This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Here’s what happens when corporations begin to control education.
“When I approached professors to discuss research projects addressing organic agriculture in farmer’s markets, the first one told me that ‘no one cares about people selling food in parking lots on the other side of the train tracks,’” said a PhD student at a large land-grant university who did not wish to be identified. “My academic adviser told me my best bet was to write a grant for Monsanto or the Department of Homeland Security to fund my research on why farmer’s markets were stocked with ‘black market vegetables’ that ‘are a bioterrorism threat waiting to happen.’ It was communicated to me on more than one occasion throughout my education that I should just study something Monsanto would fund rather than ideas to which I was deeply committed. I ended up studying what I wanted, but received no financial support, and paid for my education out of pocket.”
Unfortunately, she’s not alone. Conducting research requires funding, and today’s research follows the golden rule: The one with the gold makes the rules.
A report just released by Food and Water Watch examines the role of corporate funding of agricultural research at land grant universities, of which there are more than 100. “You hear again and again Congress and regulators clamoring for science-based rules, policies, regulations,” says Food and Water Watch researcher Tim
Schwab, explaining why he began investigating corporate influence in agricultural research. “So if the rules and regulations and policies are based on science that is industry-biased, then the fallout goes beyond academic articles. It really trickles down to farmer livelihoods and consumer choice.”
The report found that nearly one quarter of research funding at land grant universities now comes from corporations, compared to less than 15 percent from the USDA. Although corporate funding of research surpassed USDA funding at these universities in the mid-1990s, the gap is now larger than ever. What’s more, a broader look at all corporate agricultural research, $7.4 billion in 2006, dwarfs the mere $5.7 billion in all public funding of agricultural research spent the same year.
Influence does not end with research funding, however. In 2005, nearly one third of agricultural scientists reported consulting for private industry. Corporations endow professorships and donate money to universities in return for having buildings, labs and wings named for them. Purdue University’s Department of Nutrition Science blatantly offers corporate affiliates “corporate visibility with students and faculty” and “commitment by faculty and administration to address [corporate] members’ needs,” in return for the $6,000 each corporate affiliate pays annually.
In perhaps the most egregious cases, corporate boards and college leadership overlap. In 2009, South Dakota State’s president, for example, joined the board of directors of Monsanto, where he earns six figures each year. Bruce Rastetter is simultaneously the co-founder and managing director of a company called AgriSol Energy and a member of the Iowa Board of Regents. Under his influence, Iowa State joined AgriSol in a venture in Tanzania that would have forcefully removed 162,000 people from their land, but the university later pulled out of the project after public outcry.
What is the impact of the flood of corporate cash? “We know from a number of meta-analyses, that corporate funding leads to results that are favorable to the corporate funder,” says Schwab. For example, one peer-reviewed study found that corporate-funded nutrition research on soft drinks, juice and milk were four to eight times more likely to reach conclusions in line with the sponsors’ interests. And when a scrupulous scientist publishes research that is unfavorable to the study’s funder, he or she should be prepared to look for a new source of funding.
That’s what happened to a team of researchers at University of Illinois who were funded by a statewide fertilizer “checkoff” after they published a finding that nitrogen fertilizer depletes organic matter in the soil. Checkoffs are a common method used to market agricultural products, and they are funded by a small amount from each sale of a product – in this case, fertilizer. Richard Mulvaney, one of the U of I researchers, feels it is twisted that, in this way, farmers fund research intended to promote fertilizer use with their own fertilizer purchases.
But often the industry influence may be more subtle. Joyce Lok, a graduate student at Iowa State University, said, “If a corporation funds your research, they want you to look at certain research questions that they want answered. So if that happens it’s not like you can explore other things they don’t want you to look at… I think they direct the research in that way.”
John Henry Wells, who spent several decades as a student, professor and administrator at land grant universities sees it a different way. As an academic, he hopes that his research is relevant to real world problems that agriculture faces at the time. “When you ask the question, did I ever outline a research plan with the explicit notion of is this going to be fundable, I would say no. But I thought very deeply about whether my research plan was going to be relevant, and one of the indicators of relevancy would be if the ideas I put forward would get the attention of trade associations, private industry, benefactors, etc.”
If scientists use fundability as an important criteria of selecting research topics, research intended to serve the needs of the poor and the powerless will be at a disadvantage. However, Wells says that this is hardly a new phenomenon: land grants have existed to serve the elites since their creation in the 19th century.
