The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 532

alternative food movement is necessary—or indeed even useful—in order to address
our environmental concerns. This is done by presenting the environmental visions of
two prominent American environmentalists—visions that are radically different from
that of the alternative food movement.
John Muir's Environmentalism
John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, has been described as “one of the patron saints
of twentieth century American environmental activity” (“John Muir” 2013). Indeed, he
can truly be regarded as one of the greatest environmentalists of the twentieth century.
Yet Muir's environmentalism was very different from that of today's alternative food
movement, and even hostile to it in some ways.
Muir's environmental vision was driven by the desire to preserve as much wilder-
ness area as possible. He grew up on a small family farm in Wisconsin, but at the age of
twenty-two he left the farm and headed to the University of Wisconsin, never to move
back. In spite of his firsthand experience on a farm, Muir did not view low-tech small-
scale agrarianism as environmental salvation. If anything, he viewed farms—whether
small or large, hi-tech or low-tech—as essentially destructive to the wilderness. Muir's
famous characterization of farm animals as “hoofed locusts” (“John Muir” 2013) is
indicative of his intense antipathy toward agricultural settlements.
The stark contrast between Muir's environmentalism and the environmentalism of
the alternative food movement can be seen in the very different way they view human
land use: one is primarily concerned about extent , the other about intensity . For Wendell
Berry, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, and others in the alternative food movement,
the primarily concern is about the intensity of human land use. Low-intensity land use
in agricultural settlements represents, for them, the environmental ideal. They see the
move from rural to urban—what Berry calls the “unsettling of America” as a human and
environmental disaster because it means a change from low-intensity to high-intensity
land use. For Muir, on the other hand, the primary concern was about the extent (i.e.,
the total area) of human land use. He wanted to preserve as much wilderness area as
possible, and thus he wanted to limit the extent of human land use. He was not par-
ticularly concerned about intensity. If anything, the logic of Muir's environmentalism
implies that increased intensity of human land use (such as increasing the per-acre out-
put of farmland) is actually good for the environment because it means that more people
can be supported per acre of nonwilderness land, thereby reducing the pressure to con-
vert pristine wilderness areas into human use.
Rachel Carson's Environmentalism
With the possible exception of John Muir, Rachel Carson was likely the most important
figure in twentieth-century American environmentalism. Carson's landmark 1962 book