David Roedl

While I’m a little late getting in on blog action day, I want take the occasion to give attention to an issue of sustainability that I find really important: agriculture and food production. Joel Salatin is an innovative farmer and author whose practices were heavily featured in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In this 2003 essay, Salatin describes the frustrating conflicts between sustainable farming practices and government regulations.

In addition to revealing the darker side of industrial food production, I think his essay also speaks to a larger conflict in achieving sustainability: modern industry (and infrastructure and bureaucracy) is large scale and highly compartmentalized. In contrast, sustainable systems informed by ecology should be small scale and tightly integrated. Developing sustainment means adopting this ecological model in our political, cultural, and economic practices.