Dear Friends,

We kick off this week’s Fallon Forum with Mark Clipsham, a Story County architect creating innovative strategies for sustainable living. When it comes to economics, America needs a seven-generations ideology instead of our current failed model of constant growth and endlessly bigger profit margins.

Mark Clipsham

Not only is the conventional GDP framework simply lining the pockets of the already disgustingly wealthy, it’s steering humanity and this spaceship we call Earth down a dead-end road to unparalleled environmental chaos.

Writes Mark, “Energy is the thread that ties all our problems together into one knot. We need to cut the knot. We’re devolving further and further into techno-barbarism. I don’t want to live in Star Wars.”

We also talk with Dr. Charles Goldman about how Americans love conspiracy theories, and how speculation about the real cause of the COVID-19 crisis is no exception. We’ve seen that from US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), who suggested the coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese bioweapons facility.

And you thought the Chinese were only trying to poison us with lead-tainted toys!

Some of the concerns raised by conspiracy theorists are worth noting. Here’s this quote from Sayer Ji of GreenMedInfo — the first part is crazy talk, but the second part is potentially prescient, should restrictions on freedom and liberty persist beyond a reasonable deadline:

Dr. Charles Goldman

“Whether a biological weapon, or naturally occurring virus, or not a virus at all (but an epidemic of false testing), this crisis is being us [sic] as an opportunity to accelerate a number of agendas which stand in direct opposition to your sovereignty, well-being, ability to make a living, and your basic human and civil rights, and have been, in some cases, decades in the making.”

For my part, I’m trusting the wisdom and guidance of my friends in the medical profession, like Dr. MarkAlain Dery, an infectious disease physician on the front lines of caring for coronavirus patients in New Orleans who joined us on our March 17 program. But at some point — hopefully soon — we’re going to move beyond crisis mode, beyond social isolation, and back to “normalcy,” which of course as noted in my conversation with Mark Clipsham, presents its own problems.

In related news, Charles and I also discuss one example of how powerful interests hope to use COVID-19 for their own gain: privatizing the US Postal Service.

That’s not a heavy rain you hear, folks. That’s the sound of FedEx and UPS drooling profusely at the prospect of privatized mail delivery.

Kathy Byrnes with Ed Fallon in one of Birds & Bees Urban Farm’s sixty garden beds.

Finally, Kathy Byrnes and I discuss farm-produce waste in light of restaurant and school closings for coronavirus — with a shout-out to restaurants that don’t offer HUGE portions and who use recyclable or compostable take-out containers and bags. Writes Kathy, “At Birds & Bees Urban Farm, our near zero-waste lifestyle includes kitchen scraps to chickens or for compost, pruned branches for firewood to cook with, and sourcing scrap materials for raised beds and other structures.”

Click here to listen to this week’s podcast.

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Ed Fallon