Friday, 24 Jan 2003

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Friday always comes as fast as the weekend goes. Although most other days offer a variety of new assignments, the end of the week generally involves the same task: taking inventory of new memberships and renewals from over the course of the week. Hilary and I write letters and make sure they are sent with the appropriate publications before visiting the nicest, and I mean nicest, postal workers a few doors down on Pennsylvania Avenue. (I keep meaning to bake them cookies).

Generous contributors receive CFS’s most recent publication, Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, which helped launch an Organic & Beyond campaign this past summer. Through the campaign, a coalition of 14 groups are seeking to create a new agrarian consciousness, and the book is a beautiful tool for achieving that goal. This collection of essays and photographs serves as a plea for a return to a more local, family-scale, biologically diverse, socially just, and humane agricultural system. Many of the authors expose the way agribusiness has erased the essence of agriculture — culture — and illustrate through example how decisions involving where our food comes from will shape the future of our environment.

In addition to working on creating a new agricultural system, CFS is addressing the impacts of the current one, especially through legal work. Recently, the group took to the courts in response to a disclosure of bio-contamination in Iowa and Nebraska by corn and soy plants genetically engineered with an unknown pharmaceutical or industrial chemical. The legal action asks the Bush administration to halt the planting of such “biopharm” crops and to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for the contaminated farms.

A better way to grow: Organic brussels sprouts.

CFS has also joined its sister organization, the International Center for Technology Assessment, in a lawsuit against the USDA to halt the commercialization of genetically engineered lawn grass. The USDA is ignoring serious environmental risks, for not only are the creeping bentgrass and Kentucky bluegrass widely recognized as noxious weeds that threaten parks and wilderness areas, but the grasses are genetically engineered to resist the top-selling herbicide Roundup. If commercialized, home lawns, schools, sports fields, and golf courses will be able to survive being sprayed with massive amounts of herbicide, which could pose serious health risks for both the environment and people.

I came to Washington, D.C., to feed my curiosity about the legal aspect of environmentalism, leaving behind a job at Wisconsin’s only designated wilderness state park. (I never knew you could get paid to hike.) Needless to say, it’s been a tough transition. The concrete jungle has me feeling suffocated and nostalgic for black-throated green warblers and Lake Michigan shoreline. But the difficulties of adjusting to an urban life are outweighed by the importance of meeting the minds behind the legal petitions fighting the harmful technologies that so often slip into our lives without our knowledge. The promises held out by these technologies are often false ones, and as consumers, we are made to be guinea pigs in the name of industrial profit.

As I read the last pages of Desert Solitaire this morning on my way to work, I made my peace with whatever doubt still lingered inside me as a result of the recent transition in my life. When I read this Edward Abbey classic for the first time two years ago, it was his untamable “wildness” that enlivened me most. But today what comforts me is to know that even he had the need for the company of chaos:

Balance, that’s the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds. Unlike Thoreau who insisted on one world at a time I am making the best of two. … I grow weary of nobody’s company but my own — let me hear the wit and wisdom of the subway crowds again, the cabdriver’s shrewd aphorisms, the genial chuckle of a Jersey City cop, the happy laughter of Greater New York’s one million illegitimate children.

And so I thank his legacy of words. It reaffirms why I’m here: to bear witness to and take part in the preservation of a different legacy — the land.