[Announce] My speech at the Oklahoma Sustainability Network annual conference

[Robert Waldrop]

Below is the text of my speech to the Oklahoma 
Sustainability Network's annual conference.  OSN 
is a secular organization and this is a secular 
speech, but those who have been reading my work 
for a while will recognize a lot of themes.  It's 
online at 
http://www.energyconservationinfo.org/osnapril212007.htm 
.

Robert Waldrop, Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House
www.justpeace.org

I would like to begin with a reading of one of 
Wendell Berry's poems.

1991 part 2
The ewes crowd to the mangers;
Their bellies widen, sag;
Their udders tighten. Soon
The little voices cry
In morning cold. Soon now
The garden must be worked,
Laid off in rows, the seed
Of life to come brought down
Into the dark to rest,
Abide awhile alone,
And rise. Soon, soon again
The cropland must be plowed,
For the year''s promise now
Answers the year''s desire,
Its hunger and its hope.
This goes against the time
When food is bought, not grown.
O come into the market
With cash, and come to rest
In this economy
Where all we need is money
To be well stuffed and free
By sufferance of our Lord,
The Chairman of the Board.
Because there''s thus no need
To plant one''s ground with seed.
Under the season''s sway,
Against the best advice,
In time of death and tears,
In slow snowfall of years,
Defiant and in hope,
We keep an older way
In light and breath to stay
This household on its slope.

We live in a world of catastrophe. War, 
environmental degradation, social injustice, death 
and destruction are everywhere. Listening to the 
keynote address yesterday, and its vivid 
description of the toxic chemicals used in 
viticulture, and Dr. Hansen's eloquent 
understanding - a knowledge that can only be 
acquired by experience - of the dilemmas of rural 
life, we see and hear small snapshots of the 
present reality.

But like any description, the verbalization is 
inevitably incomplete, even when we contemplate 
the catastrophe of modern life. Perhaps I should 
say, especially when we contemplate the 
catastrophe of modern life. All that we see or 
perceive is not all that is.

Reality is much more complex than that. In 
permaculture, we talk about "invisible 
structures". They typically have a visible 
component, but like the proverbial iceberg, we can 
only see the tip.

OSN is an invisible structure. We see some of its 
visible component here today, but most of what 
goes on we don't see. There are connections being 
made, decisions contemplated, relationships 
blossoming, information exchanged. There is much 
more here than meets the eye. Here is not 
catastrophe - well, maybe the organizers had some 
catastrophes while they were setting up but if so 
they aren't apparent - anyway, here is not 
catastrophe.
Catastrophe is not the only option the future 
offers us. I can see something better coming, 
because I see something better happening right 
now. So we should ask ourselves, What does this 
better world look like?

It is smaller yet it is bigger. It's like Dr. Who's 
magical telephone booth. There is more inside than 
we can see outside. Think globally, act locally - 
now there's an invisible structure for you. That 
phrase has been around so long it is now a cliche, 
but cliched as it may be, it is nevertheless truth 
and it is increasing in reality. Modern 
telecommunications keep the whole world at our 
access, with just a click or two, we can read the 
daily news in Burma, or Burkino Faso, or Vanuatu. 
An injury to one can indeed become an injury to 
all. Yet, with this global knowledge, If we are 
going to heal the planet, we have to start with 
our own lives, our own backyards, our own cities 
and towns, our own doorstep. It's like I used to 
tell some radical friends of mine, "Before anyone 
is going to trust you with foreign policy, you're 
going to have to prove you can handle potholes and 
sewer systems."

This better world is founded in personal 
responsibility. Anyone can go along to get along, 
that's a no brainer. That's in part why we are in 
the situation we are in. But throughout history, 
those who have made a difference for the cause of 
goodness, beauty, truth, and wisdom have been 
people willing to take personal responsibility for 
goodness, beauty, truth, and wisdom and to 
incorporate those invisible structures into their 
own lives, thus giving a visible sign for all to 
see. So if you want more wisdom and beauty and 
goodness in the world, your job first and foremost 
is to live wisdom, beauty, and goodness in your 
own life.

One of the most important aspects of OSN is its 
institutional commitment to practicing what it 
preaches. Look around you and see all those 
compost bins. Look at this serving ware that is 
produced with a non-toxic process and which is 
compostable. taste the excellent local foods. I 
personally know many of the families who produced 
the food that we are eating at this conference. 
These institutional actions are as important as 
anything else that goes on here today because 
actions speak louder than words.

I recently received an email inviting me to go to 
a food conference.  I looked at the website and it 
looked interesting, but I thought it was odd that 
they didn't say anything about the food that would 
be served at the conference. So I sent them an 
email of inquiry and the word came back that the 
conference center had a contract with an 
institutional food supplier and so the groceries 
would be standard American agribidness crap. The 
conference is in the summer, so there isn't really 
any excuse about local foods not being available 
for the event. I am not going to that meeting.

