Hunger and Industrial Agriculture

Listen to my interview with Dr. Hugh Campbell of the University of Otago's Centre for the Study of Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (CSAFE) about his role in the ARGOS project here.

Check out the sweet jams I played during this show here.

First and foremost, one thing must be understood: all farming happens on the earth.  I would have thought this to be obvious, but the rhetoric surrounding the issue indicates otherwise.  As is so often the case with popular discourse these days, the conversation about industrial farming has been presented as a dichotomy – the cost-benefit analysis of biological farming versus industrial farming, which is better and why, which will be able to feed the growing population. This distinction is illusion.  it’s ALL biological.  The industrial farming system exists on this planet, not in a vacuum in which the laws of nature are suspended, and this planet is governed by some fairly concrete biological and physical laws. Either we work within those same principles, as with biodynamic and organic practices, or we do not, as with factory farming.  Only one way will be viable for very long.  Guess which one.

This doesn’t have to be a moral issue – we don’t have to talk about the happiness of the animals in a concentrated feeding operation or the human cost of attaining the fossil fuels to run the system, or whether it is right or wrong.  While I think that ethics are a completely valid and important aspect of decision making, a lot have been convinced by the narrative of rationality that how we feel about something is imaginary; at the very least not to be taken into consideration.  So, morality being entirely a human construct, it is  therefore mutable and subjective; the intricacies of biological systems which have evolved together for millennia are not. As Michael Pollan says, “farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reason: farming is concerned with plants and animals which live, grow, and die” (Carnivore, 213-4).

The End of Growth

Listen to the interview with Richard Heinberg here

Check out the playlist for this show here 

Sign the petition to keep Radio One alive here

The thesis of this blog is that perpetual growth is impossible in a finite world.  I believe this to be the fundamental problem facing humanity at this point in time: it underlies the current ongoing global financial crisis, climate change, and peak oil – indeed, peak just about everything.  At heart, the drive for perpetual growth is an economic issue, and so this episode of Too Fat For Our Pants is about economics.  I am not an economist, I have never formally studied economics – my knowledge of the discipline comes from having read books about it.  Gasp! That means that there is a very real possibility that I have a better understanding of economic principles than many economists, not because economists are dumb and I'm smart, but because formal economic training is deeply flawed and incomplete.  The good news is that if I can learn and grasp basic economic principles, then so can you: this is just another one of those things that we are encouraged not to understand, in fact we are told that it is too complicated for people to understand over and over and over again. I might go so far as to suggest that the obfuscation of economics has been deliberate: a lot of money is made on the back of people’s ignorance.  Knowledge is power, as they say, so hopefully today’s show helps you to arm yourself a little better.

Economics and the Fate of Free Media - Save Radio One!

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In case you have been away, which many of you have, here’s a little rundown of what’s been going on.  Based on the imminence of Voluntary Student Membership, which is in fact getting less and less likely by the day, OUSA underwent a fiscal examination by an independent, private contract firm called Deloitte, to determine where expenses could be cut.  Facing the potential loss of thousands and thousands of dollars should Voluntary Student Membership be implemented, this is perhaps not the most unexpected move on the part of OUSA, though I would argue that they could have done a lot more to educate students about the negatives of VSM in the first place. Anyway, Deloitte looked at all of Planet Media, which includes Radio One, Critic, and Planet Media as an advertising sales organization.  Astonishingly, and without much in the way of explanation, Critic and Planet Media escaped unscathed, while Radio One landed on the chopping block.  Deloitte has recommended that Radio One be sold, because there is no potential profit to be made here.  The fact that our broadcast license is contingent upon our status as a charitable trust, meaning that we can legally generate no profit beyond that needed to sustain ourselves, has so far escaped everyone’s notice.