Sustainability movements must address the question, who and what needs to be sustained?
-Ivette Perfecto
 
            “Sustainability” has become a catch phrase.  “Sustainable development” and “sustainable agriculture”  have both gained popular support, and become the acceptable “alternative” in their fields.  The most familiar manifestation of the sustainable agriculture movement for consumers is organic certification.  “Organic” has become a widely known, widely disputed, and widely profitable label.  Almost every supermarket now has an organic and natural foods section.  The popular media has discovered the debate over whether organic produce is actually “healthier” for you than its conventional counterpart.  And organic food has become the fastest-growing sector of the food industry, generating around $10 billion a year (Burros 5).  Responding to all this interest, the USDA recently established a new set of national organic standards.  Within the sustainable agriculture movement itself, these standards have become a source of debate.
                     Last year around this time I attended the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association’s (OEFFA) annual conference.  I noticed that the sessions I attended and the perspectives I heard all seemed to point toward the emergence of a movement for local food.  OEFFA is the organic certifying agency for the state of Ohio, but hardly anyone was talking about organics anymore.  Instead, there was much grumbling about the new “national standards” with the implicit understanding of a general animosity towards them.  This year, the theme of the conference was “Food from Home,” with the abstract:
 
             It has become increasingly clear that the only way for communities to insure the availability of safe, high quality foods, produced in ways that do not jeopardize future generations is to reconnect with the sources of the foods we eat.  Join us as we celebrate a      growing commitment, throughout Ohio and the world, to creating healthy and sustainable local food systems, and explore with us new ways to initiate and strengthen these systems. (Ohio)
 
            I’ve also watched over the last year as our local coop supplier (Federation of Ohio River Coops) was consumed by Northeast Cooperatives, a nonprofit which served the entire northeast region.  Northeast has since been bought out by United Natural Foods, a large for-profit company.  I just recently learned, first, that Northeast-United would no longer be supplying organic produce through our local (Columbus) warehouse, and then, that they would be closing.the warehouse altogether.  As far as I am aware, this leaves our community with only one small local operation growing “organically.”  However, this business no longer seeks certification, stating in their brochure:
We are committed to growing our food using sustainable and ecologically sound methods.  We were certified by OEFFA for 6 years but in October of 2002 we decided organic certification did not fit with our plans any longer.  The USDA has taken over the organic farming industry and is gearing it towards large farms not small growers like us.  Don’t worry we won’t be changing the way we farm because we believe that sustainable agriculture is the future of farming, we just won’t be getting the piece of paper any longer.  (Boulder)
 
Consequently, the influence of the corporate structure has made it impossible to buy certified organic food in our local community, and the gap between “organic” and “local” has widened even farther.
            This situation has caused my community to reflect on the state of the organic movement, and forces us to look locally, as is much of the sustainable agriculture movement.[1]   I have watched this new movement for local food emerge over the past few years, drawing on the traditions and memberships of the organic movement and the community food security movement.  Out of necessity perhaps, new partnerships have been forged between these two groups, and new questions have been asked.  New coalitions highlight the interconnection between the movements’ primary goals, ecological justice and social justice.  Many proponents of sustainable agriculture are now asking deeper questions which center on what the discourse of sustainability is grounded in and what power struggles shape its character.  What can overcome the largest obstacle to a healthy agriculture, the agribusiness structure?  How does the overarching economic model shape and limit sustainable agriculture?  Is it possible for large corporations to produce “organic” food?  
            In examining these questions, I will argue that “organic” food has failed to respond to the criteria for sustainability.   In its failure to address social justice issues, and thus the underlying economic system which shapes agriculture, it has instead been coopted by the corporate structure.  I will attempt to answer another, forward-looking question -  is there a new principle that might escape the traps into which this movement has fallen?  In exploring ideas that might inform the sustainable agriculture movement, I will focus on the Environmental Justice movement.  I will suggest that to apply an Environmental Justice framework to the sustainable agriculture movement is to see the need for local food systems.  An Environmental Justice perspective challenges the dichotomy between humans and nature and argues that there is no clear distinction between ecological and social justice issues.  Indeed, agriculture provides a unique look at the interaction of people and the environment because it so clearly refutes the traditional separation of the two categories.  This challenge to established Western modes of thought is the perspective necessary to create local food systems, and in doing so, enact economic transformation through a challenge to the economic power structure.
            Finally, I will relate the emergence of movement for local food to two powerful contemporary schools of thought, postmodernism and ecology.  In what ways do these theories support local food systems, in what ways do they inform one another, and what model do they suggest for change?  It is important that the changes in the sustainable agriculture movement are not just reactive, but are “thought.”  I will specifically engage three suggestions for narrative formation that draw on both postmodernism and ecology and might inform the creation of local food systems.
 
 
In this world which is so respectful of economic necessities, no one really knows the real cost of anything which is produced...”
 - Guy Debord
 
            Sustainable agriculture today faces an extremely large obstacle and opponent, the overarching system of global corporate capitalism.  This system manifests itself in the many multi-national agribusiness firms that control the overwhelming majority of trade in agricultural products.  Corporate agribusiness now manufactures and markets over 95% of food in the United States. (Lehman and Krebs, 123)  Consequently, farming is something which has fallen largely out of public hands.  Less than one percent of the U.S. population now farms; in fact, there are more full-time prisoners in this country than full-time farmers. (Kirschenmann 92)
            The principles that agribusiness draws on in its quest to “feed the world” are rooted in the theoretical ideal of the open global market that Colin Hines describes.  Much of the basis for this theory stems from the idea of comparative advantage.  Hines discusses the problems this ideal meets in practice.  Capital flow, or the ability and preference of capital to move in order to reduce costs, was not something that the originators of these theories, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, could have accounted for.  While they based the idea of comparative advantage on the free flow of goods, they did not foresee the free flow of capital as well, which “means that investment is now governed by absolute profitability and not comparative advantage between countries.” (Hines 12)  Something else missing from these original theories is the concept of power.  Traders are not equal partners; rather, competition is “less a reflection  of the ‘natural advantages’ enjoyed by traders as of the historical, geopolitical and organizational advantages they enjoy: in particular their ability to exploit those social and political forces that distort markets - state power, subsidies, cartels, externalized costs and political favours.” (Hines 13-4)                         Comparative advantage also leads countries to depend on foreign suppliers and international trading companies rather than focusing on their own food security.  The concentration of agribusiness leads to an unstable food system where multinational corporations control the flow and prices of agricultural products.   These companies thus have the power to shift comparative advantage according to their decisions about where to place capital. (Lehman and Krebs 125)  Yet another shortcoming of the comparative advantage principle is strategies by governments that pursue economic advantage at the expense of their own citizens.  One example is the United States’ domination of the global grain market.  The prices of corn and wheat have been driven below the cost of production in order to increase exports.  Meanwhile, family farms have been driven out of business, a phenomenon accompanied by many damaging  social effects.  Meanwhile, poorer countries are unable to compete with this low-priced grain. (125-6)
            Agribusiness operates under several questionable assumptions.  It acts as if agriculture is global, and technologies can be applied universally.  Correspondingly, it acts as if the food system is global and strategies for feeding the world can be applied universally. (Kirschenmann 97)  These assumptions shape the current agricultural and food systems.  Harriet Friedman, focusing on the United States, describes some of the changes in both consumption and production patterns that facilitated the shift to this sort of global system.  As the dietary model of the U.S. shifted to include more meat, industrial production of livestock sharply rose, accompanied by an increase in grain-fed livestock.  Meanwhile, food was transformed into a durable consumer good.  This facilitated the rise of wholesale and retail chains and changed the way Americans purchased their food.  In production, farms shifted from mixed grain and livestock operations to specialization in either grains or intensive livestock.  Farmers became suppliers of raw materials for food manufacturing, entering into relationships with large corporations. (Friedman 91)   Demographic changes favoring urbanization and advances in food and transportation technology facilitated the “sprawl” of our food system as the distance between producers and consumers expanded. (Halweil 17)   Friedman also describes the consequences of the transition from the “Fordist model” of the food economy to the “post-Fordist model.”  An international restructuring took place as stable, national subsectors shifted to a system of flexible, international subcontracting.  This also promoted a shift in labor force, where male farmers and industrial workers have given way to an increasing number of female and minority workers. (Friedman 93-4)
            This global system of agriculture has led to the widespread displacement of traditional agriculture in the Global South by cash crops sold as international commodities.  This shift was most widely introduced in the period known as the Green Revolution.  This form of development aimed at improving the “productivity” of agriculture.  Vandana Shiva, however, explains how the “high yields” of the Green Revolution varieties were achieved by displacing the food of other species and of the rural poor. (Stolen 12)  Lakshman Yapa challenges the sort of mindset behind the Green Revolution that believes underdevelopment is the cause of poverty.  Instead, Yapa suggests that poverty is a normal manifestation of processes of economic development through the element of socially constructed scarcity. [2] (69)
 