It has not been easy for OSN to get local foods 
for meals. Many years ago I was in the convention 
and meeting business and every convention in the 
whole world practically serves the same 
homogenized industrial food. I attended a 
conference at the Cox Center earlier this winter 
and the food was truly terrible. Yet, yesterday, 
Kamala Gamble and her staff served a superb meal 
to a huge crowd. I was towards the end of the 
line, and I was wondering what condition the food 
would be in by the time I got there. It was 
superb. In 2004, when I went to Terra Madre in 
Turin, Italy, they served meals for 5,000, and 
every bite was a delight. There is nothing 
inherent in serving a crowd that dictates that the 
food taste terrible. It helps to start with the 
best local foods, and having an artist like Kamala 
in charge doesn't hurt either.

Every time OSN holds these annual meetings, we 
push the envelope of sustainability everywhere we 
go. I trust that won't stop as time goes on, 
because it is an important aspect of OSN as an 
institution and as an invisible structure. I think 
it's called authenticity, and that is also a sign 
of this better world I like to talk about.

One way to describe how OSN approaches this is 
"entrepreneurship." It goes right along with all 
those high sounding thoughts about beauty, wisdom, 
and goodness,- entrepreneurship is an inevitable 
natural succession to personal responsibility. It's 
people thinking up new ways to fix old problems 
and rediscovering old ways to fix new problems. 
And vice versa, and every other possible 
permutation. I often carry on about how we started 
the Oklahoma Food Cooperative without a business 
plan. We thought about it and we talked about it 
and we emailed about it and finally, it was a 
reality - we had called into being a new invisible 
structure, some of which we could actually see and 
feel and touch and most importantly, taste. OSN is 
an entrepreneurial approach to the issue of social 
change towards a world that is environmentally and 
economically sustainable, as well as being 
socially just. I don't know that any of us who 
were there at the beginning could necessarily have 
predicted how all this would turn out today, but 
look around you and see what's going on now. Look 
at the list of sponsors and exhibitors. Think 
scalability and look ten years in the future. This 
is how we bring goodness, beauty, and 
responsibility into the world - one meal at a 
time, one meeting at a time, one relationship at a 
time.

This better world is a place where people question 
authority and participate fully in the social, 
civil, and political acts of the community. There 
are many opportunities for this. OSN is offering 
important input into the mercury rule-making 
process. I hope all of us Oklahoma City residents 
plan to advise and counsel the mayor and city 
council on the upcoming bond issue. $500 million 
for roads, $9 million for mass transit - what's 
wrong with this picture? What's wrong with the 
allocation of the gas tax that OKC has to take out 
a 30 year mortgage to repair its roads? Why don't 
we spend more money on mass transit so the roads 
stay in better shape and need less repair? And why 
don't we use existing infrastructure such as the 
rail yard at Union Station as part of a 
functioning multi-modal mass transit system?

There is one interesting thing, however, about the 
city's desire to borrow $500 million to fix the 
roads that deserves some comment. Opponents of 
mass transit are fond of saying that mass transit 
is subsidized transit, and that cars and trucks 
"pay their own way" through the gasoline taxes, 
licenses and other fees. Obviously this is not 
true, since Oklahoma City is proposing that the 
property taxpayers of Oklahoma City subsidize the 
automobile system by approving $500 million in 
city mortgages to pay for its roads.

This better world is literally rooted in the soil. 
If we are going to heal the planet, while we of 
course should do everything, we must not forget 
that the foundation of any civilization is the 
soil and the most important people are the ones 
who grow the food. Without a surplus of food, 
there is no civilization. There are no oil wells 
or oil refineries, no gleaming airplanes, no 
mighty cities, no technological advance, no 
division of labor, no finance system. All the 
dollars in the world will not buy you one loaf of 
bread if there is no wheat growing in the fields, 
if there is no one to grow the wheat, care for the 
wheat, and then bring it to harvest and table.

We have heard an eloquent description of the 
toxicity that goes into much farming these days. 
We have all read elsewhere, and some of us have 
smelled in person, the problems inherent in 
confined animal feeding operations. We have the 
agricultural system that we presently have because 
that's what we pay for. When we go to the 
"supermarket" and spend our money that's what we 
buy. It's another of those invisible structures. 
You don't see all the environmental destruction 
and animal cruelty that is packaged with those 
supermarket foods, but just because you can't see 
it, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. There's 
those invisible structures again.

