Local Food, More Hope

In the revolutionary spirit of Thomas Paine, author, historian, and gardener Kathleen Smythe declares in her pamphlet that the time has come for declaring independence from a global agricultural system that robs us of our food sovereignty and treats both consumers and farmers as mere colonial subjects; from the living Earth as inexhaustible rather than an exquisite complex of life that has slowly accumulated for millennia; and from human bodies as receptacles for whatever fossil fuel farming can produce most cheaply. Local food is our best hope in this declaration of inter-independence. 

Common Sense for Global Crises is a New Perennials Publishing pamphlet series in the radical and reasoned spirit of Thomas Paine. Authors come from a wide variety of backgrounds and walks of life—scholars and activists, scientists and artists, farmers and teachers, elders and youth—reflecting the belief that what we need to know now and in the days ahead will come from diverse and practical perspectives.

Contributors

Kathleen Smythe is a professor at Xavier University where she addresses questions of contemporary relevance through historical investigation. She prefers bodily-engaged learning as seen in her most recent book, Bicycling Through Paradise: Historical Rides Around Cincinnati (2021). She is trained as an African historian with years of fieldwork experience in Tanzania. Africa’s Past, Our Future highlights ideas and institutions in African history that broaden our social, political, and economic imagination. Whole Earth Living: Reconnecting Earth, History, Body and Mind proposes a new sustainability framework based on long-term human interdependencies with the Earth. 

Bill Vitek is Director of the New Perennials Project and New Perennials Publishing, and a Scholar in Residence at Middlebury College. Vitek taught  philosophy for 32 years at Clarkson University, always with the objective of helping students understand that the philosophical  imagination can, and must, do useful work in the world. Much of his work has engaged ecological issues, including collaborations with Wes Jackson and The Land Institute for over three decades. Vitek and Jackson  co-edited two books, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (1996) and The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2008).