Program Description

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

Using eight familiar objects as guides, Freinkel takes audiences on an eye-opening multimedia journey tracing the rise of plastic and touching on some of its more lasting impacts on the economy, culture, health, and the environment. Focusing on some of the interlocking themes explored in the book — the rise of throwaway culture and its environmental impacts; the new kinds of health risks posed by synthetic chemicals used in plastics, and the politics of regulating them — Freinkel explores both the benefits and problems stemming from our tight embrace of synthetics.

Moreover, Freinkel addresses the problem of plastic waste and pollution and the challenges of dealing with plastics at the end of their useful lives.  And, in doing so, she poses and attempts to answer some of the tougher questions to grow out of this discussion: Is recycling the answer?  Could bioplastics be the materials of the future, and do their benefits outweigh the risks?

Whether or not we as a species can come to grips with our reliance on, and addiction to plastic is a question that will play itself out over the decades to come, but Freinkel’s talk can help audiences better understand our role in perpetuating plastic’s ubiquity, and by the same token, give us the tools to attempt to create a more enlightened consumer future.

The American Chestnut: A Parable of Our Time

In her award-winning book American Chestnut: The Life Death And Rebirth Of A Perfect Tree, Freinkel details one of the worst ecological disasters to ever hit North America: the near extermination of one of the country’s most important forest trees.

Her lecture, based on the book, draws fascinating parallels between this early almost-catastrophe and the ecological problems of invasive species and loss of biodiversity afflicting American landscapes today.  Freinkel tells the story of the chestnuts’ near demise and the decades-long effort of various scientists and amateur botanists to save and restore this beloved tree.  Once one of the most plentiful trees in East Coast forests – source of sustenance for all living beings in its range, from hares to hogs to human and a cultural icon for mountain folk of southern Appalachia — the chestnut was driven to near-extinction by a virulent newly-arrived pathogen

Freinkel discusses the notion that while the natural world is constantly evolving and seeking it’s own equilibrium, we must be more vigilant stewards of our own environment.  If we don’t act responsibly, then we run the risk of setting events in motion that can’t easily be undone.

Bio

A science writer whose work has appeared in a variety of national publications including: Discover, Reader’s Digest, Smithsonian, The New York Times, OnEarth, Health, and Real Simple, Freinkel was awarded an Alicia Patterson Fellowship in 2005, which allowed her to conduct much of the research for American Chestnut. The book won a 2008 National Outdoor Book Award.

A graduate of Wesleyan University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freinkel began her career as a reporter at the Wichita Eagle-Beacon in Wichita, Kansas.  Her interests run wide. She has covered subjects ranging from adoption to weight control, coyote hunts to mad cow disease, new psychiatric treatments to the quest to develop a blue rose — not to mention trees and plastic.

Hewitt tells the inspiring story of Hardwick, Vermont, the town at the center of his book, and explains how other communities can learn and benefit from Hardwick’s unique food system model. He discusses the key components – both tangible and intangible – necessary to build local food systems and addresses the very real challenges this work entails.

As the global economy continues to limp toward a future that can sometimes seem bleak and dispiriting, Hewitt delivers a message that is at once sobering and profoundly inspirational. We can heal our communities and the citizens within them; we have the power to put them on a path toward long-term health and stability. We know we need to change course. Ben Hewitt shows us how.

Program Descriptions

Growing a Local Food System

What do we talk about when we talk about local food? Hewitt’s nuanced and inclusive accounting of what makes a healthy food system is essential information for anyone interested in fomenting local agriculture, whether it’s at the level of an individual business, a non-profit, or a community alliance. He discusses the “local food as economic driver” model, as well as the “local food as local nourishment” model and how they can work in conjunction to create truly sustainable enterprise.

Re-imaging Prosperity

Recent events have exposed the tremendous vulnerability of the growth-as-prosperity model. Hewitt explains how we can (and why we must) move toward a more durable form of prosperity that is not dependent on credit and supplies from afar. The traditional metrics for prosperity are failing us; Hewitt discusses what metrics we should be using to gauge the long-term health of our communities.

Marketing Local

For too long, local food has carried elitist connotations. It’s perceived as expensive, inaccessible, and liberal. Hewitt discusses how we can change the framework of the discussion to be more inclusive of all political and socioeconomic groups and he talks about the “360-degree” issues that can unite people from across the spectrum.

Bio

Ben Hewitt, author of the acclaimed The Town That Food Saved, writes and farms in Northern Vermont. His work has appeared in numerous national periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Gourmet, Discover, Eating Well, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and many others. Ben’s next book, Making Supper Safe, will be published by Rodale in 2011.

Ben lives with his wife and two sons in a self-built home that is powered by a windmill and solar photovoltaic panels. To help offset his renewable energy footprint, Ben drives a really big truck.

Program Description

Back to the Future of Agriculture:
Steps Toward a Robust Food-Economy and a Sustainable Society

In his lectures, Philpott addresses the core economic, political and agricultural issues affecting the current state of food quality, availability and safety in America and throughout the world.  He also makes the case for sustainable methods of farming, processing and manufacturing by drawing on his own experience at Maverick Farms, and presenting examples of individuals, communities and governments who have demonstrated that sustainability can ultimately lead to healthy, cost-effective and profitable solutions.

Philpott details the major environmental and economic effects of industrial agriculture — its destruction of soil, its mammoth effect on climate change, and the way it creates dead zones in coastal ocean areas across the globe. In all of these examples, the way we grow food now threatens our capacity to grow food in the future.  The whole system depends on farmers being able to crank out huge amounts of crops that can be transformed into livestock feed to create cheap meat; into sweeteners for cheap sodas; and into additives for all the convenience fare we find at the supermarket and in the fast-food chains. In this system, farmers don’t grow food for people to eat, they grow industrial inputs that corporations transform into food.

He also argues that by eating and drinking, we literally embody the land by ingesting what grows from it. Since this relationship is so intimate, it isn’t surprising that the health of landscapes and the health of people are directly linked — landscapes such as the vast fields devoted to one crop, dependent on artificial fertilizers and a variety of poisons. Almost completely depopulated and devoid of diversity — indeed, at the whim of entire industries that exist to eradicate their biodiversity — these brutalized landscapes, it can be argued, are brutalizing our bodies in turn.  Healthy, beautiful agricultural landscapes tend to engender healthy, beautiful people. Unhealthy, ugly agricultural landscapes, by contrast, tend to create disease and dysfunction.

So, if food, our daily, inevitable link to the land, can be used to extract wealth from communities and enfeeble bodies – which our giant food-processing and agribusiness companies have certainly demonstrated – can’t it also be used to build wealth and health within communities?

Philpott answers this question and tackles many of the other crises and dilemmas we currently face. The challenge, as he sees it, is to move away from a food-production system designed to deliver minimal nutrition, as cheaply as possible, to a vast low-wage workforce, and to move toward a future where we’re all invested in contributing positively to both the physical and economic health of our country and the rest of the world.

Bio

Before moving to the farm in 2004, Philpott worked as a financial journalist in Mexico City and New York City, most recently holding the title of equity research editor for Reuters, where he wrote daily dispatches on the stock market. His work on food politics has appeared in Gastronomica, The Guardian, Mother Earth News, New Farm, and Sojourners.  Philpott serves of the board of directors of the Boston-based Chef’s Collaborative, a nationwide group that seeks to push the restaurant business in more sustainable directions; and on the board of advisers at the Austin, Texas-based Sustainable Food Center.