"Fight Terrorist Use Ethanol"
by Jenna Watson, Barcelona on 02.15.08
2008 Copyright Greg Gladman
An endlessly talented friend and photographer, Greg Gladman, was in Florida last month and took this photograph of an exuberant "activist" roaming the streets of the State-most-famous-for-navals. What do you think it means? Who is the singular “terrorist” that this dude is referring to? And what is up with all those flags?
Curiously, if you look really closely and zoom in on that truck (like we did) there is a Florida Farm to Fuel website and what looks like a State Department logo. Is that a Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services truck!? From what we can see it sure is. So much for keeping the church and state separate. What does "Remember me Jesus" have to do with fighting terrorists and ethanol? This will hopefully provide you with a little pick-me-up giggle to help you past the post Valentine’s Day blues. See more of Greg’s photos on his website here.
He may be a little barking but in effect it would appear to be a relatively accurate reflection of Bush’s energy policy, and foreign policy- articulated with just about the right level of sophistication as the President himself uses.
With 20% of US maize(corn) production now being turned into ethanol, and an increasingly heavy reliance on Herbicide Tolerant Genetically Modified maize the agribusiness is a perfect encapsulation of the development of the industrial food chain, and domestic macro economic policy of the past few years. Big Farmers working closely with the biotech industry to turn the land into a chemically powered production plant. The recent ‘Who benefits from Genetically Modified crops Report 2008 from Friends of the Earth points out that this unholy alliance is actually leading to more use of pesticides and herbicides (see http://www.naturalchoices.co.uk/Genetically-Modified-Report-2008?id_mot=7) at the cost of rural labour.
There is a painful irony that there appears to be two roads being followed in agriculture, on one side you have the small, but rapidaly developing, move towards organic with the emphasis on soil quality, small scale production and labour intense production, and on the other the much larger and economically and politically continuing development of industrial scale production of GM soy, maize and cotton, with the use of bio-fuels as a thin ‘sustainable’ cover.
Bio-fuels can be a sustainable element in an alternative energy economy, and though they are getting a bashing at the moment it is important to draw a line between sustainable bio-fuels and agribusiness bio-fuels. One seeks to incorporate bio-fuels as small part of a diffused energy system and the other as huge component in an domestic energy security industry.
As a Floridian myself I have to say that I'm just happy it doesn't say "Fight Terrist". *sigh* Thanks for the pick-me-up!