“As its basis, the land-grant university was intended to cater to a narrow political interest of landowners and homesteaders – individuals who had the right to vote and participate in the political structure of a representative democracy.” he says. “Contemporarily, it is not so much that the land-grant university has been corrupted by modern agro-industrial influence, as it has been historically successful in focusing on its mission in the context of our Constitutional framework of governance. For the land-grant university, its greatest strength – a political collaboration spanning the top-to-bottom echelons of influence – has been its greatest weakness.”
Land grant universities and the USDA itself first came into being at a time when the academic view of agriculture was fundamentally changing – even if most farmers at the time ignored the advice of academics, dismissing them as “book farmers” who knew little about actually working the land. Will Allen writes about this period in his book ”The War on Bugs,” telling the story of Justus von Liebig, a prominent agricultural chemist in Germany.
“In the 1830s, Liebig began asserting that the most essential plant nutrients were nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. His theories fueled the development of chemical fertilizers and ushered in a new age of agricultural science and soil chemistry in the 1840s and 1850s. Though many of Liebig’s theories were wrong, he was the first great propagandist for chemistry and for chemical-industrial agriculture.” Perhaps the most significant of his mistakes was his belief that organic matter in the soil was unimportant.
Dozens of Americans studied under Liebig and returned to the U.S. to continue their work. Two of these students established labs at Harvard and Yale, and soon “all agricultural schools and experiment stations in the country followed their lead.” Thus, practically from the start, the elites in this country served the interests of those who peddled chemical fertilizers and other agricultural inputs – even if that wasn’t their intent. No doubt many were enticed by the prospect of founding a new, modern, scientific form of agriculture, as they felt they were doing.
The unholy trinity of industry, government and academics promoting industrial agriculture and de-emphasizing or dismissing sustainable methods has a long history and it continues today. In its report, Food and Water Watch advocates a return to robust federal funding of research at land grant universities. But government is hardly immune from serving the corporate agenda either.
Take, for example, Roger Beachy, the former head of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the agency in the USDA that doles out research grants. Beachy spent much of his career as an academic, collaborating with Monsanto to produce the world’s first genetically engineered tomato. He later became the founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Monsanto’s non-profit arm, before President Obama appointed him to lead NIFA.
As Schwab noted, policy is often based on research, but good policy requires a basis in unbiased, objective research. In a system in which corporations and government both fund research, but due to the revolving door, the same people switch between positions within industry, lobbying for industry, and within government, what is the solution?
The congressional deficit supercommittee is pulling into the home stretch. Whether the secret, round-the-clock negotiations among its 12 members will yield a budget-cutting deal before its Thanksgiving deadline is the subject of intense speculation in Washington.
Republican co-chair Jeb Hensarling indicated on MSNBC on Tuesday night that the Republicans have gone as far as they are willing to go when it comes to compromise. House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and others held a press conference this morning urging the supercommittee to “go big” on an agreement over deficit reduction. The White House, in the meantime, is bracing for failure, according to the Washington Post.
This speculation changes daily, making it hard to tell how things will unfold over the next week. But what if the supercommittee does succeed in “going big”? What would that deal look like? Yes, a deficit agreement could result in changes to programs like Social Security and Medicaid. What has been less noticed is that a supercommittee deal could — and likely would– end up rewriting other policies in ways that are entirely unexpected.
Enter the so-called secret farm bill, an oddball piece of deficit reduction legislation that could rewrite agriculture policy in the United States in one behind-closed-doors deal.
“There’s no question that the farm bill is what agriculture wants to do,” said a budget expert who works closely with farm states. Essentially, the farm bill could become a part of deficit reduction because the House and Senate Agriculture Committees are trying to take advantage of the way the supercommittee’s process was set up. Congressional committees can submit recommendations to the supercommittee on ways they would like to see spending cut in their programs.
The House and Senate Agriculture Committees, led by agriculture’s “Big Four,” Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Reps. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and Collin Peterson, D-Minn., appear poised to try to submit their suggestion in the form of the farm bill.
The farm bill, approved every five years by Congress, has more to do with your life than you might think. This legislation sets most food and agriculture policies in the United States, from food stamps to food safety measures and crop subsidies. If the Big Four submit a bill that spends less money than the old farm bill did, it could be passable as deficit reduction and potentially get swept through Congress on the coattails of a deficit reduction plan. Though it’s impossible to tell exactly what such a plan would look like, it’s logical that states the Big Four represent — Michigan, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota — and other farm states would be well-represented.
