The L and Report A publication of The Land Institute / Number 79 / Summer 2004 Contents India Looks West, Through Smog by Stan Cox ...................................................................... 3 Sending Our Idea to School ............................................ 7 Exporting Cheap Corn and Ruin by Michael Pollan .......................................................... 11 Our Broken Bond and Promise to Animals by Bernard E. Rollin ...................................................... 12 New Books .................................................................... 15 Plain Beautiful by Suzanne Winckler ...................................................... 16 Our Mission Statement At the Land .................................................................... 19 When people, land and community are as one, all Hiring for a Big Idea ..................................................... 21 three members prosper; when they relate not as members but as competing interests, all three are Prairie Festival ............................................................... 22 exploited. By consulting nature as the source and measure of that membership, The Land Institute Thank You to Our Contributors ..................................... 25 seeks to develop an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned while promoting a Memorials and Honorary Gifts ..................................... 26 community life at once prosperous and enduring. The Writers and Photographers ..................................... 28 Earth-centered Stan Rowe, 1918-2004 The Land Report is published three BOARD OF DIRECTORS: by Wes Jackson and Ted Mosquin .................................. 29 times a year. Strachan Donnelley, Terry Evans, Pete Ferrell, Editor: Scott Bontz Jan Flora, Charles Francis, Prairie Festival 2003 Audio Tapes ................................. 30 Associate editor and production: Dan Glickman, Wes Jackson, Elizabeth Granberg Eulah Laucks (Emeritus), Graphic design: Arrow Printing Mary Laucks, Conn Nugent, Direct Results ................................................................ 31 Arts associate: Terry Evans Victoria Ranney, John Simpson, Printed by Arrow Printing Co. Donald Worster, Angus Wright Friend of the Land Registration .................................... 31 STAFF : Ron Armstrong, Marty Bender, Scott Bontz, Stan Cox, Lee DeHaan, Jerry Glover, Elizabeth Granberg, Stephanie Hutchinson, Cover: Martin Stupich . Hay near Wes Jackson, Grant Mallett, Pass Creek, Carbon County, Steven Lancaster, Patty Melander, Joan Olsen, Bob Pinkall, Wyoming. Harris Rayl, Steve Renich, 2440 E. Water Well Rd. Tiffany Stucky, David Van Tassel, Above: Scott Bontz . Buffalo Ken Warren, Darlene Wolf Salina, KS 67401 gourd on the prairie. (785) 823-5376, phone (785) 823-8728, fax [email protected] www.landinstitute.org ISSN 1093-1171 The Land Report 2 India Looks West, Through Smog Stan Cox When I first breathed the dusty air of Hyderabad, India, Economist Doug Henwood estimates that outsourcing to it was 1980. Hyderabad, like India, was regarded as all countries is responsible for only one out of every 20 “underdeveloped.” But along with the dust, there was U.S. jobs that have gone missing since 2001. hope in the air. At the same time, new information technology jobs The Green Revolution was staving off famine, and it in Hyderabad are far too few to propel a significant por - would be more than a decade before thousands of farmers tion of the population into the middle class. To read the began committing suicide by drinking the pesticides that Western press, one might get the impression that most had bankrupted them. Smallpox was gone, and HIV had working people in India’s major cities are sitting all day not yet arrived. Millions had reliable, safe water supplies in air-conditioned offices tapping at keyboards. They are for the first time, thanks to the replacement of hand-dug more likely to be in hotter, grimier jobs, perhaps slap - wells with drilled wells, but aquifers weren’t yet being ping stucco on those new office buildings or manufac - sucked dry. More and more of Hyderabad’s rickshaw- turing those air conditioners. wallahs were sitting at the controls of auto-rickshaws The stimulus created by Hyderabad’s “weightless rather than pedaling, underfed, toward the grave, but the economy” extends far beyond the newly created, infor - city’s atmosphere had not yet turned deadly. mation-based industries. In tandem with the growth of In 1982 I returned to the United States and left an more mundane industries, it is working a superficial India seeking a way out of poverty without surrendering transformation on the city, while taking a heavy toll on its economic independence. By 1996, when I came to its 6 million inhabitants, their air, their water and their live in Hyderabad for another four years, Gandhian self- land — right down to the bedrock. reliance appeared to be crumbling, and representatives of U.S., Canadian and European companies were all That was then, this is then over town, dealing joint ventures and trying to make I returned to Hyderabad yet again in the winter of 2002- them stick. 