 
Finally, the soul of organics is at stake.  This process will institutionalize the word “organic” within the U.S. government.  And if this process proves to be too onerous or false, the soul of organics will be lost.  Then, those who love organics will have two choices: to reclaim the word and concept, or find new words and concepts. 
-Michael Sligh (1997)
 
            A movement for sustainable agriculture has developed that does not necessarily address the concerns raised about the effects of corporate capitalism on agriculture.  In other words, it focuses on fixing the effects of conventional agriculture, but does not examine its social and economic roots.  Patricia Allen describes a sustainable agriculture movement originating in the early 1980s that focuses largely on human/nature interactions while excluding human/human relations from its analysis.  Falling into the “false ideological dualism” of society and nature, this concentration misses the crucial point that
people’s relations with nature are mediated through social institutions and systems.  It is clear what is to be sustained (natural resources, family farms, profit margins), but the question of who is to be sustained has not been directly addresses, except where they fit in with the economic standards of conventional agriculture and the resource criteria of sustainable agriculture. (Allen 25)
 
Allen’s critique of the sustainable agriculture movement is that, at least up until 1991, it had remained “studiously non-political.”  Rather than digging deeply into root causes of the agricultural crisis, it had focused on reducing dependence on chemicals and inputs purchased off-farm and on promoting family farms and strong rural communities. (Allen 21)
            Michael Sligh points to the beginning of the U.S. “organic movement” a decade earlier, citing the formation of local and state-level organic farmer associations in the early 1970s.  He suggests that this surface-level critique is more of a recent phenomenon than something originating with the organic movement.  Tracing the origins of this movement, he touches on several influences - indigenous cultural knowledge, “back to the land” movements, organization against pesticides launched by the work of Rachel Carson, United Farm Workers union organizing, and organizing amongst farmers and ranchers themselves into groups such as the National Farmer’s Organization and the National Family Farm Coalition. (Sligh, Organics 342).  In 1971, the first organic farming organization, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), came into being, soon followed by the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) in 1973.  This spurred the establishment of many more similar organizations across the country, with the purpose of defining uniform standards for organic food and establishing certification programs.  The first legislation for organic standards was passed in California in 1979. (Sligh, Organics 342)
            The anti-corporation influences of this period that Sligh describes were then reflected in a USDA report published in 1976 by Dr. Garth Youngberg, entitled “Time to Choose.”  It consisted of a scientific validation of organic agriculture as well as an ambitious research agenda, but it also outlined a global choice between two models - the family farm model and the industrial model.   However, the Reagan administration soon came into power, Youngberg was ousted from the USDA, and printing of the report was halted.  In the 1980s, the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program was passed through Congress, but there continued to be little widespread public support for sustainable agriculture.  Yet, as trade of organic foods reached other states and countries, concern arose among organic proponents that a state-level system might not ensure the consistency needed to maintain the integrity of organic standards. (Sligh, Organics 342-3)
            According to Sligh, this integrity was “critical for consumer confidence and the continued success of the organic movement.”  As organics went from something necessarily local to become a consumer commodity, The Organic Food Production Act of 1990 (OFPA) was introduced with the goals of research, enforcement, and harmonized standards in order to “ensure continued growth and continued consumer confidence.” (Sligh Organics 343)  This bill was passed, but with two compromises which demonstrate the circumstances that limited the potential of the sustainable agriculture and collapsed it to fit within a capitalist framework.  First, the House removed all mention of the research agenda.  This made the bill concerned solely with marketing organics.  Second, the USDA assumed the primary role of setting organic standards.  While this was balanced by the creation of a partner organization from the organic community, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), a group consisting of organic farm owners and operators, organic handlers and retailers, consumer and environmental protection representatives, and a scientific expert, the NOSB faced partnership with a body (the USDA) that testified against the passage of the OFPA. (Sligh, Organics 343)  Thus, as the organic movement reached the national level, it faced being collapsed into the existing economic and power structures.  Its main focus became marketing, and in order to meet marketing requirements it was forced to focus on national standards and certification.   Furthermore, it was destined to partnership with a governmental body heavily influenced by and comprised of corporate influences.[3]
            The focus on certification that has facilitated the emergence of organic food as a strong competitor in the food market regulates such things as long-term soil management, buffering between organic farms and their conventional neighbors, product labeling, record keeping, and the processing, storage, and transportation of organic foods. (Sligh, Organics 343)  Likewise, most research on sustainable agriculture has focused on technology, rather than social and economic questions and the role of capitalism in furthering unsustainable practices. (Allen 25)  Allen, drawing on information such as the Asilomar Declaration for Sustainable Agriculture, suggests that the sustainable agriculture movement in the early 1990s exhibited a
            continuation of capitalist relations of production and the exploitation of labor; the                        reification of the ‘natural’ as a model for social processes; a premise that if people knew                   more, they would pay more for food or adopt the right technologies; an absence of                    discussion of root causes of sustainability problems; and, last but not least, a reification                     of ‘science.’
 
