Life is But a Stream

I can’t help trying to find puns for the titles of posts. I apologize.

We are back from Houston where I helped the Texas Hunger Initiative with a workshop at the BGCT’s Stream event. Here’s the back of my head in the photo at the left talking to a fellow Truett grad after the workshop.

What was most fun about the trip was getting to bring my family along and seeing Houston with them. We hung out for an afternoon at the Discovery Green across from the convention center. They have an awesome exhibit of 50 globes with different themes related to global warming. Tuesday we went to Hermann Park for a couple hours and enjoyed the playgrounds and a really nice urban park. We were too exhausted to visit the Japanese garden at the end of our walk.

I was already antsy driving in to the nation’s 4th largest city, but the green spaces made it all better for me. Urban centers are not going away any time soon. So, it seems crucial that we spend a good amount of energy greening them up.

Talk Talk and More Talk

In honor of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize I will be listening to some people talk a lot about ideas and not necessarily do anything. Don’t get me wrong. Talk is important. Ideas are important. When the other nominees included Chinese dissidents, an Afghan human rights activist and Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwean opposition leader, who all have much more hands-on experience making peace through struggle and conflict, it seems odd for such a young president with great ideas and oratory skills to be named. Anyway…

I will be attending a lot of lectures over the next week. None of them are directly related to food production or issues, but if they are interesting enough I will certainly find a way to make them relevant to this blog.

Secularization and Revival: The Fate of Religion in Modern Intellectual History is the topic for the Third Annual Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture. This afternoon I will be hearing Philip Jenkins speak. His lecture is titled “A Little Leaven: From Mass Church to Creative Minority in Contemporary Europe.” I have read his book The Next Christendom.

Saturday a good friend of ours from UMHB, David Holcomb, will be speaking. His lecture is titled “Religion in Public Life: The ‘Pfefferian Inversion’ Reconsidered.”

Finally, I will get to hear one of my new heroes, William Cavanaugh, who inspired my Eucharist as Eat-In post as well as the series on his book Being Consumed. His lecture will be on “Violence and the Religious/Secular Distinction.”

Next week Lamin Sanneh will be at Truett Seminary for the Parchman Lecture Series. The topic for his lectures is “Connecting World Christianity: New World Parameters.” The three lectures will be on “Antislavery and Mission: American Prelude, 1770-1783,” “Evangelical Movement and the New Society,” and “Christianity and the Moral Empire: America’s Role.” Should be very interesting stuff.

It seems I often come at things from the food side and then tie in the faith and theology, even when I’m blogging through the Bible. It will be interesting to hear some very academic theological lectures and reflect on their application to food and justice issues. Stay tuned…

Farm and Food Session 9

The last session of the day was on Community Food Access. I would have left early if I wasn’t so interested in hearing this session. Here are the panelists and their topics:

WIC and Food stamps at Farmer’s Markets by Andrew Smiley from Sustainable Food Center
Farm-to School Programs by Texas Department of Agriculture
Raising Food at Home by Sari Albornoz from Sustainable Food Center

Andrew gave some basics about the WIC, WIC Farmer’s Market Nutrition Program (FMNP), and SNAP (food stamps) programs. When the food stamp program switched from actual stamps to a swipe card it meant that people were no longer able to use their food stamp income to purchase fruits and vegetables from Farmer’s Markets. Sustainable Food Center has found a way for farmer’s markets to accept the swipe cards without it being a burden for each individual vendor. There’s also the WIC FMNP program that gives supplemental income for people to spend during the peak summer season on fresh fruits and vegetables.

I feel like this is an area where a lot of farmer’s don’t make the leap. Many have a conservative understanding of poverty and got into organic and sustainable farming for environmental reasons or better farming practices. For many of them they see their farming primarily as a business and I wonder how many make the connection with food access, poverty, hunger and obesity.

As the speaker from Texas Department of Agriculture shared about the connection between hunger and obesity, someone at my table said, “That’s why they’re hungry!” It seems their is a gap in understanding between the farmers that produce the kinds of food we want people in poverty to have access to and the reality on the ground. The reality is that hunger and obesity can exist in the same household and within the same person. This is because people who are food insecure are forced to get the most possible calories per dollar when they do have money. I mentioned previously at the USDA listening session someone from the Texas Food Banks Network pointed out that an organic apple costs $1.75 while a bag of cheese puffs costs $1.50. If you are food insecure and only have $2 in your pocket which one would you buy?

Sari from SFC shared about issues concerning community gardening, how to start them and legal issues and city ordinances. There were helpful ideas about securing land and working with cities to include community gardening in their long-range plans for the city.