But if the secret farm bill become law, some people will go ballistic. Anti-obesity advocates, food safety watchdogs, and food policy advocates have been waiting for Congress to write the next farm bill, which is a rare opportunity for them to plug new policies, such as targeting food stamps so they encourage low-income families to buy healthy foods. But if the new farm bill is written and debated behind closed doors, as is happening right now, they will have to wait another five years for that opportunity.
“A farm bill that preserves the status quo instead of addressing a food system that causes disease and wrecks the environment isn’t even marginally serious about deficit reduction,” wrote food writer and activist Mark Bittman in an Op-Ed for the New York Times last week.
It sounds batty, but slipping relatively small pieces of legislation into large, high-stakes bills is a proven way to get a bill passed. The health care reform bill that passed last spring, for example, included a major rewrite of a 40-year-old student loan program that was similarly folded into health reform at the last minute. It was the biggest piece of education-related legislation to get passed Congress in years and it was barely reviewed.
Corn states vs. rice states
The Big Four stand to gain two things by slipping their farm bill into a deficit agreement:
First, they avoid a scenario where the supercommittee simply caps the amount of money budgeted for agriculture in coming years, giving the agriculture committees less autonomy in their decision-making.
Second, if they reauthorize the farm bill now they can avoid what would likely be a messy, public battle over food policy and agriculture reform slated to take place next summer, in the middle of an election cycle.
Insiders and advocates say the possibility of the secret farm bill becoming the law of the land depends on a number of things happening in the coming weeks.
First, the Big Four need to come to an agreement and actually submit a plan that saves the $23 billion to $25 billion over 10 years, as the supercommittee has asked it to do. There are three areas where the agriculture budget could get slashed: nutrition programs such as food stamps, conservation programs that help preserve land and prevent pollution, and crop subsidies.
It’s likely that around half of the cuts, ranging from $13 billion to $15 billion over 10 years, would come from dropping crop subsidies and replacing them with an expanded crop insurance program that would enable farmers to collect a larger share of their losses from insurance during years with poor profits.
Currently, internal divisions are preventing the committees from agreeing among themselves, says a source who works on Capitol Hill. The division line within the Big Four and other congressmen who are trying to lobby them currently falls mostly between corn states, such as Minnesota, and rice states, such as Arkansas.
Collin Peterson of Minnesota, for example, is a strong supporter of the new insurance plan. Corn is somewhat volatile and corn farmers would gain from having expanded insurance. Rice, on the other hand, is a less volatile crop and thus benefits more from straight cash subsidies, making it likely that congressmen from rice-producing states are opposing the new insurance deal. Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., for example, recently emphasized the importance of keeping the “farm safety net” (subsidies and insurance) intact in a deficit deal and played down the need for crop insurance in his state when speaking to the Arkansas News. Unsurprisingly, Arkansas grows almost half of the U.S. supply of rice.
That’s the debate within farm states. The interests of those not representing farmers, such as people concerned about reducing agriculture pollution or reforming the food stamps program so it encourages families to buy healthier food, don’t figure into this equation, and are likely to be overlooked by the secret farm bill.
Food stamps would also likely see a small cut, because the the program is popular but constitutes an estimated two-thirds of the costs of the current farm bill, making it hard for the Big Four to plot out a way to reduce spending without at least a minor reduction in spending on food stamps.
The Big Four will likely try to sell the new insurance program as having big cost savings though it might not, in fact, save money. During years with good crop prices and yield, offering government-subsidized insurance to farmers is relatively inexpensive. But during years when crop prices and/or yields fall, the government will dole out more money to farmers who have experienced losses, resulting in much less savings.
There’s a good chance the supercommittee won’t fall for agriculture’s bait-and-switch with regard to crop subsidies. But the committee could make a deal that hits its deficit reduction mark and looks good on paper while ignoring the variations in actual agriculture savings. An expanded crop insurance program could be popular, too. As one Capitol Hill veteran noted, “Congress loves temporary disaster relief.”