She concludes that “[sustainable agriculture] has been tolerated to the degree that it does not challenge the institutional and ideological formulations of the dominant agricultural culture.” (Allen 24)
            Developments since Allen’s writing in 1991 demonstrate the ramifications for the organic movement of not directly addressing the social, political, and economic questions underlying agriculture.  Michael Sligh’s Toward Organic Integrity: A Guide to the Development of US Organic Standards shows the apparent concern with which the NOSB and the organic community faced the creation of federal standards.  In the guide, he clearly lays out the NOSB’s recommendations, made from 1992-1996, with the goal of providing “a clear road map for a more rapid citizens response to the upcoming USDA Federal Register proposed rules for US Organic standards.” (Sligh, Toward iii)  Perhaps as Sligh had anticipated, in 1997, the USDA proposed an organic rule which strayed from NOSB recommendations, instead proposing to allow genetic engineering, irradiation, and sewage sludge, a shift heavily influenced by corporate agribusiness and “life science” corporations. (Henson 330)  When the USDA received overwhelming consumer opposition, they revoked their proposal and worked until 2001 on a completely new set of standards. (Sligh, Organics 343-4) 
            This new set of national standards, however, passed in October of 2002, has not eased the worries of organic farmers.  In the face of the corporate takeover of numerous organic producers, farmers now worry that the added effect of the federal standards will help to push them out of business.  The new standards will make it easier for companies to sell organic products overseas, and companies such as Mars Inc., Pillsbury, Tyson Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, and Procter & Gamble, who have already involved themselves in organics will likely take advantage of this. (Burros 5)  Michael Sligh raises several questions about the federal standards: “Will the rule help the early farmer-innovators of organic agriculture or hurt them?  Will the costs, red tape, and paperwork drive the small-scale farmer out of organic?  Will the rule allow the entry of industrial-style confinement livestock operations?...” (Organics 344)
            Dave Henson, in his analysis of this struggle over standards, gets right to the point: “the real struggle around the national organic standards was not over the federal definition of organic, important as that is.  The real struggle was about public, democratic decision making versus private, corporate decision making on issues of food and agriculture.” (330)  The power of multinational corporations that shapes the debate on so many issues clearly also threatens the viability of sustainable agriculture.  Henson concludes that agribusiness has successfully framed the arena of struggle and the terms of the debate surrounding agriculture. As in the strategy of the larger mainstream environmental movement, he points to the limited strategy of regulating corporate behavior that has “ultimately licensed an unsustainable and unacceptable level of ecological destruction and marginalized our most fundamental concerns.” (Henson 329)  He instead advocates a more direct assault on corporate rule, much of which needs to take place in the United States.  He suggests that
[w]e must focus on new strategies that change the ground rules on who is in charge, to reclaim our constitutional right to sovereignty over economic activity.  We must choose the appropriate arenas of struggle.  The really meaningful fights that will win a reality of sustainable agriculture everywhere are over what we put in our state constitutions, corporate codes, and corporate charters. (Henson 333)
 
It is the failure of the organic component of the sustainable agriculture movement to directly address the economic structure and these issues of corporate power that has led to its cooptation.
            In light of the challenge of corporate power, it is important to investigate our systems of meaning.  More specifically, it is crucial to ask the question, is it possible for large corporations to be “organic”?  How do profit, scale, and the concentration of power affect the principles that organic farming set out to uphold?  How has the marketability of this term allowed it to be co-opted by companies whose motive is profit?  What does it mean that small farmers with priceless ecological practices who are unable to afford certification are not able to call their product “organic”?  Martin O’Connor addresses this larger question of discursive practice:
            Ambiguity runs through all of the most important discourses on economy and the                        environment today... Precisely this obscurity leads so many people so much of the time                    to talk and write about ‘sustainability’: the word can be used to mean almost anything...              which is part of its appeal. (in Peet and Watts 36) 
 
            This ambiguity leads one to examine what our systems of meaning are grounded in.  We must discover how power has shaped the term “organic” and led it away from its original meanings.  And we must search for the larger ramifications of what has been called “a developing slippage between the terms ‘sustainable’ and ‘organic.’” (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 113)  Michael Sligh asks, “Will we retain our collective organic integrity by building on our core values, or will the advent of governmental oversight and the expansion of participants result in a loss of support for these core values and thus set up the climate for co-optation?” (Organics 344)  What is this integrity of which he speaks, and how can it support diversity rather than become universalizing?  What new direction will the organic movement head in in order to preserve this “integrity” on a widespread scale, but also allow for the diversity of ecology and of culture that is so crucial?
 
 
We must ask if sustainability is even possible, much less desirable, without the elimination of patriarchy, racism, and class exploitation - all of which maintain systems of power that reinforce non-sustainable, undesirable social relations.
-Patricia Allen
 
            In order to answer this question about direction, it is important to look critically at the sustainable agriculture movement.[4]   What underlying values shape its agenda?  What are its limits and how is it constrained by the economic model in which it finds itself?  How can we deconstruct the term “sustainable,” which, as noted above, has lost much of its meaning?  What other movements can it learn from, and what new ideas can in incorporate into its analysis?  When Ivette Perfecto points out that “[s]ustainability movements must address the question, who and what needs to be sustained?” she offers three directions in which these movements must explore.  They must focus on social and cultural relations as well as human relations with nature, they must become multicultural, and they must explore how the agricultural crisis comes not only from the relationship between society and nature, but also from the contradictions of social relations. (Perfecto 177)
            To begin to look forward, it is valuable to examine the Environmental Justice movement.  The Environmental Justice movement was begun in the 1970s by grassroots activists of color who drew attention to the disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards faced by their communities.  By placing the people that environmental damage affects at the center of the analysis,  Environmental Justice activists challenge the notion of what counts as an environmental issue, including concerns such as social justice, local economic sustainability, health, and community governance under the rubric of “environment.”  (Di Chiro 299-300)  To do something similar with the questions that the sustainable agriculture movement has been asking, one realizes that “[w]here human beneficiaries are mentioned, these are usually Western farmers and purchasers of organic food, not agricultural laborers or the hungry and impoverished inhabitants of the South.” (Allen 25)
            This change in focus confronts the historical ideological basis of mainstream environmentalism, which presupposes a separation between humans and the “natural” world.  As Di Chiro explains,
            environmental justice activists explicitly undertake a critique of modernist and colonial                 philosophies of unlimited progress, unchecked development, the privileging of Western                         scientific notions of objective truth and control of nature, and the hierarchical separation                         between nature and human culture.  This antimodernist movement is also implicitly a                   critique of the mainstream environmental movement, which, activists argue, upholds the        same underlying colonial philosophy of nature as ‘other’ to human culture. (310)
 
