It’s Getting Hot In Here

This post is provided on behalf of Project Survival Media – a grassroots, student-run media project designed to highlight the true costs of fossil fuels in the lead up to Copenhagen.  As part of this initiative, Project Survival Media team members in California and Oregon are documenting industrial agribusiness’ contributions to global warming and displacement of communities, as well as the role which small, sustainable farms can play in creating a more viable and just food-production system.

When Anne Berblinger delved into the world of small-scale organic farming in 1991, the concept of global warming had not yet entered mainstream consciousness in the US.  “It wasn’t at the top of everyone’s mind,” says Berblinger while slicing freshly harvested peppers in the kitchen at Gales Meadow farm – a site she and her husband Rene’ have been farming since 1999.  Yet though climate concerns had yet to penetrate mainstream thought in the early ’90s, Berblinger says she was inspired to take up small farming in part out of her feeling that “the earth was in peril.”  Motivated by concerns about soil, wildlife, and the other casualties of industrial agribusiness she says, “Having a small piece of land to care for and be the steward of seemed important.”

Today, Anne and Rene’ Berblinger and a team of youthful helpers, many of them recent graduates of Pacific University, cultivate more than 200 varieties of certified-organic herbs and vegetables on the nine flat acres of Gales Meadow Farm. Many crops at Gales Meadow are heirloom varieties not found in the industrial farm zones that have given way to endless high-yield monocultures.  Each plant variety has a history, dating back to its origins in the traditional farming communities of Europe, North America, or elsewhere.  Every carefully cultivated strain represents a reservoir of genetic diversity – a diversity that’s become all the more important to bolster our agriculture’s resilience in a world where modern high-yield crops may turn suddenly vulnerable to changing climates.

Today, Berblinger cites global warming and the dangers of fossil fuel dependence as a major reason to reduce the scale of agriculture.  Small-scale farms cultivating a diversity of traditional plant varieties are not only more resilient to climate destabilization, but have the potential to replace industrial agriculture operations – today among the leading contributors of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  The fertile farmland of Oregon’s western Washington County, where Gales Meadow Farm is located, is home to both types of operations.  And the monotonous stretches of monoculture fields, propped up by heavy inputs of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, could hardly be more different from sustainable, organic operations like Gales Meadow.  In addition to vegetable fields, greenhouses, and a large chicken pen, Berblinger’s property also supports a forested hillside and a stretch of riparian zone where cottonwood trees thrive beside the waters of Gales Creek.  According to one rough estimate, Berblinger reports, the farm is actually carbon negative, with its trees and other vegetation absorbing more carbon from the air than is produced by machinery and other sources of emissions.

Asked if government policies need to be reformed to smooth a transition to sustainable farming, Berblinger replies, “Absolutely.”  Like renewable electricity start-ups attempting to compete with coal and gas providers, sustainable farms face an uneven playing field.  Just as the US government has handed out subsidy after subsidy to make electricity from coal appear cheap, so industrial agriculture has benefited time and time again from policies favoring energy intensive, oil dependant, large-scale agriculture.  If the world’s international powers are serious about addressing the threat of global warming, they cannot afford to ignore the contribution of Big Agribusiness.  Re-scaling agriculture to feed a growing population with sustainable food will mean eliminating unfair subsidies, and doing away with international trade pacts that favor giant corporations over small home businesses like the Berblingers’.  Were the barriers to localized farming removed, Berblinger believes that many more young people would flock to a way of life that carries with it a certain self-sufficiency and the ability to contribute to a community’s needs.

Walking the rows of heirloom peppers in the Gales Meadow front garden, or watching a red-tailed hawk circle above the forested ridge behind the farm, it becomes momentarily difficult to remember that like small, sustainable farms across North America, this place is the scene of a frontline battle against the forces of corporate globalisation and industrial climate insanity.  Yet the truth is, Gales Meadow is even more directly impacted by government policies favoring the fossil fuel industries than are most small farming operations.  If giant energy companies get their way, Gales Meadow could be sacrificed through eminent domain to the right-of-way for a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) pipeline, proposed by Oregon LNG to shunt imported gas through Oregon to the California market.  This fossil fuel infrastructure development project threatens to destroy years of hard work at Gales Meadow, making it impossible for the Berblingers’ home business to survive.  Right now Oregon LNG and other LNG developers are seeking eminent domain status for their projects, which would allow them to lay pipelines through landowners’ property without receiving permission from the landowner first.

Perhaps there is no more apt symbol of the current political system’s skewed priorities than a pipeline built directly through some of the Northwest’s most fertile farmland, to deliver a foreign fossil fuel to an increasingly globalised gas market.  Yet beside the rows of giant yellow, green, and red peppers at Gales Meadow, it’s impossible not to feel a certain faith in the future – the same faith that the traditional farmers who cultivated so many plants now grown on Berblinger’s property must have felt as they passed on the seeds of their crop to the next generation.

In attempting to follow the complex ins and outs of the international climate negotiations in the lead-up to Copenhagen, and the intricacies of the Kerry-Boxer climate bill’s slow progress through the US Senate, it’s easy to get bogged down in a feeling that such high-profile discussions sometimes devolve into mere political bickering.  However for communities which are already making ready to deal with the impacts of a changing climate, and for which struggles against the globalised fossil-industrial complex are a daily fight, there can be no compromise on sealing a global deal that works for the planet.  With the Copenhagen climate talks less than a month away, the peaceful scenery of Gales Meadow Farm is a poignant reminder of what we stand to lose with a failed global treaty – and of what we can gain with a return to local, climate-sane policies for all.