Carrol Firmage, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Rob DeBirk, 4 June 2008

Transcript (18 pages) of interview(s) by Rob DeBirk with Carol Firmage on June 4, 2008

Firmage camped throughout Utah as a child with her family. She married Ed Firmage whose educational pursuits took them to Berkeley, California, and then to Israel on an Albright Fellowship. When they returned to Salt Lake City, they began to take weekend trips to the Escalante-Boulder area in southern Utah. Inspired by the scenery, they became interested in landscape photography. Ed's father was an activist who opposed the MX plan to put nuclear weapons in the West Desert. Ed and Carrol followed in his footsteps and became active in the Divine Strake project when the government talked about doing more testing in the West. They were also involved in issues over water rights in Utah involving Las Vegas. Her Master's Thesis at the University of Utah studies historic farming practices in Utah and modern urban gardening in an effort to increase sustainability by growing more food locally. Interview is part of the Utah Environmentalists Oral History Project. Interviewer: Robert DeBirk

CARROL FIRMAGE Salt Lake City, Utah An Interview by Robert DeBirk 4 June 2008 EVERETT L. COOLEY COLLECTION Utah Environmentalist Oral History Project U-1890 American West Center, Environmental Humanities Program, and Marriott Library Special Collections Department University of Utah THE FOLLOWING IS AN INTERVIEW WITH CARROL FIRMAGE ON JUNE 4,2008. WE ARE CONDUCTING THE INTERVIEW IN SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH AT HER HOME. CF: O.K. Well, I guess I'll start talking about when I was a kid. We did a lot of camping, travel, probably more out of necessity, financial necessity. When we’d go on vacation, we’d need to camp rather than stay in motel rooms much to my mother’s dismay. [laughs] She was not someone who enjoyed camping, but... There was me and my dad and my brother and my mom. I have a younger brother that’s two years younger than me. I think our favorite place to go was Bryce Canyon. I remember as a kid we’d go down there at least once a year if not sometimes twice. We could leave Salt Lake in the afternoon and pull up in Bryce Canyon and get a camping spot right on the rim in the campground that evening. It wasn’t crowded. We had this favorite spot that we liked the best that was right on the rim there and often it would be available. It was not crowded at all. We’d hike in the canyon. I think I’ve done every trail in Bryce Canyon except the one that goes all the way to Tropic. My dad always had the aspiration—he always wanted to be a park ranger. He thought that was the best job in the world [laughs], but never did it. He worked for a sign company, but he thought the best job in the world would be to be a park ranger. So we all... we always went to the campfire programs that the rangers do and learned what we could about the plants and animals of the area. Then, when I got married, Ed was not someone who, at least then, was that interested in the outdoors, ironically. He had gone camping quite a bit with his grandparents when he was a kid, but not with his parents. His grandfather owned horses and a horse ranch in Provo and he loved to take Ed and his next youngest sister out, the CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 grand parents did, and they’d go camping with the horses a lot up in the mountains behind Provo. But other than that, Ed hadn’t done a whole lot outdoors and he was very bookish and we went off to Berkeley to grad school and then to Israel. So we didn’t do a whole lot outdoors, although I do remember, when we were living in Berkeley, when I would need a break. I loved to go out to Point Reyes which is an incredible place. We’d drive out there about once every two months or so for a day and just spend the day on the beach. That was our restoration place [laughs] from living in Berkeley. Then in Israel, I think Ed’s favorite thing, certainly my favorite thing—he was an Albright Fellow and so the Albright Institute would take field trips at least once a month, sometimes more often, out into various parts of Israel, to digs mostly, to archaeological digs and they’d go with the archaeologist who had done the dig there. To do that, you were out in the landscape and those were his favorite things to do and whenever I could I would go with him. We did one several day trip out into the Negev which was really an incredible experience. I remember riding along in the bus seeing a sidewinder go, it wasn’t very far from where we were stopping to camp, and this sidewinder was just crawling off into the desert and I thought Oh, I am going to sleep out on the ground tonight. [laughs] That was really an interesting experience. When we came back from Israel, we were back here in Salt Lake and still again not very... didn’t do a lot of traveling in and around Utah or anything that much, but one year we decided to go down to the Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City and then sort of make a tour