HomeGrown Festival and John Locke's "Acorns and Apples"

This Saturday, September 13th, the first HomeGrown Festival is taking place at the Ann Arbor Community High School field across from The Farmer's Market. The event plans to highlight, "the health, economic, and environmental benefits of buying local," according to the advance publicity for the Festival.

And a2ethics.org correspondents, or at least one among us, intend to be there. It would probably be better for me to go, as I know very little about the benefits of buying local, and for that matter about living the Green Life, while my colleagues in a2ethics.orgdom walk the walk...and in the case of barcode 2x, actually do the walking and most of the talking about environmental issues and their ethical consequences on our forums. I know just a bit about water resources and am quite passionate about discussing the ethics surrounding it, but not very much about sustainable practices, food heritage and community-supported agriculture. Yet, all of these issues have been on my mind since talking with Mary Wessel Walker of Community Farm Kitchen and Hanna Raskin and Catherine Dann Roeber of American Table Culinary Tours, in two of our "Working Ethics Series" podcasts.

There is alot to learn and to think about. So, on Saturday... I look forward to hearing more about what 'food security' really means, and why it is necessary to use a term that for me conjures up many conflicting ideas...

And, I will want to know in a naive, and let's begin at the begat way, why the HomeGrown Festival must be framed primarily as it relates to investing in the Michigan economy or to economic issues over all others.

It strikes me that if we are going to do this...which is to link what is homegrown and local to economic benefits and to local businesses, that we should also think about land ownership issues and to the ways in which businesses come to own the products of the land. Where does this lead me? Well, for now, until I get some more foundation in the "think local first" movement to the property rights poster child himself, philosopher John Locke.

Locke thought that ownership, and thus individual property began when a person used his labor to change or alter the land, which is the property of all at the beginning when humans had no hand in altering it. Said Locke in the Second Treatise of Government, "He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them for himself. Nobody can deny but that the nourishment is his."(my italics for quote.)

For Locke then, property is primarily about land, and it is economic in origin. But it seems to me that this principle of Locke's as popular and engrained as it is, does not really work with, say, air or with water. So, while we can have a HomeGrown Festival for the products of the land, can we also have one featuring HomeGrown air or of water?

It might be better for me just to go to the HomeGrown festival and enjoy the eating and cooking. Hope to see you there. You might also want to check out the website: homegrownfestival.org.