[SustainableTompkins] The Once & Future Republic of VT

[northsheep at juno.com]

As sustainability/relocalization movements across the country become
increasingly aware of the obstacles to their goals that national  power
structures present, I believe they will of necessity become more
secessionist. Vermont is only a front runner in what is likely to become
a trend. 

The poet laureate of sustainable agriculture, Wendell Berry, in The
Unsettling of America, said that we live in a colonial economy where
hinterlands are subject in many ways to the goals and exploitation of
elites in centers of power. Centers controlling peripheries for their own
self interest. At all levels of scale - from county to international
empire. In Cortland County where I farm, the local real estate cabal, in
cahoots with the county Chamber of Commerce and the county dept of
development has constituted a local center of power whose historical
pattern of decision making defies any vision of county sustainability.
Wendell said that the colonial economy is in evidence all over the world.
  

I foresee that the issue of degree of secession will require wrenching
decisions and much struggle, since our local quality of life is currently
so entangled with larger structures of the national political economy.
But as our ties to those larger structures reveal themselves as chains
increasingly detrimental to the construction of sustainable futures for
local communities, I believe we shall have to break many of these chains,
making new rules as we go, to assert independence. I discuss this
question in regard to the development of a local food system in
Successful Strategies for Food System Change: New Rules or Market
Populism, available at
http://www.geocities.com/northsheep/foodchange.html

Karl North
Northland Sheep Dairy, Freetown, New York USA
     www.geocities.com/northsheep/
"Mother Nature never farms without animals" - Albert Howard
"Pueblo que canta no morira" - Cuban saying

On Mon, 2 Apr 2007 11:38:57 -0400 "Tony Del Plato"
<tonydelplato at gmail.com> writes:
> Friends, Ithacans & Countrymen & women, lend me your minds:
> Does the following story suggest a direction for Americans to 
> consider along
> the road to a sustainable society?
> Tony Del Plato
> 
> 
> 
>   <http://www.washingtonpost.com/?referrer=emailarticle>
>
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/emailafriend?contentId=AR200703
3002076&sent=no&referrer=emailarticle>
>  **
> The Once and Future Republic of Vermont
>
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/30/AR200703
3002076.html?referrer=emailarticle>
> *By Ian Baldwin and Frank Bryan*
> The winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State.
>    
>
<http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/wpni.email/emailafriend;ad=bb;kw=emailafr
iend;ord=1175511896508?>
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> 
> 
> -- 
> And the time came when the risk
> to remain tight in a bud
> was more painful than the risk
> it took to blossom- Anais Nin
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