of... After we went to a Shakespeare play, we went to Zion. My dad had said you know you really should, the road had just opened between Torrey and Boulder maybe a year or two before. Not between Torrey and Boulder, between Boulder and CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 Escalante, so they had just barely paved that, before that it had been dirt. And so I said to Ed, I really want to do this drive. So we did that trip and something clicked in Ed. It was interesting. He just loved it and had been to some of those places as a kid, but not as an adult. So of course, the drive between Escalante and Boulder is one of the most spectacular scenic drives in the country. Every chance we could... we sort of could on the weekends, we’d head down and he started taking... his brother had given him his old 35millimeter camera and he just started taking the camera and taking pictures and then we started, instead of just doing all of the normal things that 99 percent of the people do. We started saying well, where does this dirt road go to? [laughs] So we’d take our Audi and sort of go off exploring. And it turned into, well, we’re exploring to go and find shots to take. And then it turned into well, I’m really tired of doing my nine-to-five job and I'd much rather be out here taking pictures, for Ed, so eventually, of course, he turned professional and got his four-by-five and we made a radical change in our life, but... so far as environmentalism goes, I think, it was just being out in these places and wanting to preserve them that sort of led both of us, and I’'m sure, he’ll tell you his own story, but just the fact that we saw some of these place in danger was what led us to try and stop whatever it was that might be endangering them. RD: Can I ask you to go back just for a second to... I’d like to hear about, if you can, kind of do a comparison between the landscape here and what it was like growing up in the Great Basin area and then I’m going to go somewhere radically different, like to whether that be the Berkeley area, but I guess I am more interested in your experiences in Israel. What were your feelings regarding having that shift of landscape? CARROL FIRMAGE CF: 4 JUNE 2008 Well, of course, Berkeley was very different from the Great Basin because of the moisture and the whole climate and I really missed snow. I missed... [ somewhat missed the mountains, although you’ve got hills at least on one side of Berkeley, but I terribly missed the snow and the cold. I didn’t miss so much the summer heat [laughs]. I guess I"'m more of a winter person. When we lived in Berkeley we’d come home for all the holidays and Thanksgiving and Christmas and so it wasn’t as hard. When we moved to Israel... actually the landscape of Israel is somewhat like the Great Basin. Even though you don’t have the mountains, Jerusalem is very hilly, but it’s also fairly dry and rocky. Going out into the landscape of Israel itself was very reminiscent of the Great Basin, and so, in that sense, it really... it reminded me of home. It was so funny because I had never talked to Ed about this before until during Terry’s class when I was writing about our experiences in Israel. I said... I remember... We’d come home every summer from Israel for a couple of months. I don’t remember which trip it was when we were going back. We were headed back. We’d just flown into Tel Aviv and we were on the bus from Tel Aviv to go back to Jerusalem. I remember looking at the sun starting to set and I thought oh, we’re back to this light. The light in Israel is very intense. It’s much more intense than here. The sunlight—I don’t know how else to explain it—it’s much more stark and it’s something that I very much noticed and so I was talking about how I did not like the light in Israel. It was very jarring to me. And Ed said “Oh, the light in Israel. I absolutely loved it.” [laughs] I don’t know, I guess it’s the different latitude or something. The other thing I really loved about Israel was you go out into the landscape and it’s not just, like here, the only similarity would be when you come across ancient Indian ruins, but there you’ve got ruins that are thousands of years old. And I loved that CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 connection with the past in the landscape. It’s very much a part of the landscape and it’s all over the place there. You don’t go very far without coming across some ruin or other, where somebody has lived at some point. You get a sense of extreme age that [ missed when I came back here because. I think my perception was always wrong growing up here and I’ve started to change my mind on it. I’ve always felt, especially growing up as a child of English immigrants, I always felt like this place was new and it didn’t have the history, which it doesn’t. You’ve got just the Mormon pioneer history, but you go out into this landscape and think, well, it’s been untouched. It doesn’t have the human history here, but it actually does. It’s just that we choose, have chosen not to see it, but it’s there. That’s been a new perception