The Environmental Justice movement presents another view of the environment, as the place where people live.  It claims that the universal division between humans and nature is “deceptive, theoretically incoherent, and strategically ineffective in its political aim to promote widespread environmental awareness,” given that some humans are victims of environmental destruction and some cultures live in an ecologically sound manner. (Di Chiro 301)  Vandana Shiva points out that the ability to dissociate the environment and social justice is a luxury, one which accompanies the viewpoint of the environment as an external distant category rather than the place in which you live. (Close 2)
            The Environmental Justice movement has also differed from the generally white, middle class, and male-led mainstream environmental movement by its makeup in terms of gender, race, and class. (Di Chiro 300-1)  By engaging the perspectives on the environment of those not coming from a privileged perspective, Pam Tau Lee argues that “environmental justice is able to bring together all of these different issues to create one movement that can really address what actually causes all of these phenomena to happen and gets to the root of the problems.” (in Di Chiro 301)  From the perspective of the Environmental Justice movement, environmentalism, a movement for biological diversity, has suffered from a lack of cultural diversity.  Its focus on national legislation has not always benefited the communities who disproportionately experience exposure to toxic hazards.  Often, the “solutions” of traditional environmentalism merely shift pollution burdens to communities of color. (Ferris and Hahn-Baker 70-2)  For example, the concept of wilderness preservation has been directly harmful for countries in the South.  Ramachandra Guha comments, “The wholesale transfer of a movement culturally rooted in American conservation history can only result in the social uprooting of human populations in other parts of the globe.” (284-5)  Shiva argues that the traditionally white, male environmental organizations have been unable to see the interconnectedness of issues that is central to Environmental Justice. (Close 2)
            According to Arturo Escobar, this disconnected “environment,” where humans and nature are distinct categories, has its roots in the view of nature posited from the perspective of the urban-industrial system in which an inert nature is acted upon by human agents. (52)  Environmental Justice seeks to reestablish a connection, theoretically and materially, between humans and nature.   It does so through notions of  “community.”  For Environmental Justice advocates, community “becomes at once the idea, the place, and the relations and practices that generate what these activists consider more socially just and ecologically sound human/environment configurations.” (Di Chiro 310)
            In order to redraw this connection it is important to look deeply at the relationship of poverty and environmental issues.  From the mainstream environmentalist perspective, it is possible to see the poor as agents of environmental destruction. (Sachs 244)  Escobar describes how the poor are blamed for a lack of “environmental consciousness.” (2)  The dichotomous conception of humans and nature  paints the picture of a “sublime” or “Edenlike” nature, against which marginalized people are often classified as anti-nature or impure.  Conversely, they might be conceived of as identical with nature, and thus open to exploitation in the way that inert nature is.  The result is that the Edenic notion of nature “becomes, for many communities of color, a tool of oppression that operates to obscure their own ‘endangered’ predicaments.” (Di Chiro 311)  An alternative view of these intersecting issues, however, is to look at the ways in which poverty, rather than the poor, is a major cause of environmental destruction.  To consider, as well, that poverty is no more a cause than affluence and capital (Peet and Watts 7) points to the conclusion that it is the system of corporate capitalism, which leads to these two extremes, that is ultimately the cause of the environmental destruction that we are witnessing.
            The recognition of the environmental harm caused by capitalism in the form of “development” has spurred the sustainable development movement.  One element of this is the struggle for a more sustainable agriculture.  But does this model address the core concerns of the communities being “developed”?  Does sustainable development sufficiently address the harm caused by the expansionist capitalist system? According to Wolfgang Sachs, sustainable development merely “emasculates the environmental challenge by insinuating the validity of developmentalist assumptions.”  Nature becomes a variable in the project of sustaining development. (Sachs 243-4)   The concept of “development” itself lies at the core of Western modernist discursive formation, and thus “seizes control of the discourse terrain, subjugating alternative discourses which Third World people have articulated to express their desires for different societal objectives.” (Peet and Watts 17)  Similarly, Escobar sees modern development discourse as merely the latest chapter in the expansion of Western reason.  Rather than strengthening communities in the Global South, it undermines their autonomy:
            reasoned knowledge uses the developmental language of emancipation to create systems           of power in a modernized world.  Such hegemonic discourses appropriate societal              practices, meanings, and cultural contents into the modern realm of explicit calculation,               subjecting them to Western forms of power-knowledge.  They ensure the conformity of                   the myriad peoples of the world to First World (especially American) types of economic                         and cultural behavior. (in Peet and Watts 17)
           
            Elsewhere, Escobar examines the ways in which sustainable development attempts to
reconcile two enemies, growth and the environment.  He argues that this cannot be done –
            Given the present visibility of ecological degradation, this process [sustainable                            development] necessitates an epistemological and political reconsideration of ecology                    and economy, intended to create the impression that only minor corrections to the                      market system are needed to launch an era of environmentally sound development, and                  hiding the fact that the economic framework itself cannot hope to accommodate                                     environmental concerns without substantial reform. (52) 
 
While ecologists have recognized environmental limits to production, they have largely overlooked the cultural nature of the extension of the Western economy.  Even “sustainable development” depends to an extent upon the “semiotic conquest of local knowledges,” whose cultural limits on unchecked production go largely unnoticed. (Escobar 53, 57)
            Such gaps in theories of sustainable development highlight the need for a power analysis in the field of ecology.  As Arne Naess states, “The ecological movement cannot avoid politics.”   He describes the need in environmental conflicts to map out the relevant power structures, and also the resistance to doing so by forces who try to show that ecological questions are “cleanly scientific” and reducible to question of physics, chemistry, mineralogy, and resource research.   Naess cites the conflict over pesticides that began in the early 1960s to demonstrate that ways of production and consumption must be tackled head-on  A system of production shapes a society and its aims in a way that different values and aims cannot be expressed unless the mode of production is altered. (Naess 130-2)  The field of political ecology which addresses these issues responds to Escobar’s criticism that cultural questions are not addressed in the pursuit of sustainability.  Combining concerns of ecology and the political economy, political ecology examines such questions as that of participation, community rights, and local needs in environmental and conservation strategies. (Peet and Watts 10)  Patricia Allen makes this point when she states that “We must ask if sustainability is even possible, much less desirable, without the elimination of patriarchy, racism, and class exploitation - all of which maintain systems of power that reinforce non-sustainable, undesirable social relations.” (28)
            This discussion shows the inseparability of social issues and ecological issues, especially in relationship to addressing the global political economy.  Given the relationship between humans and nature posited by the Environmental Justice movement, that is, one where social life cannot be separated from the environment, new criteria for sustainability emerge.  Questions of ecological sustainability cannot be separated from social issues.  Sustainability must address both.  Wendell Berry acknowledges this when he writes, “What I am aiming at ... is the probability that nature and human culture, wildness and domesticity, are not opposed but are interdependent.  Authentic experience of either will reveal the need of one for the other.” (Home 11-2)  How does this come into play when examining our global food system?  How is it that our economic model and the sustainable agriculture movement can change together to address these concerns?
            I would like to suggest that the direction in which the sustainable agriculture movement appears to be heading, “local food,” is the way to address both the environmental and social concerns of the current global industrial food system.  Furthermore, this emerging movement for local food systems directly addresses the centralized system of power that embodies the current political economic system of capitalism.
 
