Show Description/Notes
Jason, Rob, and Asher take a tour of New Caledonia, California’s Central Valley, Bhutan, and Cuba to uncover the ins and outs of industrialism, especially as it has been applied to agriculture. Along the way they riff on how the hell we can escape from an -ism that completely engulfs us.
Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.
Sources/Links/Notes:
- Tom Murphy “does the math” on declining wild mammal mass.
- Understanding the primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary sectors of the economy.
- USDA graphic and statistics on the scale of family farms.
- Our World in Data: “Farm Size and Productivity”.
- Video clip from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
- Hossain, S., Jami, A.T. (2023). “Opportunities and Challenges in Sustainable Development and Governance in South Asia: Case Study of Bhutan.” In: Wu, HH., Liu, WY., Huang, M.C. (eds) Moving Toward Net-Zero Carbon Society. Springer Climate.
- Arch Ritter, “Can Cuba Recover from its De-Industrialization?”.
- Julia Wright, “The Little-Studied Success Story of Post-Crisis Food Security in Cuba: Does Lack of International Interest Signify Lack of Political Will?” International Journal of Cuban Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2012, pp. 130–53.
Transcript
Rob Dietz I'm Rob Dietz. Jason Bradford I'm Jason Bradford. Asher Miller And I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town where Jimmy Dean and Mayor McCheese sponsor your local school lunch program. Melody Allison Hey, this is Crazy Town producer Melody Allison. Thanks for listening. Here in Season 6, we're exploring escape route pathways that just might get us out of Crazy Town. In today's episode, Jason, Rob, and Asher are escaping industrialism. And here's a quick warning. Sometimes this podcast uses swear words. Language! If you like what you're hearing, please let some friends know about Crazy Town. Now on to the show. Jason Bradford You guys know that I used to be this kind of gallivanting botanist? Rob Dietz Yeah, it's like your glory days. Sure. Jason Bradford I should. I should put it on my LinkedIn account. Asher Miller I love that title -- gallivanting botanist. Can you put that on a business card? Rob Dietz That would make a lot more students interested in botany in college, that's for sure. Jason Bradford Yeah, I had a series of grants and stuff and National Geographic, bla, bla, bla. Anyway. . . Asher Miller La di da Rob Dietz Look at that name dropping! Asher Miller Exactly. MacArthur Genius! Jason Bradford Not yet. Anyhow. So I went looking for this plant because I go to museums, and I look at the specimens in museums. And there's this one species, it was only known from like these collections in 1800s from the single mountain in New Caledonia. Rob Dietz Basically, you're the biological equivalent of Indiana Jones. He's archeological, you got like the hat and whip. Jason Bradford Pretty close. Asher Miller You have a whip? Jason Bradford I'm not saying the based his character off of me, but anyhow. . . I had a plant press. Anyway. . . And I had clippers. So, it was cool Rob Dietz Instead of a whip -- Asher Miller You had clippers Jason Bradford It was good. Anyway, so I'm like, can I find this again? Because it happens. Like I've found stuff -- like undescribed species. I found stuff that haven't been seen in a long time, right, you know, 100 years or more. Asher Miller Bigfoot. Jason Bradford That kind of stuff, but plants and trees. No one really cares. Anyhow, I go to this place and I drive to this mountain. And the entire mountain is essentially being whittled away by a mining company. And I drive up this mountain. And the only thing left is ditch weeds because it's this huge road. It's all dirt. It's just like -- Asher Miller Where was this? Jason Bradford New Caledonia. Asher Miller Okay. Jason Bradford It was on the on the on the east coast of New Caledonia. Anyway, they have just basically spent the last, I don't know how many decades, harvesting this mountain. And you've heard of mountaintop removal of coal? This is just mountain removal. Rob Dietz Full mountain. Asher Miller The whole mountain is gone? Rob Dietz We don't want to take the top. Jason Bradford Yeah because the whole thing is just rich in ores, nickel, and cobalt, and silver, and all these kinds. . . Asher Miller So my guess is you didn't find this plant there. Jason Bradford No. It was rather upsetting. Asher Miller Thank God. They saved one specimen in some museum somewhere. Jason Bradford In Paris. Yeah. Rob Dietz Well, the crazy thing about the mountain top and full mountain removal is we also do that in the valleys. Right? Asher Miller Yeah, it's from the mountains high to the valleys low. Let's rip the