For me, though, Irene has only really hit home in the last few days. As the storm approached, I was far enough inland here in Western New York to have little to worry about besides the possibility that a bit of rain from it might drift my way and ruin my plans for going to the beach. When I heard on Monday that Irene had flooded parts of eastern Upstate New York and Vermont, my thoughts immediately went to my NOFA acquaintances. There were plenty of other things on my mind, like preparing for the Locavore Challenge, and I moved onto other things.
Then NOFA-NY's weekly e-newsletter arrived in my email inbox on Wednesday. Most of the newsletter focused on the farms affected by Irene and what to do if your farm was amongst the ones flooded. It warned not to feed crops touched by the floodwaters to livestock, let alone sell such crops to customers, due to bacterial contamination. It also suggested getting wells inundated with floodwaters tested for not only substances that would make the water unfit to drink, but also for any chemicals that could affect the organic status of crops watered from the well.
At that point, Irene became real for me. Though I still feel like a newbie to the world of organic farming and NOFA, I've been to NOFA-NY's winter conference four times now. I now recognize many of my fellow attendees. Some of them I know by name, like Elizabeth Henderson (whose book Sharing The Harvest helped launch the CSA movement in the U.S.) and Karma Glos (whose book on organic poultry care, Humane and Healthy Poultry Production, cannot be beat), while many, many others I simply know by sight.
A lot of the participants and presenters come at the winter conference come from areas hard-hit by Irene. As I think back to the beautiful pictures of lovingly tended farms I've seen in many PowerPoint presentations in the conference's workshops, my heart breaks to think of these some fields ravaged by floods. I can't imagine the task facing my fellow NOFA members as they beginning cleaning up from the hurricane and trying to figure out how -- or even if -- they can rebuild their farms after the damage they sustained from Irene.
Governor Cuomo says there was about $45 billion in damage to farms in New York State alone. In an era of budget deficits at the federal level of government in the trillions of dollars, mere tens of millions may not sound like much. To a largely rural region with lots of small farmers, $45 billion is a lot of money, though.
What really makes me upset is the way this storm has been treated. There's been so much coverage about how popular, populous places like New York City and the beach towns of North Carolina dodged a bullet with Irene. Yes, these places really did. The environmental blog Grist had an excellent article about how if the Irene-influenced high tide in New York City had been a mere inch higher, which could have happened if the storm had arrived at a different time of day or if it had been a bit stronger, it would have caused flooding within the subway system.
However, why isn't there more coverage of eastern Upstate New York and Vermont? Why the heck is Obama visiting New Jersey to see Irene's damage when the worst of it is elsewhere? Upstate New York and Vermont are places that aren't used to dealing with the threat of hurricanes, yet they didn't dodge the bullet and were hard-hit with Irene.
What coverage there is often fails to convey the severity of the situation. There was a pathetic report on NPR a few days ago talking about kids having to walk a full half mile to get a ride in other parents' mini-vans to the bus stop because of roads washed out by Irene in Vermont. Within the past century, many children in rural America had to walk much further than that to get to school. Today, many children across the developing world walk much further than a half mile to get to school, while there other other children who live completely out of walking distance of a school and thus get no education. However, NPR sees fit to try to make its listeners feel sympathy for children who have to walk half a mile until the roads are repaired to get a ride in a cushy mini-van to the bus stop. Heck, with the number of Americans who get little to no exercise today, many of the children in the story probably need to walk that half mile for their health!
To me, the NPR story about the children walking part of the way to school in Vermont because of Hurricane Irene is emblematic of the self-centeredness of the middle and upper classes in the country. The fact that nobody at NPR could step back and see how the story would sound from the perspective of a farmer in New York or Vermont who lost most or all of their crop because of Irene, let alone the children who really struggle to get to school across the world, is an extreme example of this self-centeredness.
Perhaps it's a sign of my own middle-to-upper class self-centeredness, but I wonder about how Irene will impact Locavore Challenge participants and others interested in New York State. As Grist says
Hurwitz [the director of a group that runs many New York City's farmers markets] estimated that 80 percent of NYC farmers market participants experienced damage, and, for as many as a third of those, the damage was exceptional.Thus, it would seem that people in eastern Upstate and NYC will have choices in food and higher prices. I even wonder if it might have an affect further west, as farm goods flood east towards higher prices to fill any gaps left in local food choices by Irene.
Even before the storm, a lot of things produced more to the west made their way to New York City. For example, part of the reason that Farmers and Artisans currently doesn't have Flour City Pasta (which is produced about an hour and a half east of Buffalo) is that Flour City apparently sells their products at a lot of NYC farmers' markets (which are over five and a half hours southeast of Rochester).
In sum, I wish Irene hadn't been bad for farmers in New York in Vermont. I wish the media had paid more attention to those who'd really suffered in Irene. I wish that Locavore Challenge participants in the affected region find success despite Irene. Most of all, though, I wish all the best to those who have suffered real losses because of Irene, whether the damage is to a home, farm, or other business.
No comments:
Post a Comment