Articles by Tom Philpott

Wendell Berry on ‘economic development’

Right-wing critics of environmentalism lean heavily on a false dichotomy: "the economy" vs. "the environment." They pretend that human prosperity and "nature" are playing a zero-sum game. By, say, neglecting to mangle the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve for a year or two's supply of crude, we're somehow making a huge economic sacrifice. Mountaintop removal is unpleasant, the argument goes, but we need to get at that coal to maintain "economic development."

Wendell Berry, the sage of northern Kentucky, has made a career of obliterating such sophistries. Counterpunch.org has just published an interview with him. Check it out.

On an unrelated note, I declared in a recent post that "Environmentalists could intervene in the immigration battle by altering the terms of debate. But so far, they've been silent." As a correspondent pointed out, that statement "is not entirely correct." Andrew Christie of Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Committee recently published a piece linking trade with immigration. It's worth reading.

On the art and brutal economics of small-scale farming

Since moving to the North Carolina mountains in 2004 to launch a farm project, I've learned some sobering lessons about idyllic rural life.

To wit, small-scale organic farming is an art form -- and as with most artistic endeavors, the hours are long and the pay is crap. How did I wind up penniless and exhausted, sporting a beat-up pair of Carhartts? You'd think I had set up shop as an abstract painter in some squalid, ruinously priced Williamsburg, Brooklyn, garret.

(There's much to love about the farming life, too: for example, the volunteer broccoli raab that's sprouting up everywhere in one part of the garden, a triumph of unintentional permaculture. Saute it with a little olive oil, garlic, crushed chile, and vinegar, and you remember why you came to the farm in the first place.)

The USDA's Economic Research Service recently released two reports on the state of farm economics. The information contained therein can help greens as they formulate an agenda for the 2007 Farm Bill (which may be even more important than defending biofuel and hybrids from critics.)

Michael Pollan digs into the mysteries of the U.S. diet in The Omnivore’s Dilemma

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan diagnoses the national attitude toward food: angst. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, Penguin Press, 320 pgs, 2006. Channeling the modern middle-class shopper wandering vast supermarket aisles, Pollan asks: “The organic apple or the conventional? And if […]

How environmentalists can recast the terms of debate around immigration.

Nothing exemplifies the neoliberal policy consensus that dominates U.S. politics quite like NAFTA. The trade pact germinated under Bush I and flowered under Clinton/Gore. Bush II tends it like a conscientious gardener; he is even trying to harvest its seeds and plant them in Central America, hybridized as CAFTA. (There goes my garden-metaphor quota for the month.)

Nativist NAFTA critics like Pat Buchanan and anti-corporate opponents like Ralph Nader operate outside the mainstream. Rebuked as apostates by the major parties, they prove the rule: As divided as they are over the war, environmental policy, and other issues, political elites believe on faith that global trade must be promoted by public policy. Hillary Rodham Clinton and George W. Bush may not agree on much, but they converge on this point. (On the war, HRC's major beef with GWB hinges on troop levels, but that's another story.)

The heated debate in Congress over immigration, which gained new life last week when a bipartisan Senate deal collapsed, has touched very little on NAFTA -- just as the question of God's existence probably doesn't figure much in Vatican fights over papal succession.

But the two issues are intimately related, for NAFTA stipulates that capital and goods must flow freely across the U.S.-Mexico border, while leaving policy about labor -- i.e., people -- to the pleasure of the respective national governments.

Environmentalists could intervene in the immigration battle by altering the terms of debate. But so far, they've been silent.