 
Thinking and acting in terms of the foodshed is an indication of our commitment to work not simply to reform the food system but to transcend that system entirely.  And while a system can by anywhere, the foodshed is a continuous reminder that we are standing in a specific place; not anywhere, but here.
 –Jack Kloppenburg, John Hendrickson, and G.W. Stevenson
 
            To understand the viability of local solutions to the agricultural and larger sustainability crises is to realize that there is no one successful alternative.  Lakshman Yapa explains that “there is no circumscribed space called ‘the alternative’ to the Green Revolution; in fact there are thousands of site-specific alternatives that emerge in the substantive details of the story.” (69-70)   And, as Fred Kirschenmann points out, “There are no global ecosystems, only local ones.  So farming must be designed to fit into local ecosystems if it is to achieve even a modicum of sustainability.” (97)  Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan also suggest that sustainability will fail to the extent that it is imposed by outside forces.  Instead, it “will take endless forms, the very diversity of design possibilities helping to ensure that the whole patchwork quilt of technologies, cultures, and values is sustainable.” (63)  Successful alternatives, then, relate to their location, both in terms of ecology and of culture. 
            The change of focus from “organic” to “local” also allows many new issues to enter the picture.  In a similar way to its challenge to the notion of “environment,” an application of an Environmental Justice perspective to the sustainable agriculture movement causes one to question what qualifies as an issue of sustainability.  One important shift that needs to take place in order to achieve a “sustainable” agriculture is to examine the problems that lie within the entire food system, not only with production, but also with marketing, distribution, and consumption.  The same corporate structure that causes environmental devastation leads to social problems when it relies on poorly supported farm labor, leads to the breakup of rural communities both in the United States and in the Global South, creates immense transportation costs that are reflected in foreign policy via dependence on fossil fuels, and fails to get healthful food to low-income city residents.             
            Currently, sectors in our food system other than production require more energy and receive more profit.  Out of each dollar we pay for food in the United States, only 7 cents reaches the farming community it originated in, while the remainder goes to processing, shipping, brokerage, advertising, and retailing firms. (Halweil 23)   Furthermore, the food processing and retailing sectors are two of the most intensely consolidated sectors in the food system, and “consolidation at one link in the food chain fuels consolidation at every level of the food business.” (Halweil 7,23)  The long-distance transportation of food requires more packaging, refrigeration, and fuel and creates much more waste and pollution than locally-grown food. (14)  The hidden costs of long-distance food, while making food artificially cheap at the supermarket, have ecological and social consequences that must be addressed along with production guidelines.  The process of organic certification does not necessarily address these concerns.  Michael Sligh calls the retail and processing sectors the “missing link in the costs-sharing system” of certification.  Their financial participation would relieve the burden on farmers and consumers, preventing a situation where “the system is either priced out of the marketplace or concentrated into very few hands.” (Sligh, Toward xii)  As reflected in Patricia Allen’s question about sustainability’s effect on systems of oppression, in the end, what changes does “organic” food make if it cannot transform the corporate industrial model?
            The social structure of agriculture has been neglected as the discourse of organics has taken center stage.  Organic methods claim to address the ecological problems of industrial agriculture, but do not address the burden of high-input agriculture which is disproportionately borne by people of color and the poor.  Organics don’t publicize the reality that 90% of all U.S. farm workers are people of color.  The internationalization of agriculture also facilitates the movement of useless products, such as banned pesticides, and wastes to the global periphery.  The agribusiness structure also has disastrous effects for family farms and rural communities, and while the government is heavily subsidizing agriculture, this money is not reaching farmers or farm workers.  While there were direct federal agricultural subsidies of $16.7 billion in 1987, farmers accumulated a debt of $150 billion in 1988, and farm workers’ wages stayed below the federal minimum wage. (Perfecto 174-6) 
            Just as the sustainable agriculture movement must broaden its inclusion of issues, it should also be as inclusive with its membership as possible.  It must move to include not only those mentioned above but consumers as well.  One description points out the movement's “farm-centricity” and comments that the movement “has not yet seriously engaged issues of race, class, and gender even within - much less outside - rural areas.  Hunger in the city is indeed an agricultural issue.” (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 116).  It is the distance between farmers and consumers that prevents us from readily making this connection.  This distance is reflected in two especially troublesome dynamics, that between urban and rural areas, and that between the Global North and Global South.  Ivette Perfecto envisions a “multicultural sustainable agriculture movement that includes the knowledge and experiences of those who have been subjugated and dispossessed (racial and ethnic minorities, women, farm workers, consumers, poor communities, Third World peasants) under the totalizing discourse of capitalism.”  Such a movement “could shape the framework that could potentially serve as the basis for a truly sustainable future.” (177)
            Wendell Berry, a leading spokesperson for rural communities in the United States, has applied the model of colonization to rural areas. He writes,
            What we have before us, if we want our communities to survive, is the building of an                  adversary internal economy to protect against the would-be global economy.  To do this,     we must somehow learn to reverse the flow of the siphon that has for so long drawn                   resources, money, talent, and people out of our countryside, often with a return only of                       pollution, impoverishment, and ruin. (Conserving 416) 
 
Helena Norberg-Hodge, addressing the same issues on the global scale, points to the economic marginalization of rural areas.  Consequently, she argues, it is difficult to imagine what rural communities would look like if they had any sort of real economic power. (Norberg-Hodge 395)  When Ivette Perfecto describes what has been implemented and learned in Cuba’s move to an alternative agriculture, she also stresses the importance of rural communities.  An integral part of Cuba’s plan has been an alternative organization of labor, which moves labor back into the countryside, through means such as offering incentives to city workers to volunteer to work in the country. (Perfecto 183)  Perfecto also notes that these newly strengthened rural communities must not be isolated, but rather an interdependent and integrated rural society, not the sort that “could spring from a purist and myopic bioregionalist approach.” (186)
            Examining how communities in the Global South are affected by the global food system brings up questions about what will happen to them if we in the Global North were to localize our food systems.  To eliminate the demand for the products they supply could potentially further deteriorate their economies.  This argument against localization brings up the trap into which the “simple living” movement falls.  It is an important one to address, because the ramifications that these communities could feel are real ones.  However, a movement towards local economies necessitates this movement in all regions, North and South.  As Helena Norberg-Hodge puts it, “promote small scale on a large scale.”  She argues that such a move would not undermine the South’s economies; rather, it would allow the resources in the South to remain in the South. (394)  Similarly, Colin Hines describes how localization policies would “allow nations, local government and communities to reclaim control over their local economies; to make them as diverse as possible; and to rebuild stability into community life.” (29)  This would necessitate an economic paradigm shift, and would not abandon local communities to fend for themselves.  Rather, it would require overarching macro policies that would provide for and allow relocalizing, as well as grassroots action. (Hines 32)
            Arne Naess also reinforces the necessity of change at both scales.  He refutes the misconception of many people in the conservation movement who attempt to change society by decreasing their own private consumption rather than by political means.  While both methods are necessary and complementary, he feels that the former, on its own, displays a lack of understanding of how production and consumption are determined. (131)  A model for this twofold strategy as related to a transformation of the food system is that of “secession” and “succession.”  Secession refers to “withdrawing from and/or creating alternatives to the dominant system rather than challenging it directly,” while succession is “the conscious and incremental transfer of resources and human commitments from old food-associated relationships and forms to new ones.” (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 117-8)  These two forms of change are mutually reinforcing.
            A shift toward the local also addresses the problematic discourse of the “global
environmental crisis,” yet another place where the struggle of power enters into language.  For
 example, Arran Gare writes, “The notion of a global environmental crisis is a social construct...
The majority of the world’s population have no conception of a global environmental crisis at
all.” (73)  When “global survival” is sought, it is at the expense of the sustainability of local
cultures and realities.  This is because “global” is defined “according to a perception of the world
 shared by those who rule it.”  The phrase ‘Think globally, act locally’ assumes that problems
can be defined at a global level, and that problems are equally compelling for all communities. 
(Escobar 51)  Wolfgang Sachs voices a similar criticism when he describes sustainability as seen as a challenge for global management.  The resultant focus on resource budgeting provides
            a knowledge that is faceless and placeless, an abstraction that carries considerable cost:                         It consigns the realities of culture, power, and virtue to oblivion.  It offers data but no                        context; it shows diagrams but no actors; it gives calculations but no notions of                           morality; it seeks stability but disregards beauty.  Indeed, the global vantage point                         requires ironing out all the differences and disregarding all the circumstances; rarely has                   the gulf between the observers and the observed been greater... It is inevitable that the               claims of global management are in conflict with the aspirations f or cultural rights,                democracy, and self-determination.... (251)
 