If the supercommittee does accept the farm bill and then manages to strike a deal before Thanksgiving, then the farm bill heads to Congress as part of the deficit reduction agreement. Congressmen will have to swallow the entire agreement or none at all. It’s unlikely that many would change their vote on the $1.2 trillion bill because of the relatively small, $23 billion agriculture component, meaning that if the supercommittee makes a plan that wins approval, the secret farm bill would become law regardless of who loves or hates it.
“The outside has really been shut out of the process,” commented a source on Capitol Hill. With this and other “secret” bills, there’s no knowing what surprises might be waiting if the supercommittee does in fact make a deal.
You could say Penny Jordan saved the farm. A veteran of the insurance industry with a business degree, she came back to work at her Maine family farm at age 48. Since then, she’s revitalized her old farm stand business with a bus that delivers produce to senior centers. She’s opened a tiny restaurant on wheels, The Well, where a fine-dining chef turns out an ever-changing menu to be eaten at picnic tables by the parking lot—albeit one with a stunning view of Spurwink River. Jordan, a spunky, silvery blonde who favors fleece and Carhartts, has so much energy she almost bounces as she walks. Her creativity may spark new business models for other small farms, and why not? This is a woman who seems like she could do anything.
But Jordan doesn’t take the credit. The secret to her booming business, she says, is instead a complex and seemingly rather dull legal contract called an agricultural easement. The arrangement, made with a land trust, allows farmers to be paid in return for stripping their land of its development rights – no new subdivisions or shopping malls allowed – and instead keeping it as farmland. In 2004, the Jordan family placed 47 acres of their property under an easement with the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust for an undisclosed sum. “The Jordans settled Cape Elizabeth,” Jordan says. “We would not have kept the farm, let alone been able to invest in the business, without this.”
Interest in small-scale agriculture has soared over the last decade. But it’s still anything but easy for farmers to get in or stay in the game, not least because farmland itself is disappearing: In Maine, for example, 75 percent of farmland has vanished since 1950. What’s left is often worth more as future house lots than as a farm—especially if it has panoramic views like the Jordan farm. Over the next decade, about 400,000 acres, or about one-third of Maine’s remaining farmland, will be in transition as older farmers retire or die. Here in the Pine Tree State, agricultural easements are an increasingly powerful tool to help revive and grow small farms.
John Bliss and Stacy Brenner have built their business – a 150-member CSA, a farm stand and flower design studio – thanks to an agricultural easement. Their 150-acre Broadturn Farm is actually owned by the local Scarborough Land Trust, which leases it “at a very modest rent” to the young couple. Bliss and Brenner are your stereotypical new farmers. They’re young, business savvy and hip – you can just picture them sampling cheese and sipping a craft brew at a bar in Brooklyn – and neither of them grew up farming. (Plus, if either of them decides to give up on farming, they have a future as models for J. Crew.)
Over the next decade, about one-third of Maine’s remaining farmland will be in transition as older farmers retire or die.
After apprenticing for a few years, Bliss and Brenner learned enough to want to set out on their own. But had they bought the land they currently occupy, it would have cost $750,000 and one of them would have had to take an off-farm job to pay the mortgage. “This is an arrangement where we have an affordable rent and we can reinvest in our business, not the real estate,” says Brenner.
In Damariscotta, about an hour north, the Maine Farmland Trust, a state preservation non-profit, purchased a 67-acre farm for $500,000 along the state’s main thoroughfare, Route 1. Its plan: To sell it for less than half that to the local food co-op, Rising Tide, or to a new farmer. It’s an example of what the Trust calls a “Buy, Protect, Sell” program, which has preserved 3,000 acres of farmland since it was launched in 2008. “Buy high, sell low doesn’t seem like a good business plan. But to preserve land, it makes sense,” says John Piotti, the Trust’s executive director.
Initially, the farm’s owner planned to sell the land to Wal-Mart. But the community revolted, and the deal was abandoned. Concerned that the land would still be developed, the Trust purchased the land and put an easement on the property. The easement payments, which come from federal and state agencies, plus private fundraising, will allow the Trust to sell the acreage at the farmland value, $180,000, and still just about break even.
For the Jordans, an easement was their ticket to stay on the farm, which was experiencing financial issues. Money had been diverted from the business to help pay for family health care, among other things, and there were overdue bills and unpaid taxes.
