Wes Jackson

was.

And had a chance to present your 50-year farm bill with Wes Jackson, your friend, and Fred Kirshenman.

I'm kind of curious.

We've been hearing a different kind of sound out of Washington about food and agriculture.

And I would like to see if you could comment further on that and say something about the implications of it for us.

Well, I think I must have been thinking about how few people we've got to know our country well enough to love it.

And My conversation with Wes Jackson is involved very often, was involved to some extent in this poem.

But Wes talked about the necessity for a proper ratio of eyes to acres, by which he means enough people on the land to know it, see what it needs, and care for it.

So I wrote a book called Citizens of the Empire, How Americans Might Think About Their Moral Responsibility Living in the United States.

I've written more recently about ecological concerns after teaming up with a very well-known sustainable agriculture figure in the United States, a guy named Wes Jackson, who's now a good friend.

And Wes and I have worked on three or four books and a documentary film.

So as you can see, I don't stay focused in one place very long.

So I always reject when people call me cynical because cynical people don't do some of the things I do.

I don't get up in the morning looking, you know, to dump on everybody and to, you know, be cynical in that sense.

We're just struggling with, you know, basically we live in what my friend Wes Jackson says, we're a species out of context.

That for most of human history, for like 95% of our evolutionary history as a species, we We lived in small gathering and hunting band level societies.

And so I've had to rely on my friends to a great extent.

I still call my friend Wes Jackson on the telephone and say, can I say this? Or I call my brother sometimes about economic issues or political issues, and I say, can I say this? And they're fairly exacting critics.

My brother, I often think of my debt to my brother because he's a very intelligent man, and he has a way of letting you go so far and then saying, Hang on a minute.

And then introducing something into the process of thought that you hadn't anticipated and that you have to accommodate.

It also governed the work of J. Russell Smith in his book, Tree Crops, who said, we must fit the farming to the farm.

And all this is confirmed.

And that kind of thinking has been carried on and developed further, I think, by Wes Jackson and his colleagues at the Land Institute in Kansas.

and their principle of their work for to develop perennial grain crops and better accounting on the farm, energy accounting and so on, has been that farming in Kansas should imitate the nature and the processes of the native prairie.

Yes, I do.

I got that from a book reviewer who was reviewing books by Wes Jackson and me.

And the reviewer said that we were part of an effort of the periphery to speak to the center of power, that is.

I don't think that we're speaking to the centers of political power, but we may be beginning to speak to the centers of buying power, that is in the cities, the consumers.

And what I've seen since the end of an economy, if you pull an economy out from under communities, people aren't going to be grateful.

Wes Jackson puts it this way.

If you pull an economy out from under people and replace the economy with basketball courts and programs, people aren't grateful.

So what's happened is that economy was pulled out from under people and suddenly people who were good farmers and their children who were planning to farm suddenly couldn't.