This morning was crystal clear and bittersweet because several members of our trip became increasingly sick in the last couple days and can't come. Elizabeth, Paloma, and Peggy we miss you!
We met with writer and buffalo rancher Dan O'Brien at The Tavern restaurant in Northfield at 8 a.m., looking like college students generally look at 8 a.m. ... Dan was full of excitement because we're going to be tramping around his home country, the Black Hills of South Dakota. He recounted the story of Valentine Mcgillicuddy, Crazy Horse's Doctor who lived to be 100 and is buried on top of Harney peak that we'll be climbing. Dan gave us advice on a multitude of sites to visit in his homeland and spoke about his buffalo ranch at www.wildideabuffalo.com
After finishing our heaping plates of eggs, bacon, and life-saving coffee, we bid Dan a cheerful farewell after he came out and kicked the tires of our "outfit" (the Carleton minivan). Next we went to the Just Foods Co-op conference room in Northfield to meet Bruce Anderson, the coordinator of a citizens group called RENew Northfield. Bruce explained that RENew Northfield (www.renewnorthfield.org) evolved after he wrote an op/ed piece in the Northfield News about the possibility of Northfield becoming independent of outside energy sources. After the first public meeting received a large turnout, RENew decided to focus on promoting and building utility scale wind turbines. Bruce explained that large wind turbines are the most efficient and economical form of clean energy available today. RENew played an important role in the genesis and research of Carleton'swind turbine.
Minnesota has a 150+ year history of farmer cooperatives, and these groups of growers have recently begun investing in cooperative wind projects to diversify their income. Unfortunately the wind industry has been discouraged on the federal and state level because of shifting regulations and unreliability of the meager (compared to nuclear energy and fossil fuels) subsidies wind receives. However, wind power is looking better and better and Bruce estimated Carleton's ridge location could site 5-10 more industrial sized turbines.
Then we shifted to talking about the variety of cleaner and more efficient transportation options available today. The HourCar organization is a growing trend in US cities where HourCar owns a fleet of hybrid and fuel efficient cars that members can reserve on days that they want to drive and pay an hourly rate. For city dwellers or college students who only drive once in a while, this program has been a success. Car sharing and carpooling are an important in addition to increasing overall fuel efficiency. Biodiesel is diesel fuel that is made from soybean oil or waste grease and functions 98-100% as well as regular diesel. Bruce runs his VW diesel on biodiesel sold by the Cannon Valley Coop and gets 50 miles per gallon without purchasing a drop of foreign oil seven months of the year. Many farmers run their tractors on biodiesel. Hydrogen fuel cells probably won't replace our vast oil economy in the next forty years Bruce predicted, nor would it be wise to generate this hydrogen by building more nuclear and coal plants as government speeches have advocated.
We thanked Bruce for chatting with us on a Sunday and proceeded to get a tour of the Just Food Co-op (www.justfoods.coop) with Alex Beeby, their outreach coordinator. Alex taught us about how the structure of a "consumer cooperative" like Just Foods is different from a company like Proctor and Gamble. Both offer stock to owners, but cooperatives limit the amount of stock that one owner can have, and also pay rebates rather than dividends. The rebates are based on actual purchases of food at the Coop, so local consumers benefit more from membership. All member profit made by the coop is not taxed and the board of directors of the coop is elected by the membership.
Just Food prioritizes local and organic food which helps promote personal health and revitalize the rural economy of Minnesota in an age of industrial farming and globalized food supply. Alex explained that "the average consumer has no idea how many countries their hamburger at McDonalds is coming from." Just Food often compromises by buying chemically tainted food that is local, and organic food that is grown thousands of miles away. "If we carried only local products the whole middle of the store would be empty," he said.
The organic food industry has been growing by leaps and bounds and the local economic and personal health benefits are entering into the mainstream. "In the past organically produced has been seen as unicorns and puppy dogs" said Alex referring to misconceptions about the ecological and social disaster that modern agriculture has created for small farmers and for consumers who want to stay slim and healthy.
In times when the major organic food companies are being bought up by the industrial giants (General Mills owns Cascadians Farms and Phillip Morris owns Boca Burger) its not always easy to understand how the "foodshed" works.
Alex led us past dozens of local cheeses calling me like fat white sirens in a refrigerated ocean of delight. We grabbed a cart and began shopping for the next two weeks. Our bulging cart probably paid the clerk's weekly salary, but tonight's dinner was worth it. We kissed Northfield and finals goodbye and took our groggy troupe on the road to the great city of Minneapolis.
After checking out the exterior of the very closed and locked Green Institute (www.greeninstitute.org) which houses Peace Coffee's humble world headquarters and a squad of other ecological projects, we drove to the Seward Co-op on Franklin Street. If Just Foods were a PT boat, Seward would be an Aegis Destroyer (the aircraft carrier of co-ops, The Wedge, is located on Nicolett Ave.).
We were joined for lunch by Alyssa Erickson who is an organizer for the League of Pissed Off Voters, who despite their silly name, mean business (www.indyvoter.org). The League is a progressive young people's political group who work on building an anti-racist community and swinging local elections. They have heart and pack a punch. The league is a fusion of people from the hip hop movement, Hmong community, suburban kids, inner city kids, American Indians, Somalis and far more beautiful peoples than those I've already listed. The League worked furiously to produce a voter guide for the primaries and final election of last Fall. They used concensus to endorse a slate of progressive candidates and then hit the pavement to distribute over 40,000 copies of their masterpiece. The result? All of their school board candidates won, they were the deciding margin of victory for 3 state house races, and influenced judicial races. The League has hit the scene and their emblem of lady liberty with a baseball bat pretty much sums up how most young people feel about the world they'll be inheriting. Alyssa mentioned that our host on Pine Ridge, Nick Tilsen, has an article in the League's book "How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office". That makes him our third author who we'll meet this trip. In return for a ride back to her apartment, Alyssa loaned us the book and gave us directions that soon had us carpooling down 94W in a very obsolete feeling fossil fueled vehicle.
God it feels good to get off campus after finals! It was a gorgeous day, good music, and we paralleled freight train doing 67mph as the setting sun blazed off its empty coal cars.
When we passed the largest turkey statue in the world in Frazee, MN, I begged us to go back and touch it but the group's resolve to eat dinner won. After passing a herd of 20 deer in a field we arrived just south of White Earth Reservation at a gorgeous wooden house-trailor amalgamation full of authentic furniture and drying herbs. Koya and Tea Scrap greeted us with tails wagging enthusiastically, followed by our 3 young hosts who are working for the White Earth Land Recovery Project (www.welrp.org). Steph, Jen, and Sarah are all from different parts of the country and have come here to take part in. We cooked up a chunky pasta sauce and began learning about their battle against genetically modified wild rice which (if developed) could irrevocably contaminate and hybridize the natural rice that sustains budding companies like Native Harvest across Minnesota.
Everyone else as gone to bed, including the 2 exhasted animoosh (Anishnaabe word for animal).