            Ecologically as well, the global scale, even a large scale, is untenable.  Frederick Kirschenmann argues that large scale operations cannot be managed in an ecologically responsible manner, because they span several ecological neighborhoods.  Each neighborhood can vary significantly from the others and within time and thus requires close monitoring and adaptation.  In other words, what is required is “local knowledge developed over long periods of time through intimate relationships with the land” - something that cannot occur on larger than the local scale. (95)  The study of complex systems also suggests limits to knowledge, that “we cannot scientifically ‘manage’ systems beyond a certain scale.” (Van der Ryn and Cowan 68)  So when biotech companies or agribusiness claim their mission is that of feeding the world, there is reason to be suspicious.  Wendell Berry comments on this large-scale mindset in The Unsettling of America:
That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within           the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of economics and technology; by no stretch          of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture.  It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology for care, of technology for morality.  This ‘accomplishment’ is not primarily the work of farmers - who have been, by and large, its victims - but a collaboration of corporations, university specialists, and government agencies.  It is therefore an agricultural development not motivated by agricultural aims or disciplines, but by the ambitions of merchants, industrialists, bureaucrats, and academic careerists. (33)
 
            The movement for local food addresses the power relationships that shape economic globalization, the agribusiness-controlled global food system, and the discourse of the global environmental crisis.  It seeks to restore social, economic, and epistemological power to the community level.  A crucial way in which it does this is by explicit connection with the community food security movement and the general concept of community health.[5]   Harriet Friedman describes a local food economy as an alternative vision of food in which it is an integral part of the health and livelihood of individuals and communities, in which advocacy for the right to food is tied to socially determined land use, and in which food policy is connected to health care policy, antipoverty work, and employment agendas. (96)  One way in which this partnership manifest itself is through the development of “food policy councils” which relate food issues to other fundamental community dimensions such as economic development and public health. (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 117).  Local food security is one of many movements, such as indigenous rights movements and emphases on local knowledge which “crosscut the environment-poverty axis.”  This multidimensionality is indicative of a new mode of politics - “autopoietic movements which exercise power outside the state arena and which seek to create ‘decentered autonomous spaces.’” (Peet and Watts 35)  This redirection of power is crucial to the success of economic transformation.
            Wendell Berry suggests that a community’s health is integrally tied to the way in which it makes its living; there are no sustainable local communities without sustainable local economies. (Conserving 413)  David Morris adds that “[s]mall is the scale of efficient, dynamic, democratic, and environmentally benign societies.” (438)  A bioregional economy is able to provide a stable means of production and exchange which is not in flux and does not depend on growth or consumption for its success. (Sale 480)  This relates to the Gandhian principle of swadeshi, or “home economy,” in which the community avoids dependence on external market forces and instead develops a strong economic base to satisfy its needs.  Satish Kumar provides this principle as a precursor for peace.  He suggests that we “cannot have real peace in the world if we look at each other’s countries as sources for raw materials or as markets for finished economic goods.” (421)
            Local food economies close the gap between consumer and producer, with crucial results.  Colin Hines explains, “The shorter the gap between producer and consumer, the better the chance for the latter to control the farmer.” (x)  The importance of reembedding place into our food economy is that it reinforces the principle of stewardship.  When a community depends on its human neighbors, neighboring lands, and native species for most of its needs, it must ensure the health of those resources.  (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 119)  The closing of this gap also allows consumers a high level of control over the food they eat.  To demonstrate the importance of this control, Brian Halweil uses the example of genetically modified organisms.  With distant and concentrated decision-making, the average person’s knowledge of the contents of the food supply is diminished by bodies such as the “Alliance for Better Foods,” a coalition of large food retailers, food processors, biotech companies, and corporate-financed farm organizations that has launched a $50 million public “educational” campaign and given hundreds of thousands of dollars to political figures and parties in order to prevent the mandatory labeling of GMO foods. (Halweil 61-2)
            Closing this gap provides the opportunity to repair consumers’ “separation from the knowledge of how and by whom what they consume is produced, processed, and transported.” (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 113)  Local knowledge is appropriate knowledge in the sense that environmental solutions grown from place. (Van der Ryn and Cowan 64)  As technology becomes more ecological, it must also become more site specific.  Cuba’s alternative agricultural system, in which farmers and farm workers interact with off-farm scientists to develop appropriate technologies, is an example of this principle. (Perfecto 183)  Indigenous agricultural systems can also demonstrate both the responsiveness of local knowledges and the inextricable link between cultural diversity and biological diversity.  The coevolution of heirloom crop varieties and (agri)cultural practice reveals a process by which plants develop an ability to thrive in specific geographic locations and in specific cultural systems.[6]  (Van der Ryn and Cowan 60)  Local knowledges thus blur the distinction between nature and culture and create the foundation for self-reliance.
            Local food economies, unlike the movement for certified organic food, directly challenge the economic structure.  They do this in two ways, by creating an alternative, ecologically and socially-based economic system, and by returning decision-making control to the local level.  An important economic shift to be made is the embedding of human activity into particular places.  While this means necessary constraint in some senses, it also provides the opportunity for a shift from thinking in terms of “deficiency” to thinking in terms of “capacity.” (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 119)  Thinking of nature as a source of lessons rather than a set of constraints is an important step toward an ecological economy. As Brian Milani explains, “Information-intensity allows people to make the most of natural ecosystem productivity (that is, of the ecological context) and to substitute information for long-distance material flows.” (47)[7]
            A green economy would put a greater emphasis on self-reliance, making regenerative food systems a vital part of community development. (Milani 105)  Another component is self-regulation, as opposed to the institutional domination of industrial society. (185)  This entails direct democracy which is made possible on the local scale through the integration of politics and everyday worklife, direct accountability, and general participation. (188)  Milani explains that the key factor in the ecological transformation of the industrialized countries is a basic redistribution of power to the grassroots level. (200-1)  However, a self-reliant community is not an alienated, antisocial community.  Instead, it is one which “simply should seek to increase control over its own economy as far as is practicable.”   Such an economy would minimize dependence on others, diversify, and rid itself of externalities. (Shuman 46-9)  Three strategies for a self-regulating economic community, each of which is an economic multiplier, are to nurture businesses that reduce imports for basic needs, to keep ownership of businesses local, and to channel local saving and investment capital into the building of the local economy. (50)  Local food economies, as a fundamental component of green economics, address the power relationships underlying the food system in a way that examines the root causes of its problems.  By returning power to the community level, local food economies are a step toward “ecological democracy” in which “communities of people suffering ecological injustices must be afforded greater participation in the decision-making processes of capitalist industry and the state.” (Faber 1)
 
 
Of course, we see that the question of food is simply a specific case of the general failure of late capitalism, or postindustrialism, or postmodernism, or whatever you wish to call this period of intense commodification and of accelerating distancing from one another and from the earth.
- Jack Kloppenburg, John Hendrickson, G.W. Stevenson
 
