Anthony Flaccavento - Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real-World Experience for Transformative Change

Building a Healthy Economy
from the Bottom Up

Harnessing Real-World Experience
for Transformative Change

ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO

FOREWORD BY BILL MCKIBBEN

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Copyright 2016 by The University Press of Kentucky

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Flaccavento, Anthony, author.

Title: Building a healthy economy from the bottom up : harnessing real-world experience for transformative change / Anthony Flaccavento ; foreword by Bill McKibben, University Press of Kentucky.

Description: Lexington, Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky, [2016] | Series: Culture of the land | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000230| ISBN 9780813167343 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813167596 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813167367 (pdf) |

ISBN 9780813167350 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Community developmentUnited States. | Sustainable livingUnited States. | Sustainable developmentUnited States. | United StatesEconomic conditions--2009

Classification: LCC HN90.C6 F574 2016 | DDC 307.1/40973dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000230

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

To Laurie, Josh, Maria, and Alex. Thanks for hanging in there with me through all of our experiences of trying to live a somewhat better, healthier life together; for tolerating my periodic rants and despair about the world; and for the illuminating discussions and exchanges weve had over many years. This book is dedicated to each of you, and to the memory of Kayla Jean Mueller.

There is more than enough to be depressed about on our planetif you gave me an hour, Id still be listing bullet points when the clock ran out. Melting glaciers, acidifying ocean, rising inequality, increasing flow of refugees, declining soils, on and on and on. Its easy to make the case that were doomed. And even easier to make that case if you look at the responses coming from our governments. The problems they dont ignore they try to paper over. On climate change, theyre trying to spin physics and sweet-talk chemistry; instead of acting on inequality, theyre turning our elections over to billionaires.

But say you looked a little deepersay that, instead of taking the standard-issue journalists view from 30,000 feet, you got down on the ground and examined the much-talked-about grass roots. Thats what Anthony Flaccavento has done, and hes emerged with a real story to tell, one that offers realistic hope even in a difficult moment.

Fifteen years or so agoin no small part because of Flaccaventos work along the Appalachian spinethe local food movement began surging in our country. All across America, all of a sudden, local farmers markets were the fastest-growing part of the food economy. This had good environmental consequences (the 10-mile tomato beats the continent-crosser any day), and it definitely made for tastier meals. But maybe the most important part of the equation was how it changed communities. The average shopper at a farmers market had ten times more conversations than the average shopper at a supermarket. Thats how communities start to rebuildhow they start to emerge from the withering emphasis on a kind of hyperindividuality that had managed to become Americas curse.

Because once people start talking to each other, the ideas begin to flow. Its clear now that we need a farmers market for more than carrots. We needand are beginning to geta farmers market in electrons (thats what it means when people by the millions put solar panels on their roof and turn a one-way power connection into a two-way true grid). We need a farmers market in capitalthats what happens when local banking begins to reemerge from the monopoly of the money-center banks that crashed our economy. The farmers market in ideas that we call the Internet is already thriving.

Its a moment for connections, and it strikes me that thats what these wonderful stories that Flaccavento is telling have in common. Theres every reason to despair (and every reason to keep engaged in the global fight against the plutocrats), but theres also reason enough to hope that some alternative exists. Once youve read these stories, you wont be able to say our future is inevitableand once you understand that change is possible, you have no choice but to go to work!

Bill McKibben

When we tune out politics, when we abandon hope, we arent being cool or hip or ironic or even realisticwe are being played.

Robert McChesney, Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century

If you stay in one place too long, you know youll root.

Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

History has a way of surprising us, especially in times when serious change seems impossible.

Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?

When I first met Martin Miles in 1999, he had been raising tobacco for nearly forty years on his small farm in rural Lee County, Virginia. For generations, tobacco had been the reliable cash crop for small mountain farmers, but by then it was in steep decline. Many were thinking of quitting altogether, worn down by the relentless work of farming and discouraged by the steady decline in income. Bumper stickers proclaiming Tobacco Put My Kids through College were becoming less common. That sentiment had been replaced by the newly widespread belief that nothing can replace tobacco.

Martin was among that smaller group of farmers looking for alternatives. When he heard me pitch the idea of raising organic produce for sale to supermarkets, he was interested. So, too, was John Mullins, a younger man who lived just down the road from Martin. By the following summer, several acres of organic peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, and other crops were growing along Wallens Creek as Martin and John became leaders in a transition from raising tobacco to growing healthy fruits, vegetables, and other foods.