A summary of the Iowa state supreme court’s decision here.
I imagine we can look forward to a protracted political battle a la California now?
Category: Politics
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So much for states’ rights
In the grand tradition of Congress treating D.C. as its own personal political laboratory, Nevada’s Republican senator John Ensign has attached an amendment to the D.C. voting rights bill that would essentially gut what remains of the District’s gun control laws post-Heller.
I actually have fairly middle-of-the-road, or even conservative views on gun rights. Part of that comes from growing up in a small town/rural area where virtually every adult male (and not a few of the women) I knew owned multiple firearms. So, I don’t have the aversion to guns per se that a lot of my liberal friends do.
But – D.C. is a dense urban area with a high crime rate, and it strikes me as utterly reasonable that the District would want to regulate guns, even if Heller makes an outright ban untenable. Approaches to gun control ought properly be tailored to local needs and conditions; that’s one benefit of federalism. Stunts like these are nothing more than playing to the folks back home, while depriving D.C. residents of meaningful self-government.
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Schwenkler vs. Larison on trade
There’s a spirited and high-quality debate about free trade between John Schwenkler and Daniel Larison at Larison’s site here.
I’ll admit that I’ve swung more into the protectionist camp in recent years, or at least I think the benefits of free trade have been greatly overblown. But old-time protectionism that benefits certain well-connected interests at the expense of everyone else isn’t the way to go. I do think some kind of shift toward greater local (and regional, national, etc.) self-sufficiency is necessary as well as real standards for labor and the environment. That doesn’t mean international trade will vanish or that we should strive for autarky, but for genuine democratic control over trade–as opposed to our current elite-enforced free trade consensus.
Related posts from the archives: A review of Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful; “Schumacher on the poverty of economics”; “Localism and/vs. nationalism”; “Economics for community.”
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Our future: skyscraper farms?
Paul Roberts (author of The End of Oil, The End of Food–you get the idea) writes that creating a sustainable food system will require more than “buy local” or “buy organic.” In some cases, he says, these can be misleading and oversimplifying labels for a much more complex reality. For instance, how food is produced is more important in many cases than how far it traveled to get to your plate.
Getting where we need to be, he argues, will require some more imaginative steps between our current industrial system and and a sustainable one. This will mean abandoning in some cases the demand that food be “pure” organic for the sake of creating hybrid models that are environmentally and ethically sounder while still being able to feed people on the scale that industrial food does currently. And the local food movement is going to have to come to terms with regional specialization and long-distance trade if it wants sustainable food to be something other than a luxury item for rich countries.
As this more pragmatic system emerges, it’s a good bet that many of our romantic notions about alternative food production will be cast off. The vision of a nation of small farms, for example, will give way to farms of multiple scales—small farms, but also massive agricultural operations that can produce bulk commodities like grain at the lowest possible cost.
Jettisoned, too, will be the postcard image of the small farm with its neat rows of crops, vegetables, and livestock as constraints on space and resources necessitate new and quite unfamiliar designs. Proponents of vertical farms, for example, envision enormous glass-walled skyscrapers filled with vegetables, fruits, poultry, and aquaculture. Towering as high as 30 stories, and based on soilless farming, these space-age facilities would epitomize efficiency and sustainability: Water would be recycled, as would nutrients. The closed environment would eliminate the need for pesticides. Better still, the year-round, 24-hour growing season would boost yields anywhere from 6 to 30 times those of conventional dirt farms. Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University public health and microbiology professor who has championed vertical farming, claims that a single city block could feed 50,000 people.
The shift will also require more than changing consumer preferences and letting the market do its magic, as ethical consumers and romantic libertarians sometimes contend. The problem, Roberts says, isn’t farm subsidies, but that we’re subsidizing the wrong kind of farming.
Read the whole thing, as the kids say.
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Inching closer to voting rights
Senate clears way for approval of D.C. voting rights bill
D.C. Vote: As Constitutional As You Want It To Be
If DC isn’t going to be “retrocessed” into Maryland, or made the 51st state, then I don’t really see any other solution that’s fair and reasonable. I look forward to having a representative in Congress who can actually vote.
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Michael Pollan interviewed in Mother Jones
I do take issue with this, though:
MJ: When you first wrote the mantra “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” did you have any idea what kind of reaction you’d get?
MP: Well, I studied my poetry in school, and I knew there was something about the way it sounded that made it easy to remember. After writing The Omnivore’s Dilemma I wanted to write a book that got past the choir, that got to people who didn’t care about how their food was grown, but who did care about their health. I wanted to make it almost billboard simple. It started out as just “Eat food.” But then I realized, Eh, not quite good enough. You’ve got to deal with the quantity issue. And then plants; the more you looked, the more you realized that the shortage of plants in our diet could explain a lot. Not that I’m against meat eating. I think we’re eating too much. That’s why I said “mostly plants.”
MJ: Did you hear from the beef lobby?
MP: No, but there’s another group, the Weston A. Price Foundation, who are fierce in their love of animal fat. And a lot of what they say is right, but they really don’t like plants. People feel like they have to take sides on this plant/animal divide, and I don’t think we do.
MJ: There’s no dilemma?
MP: [Laughs.] No dilemma. And of course a lot of vegetarians were annoyed that I wasn’t saying “all plants.” It’s a thicket. People have strong, quasi-religious views. Secularizing the issue is challenging.
This is unfortunately not atypical of Pollan’s writing: to dismiss strongly held moral views as “religious” (and therefore, presumably, not rational). For an antidote, it’s worth reading B.R. Myers’ infamous review of the Omnivore’s Dilemma. This isn’t to say I think that everyone has to be vegetarian, but moral concerns can’t just be swept under the rug.
In other foodie politics news, the nomination of “organic food expert” Kathleen Merrigan for Deputy Secretary of Agriculture has been generating good buzz among food reformers. See this Ezra Klein post and follow the links for more info.
A Thinking Reed 