, infrastructures, and institutions that are necessary to build and govern a new society. Activists transform and empower themselves when they struggle to change their reality by exploring, in theory and practice, the potentially revolutionary social forces of Work, Education, Community, Citizenship, Patriotism, Health, Justice, and Democracy.” In this regard, you must believe that humanity can be transformed. Using Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. as guides, Grace emphasizes that we “must become the change we want to see in the world.”

Grace relates that it is easy to unite against that which we are against. We need to redirect our focus by defining what we are for while enacting proposals to govern the whole of society. To do this we must develop non-antagonistic means to work among ourselves, to reevaluate our own outmoded concepts and practices in order to create new energies. Thus, “we must develop our own capacities for self-government rather than simply demanding and expecting that our elected representatives take care of us.”

Grace touches on the changes happening in Detroit, “the city that was once the national and international symbol of the miracle of industrialization and is now the national and international symbol of the devastation of deindustrialization.” Community building programs; hundreds of home, school, and community gardens; commercial-size greenhouses; Healthy Kids programs, the Detroit Agricultural Network and Garden Resource Program, etc. are a sign that grassroots members of this community are moving to make a difference. They are taking charge of their own lives and livelihoods. Numerous articles have been written about the new emerging Detroit. However, this movement is not only found in Detroit, but seen in many other urban gardens throughout the United States. She mentions Will Allen’s Growing Power program in Milwaukee and Chicago as one initiative. These programs are not only helping to provide individuals with healthy food, but are striving for long-term and sustainable transformation of our society. They are working “to keep our communities, our environment, and our humanity from being destroyed by corporate globalization.” The urban agricultural movement is the fastest growing movement in the United States.

There is so much covered in this book that I found inspiring. Her concept of good education, her involvement in the Beloved Communities Initiative, her own thinking transformed by her involvement in many movements during her lifetime – all have influenced her approach to understanding what revolution means. She concludes that the revolutionary movement in the United States is not headed by a particular party with a common ideology but by individuals and groups responding to the real problems and challenges that they face in their lives and work. The movement is made out of love for people and for the place where we live. James Boggs shared this thought: “I love this country, not only because my ancestors’ blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.” We all need that belief that the United States can become a better place.

Although I was looking for ideas on how to go about making “revolutionary” change in my own community, by reading Grace’s book I began realizing the need to acknowledge the innate goodness of human beings who have the capability to work cooperatively for the greater good. In Western civilization we lack a sense of Spirituality or an awareness of our interconnectedness to all things. Has our society always been this way? Because we give priority to economic and technological development over human and community development, have we lost what it truly means to be a human being? Grace leads us on a search to find this truth and at the same time change the way we view “revolution” in our society.