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acres, enough to feed the entire country without cholera and tuberculosis, right? They absolutely think we’re just a bunch
any farms or ranches. What do you mean, bio- of Neanderthals, wanting to turn the clock back on technological evolution
logical farming can’t feed the world? We’ve got and everything modern. Here again, the scene is set for this attitude in the
plenty of land, plenty of ability to do just that. early 1900s. If you could go back and pick up all of the leading metropolitan
What we need to do is attach chicken houses newspapers in the land, you would find a recurring theme in every editorial
to every kitchen. Every kitchen should have an page, from about 1908 to 1912, namely that cities in America were going
attached number of chickens to eat the kitchen to be consumed and implode under a mountain of horse manure because
scraps and keep them out of the landfill, and pro- the country was urbanizing way faster than the infrastructure in cities
vide us with fresh eggs. If you can keep parakeets could handle it. Remember we were still using gas lights in most places
in your condominium, throw out the parakeets, because electrification hadn’t arrived yet, we were just beginning to get
they’re just nasty noise makers, and put in two plumbing, were just starting to clean up our water with sewage systems,
chickens. we were just starting to replace the polluting horse with the car. The point
There’s a new book coming out called Amer- is that the tip of innovation at that time was urbanization, yet we did not
ican Wasteland and it documents how America have refrigerators or sewers, and people were still taking one bath a winter.
wastes 50 percent of all its human edible food. We did not have electric lights to see whether the floor was dirty, and you
A lot of that waste happens through spoilage and had to take the bed outside to look for bed bugs. We only washed utensils
long distance transportation. When the tomatoes in surgeries between arm amputations.
come across fifteen hundred miles of jiggling, It’s important to understand the context. Urbanization was crowding
they get mushy unless you genetically breed them people into the cities and vacating the countryside before farmers had
into cardboard so they don’t bruise. So spoilage electric fences, canvas covers, concrete, pharmaceuticals, sanitizer soap,
from warehousing, storage and transport is a big stainless steel, refrigeration or electrification. Farmers were beginning to
source of waste. So don’t be shy about defending industrialize their farms, people were beginning to crowd into the cities,
the fact that small-scale, local, pasture-based and the combination of the two without the metabolic leveraging of these
agriculture can feed the world. new technological innovations created rapid infectious diseases both in
people and on farms due to the overcrowding and industrialization of each
TWO: YOU REJECT TECHNOLOGY before the infrastructure was able to metabolize the new dynamics.
The next big political argument: You want There’s a lag between innovation and metabolization—in business
us to go back to loin cloths, wash boards, hog it’s called the “slinky effect.” Today we have a host of things that didn’t

WISE TRADITIONS 2010 KEyNOTE ADDRESS By JOEL SALATIN

Joel amazes and inspires as a speaker and
then signs his many books for an enthusiastic audience.

WINTER 2010 Wise Traditions 19

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