of mine that I’ve had to change. But it is very much evident in Israel. I really liked that sense of connection with the past and that past was very connected to the land. I think Ed felt that as I did. I think that was something we both missed when we came here. So as we connected more to the land that sort of threw us into environmental pursuits. RD: What are some of those pursuits? CF: Well, they are more for Ed than for me because of... especially as he’s gotten involved with HEAL Utah [Healthy Environmental Alliance of Utah]. He’s now on their board of directors. He’s very much involved in that now. What have we done? We went to all of the hearings on Divine Strake and put our two cents worth or as much as we could. I remember we went to protest in front of the governor’s mansion with signs. I believe that was for Divine Strake, too. We took our kids. CARROL FIRMAGE RD: 4 JUNE 2008 You want to talk a little about Divine Strake? What it was and why you felt it was important? CF: Well, we are inheritors of a legacy through Ed’s dad and I don’t know if you’ve interviewed him yet. Ed’s dad fought the whole MX plan to put nuclear weapons out in our west desert and fought all of his adult life against nuclear weapons. Of course, we totally agree with his mindset on that. So when the government started talking about doing testing again and Divine Strake being one of them, even though it wasn’t a nuclear weapon, it was still going to be tested where nuclear weapons had been tested. There was concern about what radioactive dust would go up into the air by this test, but also just setting another precedent for renewal of nuclear testing or any sort of major weapon testing. We’ve got plenty. We don’t need more. [laughs] Going to the Nevada test site, I found it extremely fascinating, sort of getting a handle more on what the whole military mindset was like, is like. It hasn’t changed. RD: You want to talk more about that too? CF: I wrote several of my papers for Steve Tatum’s class, actually, on the military mindset because we read Chip Ward’s book Canaries on the Rim. For an extra book that I needed to read, I read Last Cheater’s Waltz, so it was really fascinating to me that this whole mindset of, not really looking at what the end is. It’s sort of, well yeah, these are weapons, but what... I don’t think our guide... I don’t know. It just seems to me like none of them had really stopped to think about what they do. What the weapons do. What they were designed for. It’s just sort of, well yeah, this is something we have to do and they get caught up in how they’re going to do it and not why. Why do we even need them? CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 And we’ve watched Dr. Strangelove which I had never seen before. I can’t imagine why. [laughs] It all seemed so surreal. Then to know that same thing was going on over in Russia and the everyday people living around the testing range in Russia were having the same problems we have. Ed’s dad always likes to point out that the nuclear war happened. It happened here against our own people. Thinking of starting a whole other round of this was just unimaginable and that’s why we got involved in Divine Strake in protesting. We really tried to get our kids involved so they would understand what was going on too, and they were just so excited the day we heard they decided to cancel the test. They felt like holding our signs down in front of the governor’s mansion did something. I haven’t told them what Danielle said [laughs]. We’ll let them think that... in some sense it did work. RD: Let them continue in their naive ideas of democracy. CF: Yes. Democracy actually does work. [laughs] So we got involved in that. We also have been involved, not so much lately, but in the whole Las Vegas water grab thing. That, again, was connected with Ed’s dad. He got a call from Cecil Garland who was a rancher who went with him to speak against MX when they were doing their dog-andpony shows around the West and events in the East. He was part of the speaking group that went with his dad to talk about what it would do to his landscape. When this whole Las Vegas water thing—this is several years ago now—started. He called Ed’s dad again and said I got another fight. [laughs] that I need your help with. So we went out there and stayed with them and Ed took some pictures and learned about what was going on there and have done what we can, although we haven’t... we’ve written letters and sort of kept up on what’s going on with it, but that’s been another.... CARROL FIRMAGE RD: 4 JUNE 2008 So what is your interest in this issue of the Las Vegas water grab, other than the personal, what motivates you or animates you? CF: There, I think, both Ed and I realized that—especially after reading Beyond the Hundredth Meridian from John Wesley Powell’s stuff—that water is going to be a huge, if not the biggest issue in the West as population continues to grow and as climate change will probably diminish our amount of water here in the West. I think it’s going to be a defining issue as to