The money the Jordans received for the easement allowed the family to make a substantial capital investment in the farm. They almost doubled the number of acres under cultivation, from 40 to 70. They built a new three-room farmstand, where at this time of year you might find squash, shell beans, kale, salad greens, beets, eggs, apples, cider and maple syrup. Retail sales, which are far more profitable for farms, now make up 90 percent of the family’s business.
Business certainly was brisk on a recent sunny autumn afternoon. Older couples parked their cars and greeted sales staff by name. Mothers piled apples and greens in their baskets and appeased their children with pumpkins stacked on a bale of hay by the door. “Writing an easement – it was the hardest process. But it forced the family to confront the hard decisions that had to be made,” says Jordan. “And that’s what saved the farm.”
The easiest way to explain Gallup’s discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being “Whole Paycheck.” Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times.
It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point’s carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile — if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blowhard — that’s because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.
As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism — the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.
In this chapter of that larger tragicomedy, lawmakers whose campaigns are underwritten by agribusinesses have used billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize those agribusinesses’ specific commodities (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) that are the key ingredients of unhealthy food. Not surprisingly, the subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that recession-battered consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to “choose” the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support.
Corn — which is processed into the junk-food staple corn syrup and which feeds the livestock that produce meat — exemplifies the scheme.
“Over the past decade, the federal government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop … artificially low,” reports Time magazine. “That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain.”
Yes, it is a bargain, but one created by deliberate government policy that serves the corn industry titans, not by any genetic advantage that makes corn derivatives automatically more affordable for the budget-strapped commoner.
The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry, notes Time, is “that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit.”
So while it may be amusing to use Americans’ worsening recession-era diet as another excuse to promote cultural stereotypes, the nutrition crisis costing us billions in unnecessary healthcare costs is more about public policy and powerful special interests than it is about epicurean snobs and affluent tastes. Indeed, this is a problem not of individual proclivities or of agricultural biology that supposedly makes nutrition naturally unaffordable — it is a problem of rigged economics and corrupt policymaking.
Solving the crisis, then, requires everything from recalibrating our subsidies to halting the low-income school lunch program’s support for the pizza and French fry lobby (yes, they have a powerful lobby). It requires, in other words, a new level of maturity, a better appreciation for the nuanced politics of food and a commitment to changing those politics for the future.
Impossible? Hardly. A country that can engineer the seemingly unattainable economics of a $5 McDonald’s feast certainly has the capacity to produce a healthy meal for the same price. It’s just a matter of will — or won’t.
Let me heal America’s political divide with an issue that can bring together enviro-lefties and free-market conservatives: In this back-to-basics era when the demand for traditionally produced food has exploded, government regulation of small farmers is often capricious and incoherent. Kristin Canty’s documentary “Farmageddon” isn’t memorable cinema, and it follows a familiar formula. Activists, farmers and foodies make the case for locally grown and minimally processed food, and we hear a lot of anecdotes about governmental overreach, while the bureaucrats either damn themselves by keeping their mouths shut or damn themselves by talking and saying nothing. A Vermont family has its entire herd of imported sheep destroyed, thanks to a completely imaginary outbreak of mad-cow disease (which is not known to occur in sheep in the first place, and definitely didn’t occur in theirs). Armed agents invade an upstate New York farm to seize a cooler full of raspberry yogurt. An undercover unit breaks up an interstate trafficking ring — one devoted to bringing USDA-certified raw milk from South Carolina across the line into Georgia.
You don’t have to believe that raw milk is good for you (which is a contentious issue I can’t tackle here) to think that the hodgepodge of state and federal regulations covering it — and numerous other “natural” animal and vegetable products — is ludicrous. As someone in “Farmageddon” observes, the fast food and processed food that renders so many Americans morbidly obese and hastens the deaths of millions is legally available everywhere, but in many states people can’t make their own decisions about whether to consume raw dairy products. (E.g., in California you can buy raw milk at the grocery store; in New York or Pennsylvania you have to buy it from a farmer; in Maryland you can’t legally buy it at all.)
Canty makes a compelling case that federal and state agricultural officials — who are supposed to help farmers sell their products, not make their lives miserable — have fallen way behind the public’s growing appetite for locally sourced and artisanal food. But “Farmageddon” also implies that this is because corporate agribusiness is using its friends in government to crush small producers. Given the revolving door between government and industry we absolutely can’t rule that out, but Occam’s razor suggests that entropy, chaos and bureaucratic thinking are more to blame. Food-safety laws dating to the 1930s and earlier are being enforced alongside those written more recently in response to outbreaks of E. coli and other dangerous pathogens, and regulatory schemes designed to cover billion-dollar corporations fit poorly on small family farms.