I have mixed feelings about having to navigate bureaucracies to get things done. On the one hand, I say you should just put seeds in the ground and grow your own food as a way to subvert the system and stick it to the man. I also recognize that the man can help make it possible to stick your seeds in the same place all the time and build a community within a city that is supportive of gardening and farming programs in neighborhoods and schools. Hopefully someday guerrilla gardening will be nothing more than a hobby, because the Powers that be will come around to the dark side (that is the side with the darkest soil… Booyah!)

And I’m spent…

Farm and Food Session 8

This session was on How to Lobby Effectively with Bonnie Bruce Legislative Director for State Rep. Burt Solomons. It was helpful for me because I might end up doing policy work in the future. I feel more confident and knowledgeable about the legislative process. I don’t find it interesting enough to write about though. The main point that everyone might find useful is that the majority of representatives don’t know anything about agriculture. Only if they come from an agricultural district will they have specific knowledge about those issues. One of the ways democracy functions better is when we can act as a croud source for our representatives. We can’t expect them to know everything. So let them know.

Farm and Food Session 7

This session was a panel on Climate Change and Agriculture. The panel included:

Malcom Beck, author and founder of Garden-ville
Leighton Steward, author of Fire, Ice and Paradise
Andy Wilson from Public Citizen

Another good session on a very controversial topic. Malcom Beck, the king of compost, may be my new hero. I’m becoming somewhat obsessed with compost, as you can tell. He pointed out that carbon is one of the important things that plants need. The difference between organic fertilizers and conventional is the higher carbon content in organic fertilizers. Leighton Steward in his presentation said that CO2 is not a pollutant. I agree that it is important to recognize the role that CO2 naturally plays in the ecosystem. The goal certainly should not be to get rid of CO2. The question is the role of CO2 in the ecosystem, how much is acceptable in the atmosphere and where this CO2 might be coming from.

Leighton Steward had an excellent presentation with lots of colorful graphs and statistics. His basic thesis is one you may have heard before, that CO2 is a lagging indicator. CO2 levels rise only after temperatures rise and sometimes hundreds of years later. The indicator that he says does track with the changes in temperature is solar radiation.

Andy Wilson from Public Citizen did respond that there was significant debate in the scientific community on this issue. He also pointed out that the majority of climatologists working on climate change that were published have reached consensus about human activity as a cause of climate change. The majority of his time was spent on impending legislation and changes regulating CO2 emissions and the impact of things like cap and trade on both agribusiness and small sustainable farmers.

Here are some of my overall thoughts on a very complicated topic.

I’ll be honest, I generally stay out of the debate on climate change because I don’t base what I believe we should be doing on whether or not climate change is anthropogenic (caused by human activity). I know that there is another side to the debate that would have rebuttals for Leighton Steward’s claims. It’s a good debate when it is based more on science. Unfortunately it seems too often to devolve into politics on both sides. One side says the IPCC scientists are not real scientists, but politically motivated and manipulated. The other side makes the same claim about some of the scientists who discount human activity as a cause of climate change. If it’s possible to keep the debate scientific it’s a good conversation. At this point it seems impossible to keep politics out of the conversation.

I also feel manipulated anytime someone throws too many statistics, charts and graphs at me. Data is never objective. First of all the collection of the data always happens by human beings who use a process to decided what’s important and what’s not. That is the way it has to be, but is important to recognize that it is the case. After the data is gathered selectively it has to also be interpreted. What does this collection of numbers mean? Time and again you see different people look at the same set of data and make wildly different conclusions depending on their assumptions or interpretation of what the data says. So, someone’s charts, graphs and stats sometimes tells me more about their assumptions than any objective facts.

I do agree that CO2 is not a pollutant. However, doesn’t it matter what kind of CO2 or where it comes from? Isn’t there a difference between the CO2 that mammals exhale and the CO2 coming from factories, cars, etc.? I would be interested to hear more about comparing CO2 from different sources and used in different ways. My hunch is that the concentration of CO2 in factory farms, factories and urban centers would be different than the CO2 occurring naturally in the ecosystem.

At one point Mr. Wilson said that the goal was for sustainable agriculture to compete with industrial agriculture and that cap and trade (if done right) has the potential to do that. Is that the goal of sustainable agriculture? What would we sacrifice to “compete” with Big Ag? It seems counterproductive to me for that to be the goal. Part of the reason we have industrial agriculture is because the Secretary of Agriculture in the 70s said “Get big or get out!” What happens if we say the same to small-scale sustainable farms?

One of my favorite statistics was that Texas is #7 in the world in greenhouse gas emissions… in the WORLD! That’s just crazy!

Thoughts?