what cities can take from other areas and this is just the first battle. So it can and probably will set a precedent, and I don’t think it’s right that a large city, especially one like Las Vegas, should take water from another area. I think a watershed should be able to live sustainably with its own amount. That’s what the pioneers did. I think that’s what we have to look to do. I think the water pipe from Lake Powell to Washington County is a bad idea. Washington County should limit its growth. If it’s going to survive, it’s going to have to survive on what water it has. RD: [ would love to hear a St. George politician say that. CF: Yes, I would too. [laughs] However, I did see in the newspaper just a day or two ago that Washington County’s housing market had been one of the hottest in the country and now it’s one of the coldest. It’s like second or third from the bottom. It’s just completely stopped which is interesting. I think Las Vegas may be just a bit below that. [laughs] RD: Then, did you see there was another article in the paper about Lake Mead and Lake Powell. They were saying like within twelve years they could be mud puddles. That was shocking. CARROL CF: FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 Yeah, I guess our whole sort of mindset is just that an area should, a community should be able to live off its land sustainably and that includes water, especially here in the West. Water is a huge issue and to have a major city like Las Vegas think that they can draw down the water table from two or three hundred miles away, is just wrong. I think it was wrong for L.A. to do it. RD: Your background is something we haven’t mentioned. I may be wrong, but you’re a Mormon are you not? CF: Right. I grew up Mormon. RD: So you have a unique perspective, I think, as far as the people I’ve spoken to and the people that I’m aware of and familiar with in the environmental community, not a lot of people that I’'m familiar with and have interviewed thus far have been Mormon. So you have this really unique perspective where you are a Mormon environmentalist and those aren’t two words that go together too often. Hopefully, we are seeing that change more and more, but traditionally people would kind of see that as oxymoronic. I just wonder what you think about that stereotype of the Utah environmentalist as being oxymoronic and why you think this may be changing, and if it is changing. CF: Well, Id really like to see it changed. I grew up Mormon. Was active mostly until about, through our years in Israel. Once we came back here... because we didn’t really go back to... Ed really sort of stopped attending church in Israel. He had to go once in awhile just because that was our community and I was working at the B.Y.U. center. [laughs] in order for me to keep my job, I had to... [laughs] continue attending church. But once we came back to Salt Lake... actually it was in Berkeley that we both, as Ed was studying, he was doing Middle Eastern languages, and studying the Bible with Jacob CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 Milgram who is a Jewish rabbi. They were reading Leviticus and looking at. Even though Milgram was a Jewish rabbi, they were looking at the Bible in a very critical sense, literary criticism. We started applying some of those same views looking at the Book of Mormon which was the work of study that year for Sunday school. The Book of Mormon didn’t hold up so well [laughs] as a... what it claimed to be, let’s put it that way. As we started to see the holes in at least as we perceived them, in the historicity of the Book of Mormon, then sort of everything... that’s sort of a foundation. And everything kind of at least belief-system wise, sort of fell apart. So I tried going to church a little bit when I came back from Israel, but I just felt too hypocritical in going much to the dismay of my parents. We haven’t been to church for almost a good eighteen years I imagine. Nevertheless, that being said, we grew up that way and certainly understand the Mormon viewpoint. One thing I’m sure Ed who has been very much involved and me just a tiny bit, but not so much because of the time involved with school, but one of our goals is to actually get the church to become environmental. I guess it was a little over a year ago, Ed put together an incredible document, a whole actually series of documents on how the church could do that and things are actually progressing in that regard and I’1l let him explain more about that to you because he knows more about it than I do. But we’ve actually got... I think this guy might be a good person for you to interview.... [ don’t know if he would call himself an environmentalist, but he’s actually a business professor at B.Y.U. His name is Don Adelson. He lives here in Salt Lake though, up on the avenues. He is starting to put together a study of what a cost-benefit would be of changing all the church buildings to have solar and geothermal energy to run the buildings. And that’s, hopefully, going to start this fall and be completed by about a year 10 CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 from now. That‘s something Ed has been working on with him and he’ll have more to tell you about that. That’s sort of our ultimate goal. It’s kind of in one sense we feel sort of, I won’t say uncomfortable, a little bit shy in asking the church to do this when we’re not members in good standing. And yet, it’s something that is so... we realize the impact the church could have on the West, but worldwide even. We found out a couple of years ago that the church is the largest buyer of furniture in the nation outside of the U.S. Government to furnish all of their church buildings. [laughs] Yeah, it’s amazing. The church could have a huge influence. And I think, just as Bryon talked about, I don’t know if you were at his... the talk he gave when they had that panel... that was really an interesting thing because there is, certainly environmentalism and church beliefs are not antagonistic. Lots of what Brigham said and what the early church leaders said about the land go hand-in-hand with environmental pursuits and yet, you’re right, environmentalist and Mormon do not have very synonymous terms. It was interesting... I was listening on the radio a couple of days ago they had a repeat show on Radio West of Amy Irving and her book 7respass and she was talking about the mentality of the Mormon rancher down in Monticello. How it was so antienvironmentalist and yet these people love the land. I haven’t read her book yet, but it seems like there should be common ground there. She made a point during her talk with Doug Fabrizio that, I think, there is room for environmentalists to compromise as well as the ranchers. Somehow we’ve got to bridge that gap. RD: You just said you think there’s room for environmentalists to compromise, from both sides. As you see it, what do you think that room is? 11 CARROL FIRMAGE CF: 4 JUNE 2008 That’s a difficult issue. I think so many times environmentalists, and they are certainly perceived this way by the people who live in rural areas, they are sort of upper middle class folks who live along the Wasatch Front who go to southern Utah or wherever to recreate, they’re there for a few hours on the weekend and then they leave to go back home and yet they want it to stay the same and not change. They want the land to be there for their, some of them for their ATVs and motorbikes, but others for hiking or biking or whatever. And yet, the people who live down there see the land as a way for them to make a living and so they view it in a different light and I think the people on the Wasatch Front have to recognize that it is a place where people make their livelihood. Now that doesn’t mean that they have the right to trash it or to destroy it or change it unrecognizably. So somehow there has to be a compromise worked out between both sides on how it can be managed sustainably but both can be able to use it. It’s tough. [laughs] RD: It’s been going on for how long now? CF: Yeah, [laughs] but I think the first step is to realize that actually the goals of both of these groups are in essence the same and that is preserving the land and hopefully... I was watching a show last night on TV that was kind of interesting. It was on Channel 7 something like America’s Lost Landscape: the Tall-Grass Prairie. They were talking about the mindset that pioneers and settlers came with was that a wild landscape was, not evil, but was not the way the land should be, it had to be changed and tamed by man. Their mindset was that a place could not be left wild. It had to be cultivated in order to be obviously useful, but in order to be good land it had to be under cultivation. In some sense they were taking away its evil or bad aspects by changing it. I think a lot of 12 CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 southern Utah farmers and ranchers probably still have that same mindset. It hasn’t changed. And maybe their mindset needs to change slightly. It was interesting some of the farmers now in the Midwest have part of their land going back to tall-grass prairie and it’s co-existing with the cultivated. I thought well can we somehow do that here. Not that we have tall-grass prairie here, but in another sense is there a way to make a land... and they had Aldo Leopold’s daughter on and she was talking about how he changed the land that he bought back to, land that was still fruitful, but in a different way. RD: I’m curious. Your program at the University of Utah, the graduate program called Environmental Humanities. Could you mention, what is your relationship with that graduate program? How did you think that may in some way and alter and form your worldview of environmentalism? What were your conceptions or preconceptions going in to the program? CF: Well, going into the program, I guess... My reading on my own had sort of been in the direction of what we read in our classes. So I had felt like it would, like the program would give me a good base, a good foundation, a good grounding in a lot of these ideas which I feel we are going to need to have as our world