No one in “Farmageddon” ever suggests that small producers of raw milk or organic poultry or anything else shouldn’t be subject to safety inspection and prudent regulation, only that it might be nice if they weren’t subjected to security-state crackdowns for reasons that have little to do with reason or science. “Farmageddon” is an informal sequel to the hit documentary “Food, Inc.,” and features several appearances by Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, one of that film’s stars and a genuine local-food celebrity. Canty clearly hopes to drive a lobbying campaign aimed at reshaping the regulatory climate to the realities of the organic-mad marketplace. Do I smell a Bernie Sanders-Rand Paul libertarian-socialist bill in the making?
“Farmageddon” is now playing at Cinema Village in New York. It opens July 22 at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Ore., and Aug. 26 at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Check website for other cities and one-time screenings.
Radicals perform a social function that they themselves often view with contempt, and one that is similarly misunderstood by people in the political mainstream who almost always see radicalism as crazy and counterproductive. People who chain themselves to old-growth redwoods — or, for that matter, to the doors of abortion clinics — hardly ever get what they want in the short or medium term, since what they want is generally unrealistic, and often amounts to a revolutionary change in the social order. But in posing an unrelenting and quixotic challenge to the consciences of their fellow citizens, radical activists often nudge us along toward more modest, incremental changes. Does anyone dispute that facts on the ground with regard to environmental policies and abortion rights have changed, thanks in part to the actions of activists many people view as deranged?
I’m not trying to claim that the shadowy alliance of underground environmental radicals known as the Earth Liberation Front were (or are) a constructive force; taken as a whole, their actions were idiotic and vainglorious. But I am trying to sneak up on Marshall Curry’s fascinating new documentary, “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” because it takes on a complicated subject that calls forth an unfortunate wealth of received opinion and knee-jerk reaction. Curry, whose Oscar-nominated “Street Fight” explored a nasty mayoral election in Newark, N.J., is to be commended for surrendering to neither. “If a Tree Falls” is a remarkably evenhanded story about an eager young activist who was drawn down a slippery slope toward property destruction and violence, and who wound up as a baffled defendant in a widely publicized federal terrorism case. Those eager to defend the motives and ideology of the ELF will be made uncomfortable, and so will throw-away-the-key viewers who view the group as a hippie-flavored answer to al-Qaida.
During its brief heyday as an underground direct-action movement in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the ELF was simultaneously the subject of massive media hype and widespread incomprehension. Daniel McGowan, the young man at the center of “If a Tree Falls,” was involved with an ELF cell operating in and around Eugene, Ore., which committed various arson attacks on perceived environmental evildoers in the Northwest. These ranged from a Forest Service ranger station to a slaughterhouse where wild horses and burros were rendered into dog food to a timber company to a Ford dealership. If that makes it sounds as if the group’s rationale was all over the place that’s exactly right, but let’s not get ahead of the story. Since ELF was conceived as a “leaderless collective” of autonomous cells, McGowan’s group presumably had no connection to a series of ELF attacks in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana, nor to the suburban arson fires set in San Diego or on New York’s Long Island. (Who exactly committed the ELF’s most famous arson attack, the 1998 torching of five buildings at the Vail ski resort in Colorado, causing at least $12 million in damage, is a disputed question.)
Curry came to this film with no particular knowledge of environmental activism or its underground component, which may be for the best. Purely by chance, McGowan was working for Curry’s wife in New York when he was arrested by the FBI in December 2005. In fact, this is a sterling example of journalistic documentary, clearer, fairer and more engrossing than any of the sensationalistic newspaper or magazine stories about ELF. Curry spends a lot of time with McGowan and his family, which is almost the opposite of what you’d expect from an accused eco-terrorist. McGowan grew up in middle-class, Irish-American Queens, and his father is a retired New York police detective. By his own account, McGowan’s environmental awakening happened not in the wilderness but at Wetlands, a now defunct nightclub in downtown Manhattan.
