Living the American Green

PhD applications are running my life these past few months, and another two to go – but a quick stop by LtAG to share two recent New York Times articles that corroborate my earlier musings on the importance of ramping up our venison consumption on the East Coast, especially when we can eat it instead of factory-produced meat with its astronomical carbon footprint and barbaric animal treatment standards. 

Christopher Walken is watching you not hunt for your own food.

One article is called “The Urban Deerslayer”, and deals with a Virginia man’s new entrepreneurial classes called Deer Hunting for Locavores – in which he teaches urban and suburban people committed to eating more responsibly how to hunt for their own food. The classes have been a huge success, as they play into the contemporary trend of being as close as possible to the food cycle that sustains us, while also having the feel-good element of helping to reduce some of the environmental pressure the deer are placing on Eastern forest ecosystems – not to mention combatting the unnerving trend that only about 22% of hunting today is for food.

The other article is an even better idea, in my opinion, than training trendy urbanites to be even more environmentally sensitive than they already are. This concerns a bill that was introduced last winter in Connecticut to allow hunters to cull additional deer if they donate the meat to food pantries struggling to meet their needs. As legislators put it, this proposal addressed three problems at once (and reminded us again that taking responsibility for our ecosystems is emphatically not some hippie cause that doesn’t help people): it combats the deer overpopulation and defoliation due to the destruction of their natural predators, it redresses the dire straits that many food charities are facing as their demand increases and their supply dwindles during the recession, and it helps to reduce the risks of Lyme Disease in the region. 

And it’s not just Connecticut. Ohio has a similar program to enroll hunters – who are often pejoratively treated as backwards or insensitive by urban folks – in the effort to help the poor outlast the economic downturn and help the land recover from its many mismanagements. And my prediction? We’re going to see more and more of these kinds of solutions on the ground, because communities need them, and everyone wins. Forget the dicks-in-hands dithering of Dems and Repubs on Capitol Hill – here we’re bringing together hunters and environmentalists, rugged individuals and community service charities….this is bipartisanship in practice. 

Who wrote this one?  Me: Cook, hiker, mushroom hunter, snowball fighter, lover of good coffee and cheap wine, enjoyer of the taste of tap water, wannabe Sicilian goatherd, comrade of big hairy spiders. You: widespread sustainable agriculture, bioregional community structures, innovative green-collar workforce policy, pesto sauce made by an Italian grandmother. Come over for dinner sometime. --- “A gastronome who isn’t an environmentalist is just stupid, and an environmentalist who isn’t a gastronome is just sad.” -Carlo Petrini, Founder, Slow Food Read more from this author