We are just getting this blog up and running, so I’m going to try to recapitulate what the Unheard Voices Project has been up to in the past month! In mid-November, Matt, UVP editor Chris Holmes, and I went to Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, South Dakota, for the 2008 McGovern Conference, “Hungry for Green: Feeding the World Sustainably.” The main impetus was Matt’s work on Wild Caught: The Life and Struggles of an American Fishing Town. His depiction of small-scale shrimpers and crabbers, fishing in tandem with, not opposition to, the ocean, has meshed with the growing popular interest in sustainable food sources.
Matt did a presentation on sustainable food sources, showing clips from Wild Caught as well as an interview he did with Ted Ames. Ted is a fisherman-scientist who won a McArthur genius award for his work interviewing old-time fishermen, piecing together their knowledge of the cod’s spawning grounds and migratory routes before the fishery collapsed.
It was exciting being with people who “get” sustainable agriculture—and with people like Fred Kirschenmann of Iowa State and Stone Farms (NY) who are transforming agricultural practices. And there were a lot of parallels between agriculture and fisheries—especially the interconnectedness of many life forms. On land, for example, companion plantings support erosion prevention, water retention and pest management, whereas in the ocean, each species is interdependent on multiple other species—including fresh-water fish that no longer can reach the ocean thanks to dams—to survive. Another factor that is true for both fisheries and agriculture is that healthy food sources require healthy communities. The Lone Ranger approach—a single farmer practicing monocropping on thousands of acres, or a huge freezer trawler that scrapes the bottom of all forms of life and lands its catch hundreds of miles away—needs to be replaced with strong communities who monitor their resources, and have a say in how their product is harvested and distributed.
After the conference, we visited South Dakota ranches and farms where people are going back to the old ways, whether reintroducing buffalo to the land, or raising organic cattle and poultry… more on that later.