Curry spends time with several other ELF members, including McGowan’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne Savoie (who spent nearly four years in prison) and the notorious Jake Ferguson, a charismatic founder and leader of the Eugene cell who subsequently turned police informant and wore a wire to incriminate McGowan and others. “If a Tree Falls” includes archival footage of many ELF attacks and visits to most of the sites, including interviews with the befuddled owners of a lumber mill and a tree farm that were burned to the ground. The filmmaker also has revealing conversations with assistant United States attorney Kirk Engdall and Eugene police detective Greg Harvey, who led the four-year ELF investigation that culminated with the arrest of McGowan and many other suspects — and both have a more nuanced understanding of the group than you might expect.
Most important of all, Curry pushes backward into the heady, crazy world of recent activist history, before the ELF started grabbing headlines around 1998. (He’s aware, furthermore, that you can go back still further, to Dave Foreman and the founding of Earth First!, or to Edward Abbey and “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” This is one movie, and it doesn’t claim to be comprehensive.) Those years saw an escalating series of confrontations in the Pacific Northwest between activists, timber companies and law enforcement officials, who began to use increasingly brutal methods to deal with nonviolent civil disobedience. As you’ll see in the film, cops sometimes beat and mauled activists engaged in such time-honored tactics as lockdowns or tree-sits, and frequently maced resisters at close range or daubed pepper spray directly in their eyes with cotton swabs. After a 1997 tree-sit at a park in downtown Eugene led to a violent police crackdown, the town’s long-standing community of anarchists and left-wing libertarians began to coalesce around more radical possibilities.
McGowan, Savoie, Ferguson and other Eugene activists played roles in the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999, when the World Trade Organization conference collapsed amid widespread protest and rioting. By that time they were already the central nexus of Eugene’s ELF cell, which became identified by the FBI as the most dangerous domestic terrorist group in the U.S. Activists have accused the government of using the activities of a handful of radicals to foment a widespread “Green Scare,” and one can definitely argue that the word “terrorist” doesn’t fit ELF, whose attacks were meant to cause economic damage but not to spread fear or inflict civilian casualties. (No one was ever injured in an ELF fire.) As someone in the film observes, “terrorist” is always a political term of art, which in practice means “someone who uses force in service of a goal we don’t support.” Your terrorist is somebody else’s freedom fighter.
Curry captures the rush that ELF members got, for instance, from burning down that horse-butchering facility, which was never rebuilt or reopened. But the media seized on ELF as a hot story and the group almost instantly became seduced by its clandestine, badass reputation, meaning that the supposed original goal — educating the public about the evil actions of corporations and government — evaporated completely. ELF members became highly skilled at staging arson fires and covering their tracks; several years and millions of dollars were expended before the FBI “turned” Jake Ferguson and broke the case. But the actions themselves went from borderline-counterproductive to flamingly stupid: In May 2001, McGowan’s cell firebombed the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington in Seattle, causing $7 million in damage to an eco-friendly research facility under the mistaken impression that the center engaged in genetic engineering. Simultaneously, an ELF cadre burned down a tree farm in rural Oregon, one that grew hybrid poplars using conventional methods used in agriculture for centuries, if not millennia.
McGowan suggests to Curry that his ELF cell blew apart not long after that, partly out of regret over those mistakes but also because some members suggested the possibility of going after human targets (something that I don’t think has been attested elsewhere). One thing is for sure: After September of 2001, the national climate shifted dramatically and the ELF’s bush-league experiments in terrorism, with or without scare quotes, stopped seeming like fun to anybody. You can find several different warring websites claiming to represent the remnants of ELF, and people still commit “actions” in its name, if you want to glorify acts of petty vandalism at shopping malls and auto dealerships with that word. Daniel McGowan will be eligible for release from federal prison in a couple of years, and if there’s a lesson to be learned from the thorny history of his brief but stellar career as an eco-terrorist, I don’t think he, or any of the rest of us, has learned it yet.
“If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York. It opens June 23 at the Bijou Cinemas in Eugene, Ore.; July 9 in Olympia, Wash.; July 15 in Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco; July 22 in Minneapolis, San Diego and Seattle; and Aug. 12 in Washington, with more cities and dates to be announced.
In a Thursday, May 10, 2012 photo, a farm worker prepares a tomato field near Oneonta, Ala. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves) (Credit: AP) 
Rep. Collin Peterson, ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee (Credit: Reuters) 
(Credit: Courtesy of Maine Farmland Trust) 
A still from "Farmageddon" 
A still from "If a Tree Falls" 
