I know I'm not alone in hoping that the future presidential administration will lead the country toward a new green economy, something like what Van Jones describes in The Green Collar Economy. Well, here's a glimmer of hope -- an interview with president-elect Barack Obama reveals he's well aware of the many layered agricultural, economic, energy, and healthcare issues we're facing. A poignant excerpt:
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan(Image: Annie Leibovitz)about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
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[Swampland (Time) via Permaculture & Regenerative Design News via Yellow Pages]