Recently, in an article about local foods, a 
"nutritionist" from OSU made the astonishing 
statement that she would rather shop at the 
supermarket because she was afraid of E coli on 
organic foods, a reference no doubt to the organic 
spinach contamination scare of last year. Well, if 
she is afraid of E coli, she should stay out of 
the supermarket. How did that spinach become 
contaminated? A feral pig wandered into a spinach 
field - after first traversing part of a cattle 
feedlot. Rooting around in the cattle manure, it 
acquired a good load of a virulent strain of E 
coli. That strain of E-coli evolved in the highly 
acidic digestive system of feedlot cattle, who are 
fed an unnatural diet in order to fatten them for 
market. Science magazine recently published a 
study reporting that grain feeding of cattle 
increases the bacteria count and their resistence 
to stomach acids. This high stomach acidity is not 
natural in ruminants so once stranded in feedlots, 
they become ill from their diet and the filthy 
conditions and they require heavy use of 
antibiotics to keep them alive. So it comes to 
pass that antibiotic resistent strains of E coli 
develop, thrive, and spread in these confined 
animal feeding operation disease factories. 
Besides corn, that feed includes animal byproducts 
like beef tallow, feather meal, and chicken parts. 
According to the book Fast Food Nation, 13 
processing plants produce almost all of the meat 
in the supermarket system, thus making it easy to 
spread disease. The contaminated spinach also went 
through a centralized processing system, so that 
people in 26 states got sick. A study in Consumer 
Reports found that 83% of broiler chicken in a 
supermarket was contaminated with dangerous levels 
of bacteria.

If our OSU nutritionist is afraid of filthy food, 
she is much better off buying from Oklahoma 
farmers than she is shopping in the supermarket.

Food systems grow from personal choices. If we 
want something better, if we want this better 
world I keep talking about, then we have to take 
personal responsibility for our household's 
choices. If we want a more sustainable, just, and 
humane system of agriculture, then there must be a 
market for the products of more sustainable, just, 
and humane farms.

Thus, Personal and household choices about where 
and how we spend our kitchen money and time are 
critical decisions about the future of this 
planet. Your active participation in healing the 
planet begins with a detailed observation of your 
present situation and an inventory of what you 
have and do, what you need, and the challenges of 
getting from here to there.

OSN conferences are a great place to explore new 
ideas in that regard.

Natural succession is the rule in nature, and we 
find it in human ecologies too if we know what to 
look for. A mature forest does not spring into 
being overnight. It starts small, or it doesn't 
start at all and that's true for us too. Change is 
often exciting but it can also be scary for 
people, especially when we are talking about food.

A local food system is about distributing basic 
foods; it does not look like a supermarket. And 
thank God the food does not taste like supermarket 
food.

Modern consumer culture has degraded food to the 
status of mere fuel, and devalued it of any 
greater cultural or existential meaning. But food 
is not just fuel. Food is life. It speaks of our 
families and our cultures, our identity as persons 
and communities, Eating is an agricultural act, 
and eating is a moral act and you are what you 
eat.. The big questions are - what food is in your 
kitchen, where did it come from, who produced it? 
Do the groceries create beauty and wisdom and 
environmental sustainability? Do you even think 
about that and your food? Do you steal food from 
hungry children in poor countries to feed your 
household? It's time that we focused on the food 
first, and then let the form and function of our 
food systems flow from that original essential 
reality. When OSN goes the extra mile to secure 
local foods for its meetings, it is saying 
something about who we are as an organization. And 
what it says is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and 
truth.

Which leads me to my final point, which is that 
this better world is a time and place of hope and 
promise. Even as the smoke rolls into the air from 
the fires of Mordor, and hosts of genetically 
modified evil descend to murder and destroy, out 
of sight and thus out of mind, hope creeps slowly 
and carefully along a way that leads to a better 
world. The promise of tomorrow is not a 
genetically modified nightmare of soylent green. 
The hope we carry is not the death of our species 
in an orgy of mindless consumerism. We can see the 
true hope and promise of tomorrow because right 
now we are busy creating a tomorrow of 
sustainability and justice, beauty and wisdom, 
truth and authenticity. The day of the genetically 
modified orc is past, what we see about us is the 
tumultuous birth of promise and hope. That doesn't 
mean that this is an easy time, ask any woman who 
has given birth about that. It does mean that the 
tumult and the suffering has meaning and is not 
purposeless. This purpose that we read into these 
events is, of course, itself another indivisible 
structure that we brought into being, but that 
does not make it any the less real. 
Self-fulfilling prophecies are the best kind of 
prophecies, because they always come true.

We just have to be careful about which prophecies 
we choose to self-fulfill.

I do not mean to trivialize the challenges that 
come before us this day - peak oil, climate 
instability, war and injustice are real and cannot 
be ignored. There is more there too than we can 
see with our eyes, and that's an important concept 
to think about. The response of humanity to these 
challenges clearly hangs in the balance. This is 
why each individual's effort is important. Nobody 
can say to himself or herself, "What I do doesn't 
matter", because everything we do does matter. By 
our choices, we vote for the better world I have 
been talking about, or we vote for catastrophe and 
collapse. No one knows where the critical mass is 
that leads us to hope or to doom, so it's better 
that we don't push the envelope of catastrophe, 
but rather run forward into beauty, goodness and 
wisdom. As we become the change we want to see - 
and remember, this too works both ways - we bring 
into reality a self-fulfilling prophecy of hope 
and promise for all people and indeed all the 
earth.

The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows for me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives 
may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests,
in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things,
who do not tax their lives with forethought of 
grief,
I come into the presence of still water,
and I feel above me the dayblind stars,
waiting with their light,
for a time, I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.