The Market Is Open

ALFN Members,

The market is open! We are entering the ides of March full of surprises and delights. Keep an eye out for perennial crops to emerge out of the ground whether they be asparagus spears or labrynthine morels on the forest floor.

Updates/News

We are excited to announce that ALFN won a $1000 grant from the Super Service Challenge which supports volunteer-based initiatives. Thanks to your votes, we were able to receive this money…wahoo!

Reflection

The world of cost benefit analysis attempts to count all objects, creatures and possibilities into quantifiable units. When a capitalist, market-driven culture meets the natural world, it reduces all ecological relationships and individuals to discrete units…numbers. Our whole system of money is based on the assumption everything can be counted. A market culture believes everything from the sand on the seashore, to the fish in the sea, to the minerals in the ground, to the cabbage above the ground can be counted. From the counting, markets assess value. On a counting scale, we assign worth. Our labor is counted and assigned value based upon how many units are counted. For the capitalist country, even the worth of citizens is assigned worth based upon quantifiable units called currency.

But all this counting raises a simple question. Can everything be counted? Are some aspects of Earth uncountable? Unfathomable? What happens to the aspects of earth we can’t count? Do they just disappear under the bulldozer’s blade of market interest? Consider the pressure put on managers of the land…farmers who are in relationship to the land? The market squeezes interest and attention only into objects that can be counted and valued. The wetland is drained so we can count more lettuce heads. But there is a deep in the wetland and a deep in the sky that we cannot count. From the complexity of land and sky, life is supported. The unfathomable places of our landscape are where the gifts of life emerge. Human-made markets may not be able to quantify weeds, butterflies and frogs, but these are natural individuals that help weave a tapestry of life onto our planet. Our counting civilization has wrecked havoc on what cannot be counted with green numbers.

When we exchange green numbers for produce, we aren’t identifying the true worth of kale, carrots or cabbage. The money merely counts an exchange made for a much deeper gift we truly cannot count. Our economics are built on a deeper mystery we cannot fathom, nor quantify.

“To sum up: a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning.” (Leopold in The Land Ethic)

Have a great week,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager