FAIRVIEW: Travelogue

By ANDY KEGLEY/Columnist

Looking down on the nation’s breadbasket from 35,000 feet, one wouldn’t know that our food policy is as out of whack as our energy policy. The economics of hunger—for food and petroleum—are poised now to wreak a double whammy on our way of life, unlike any point in our memory, maybe even worse than what was happening three quarters of a century ago.
But it wasn’t rising commodity prices that I was seeing during a recent getaway west. Flying into the sprawling new Denver airport ought to be one of the must-dos, if not for the massive scale of the facility, as for the descent toward the Rocky Mountains and the hint of the Denver skyline. Clouds, the mountains, help inspire the dreaming of what shaped and worked the land below. Somewhere below our plane, memorialized, are the ruts left behind on the Oregon Trail by settlers intent on finding a better place to make a living.
Even from five miles up, the landforms fascinate the imagination, with every conceivable geometric shape, color and texture, suggesting a multitude of on-the-ground farming practices and cultures. As this was early May, or mid-spring in the high plains, the fecundity of the season had yet to peak.
The center pivot irrigation systems, watering the polka dot patterns of fields nestled inside quarter sections of land, belie the depleting aquifer below. Farmers, motivated in part by the newly re-subsidized farm bill, are back to the old fence-row to fence-row planting schemes, taking advantage of global record high grain prices. Speculation is that conservation practices are being plowed under, for the same reason. Other speculation has it that the bio-fuel fantasy of energy independence is contributing to the high food prices. All the consumer really knows is that the price of a gallon of milk, gas, and loaf of bread are escalating. Talk of a barrel of oil going on up to $200 rattles the backbone, and that mid-eastern oil producers could buy our national banks with a week’s proceeds from the sale of petroleum.
Reality settles in with the approach to that new airport. It’s humongous, paving over enough acres east of Denver to feed a small sub-Saharan nation. Flat farm land runs right up to the paved runways, and airplanes glide in on parallel tracks, lights blinking, descending, bumping upon landing, then jockeying for position to approach the terminal gates. It wasn’t too many years ago that farmers hacked a living out of this very soil now permanently idled and encapsulated by an asphalt lid.
Back home now, grateful for the time away, and the visit to a relaxing, mountain-air Last Best Place, we resume our commute to and from work. We spin around the hay field on the tractor to harvest the sun-fueled greenness of photosynthesis, to feed the cattle next winter, and we don’t seem to have any choice in our addiction to petroleum.
I couldn’t make the sacrifice to participate in last week’s Bike to Work week. I know of a handful who rode their bike to work, and at least one intrepid Gatorade employee who rides rain or shine, and takes full advantage of the plant’s commitment to green design technology.  Several did ride bikes in the third monthly Critical Mass bike ride around Wytheville on a cool May Friday evening.
What the plane and technology and progress have helped make possible—the flattening and globalization of the earth—really means that what goes around, comes around. Many westerners may have scoffed at pictures of bicycle jammed far eastern city streets. As the hunger for a higher standard of living there increases, they’ll be the ones driving the fuel efficient vehicles, and we’ll be resorting to the bike. Among future problems though, we’ll have to contend with our sprawling and wacky land use development.
Start pedaling.
Andy Kegley manages a non-profit community development agency, in addition to a family farm in the Fairview section of Wythe.