When it comes to local economies and local agriculture, Gary Nabhan says all people have to do is get back to the root of the matter, their own roots.
It's astonishing, he says, how few people in the United States eat food from near to where they live. If they did, local economies would benefit, and people would probably eat better.
And Nabhan should know. As director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, he heads up a program aimed at bolstering the local economy by encouraging the sale and consumption of locally-grown food.
Nabhan gave a lecture Friday, Oct. 6, at the Liberty Theatre in Hailey. His visit was sponsored by the Lava Lake Foundation for Science and Conservation. The foundation is a sibling to Carey-based Lava Lake Land and Livestock, which raises sheep in the Pioneer Mountains and on the northern Snake River Plain. Some of the sheep are, needless to say, sold locally.
Unfortunately, according to Nabhan, the norm in this day and age is that agriculture operates much the same as big box stores.
"A lot is wrong with this picture," he said. "We call these the working landscapes, the farms and ranchlands of the West. But they don't work right now for us the way they should."
The real underlying issue is looking for a working definition of what a working landscape actually is. In a bygone era, people in local markets consumed local produce and livestock. Producers, distributors, restaurants and consumers all benefited. The money, "sticky money," stayed in the local economy.
"Somehow that flow has been disrupted and undervalued," Nabhan said. "Somehow, they are disconnected from the consumers. That means some of the best food produced in the West is not consumed in the very landscapes in which it is produced.
"The land itself is undervalued. The quality of the food is undervalued. So they're working landscapes that tend to have their working relationships with their communities broken."
In northern Arizona, Nabhan has embarked on an effort to quantify the extent to which local food production and sales contributes to the local economy.
He said in Arizona, the Southwest and elsewhere, many conventional economic development officials still ignore the contributions such efforts make to the overall wealth and health at the community level.
"Perhaps the reason for this is that the annual growth in food sales for a corporation such as Wal-Mart is easier to measure than the diffuse growth of the local foods movement," he pondered.
In 2001, annual purchases of locally and regionally produced foods were less than $20,000 in Flagstaff and $85,000 in the northern Arizona region immediately surrounding Flagstaff. In response to "buy local" initiatives, by the end of 2005, Flagstaff's local food purchases had reached $250,000 in the region served by the Northern Arizona Food and Agriculture Council, while purchases were approaching $500,000 per year.
"The generation of wealth and well-being by local and regional food initiatives is quantifiable, and may in fact directly benefit more members of a rural community than the income generated by a big box store," Nabhan said.
Gary Nabhan