changes climatically and I think it will probably affect how society changes somewhat because I see change coming definitely and I felt like understanding our environment better and maybe even the concept of wilderness and the environment would help me especially if I teach. It would help me be able to give my students more of a basis or a foundation on which to go forward and make the change. I think it’s probably that this generation coming up, my kid’s age that is going to have to do a lot of the changing. I guess that’s one reason why I 13 CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 went into the program... to get more of a foundation... I feel like I had more of a good basis on which to... well I just want an education on these issues. RD: Would you mind talking about the project you are working on and also talk about the way in which you see the project interacting and maybe how you see it working in a larger environmental frame. CF: My project sort of grew out of... we’re doing some work for the Hemmingway Foundation which is to try and start a community here within Salt Lake City that sort of takes a second look on how we live and how the average family can make small changes and go to bigger ones as we grow... to live more sustainably. A lot of that requires thinking about where things come from. Where does your electricity come from when you turn on the light? When you think about that do you really need that light on? Just really basic, practical things like that and part of our project is changing our backyard into a vegetable garden and I decided to base my project on that, on the food part of it because I needed to narrow it in some manner. As we look at the future, I think one interesting thing that had a tremendous impact on both me and Ed was a movie called 7he Power of Community. It was about the process that happened in Cuba of all places. When the Russians pulled out their support for Cuba, they pulled out all of their oil and overnight, Cuba’s oil was turned off, so they had to come up with different ways of functioning. This movie shows how places, people in Havana as well as in the countryside suddenly had... they didn’t have food imports anymore from Russia. They suddenly had to start growing most of their own food. They somehow succeeded. It’s a really... it’s a hopeful documentary. Ed and I watched that and said maybe there is hope for us because I think we are... just the last couple of months, the gas prices have shown 14 CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 we’re coming to that point ourselves as well. In just doing the little bit of history that I have... even during World War II, 40 percent of our nation’s produce was grown by people in their backyards. We felt like that was a really important part of our project and we’ve turned almost half of our backyard into a vegetable garden and we’re starting to figure out how to grow some of our own food. So that’s basically my project writing about that. And the personal story, and then also bringing in the history. As I’'m out there, I’ve been thinking as I’m planting my vegetables in May, I’m thinking about the pioneers arriving on July 24™ and having this baked earth. Here am I adding bags of compost to it, but they didn’t have bags of compost to add to it. I guess they had manure. But the soil would have been clay, complete clay. Within like two weeks, they had eighty-six acres plowed and planted and that’s just incredible to me. I think our whole yard is not quite a quarter of an acre and we’ve got a tiny fraction of it, and I think how much work that’s been. And so, I started thinking about these things. My gosh, that would have been a huge undertaking. One experiment I want to do... he said they had corn two inches high within two weeks and so one of my experiments is on July 24" I’'m going to go out there and plant some corn and see if I have corn two inches high in two weeks [laughs]. I’'m also going to bring sort of the history which has been prompted by the project for my fellowship and that’s the history of the water development on the east side of the Salt Lake Valley. RD: Can you tell me more about that? CF: Sure, it’s going to be a web site that’s hosted by Marriott Library which is part of the Western Waters Digital Library. There are several universities involved and each university has their particular water shed. There’s a university in Washington that has like 15 CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 the Snake River drainage. I’'m not sure if it’s the University of Washington or not. I don’t remember. Then there’s one that has... there’s like four and [ don’t remember them all. Anyway, Marriott’s going to be hosting the Great Basin. Peter Goss and Craig Denton-Peter Goss is from the architecture department and Craig Denton is from the communications department--were given a grant for something to put together photographs and sort of tell the story of water development along the east side. So the drainages that go from City Creek to Little Cottonwood Canyon to the Jordan