03. Back in 1980, it had been a dust-brown and chloro - Not a part of that invasion force, I was in the city phyll-green city, but these days, the business districts are working for rupee wages. But as a fellow foreigner, I almost completely smog-and-concrete gray in the day - had plenty of chances to meet business people. On time and lighted like Vegas at night. The internal com - arrival in the city, they were pumped up with high- and bustion engine holds Hyderabad in its grip more tightly low-tech dreams. But most of them left, deflated, within than did the royal line of Nizams who ruled the city months. At farewell parties that cluttered the social cal - until the 1950s. endar, they would tell me, “You just can’t work with The cautious opening of India’s economy has liber - these people. They are unbelievably difficult.” I would ated enormous amounts of capital, both old and new. suggest, to little effect, that maybe they just weren’t Today, through the traffic, you can reach clothier, jew - ready to roll over, bow down, bend over backward or eler, appliance store, restaurant, coffee shop, pub or, of perform whatever gymnastics are required of govern - course, car dealership without leaving a circular main ment and business people in more “business-friendly” route that traverses the twin cities of Hyderabad and countries. Secunderabad. This central loop of new, black asphalt And sure enough, India’s stubbornness has begun to and still unblackened concrete is trimmed with green pay off — in a way. The excesses of a few corporate plants, sodium-vapor streetlights and billboards for cell giants like Coke have provoked ire from the Himalayas phones that are guaranteed to “change your life.” But a in the north to Kerala in the far south, but Western com - quick turn down any side street shows that, for most panies in the booming “information sector” are being people, living conditions haven’t changed significantly compelled to share the spoils of exploitation with their since 1996 or 1980. A trip across the river to the Muslim Indian counterparts. Old City of Hyderabad is a 20-year trip back in time, Hyderabad is one of the hubs of India’s “outsourc - except that the air is much worse. ing revolution,” with vast numbers of people working in If you leave the loop and avoid Hi-Tec City, home software development, call centers, medical transcrip - of Hyderabad’s weightless economy, on the city’s west - tion and other mind-over-matter industries. The out - ern fringe, the same old problems persist. Lack of access sourcing boom has caused something close to panic in to water is now an annual crisis. Last year, both major the United States, though the loss of white-collar jobs to reservoirs that supply the city with water had dried com - India is small relative to the U.S. work force size. pletely four months before the start of the monsoon in The Land Report 3 Stan Cox . Hyderabad two decades ago. Now imagine more cars, without U.S. pollution con - trols. The Land Report 4 June. The April-to-June summer sees fierce competition tossed out the ruling party at the national level. Both for electricity between televisions and air conditioners in upsets have been attributed to a widespread awareness Hyderabad and irrigation pumps in rice paddies far to among India’s poor that only the elites and parts of the the south and east. Meanwhile, sanitation systems are middle class have benefited from India’s economic groaning. Air quality, as quantified on scoreboards at boom. major intersections, is frighteningly bad. Last year, Naidu brought in a massive new polyvinyl chloride plant that was to have been built in the neigh - Technology, high and low boring state of Tamil Nadu. The Tamil Nadu Pollution Indians, even middle-class people, live in very close Control Board had banned the operation, citing the quarters with the ecological consequences of growth and deadly chemicals that are the inevitable inputs and out - consumption. But it’s the super-rich in both India and puts of PVC plastic production. Naidu was more than the United States who make the economic and political happy to step in and welcome the plant. But to win final decisions that set the courses of their societies, and they government approval over environmentalists’ objections, can afford to accumulate capital with single-minded the Indian company behind the project, Chemplast