Hot on the heels of Hercules’ recent victory over Wal-Mart, Mark Morford on the intended greening of “this most voracious and powerful of low-end, trashy retailers.”
Wal-Mart has already committed to selling 100-percent sustainable fish in its food markets. They are already experimenting with green roofs, corn-based plastics and green energy (which is now used to power four Canadian stores, for a total of 39,000 megawatts, amounting to what some estimate is the single biggest purchase of renewable energy in Canadian history). Is this remarkable? Groundbreaking? Utterly confounding? Well, yes and no.
The motive may ultimately be profit rather than a genuine interest in eco-health, and their move to sell organic food may undermine the critical “small and local” ethos, and there may still be a dozen other reasons to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart, but you gotta admit there’s something very wonderful in this, “like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes.”
Walmart isn’t going to be the only company to undermine the small and local theos. Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and the myriad of other large natural foods markets are also going to contribute to the demise of small organic farms. It won’t be profitable or efficient for these markets to have contracts with 50, 100, or 500 small farms to supply them with organic products. The small organic farms are going to turn into the corporate farms that now exist here in the US. Can we trust a corporation to live up to standards of organic farming?