By Mike Seraphinoff

When I was a teenager I had a grandfather who was what we called a health food nut. His eating habits were a source of hilarity to my brothers and sisters and me. By the time I finished college I was eating organically grown food and growing my own organic gardens with the help of the Rodale gardening books I had inherited from that grandfather.

My grandfather had grown up on a farm in northern Michigan. He’d seen the rise of industrial factory farming. It was farming that treated the living earth and organic plant life as if the earth were a factory floor and the plants nothing more than widgets on an assembly line. Everything was done with big machines, and chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides were applied on a fixed schedule in amounts determined by applied science.

My grandfather had rebelled against this industrial approach to agriculture. His grudge against modern industry may have gone deeper though. He had lost a son, a bomber pilot, in World War II. Our civilization had even mechanized death.

I am now at the age when my grandfather received ridicule for his silly eating habits. Few people would laugh at him today. Our stores now have shelves filled with certified organic apples, lettuce, milk, rice, beans, breakfast cereal, spaghetti, and a hundred other food stuffs.

Conventional factory farming still accounts for the lion’s share of food grown in the U.S. It also accounts for the thousand square mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by chemical run-off from a million acres of corn in the Midwest. It also accounts for the statistical evidence that the present generation of young people are unlikely to enjoy the life span of their parent’s generation as earlier onset of diabetes and high blood pressure translate into earlier death.

I was stirred to write this letter after viewing a heart-warming story of a young teacher in one of our schools, whose students helped raise thousands of dollars toward the cost of her cancer treatment, which was expected to exceed the quarter million dollars that her insurance would cover. The same day I heard a story about a clinic in the east that was willing to treat people who couldn’t afford to pay for it. Thousands of people who hadn’t been able to get preventive care or treatment for years traveled from far away and waited many hours to see a doctor. Our nation’s medical system is also part of the modern industrial complex, owned and controlled by many of the same people in charge of our military-industrial complex that is responsible for more death dealing product than almost all of the other nations on earth combined.

What I’m getting at here is the fact that the promise of the industrial revolution has proven to be a false promise in too many ways, and buying bottled water and organic food and filtering the air in your own home isn’t enough. Ask the Eskimos. They live thousands of miles north of the industrial complex, yet they have some of the highest levels of dangerous industrial pollutants in their blood of any people on earth. I myself may eat mainly a home-grown organic food diet, but I grew up next to a chrome-plating plant that spewed highly toxic chromium oxide dust over our neighborhood for years, unbeknownst to all of us.

I’ve now seen far too many family members and friends suffer the ill effects of modern industrial life to ignore the trend. The Island County Commissioners once denied me a place on the county Community Health Advisory Board because I was too outspoken and impolitic in my public speech at the time. With the passage of time and the advance of our human knowledge, I offer no apologies today for my public candor. In fact, I would issue a call for revolutionary change today.

Indeed, may it be peaceful change, brought about through the ballot box and the local community council and through changes in the way of life in every home and factory and farm in America. After all, it is the very lives and quality of life of children and young parents, as well as middle-aged and aged adults that is at stake here. It will take all of us working together every day for the rest of our lives to effect the needed change. So let’s get started.

Mike Seraphinoff is a Greenbank resident and a member of the South Whidbey Tilth governing council.