Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Walking gently - what does it take?

[Brian Bartholomew (bb]

Racheli Gai <racheli [at] sonoracohousing.com> writes:

> Is buying the cheapest food (conventional, sold at WalMart) the
> environmental thing to do?  Or does one walk gently by contracting
> with a farmer and paying her way more than what they would get in
> the store, so that she can actually make a living?

Now I'm thinking that "walking gently" doesn't mean what I thought it
did.  Let me retract that and address a smaller subject area by
saying: "price in dollars is generally the best measure of resource use".

If there existed a perfectly free market, with no subsidies and no
uncompensated pollution, I would remove the "generally".  However,
today there exist absurd subsidy distortions, such as that animal feed
corn is the cheapest solid fuel to burn in stoves for home heat.

                                                        Brian