Date: Sun, 1 Mar 2009 17:14:11 -0500
From: John Dykers, MD
Subject: urban distancing from food production
Your excellent description correspond to my representation of modern civilization as shaped like an umbrella mushroom, with very few of us still living at the small root connecting us to the earth. More of us live in the long stalk processing and transporting food and other natural resources to the majority of us humans who live on the large umbrella. Most of us on the top of the umbrella interact only with things human have created and with other humans, and all of us depend on the electrical grid. Concrete and airconditioning make us comfortable but isolate us from nature, and the occassional trip to a park only teases us.
My wife, Carol, describes it beautifully when she relates her days as a editorial page editor at the Charlotte Observer and an enthusiastic member of the Sierra Club and the entirely different perspective as she spent our honeymoon on the bush hog and helping me clean the barn and her experience now as a certified meat cutter preparing CharLean.
John Dykers