Scale of change

By Fester

My wife is the gardener in the family.  She actually can intentionally keep plants alive and healthy until she wants to harvest a fruit.  For me, it is pure luck that the beans can last the summer.  This year we are growing a number of different strains and varieties; heirloom, roma and plum tomatos, strawberries, jam raspberries, concord grapes, sweet onions, green beans, sugar snap peas, green and orange bell peppers, jalapeno peppers and the herbs rosemary, thyme, basil and cilantro.  We'll get plenty of desert toppings, breakfast hash components and random snacks.  Excluding the hot peppers and herbs, we'll displace almost none of our normal grocery bills with our gardening efforts. 

Common Dreams (via Kat,) notes that gardening and other simple acts of personal action are insufficient to affect systemic change or localized indepedence or resiliency. 

That theoretical 5 million acres of potential home cropland compares
with about 7 million acres of America�s commercial cropland currently
in vegetables, fruits, and nuts, and 350 to 400 million acres of total
farmland....

A nationwide grow-your-own wave would send good vibes through
society, ripples that could be greatly amplified by community and
apartment-block gardening. But front- and backyard food, even if
everyone grew it, would not cover the country�s produce needs, .....

Essential for providing vitamins, minerals, and other compounds, a
highly varied diet is important, and home gardens around the world help
provide such a diet. But with a world population now approaching seven
billion people and most good cropland already in use, only rice, wheat,
corn, beans, and other grain crops are productive and durable enough to
provide the dietary foundation of calories and protein.

Grains made up about the same portion of the ancient Greek diet as
they do of ours. We�ve been stuck with grains for 10,000 years, and our
dependence won�t be broken any time soon.

Localized, and personal efforts are rewarding and enjoyable but they are insufficient to produce significant societal change in the food consumption patterns of a society.  Instead, deliberate changing of incentives at a higher level than making some excellent fresh raspberry jam is needed.  Moving subsidies away from animal feed crops and towards either increased fruits and vegetable production or more likely towards higher quality grain crops would be one of the simplest and most profound changes in producing significant decreases in market prices for basic food necessities.  It would also significantly expand the scope of affluence for more of the world while increasing the cost of beef, pork and other meats.  Enacting a half a cent per gram of fat tax as an anti-obesity effort would also have profound effects on the American food supply.  Both of these changes are small, technocratic solutions that will have larger spillover effects than any gardener.   

This same logic applies to numerous other problems including the energy pricing problems.  Personal efforts such as shifting to more efficient automobiles and taking fewer trips for fewer miles will create some demand destruction but currently any gallon not burned in Pittsburgh will be happily burned in Shanghai or Mumbai.  These efforts currently provide personal benefits but few systemic benefits.  Changes in the basic equation and incentive structure that currently makes burning fuel the preferable trade-off for many activities will need to be changed.  Some of the shorter-run changes include increasing CAFE standards and providing short term operational funding boosts to mass transit agencies while longer term changes will include improving urban and inner ring suburban public schools so that the educational arbitage that drives so much surbanization is limited while also encouraging through changing building codes the development of much higher density neighborhoods with mixed use and mixed audience construction. 

Personal responsibility is necessary but it is not sufficient unless it is used as a rallying point to move towards systemic change.