            Local food as a social movement lies at a crucial intersection of two prominent theoretical fields, postmodernism and ecology.  While the play of postmodernism lifts its heads into the clouds and seemingly supports an infinite cultural diversity, ecology firmly plants its feet on the ground and presents the challenge to learn and live within natural principles.  However, both theories in their own way seem to support the concept of local food systems.  Postmodernism deconstructs theoretical centers and metanarratives, instead positing a decentralized production of power through ideas and discourse.  This seems to support the local sites of control and knowledge that maintain local food systems.  Ecology focuses on the interrelationships between organisms and their environment.  These relationships are inseparable from boundaries which “maintain a steady yet dynamic equilibrium.” (Gliessman 17)  Ecological principles are followed at a scale which respects these boundaries.  Local food systems are thus able to follow ecological principles, in contrast to industrial agriculture which imposes its own principles.
            Several theorists explore the intersection of postmodernism and ecology.  Critiques of postmodernism from an ecological framework raise crucial questions.  A central one, which I will engage here, is posed by  Jim Cheney: “in the light of postmodernist deconstruction of modernist totalizing and foundationalist discourse, can we any longer make sense of the idea of privileged discourse, discourse which can lay claim to having access to the way things are?” (117)  This question is vital in light of the transitioning of the sustainable agriculture movement.   If “organic” and “sustainable” labels no longer relate to methods that will address ecological and social justice, is there an approach that can?  Is there a way in which discourse, drawing on both postmodernism and ecology, can “ground” itself without a dangerous totalization?
            While Arran Gare believes that poststructuralist analyses of power in discourse and discursive formation can be used to understand the dynamics of global environmental destruction, he argues that the poststructuralist framework does not enable a response.  Gare argues that “[b]y abjuring any recourse to grand narratives or to any reference point beyond the immediate situation, poststructuralists are simply committed to the defense of local knowledge and local power against global knowledge and global power.”  He feels that this celebration of the local could be put to multiple ends, not all desirable.  He continues:
            More fundamentally, by supporting the postmodernist dissolution of perspective,                                    poststructuralists not only fail to reveal the interconnectedness of environmental                              problems and the global causes of the environmental crisis, but invalidate the efforts of                those who are striving to reveal them.  For poststructuralists, the notion of a ‘global                        environmental crisis’ can be deconstructed and shown to serve the power of those who                 are attempting to mobilize people to address it.  And, with their opposition ... to grand               narratives which would put all local narratives in perspective, poststructuralists leave                        environmentalists no way to defend their belief that there is a global crisis or to work out                        what kind of response is required to meet it... This inability to deal with the phenomenon                        of a global environmental crisis manifests the loss of contact with the world. (98-9)
 
            For Gare, while postmodernism has garnered support from diverse groups for environmentalism and a new social order, this support has failed to translate into effective action.  Therefore, he concludes that, while it is unlikely the environmental crisis will be addressed without poststructuralist perspectives, “these insights will have to be absorbed into a comprehensive system of thought which is able to analyse and relate everything from the world ecosystem and the global system of capitalism and Western civilization to the lives of individuals struggling to come to terms with their situations in the world.” (100) 
            In his conclusion, entitled “Towards a New World Order,” Gare writes:
             ... the poststructuralists, have not provided the means to come to          terms with the               situation confronting us.  What is required is a new postmodernism which not only              negates the cultural forms of modernity, but which can replace these forms.... To do this                         it will be necessary to construct a new grand narrative, a grand narrative formulated in                     terms of the cosmology based on a philosophy of process. (139) 
 
He argues that narrative is essential in order to orient people, to provide stories powerful enough to explain environmental problems and the role people might play in resolving them-
            Environmental problems are global problems and their causes are global; it will be                      impossible for stories to effectively orient individuals for effective action to overcome                  these problems unless the stories pertaining to people’s individual lives and to local                     problems can be integrated with broader narratives, and ultimately with a grand                               narrative... (140)
 
            While maintaining the concept of the grand narrative, Gare acknowledges that it is important to study the way in which power operates, noting that those who are invested in repairing the “global environmental crisis” are unable to relate their own lives to such problems.  His grand narrative is a new, reflective and dialogical version, based on a multiplicity of perspectives.  With it, he believes, the oppression caused by all previous grand narratives can be avoided: “A polyphonic grand narrative in the form of a dialogic discourse could take into account the diversity of cultures and the multiplicity of local stories by which humanity has formed and is forming itself...” (140-1)
            While Gare’s polyphonic narratives are “environmentally sensitive,” there remain a few questions about his prescription for humanity.  What is the relationship between humans and nature in this new grand narrative, and in what ways, if any, does this narrative maintain a center of power?  Does his language of “conservation” and “preservation” of the environment disassemble the Western notion of dichotomous nature and culture?  What is the relationship of his means - a struggle imbedded in local organizations and issues, an “environmental nationalism” - and his ends -  a new grand narrative which is a globally oriented struggle for an environmentally sustainable civilization? (145, 160)  While the struggle he presents is regional, its source of power is not necessarily decentralized.  While “it follows... that it is impossible to prescribe for everyone what should be done,” and “[w]hat is required is a ‘politics of the rhizome’ in which everyone, every community, every nation and every major region comes to terms with the uniqueness of their situation and acts accordingly,” there is still “the environmental crisis” to be solved. (161)  There is still a group of “environmentalists” whose task it seems to be to convince people to take this new grand narrative seriously. (144) 
            What are the consequences of his maintenance of a universal sense of justice in which national interests are subordinated “to the interests of humanity”? (153)   Lines such as “For the sake of humanity Third World people should recognize this...” seem to maintain a center of power which negates the efficacy of local solutions at transforming the economic system.  The debate remains between a set of solutions that ultimately keeps its eye on a global end and an altogether grassroots approach; which will fully articulate the restructuring of power necessary?  While Gare might be correct that an analysis of the current situation requires an awareness of global forces, perhaps the solution(s) does not and cannot require a corresponding global scope. What then are other ways that this sense of narrative might be employed?  In what ways might the  play of poststructuralism be grounded other than Gare’s “new world order”?
            Richard Peet and Michael Watts further this discussion as they directly address questions of social justice in their exploration of the new directions of political ecology.  What they find striking about these new directions “is the extent to which these new directions attempt to engage political ecology with certain ideas and concepts derived from poststructuralism and discourse theory.  There is in other words an extraordinary vitality within the field reflecting the engagements within and between political economy, the power-knowledge field, and critical approaches to ecological science itself.”  They refer to these “confluences and engagements” as “liberation ecology,” a term which they use to point to the emancipatory potential of what they call the “environmental imaginary.” (13)                                                                                                                        
In their exploration of the formation of narrative, Peet and Watts point in a different direction than Gare.  Rather than relying on strictly human dialogic narrative, they collapse the strict dichotomy of human and nature.   They suggest
            that the social imaginaries and discourses which environmental and other social                           movements contend, do not arise on the head of a pin or in a de-natured ivory tower.                      Rather, the environment itself is an active constituent of imagination, and the discourses               themselves assume regional forms that are, as it were, thematically organized by natural        contexts.  In other words, there is not an imaginary made in some separate ‘social’                     realm, but an environmental imaginary, or rather whole complexes of imaginaries, with                which people think, discuss, and contend threats to their livelihoods... (37) 
 