River. How that was developed in the Salt Lake Valley. I was given to them as their research fellow and so I’ve been finding old photographs as well as historical information on how the water has been developed as the population has grown in the Salt Lake Valley. That web site.... So I’'m writing all of the historical text for the web site. What we’re hoping to do is have a web site where you draw your mouse over a drainage, say you draw it over Millcreek Canyon and up will pop up information on the mills that were on it, the first mill was just over here on the S-curve. That was the very first mill in the valley. It was put in by John Neff who Neff’s Canyon is named after so it’s all very fascinating stuff. So that’s that project. I don’t know how long it will take Peter and Craig are doing modern-day pictures and then we’re going to have historical photographs interspersed as well that will pop up over each drainage hopefully. So that’s I guess kind of been the catalyst for thinking about historically what happened in the valley as far as food production goes because water is integrally part of that. Hopefully, the web site will start to be built this fall, but our contact at Marriott ended up leaving the job a couple of months ago, so it’s kind of in flux right now, but I’m still working on the text through the summer. 16 CARROL RD: FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 Is there anything else you want to discuss that we didn’t get to? CF: Not really. I don’t think so. RD: Can I just ask... you’re getting more and more interested in food production which is getting to be more and more of a mainstream concern. You’re finding articles in New York Times, you’re finding like Michael Pollan is one of the best sellers on the New York Times best-seller list and that’s primarily what he writes about, so does Barbara Kingsolver, so I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about what you see happening in your community as far as concern with food and production of food. CF: What I’d like to see... I’'m older than you, but I remember when I was a kid, a lot of people had backyard gardens and where Ed grew up, the house he was in down by where the Cottonwood Mall used to be, he said everybody in the neighborhood had a pretty good size backyard garden and a lot of people had chickens, a lot of people still did a lot of their own food production. A fair amount of people in our neighborhood did too. I don’t remember anyone having chickens, but I remember a lot of people having vegetable gardens and every fall people canned their own food and it was a way of life, we’ve really lost and I think we’ve lost a connection to what we eat and through that a connection to the land because food is one of the most visceral connections we have, and especially to... in one sense, when you eat something, you become a part of where that food was produced. So if you eat grapes from Chili, it’s not like eating grapes from your backyard and I don’t think, especially today, a lot of people and especially kids understand where our food comes from. And so, I think, Michael Pollan has really hit on a lot of interesting issues when he looks at... and his latest book /n Defense of Food looks at just going back to real food that’s uh processed and stuff that comes from who 15 CARROL FIRMAGE 4 JUNE 2008 knows where now. I did run across an interesting article in the New Yorker on line where a fellow was talking about the people who call themselves “localvores” who eat only locally. He was thinking it’s a lot more complicated than that. He was talking about... at least if you look at the carbon footprint... that’s a whole other kind of ball game... he was saying if... he was taking for instance, if you lived in London and you bought some fresh roses, they probably either come from Holland or from Kenya. He said you would think that the ones coming to London from Holland would have the lower carbon footprint, but in actuality the ones coming from Kenya take six times less the amount of carbon to produce because the ones grown in Holland are grown in a greenhouse which takes incredible amounts of energy to keep warm or cool depending on the weather. The ones grown in Kenya are just grown out in fields with very little fertilizer and so pretty much the only carbon used is getting them from Kenya to London which is a lot less than bringing them from Holland. It can get incredibly complicated. And of course people have been trading stuff for thousands of years. [ mean you’ve got the whole Silk Road and spices that have been traded from the Far East forever. So I’'m not getting into all the... you can only eat stuff that comes from a hundred miles of where you live, but I think it is important to understand where your food comes from and I think growing some of it yourself is connecting you more to the land where you live and in your own backyard. I, for one, have loved the time I spent out in my backyard working in my own little plot. RD: Is there anything you want to add? CF: 1 don’t think so that I can think of. END OF INTERVIEW 18