About All This
The Story
Welcome to my word warehouse, an amalgam of a lifetime of muckraking and merrymaking, mostly from the wilds of Walden, Vermont. This site is a blend of the old (Food & Water and RegenVT) and the new (Amid the Unrest), and seeks to weave experiences, lessons learned, and aspirations into a narrative that is my life. And here we are.
Food & Water
Founded in 1986 by the late, great Dr. Wally Burnstein, this mighty little outfit brought the nuclear and food industries to their knees when they made the absurd calculation to blend their interests in what’s called food irradiation. Wally was having none of it. Fresh off his victory to stop uranium mining in New Jersey, and still practicing as a family physician, he brought friends like Tony Mazzocchi, Sister Miriam MacGillis, Thomas Berry, Bob Alvarez, Danny Goldberg, Joe Wagoner, Rosalie Bertell, and Alice Stewart (and others) together to call bullshit on the push to sterilize the food supply by exposing it to nuclear waste products (cesium-137). No, really.
I joined Wally in 1988, thus beginning the most profound years of my life, those precious few eight years that we had together before Wally’s passing in 1996. The bond and the joy we had waging impossible campaigns – and winning! – against corporate behemoths (Tyson, Hormel, Perdue, and so many more…) was nothing short of sublime. We were fearless, and we laughed all of the time, even on the darkest days when it felt like everything – and everyone – was lining up against us. There are so many stories yet to be told, and I’m looking forward to telling them here.
RegenVT
This was a flare-up and flame-out effort, unfortunately – shooting for the moon (calling for a statewide transition to organic – and only organic – agriculture) and crashing into the realities of the great inertia that defines and protects Vermont’s monopoly agriculture, from the media to the so-called regulators, and from the nonprofits cashing dairy industry checks to politicians doing the same. We made a tremendous case for the needed organic transition – just see for yourself here. But, in the end, we were sadly divided from within, our radicalism leaving us vulnerable and outflanked by the circling of the doubters and, worse, the vengeance of the enablers, those whose livelihoods depend on the story remaining the same. Read it, you’ll see. But this is where you’ll also find my new screams into the miserable abyss that is Vermont’s industrial agriculture addiction, as well as new commentaries aimed at moving the state forward.
Amid the Unrest
A child of the pandemic, this project arose out of a series of profiles, essays and reflections written during the early, unrestful days of the still-ongoing pandemic. All at once, everything was different, as we found ourselves – on so many fronts – amid the unrest. It wasn’t just Covid, but also the existential threats of the faux-populism (read: fascism) taking hold in our country and elsewhere, the anti-science and anti-woke regressivism, the planetary upheavals manifested in our own lives and livelihoods being threatened by floods, winds and rising temperatures, and the accelerating – and tragic – gaps between the have and have-nots, creating, by design, more “have-nots” than “haves.”
Which is a long way of saying, Amid the Unrest is the new blog, written in the spirit of the old Food & Water Journal, where I roamed free in the wild expanse of being and writing. You’ve been warned.
Michael Colby is the president and publisher of Food & Water.
Food & Water is a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate and activate the public on matters of the human and ecological struggles. Founded by Dr. Wally Burnstein in 1986, Food & Water has led activist campaigns, published periodicals and acted as a think-tank for muckraking and merrymaking of various kinds, sizes and flavors.
Food & Water’s creative and bold national campaign against food irradiation stopped this threatening and misguided technology from taking hold. In an editorial attacking the group’s success, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “The industry seems to be cowed by the hardball tactics of an outfit calling itself Food & Water.”
In the book, Food Safety, in which various food movements were chronicled, Food & Water’s successes in stopping food irradiation were described as follows: “A willing David to the food industry’s Goliath, Food & Water has almost singlehandedly blocked the commercialization of food irradiation.”
Colby was the editor of the group’s quarterly magazine, the Food & Water Journal, a leading forum for creative and strategic advocacy, provocative and inspiring essays, and the commingling of the arts and activism.
His writing and activism has been featured in hundreds of media venues, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Newsweek, ABC’s 20/20, the CBS Evening News, and the Wall Street Journal.
For more than 30 years, Colby has been involved in both agricultural production and activism, partnering with his wife, Stacy Burnstein, on a vegetable farm and maple sugaring operation (Walden Maple Co.).
In addition to founding and editing the Food & Water Journal, Colby was the editor of the Vermont monthly, Wild Matters, a columnist for Vermont’s alternative weekly, Seven Days, and a contributing editor of the book, Fatal Harvest.
Colby has been a lifetime participant in acts of creative nonviolence, including civil disobedience, primarily regarding issues of war & peace, industrial agriculture and the protection of wilderness.
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