Rather than Gare’s grand narrative, their version of a “poststructural ecology may begin with the devastating environmental consequences of modernity but it deepens this practical critique by arguing for its path-dependency, substantially different local discourses about environment, each marked by it own contradictions, each with lessons to teach and problems to avoid.” (Peet and Watts 38)
            Jim Cheney elaborates on the integrally environmental element of narrative.  He, too, questions why metanarratives can and have been so destructive.  He explains that the “possibility of totalizing, colonizing discourse arises from the fact that concepts and theories can be abstracted from their paradigm settings and applied elsewhere.”  When these abstractions are  applied beyond the paradigm settings which gave birth to them, they take on a life of their own.   (120)  The effect of this sort of discourse is to assimilate the world to its totalizations.  Cheney instead argues for a narrative tied to place: “Contextual discourse reverses this; it assimilates language to the situation, bends it, shapes it to fit.” (120)   He explains that “[n]arrative is the key then, but it is narrative grounded in geography rather than in a linear, essentialized narrative self.” (126)  He offers as an example a statement on right and wrong by Aldo Leopold, describing it as authentic, not as a universal norm suggested to Leopold by his situation, but “as inflected by historicity, as essentially tied to place and Leopold’s narrative embedment in, and understanding of, the sand counties of Wisconsin.”  With this suggestion, Cheney claims to sketch a path for postmodernism which draws on currents in contemporary environmentalism and to reconceive of environmental ethics in postmodern terms. (125) 
            While Cheney acknowledges that there is not necessarily any setting in which contextualizing discourse is not constantly in danger of falling into essentializing and totalizing discourse, a “partial way out” is to “expand the notion of a contextualizing narrative of place so as to include nature ... in the construction of community.”  He utilizes the concept of bioregions here, arguing that “[b]ioregions provide a way of grounding narrative without essentializing the idea of self, a way of mitigating the need for ‘constant recontextualization’ to undercut the oppressive and distorting overlays of cultural institutions.” (128)  This bioregionalism “can ‘ground’ the construction of self and community without the essentialization and totalization typical of the various ‘groundings’ of patriarchal culture.” (Cheney 134)
            Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson provide a more concrete look at what such solutions applied to food systems might look like in “coming in to the foodshed.”[8]   They explain that “[f]oodshed analysis will not be constructed to conform to some predetermined theoretical and methodological framework, but will be constituted by the concrete activities of those who seek to learn about the food system in order to change it.” (121)  While the movement will be informed by the global economic system, solutions must not emerge from a global framework.  Solutions must recognize that nature is an actor in human theory and practice, and that this interaction takes place on the local scale.  By grounding theory in place, the dichotomy between humans and nature begins to collapse, and we can begin to think beyond these categories, moving out of the trap that both modern and postmodern social theory have fallen into. 
 
 
 
It is not our differences that divide us.  It is our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences.
-Audre Lorde  
 
The focus on solutions that emerge from “specific sociogeographic places” rather than grand narratives spanning regions relies on the strength of local communities.  Clearly, neither many rural nor urban communities can today claim this strength.  The development of such communities is a process that might occur simultaneously with the growth of local food systems.  The “foodshed” can become a place for organizing: “In this unstable postmodern world, the foodshed can be one vehicle through which we reassemble our fragmented identities, reestablish community, and become native not only to a place but to each other.” (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 114)  Milani describes this struggle for community as one of overcoming the fundamental antagonism between the individual and the social that has been a source of power for industrial society. (183)
            Yet, this sense of the necessary community is not a simplistic one.  A community grounded in place does not allow for a deceptive sameness, but instead confronts the diversity present and contained within the given boundary.  Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, drawing on Foucault’s theorization of power in terms of production and discursive formation, describe such a community in which unity, coherent group identity and sense of shared experience are problematized.  They suggest the need for a new sense of political community which does not suppress positive interests and which makes connections at levels other than abstract political interests. (205)  The result, then, is community that is “the product of work, of struggle; it is inherently unstable, contextual; it has to be constantly reevaluated in relation to critical political priorities; and it is the product of interpretation, interpretation based on an attention to history, to the concrete, to what Foucault has called subjugated knowledges.” (Martin and Mohanty 210)
            In examining these communities, the question of “how local?” is an important one as well.  The answer, however, is not clear.  In fact, it “will vary as a function of who is engaging in the analysis and what their objectives and resources are.  The foodshed is not a determinate thing; foodshed analysis will be similarly variable.” (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 121)  The local dimension is always in relationship with the larger scale of society.  Milani describes such a relationship:
The green perspective is not a mindless localism; rather, it’s one of linking scale between levels of community - from neighborhood to planet.  A fairly harmonious relationship between these nested hierarchies of regulation is possible only because they are built from the bottom up, with the base being the key level.  What’s more, this kind of relationship between different levels is possible only because these are relations between wholes, that is, between levels of relative self-reliance. (183)
 
Nearly all advocates of locally-based solutions acknowledge the importance of a consciousness of and connections with systems at a larger scale.  Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson write that “Until and unless we know where we are in the larger social and political ecology of the global food system, we may not be able to move effectively toward realization of a foodshed locally.” (120)   Michael Shuman suggests that a community can and must maintain  economic relationships with the rest of the world; the key is that it retain control of these relationships. (50)  Furthermore, self-regulation might entail more involvement of the state, rather than an evacuation of the state at the local level, but an involvement which empowers the individual and community. (Milani 184)  Locally-based economies are not a way for communities to disengage from the rest of the world, but a way to articulate and honor the existing ecological and cultural differences in way that allows interactions among communities to be mutually beneficial rather than oppressive.
            Local food has emerged as the next step in the evolution of the sustainable agriculture movement.  While organics have been commodified and the organic label coopted, a foodshed movement heads in a new direction by addressing the root causes of agricultural crises.  It is because local food systems address social concerns along with environmental concerns, redirecting food and power to the local, bioregional level, that they transform the power structure which underlies and maintains the corporate capitalist threat to sustainable agriculture.  Local food provides a means by which social, economic, and epistemological control might be returned to communities, even while simultaneously creating the community necessary for vital local economies.  This model iterates the importance of grassroots action for sustainable change and challenges the ways in which power has entered environmental discourse to posit a totalizing “global’ perspective.
            The promise of local food is one which cuts across boundaries, rural/urban, South/North, human/nature.  It is a way in which to articulate the interrelatedness of people and the environment that is the focus of ecology.  It refutes the dichotomy that Western rational industrial thought has constructed between these two categories.  As Wendell Berry so articulately comments, “But there is danger in this opposition, and it can be best dealt with by realizing that these pure and separate categories are pure ideas and do not otherwise exist.” (Home 6)  The thinking behind local food realizes this and then moves beyond poststructuralist analysis to ground the play of discourse without totalization.  It does so by listening to nature, by acknowledging the lesson of the Environmental Justice movement that there is no clear separation between people and the places in which they live.  Like people who must live out their lives on earth, theories must be embedded in nature and in place so that they, too, face natural limits.  Even postmodernists have to eat, and when they do, they participate in the age-old tradition of agriculture which has always served as a reminder that humans and nature are never far apart.
 
 
 
 
 
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