https://hightowerlowdown.org/
In hopes of securing my former boss and a colleague from Jim Hightower’s Texas Department of Agriculture for a panel discussion of local water quality issues, regulation, and enforcement here in the Guadalupe County area, in Mass one recent Sunday I began to think about how I first knew about Jim Hightower, and what a wonderfully great learning experience his Texas Department of Agriculture was. During my period of working with Hightower and his administration I met: Allen Savory, Peggy Maddox, now of the great ecological effort–Kids On the Land, Dr. Darryl Birkenfeld–currently Executive Director, Ogallala Commons, U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela, was around Ralph Yarborough and Jesse Jackson a couple of times, worked with Gus Townes and Jim Jones, civil rights activists, Barbara Meister who had previously been with Prairiefire Rural Action, Nancy Simcox and Carmen Pacheco, Farmworker Right-to-Know specialists, and Renee Hicks (sp.), a wonderfully intelligent and competent lawyer with Attorney General Jim Mattox, Travis County Judge Sam Biscoe who was TDA’s General Counsel while I was there, and many other astute bureaucrats, politicians, and handlers of very high energy, intelligence, purpose and integrity. (Note below in the Wikipedia piece that they were human and did have some flaws. Moreover, I was one of “they”, and as Director of Pest Management, I succumbed to pressure from on high, and funded an Integrated Pest Management Association not worthy of being funded and despite the strong recommendation to deny funding by an elite internal committee.)
Hightower’s TDA was the best place I ever worked! ,,, (Despite this, I don’t believe I would have survived after the election in which Hightower lost to Rick Perry because my modus operandi was viewed–as my good friend George Ellis, Hightower’s Chief of Staff characterized it—as being too overtly radical and subversive.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory
https://www.facebook.com/KidsOnTheLand/
http://ogallalacommons.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filemon_Vela_Sr.
https://clintonwhitehouse2.archives.gov/PCSD/Publications/suscomm/suscoc-am.html
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4226246?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://deohs.washington.edu/faculty/simcox_nancy
https://www.statesman.com/NEWS/20160924/Judge-Sam-Biscoe-served-Travis-County-well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Hightower
………………………………………..
My first cousin Patricia Fanning, a journalist in D.C. with the National Observer and with other news media entities in the 1970s purchased Jim Hightower’s home in ca. 1973. Then about 1973/74, fellow graduate student Jim Price came into our study area in McCarty Hall at the University of Florida and plopped down on my desk, Hard, Tomatoes, Hard Times which resulted from Hightower’s involvement in the 1970s Agribusiness Accountability Project, saying, “This guy is crazier than you Paul!” [I was already seriously questioning the authority and credibility of our Land Grant University System and USDA because of their promotion of the use of ecologically-destructive biocides. I do primarily credit some supervisors and coworkers in a USDA biocontrol laboratory in College Station, ecology courses in entomology, wildlife science, and range science, introduction to concepts of integrated pest management, and a leftist toxicologist, Dr. Fred Plapp, who in addition to toxicology and an introduction to pesticide contamination/pollution and biomagnification in the Brazos Valley, taught me of the charge of Nixon’s (or Ruckelshaus’) newly-established Environmental Protection Agency … for my strong positions concerning industrial agriculture and pesticides (and later what I call “PEACE/Positively Ethical Applied Community Ecology” which was influenced by leaders like David Pimentel, Archie Carr, H.T. Odum, Herman Daly, E.O Wilson, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Fred Kirschenman, Miguel Altieri, Helmut Haberl, and many others.)
http://www.sjsu.edu/people/scot.guenter/courses/ams1b/s2/hardtimes.hardtomatoes.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ruckelshaus
After I completed my doctoral work from the University of Florida (and squeezed in a couple of years of horticultural field work with my Uncle L.C. “Peggy” Martin in the Winter Garden of Texas), I worked for seven years as primarily pasture/forage entomologist at the Coastal Plains Experiment Station in Tifton, Georgia and at the National Beef Cattle Research Center, Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brasil. Upon returning home to the Martin family farm near Stockdale, Texas in 1983, one of my county extension agent friends with whom I had officed and roomed while working on my Masters Degree at Texas A&M University called me and during the conversation blurted out, “And Paul, one thing which has changed here is that we have one CRAZY! Commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture.”
Three years later as a result of some commonality of desires for radical change in our agriculture (and whole world) systems, and as a result of a connection of a TDA administrator and my friend Dr. Miguel Angel Altieri, agroecologist, University of California-Berkeley, I went to work for Hightower’s TDA as agricultural integrated-pest-management specialist, then (Acting) Director of Pest Management, and finally as Sustainable Agriculture Coordinator.
Hightower’s TDA was very innovative in terms of pushing for: sustainable agriculture, farmworker justice, small farmers, organic certification, healthy nutrition, pesticide law-enforcement, Farmers Markets, and a rainbow coalition of workers at & collaborators with the Texas Department of Agriculture … and serving as a model nationally and internationally for efforts toward sustainability and solidarity (i.e., social justice, humaneness, and ecological sanity). (The Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, Rick Perry, and his administration which followed Jim Hightower, and administrations like the current one of Sid Miller, have done significant damage to the progressive programs established by Jim Hightower … and they have set Texas back in terms of regeneration and conservation of resilient, sustainable community.) [And of course Donald Trump has not helped one bit in holistic-/comprehensive-/profound-efforts to appropriately live as Rice University’s Timothy Morton suggests we should–“in solidarity with humankind and with nonhuman people.”]
7S’s / VV->^^
pbm
