Gil Friend and David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

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The central theory of Fuller's approach is that all these problems are connected together . . . and that if we'll just look at the whole picture all at once, instead of trying to solve each problem by itself, we'll have a better idea about how to make this the kind of world we'd like to live in twenty or thirty years from now.

And, you know . . . no matter how big a look we took at the whole picture, the solutions we came up with were all small solutions. Decentralist solutions. The final answer always seemed to be that we should develop our communities so that food and energy production could be handled on a neighborhood level.

This was very exciting to me. It confirmed my intuitions. Things I had felt on a gut level before seemed to be borne out by the facts. Another intuition which was confirmed was that the only reason these grassroot solutions haven't been implemented already is that they're not in the interests of organized political and economic power. But that has to change . . . and work on a local level—on a community level—seems, in a lot of ways, to be the best way to bring about the necessary changes.

PLOWBOY: How has the ILSR worked toward that goal?

FRIEND: We began by experimenting with food production . . . both because we were very interested in the subject and because the consumption of food is an experience we all share. It's a common denominator that everyone, whatever his or her background might be, can relate to. Also, we recognized that it was going to be a crisis area to an extent unprecedented in this country . . . and we had an idea about the direction the solutions to that problem would take.

PLOWBOY: That future crisis, presumably, will be the result of a rapidly growing population outstripping the food supply.

MORRIS: True. But it's even more complex than that. We're questioning the very way our culture has produced food until now.

FRIEND: Right. Aside from the social and economic injustice of putting more and more of our best farmland into the hands of fewer and fewer people, our whole agribusiness approach to food production depends almost entirely on cheap sources of fossil fuel energy. We don't have that luxury anymore and we'll have it even less in the future.

But even if we still had cheap energy to squander, that method of raising food is ecologically bankrupt. We've been destroying the soil in this country, and we've been exporting an agricultural technology to the developing world that will eventually destroy the soil in those nations too. And soil is the most fundamental resource we have on this planet. The purpose of agriculture is not only to produce food to feed people now. A rational agriculture also protects the topsoil for succeeding generations and provides a decent quality of life for the people who live on the land. American agriculture has failed at all of these purposes.

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