shit out of the planet. Rob Dietz I don't know if removal is the right word. But you and I, Jason, we used to work in the Central Valley of California. Jason Bradford Yeah. Rob Dietz Man, I don't know anybody who's been there -- you want to talk about an altered landscape. And it's not just that we've turned it into, you know, fields of monocrop farms. But the scale of that sucker. . . I mean, miles and miles in every direction. It's just all altered. Jason Bradford Yeah, the fields are huge. Like you go out into one of these fields and it might be a 100 acre field, but it's part of a farm that might be 2,000 acres. And it's just hard to imagine. I remember one time taking a map of the farm and putting it over San Francisco. Asher Miller Oh that's interesting. Jason Bradford Like, "Oh." Rob Dietz The farm is bigger than San Francisco. Asher Miller Awesome. Did you give you a moment of pride? A sense of power? Jason Bradford Oh, it is unbelievable. Rob Dietz And then we hatched an ecological restoration plan to dig out the valley, take it over to New Caledonia, and put it back on a mountain. Asher Miller Did it work? Rob Dietz Yeah, it totally worked. Jason Bradford In Silicon Valley a lot of those minerals are there, so. . . Rob Dietz Yeah, you get another National Geographic grant for that work. Asher Miller I'm sure you put it in a proposal for that, right? Jason Bradford Yeah. Asher Miller Well you know, there's this expression, right? The industrial revolution, we've all been taught it in school. It's used to describe the period that started in the 19th century where we kind of supercharged modernity and all the progress that came with it. But if you live in Crazy Town like we do, right, you look at that -- People think of the Industrial Revolution as this huge wonderful, generally wonderful, thing, right? It is progress. When you live in Crazy Town like us, you might tend to see more of the dark side. You know that. And that's what you guys are describing. Jason Bradford Yeah, what happened to my tree? Asher Miller Exactly. Describing that a little bit. My favorite factoid that sort of describes or encapsulates the dark side of industrialism comes from our good friend Tom Murphy, who's also been on this podcast. He did the math for us in a post that we actually published on resilience.org. So in 1800, right? About the started the Industrial Revolution. There was about 80 kilograms of wild mammal for each 50 kilograms of human. Jason Bradford And humans are mammals, so that's why they're doing it that way. Asher Miller Exactly. Thank you for explaining that. I appreciate that. Jason Bradford Yeah. taxonomy Asher Miller So as Tom shared, 80 kilograms is about the size of a jaguar. Jason Bradford So each human had about a jaguar. Asher Miller Each of us had a jaguar. Rob Dietz I want a Jaguar. They've got pretty spots. Asher Miller You mean the car or the --? Rob Dietz No, the animal. Asher Miller Because the car is way more than 80 kilograms. Well today there's 2.5 kilograms of wild mammal. Rob Dietz You guys remember when we did that episode on how all the cars are named after things disappeared? There's another one: The Jaguar. Asher Miller Yeah. So we've gone from 80 kilograms down to 2.5 kilograms, right? That's the size of a small house cat, a small chicken. Jason Bradford I know how to get this ratio rebalanced. You remember the episode we did on the dehumanism manifesto? Asher Miller Oh, yeah. Jason Bradford And turning us into marmosets, right? Asher Miller Oh right. Jason Bradford So we get us down to like, you know, a couple 100 grams or so. Rob Dietz You're the rebalancing guy. Asher Miller So you're trying to do that with mountains and valleys. And you're trying to do that with you know, our relationship with kilograms of mammals. Rob Dietz Just to not disappoint our listeners, we're gonna have better escape routes than this crap that we're spouting right now. Later. Jason Bradford And eugenics? Is that what you're saying. Better than eugenics. Rob Dietz Better than that. Asher Miller What can be better than that? Jason Bradford Okay, so we're talking about industrialism, okay? That's what this episode is about. And so let's start by some just basic definitions. If you look it up in the dictionary on the computer, which is what you do nowadays. Asher Miller I just ask Chat GPT. Jason Bradford Of course, you could do that, too. It might get it wrong, but it's going to be close. It's typically defined as a socio-economic system based on mechanization of manufacturing, as opposed to, or rather than agriculture and crafts. Rob Dietz Yeah well, I think a lot of people could see it that way. It's sort of this dichotomy between a factory and the city life versus the farm and the rural life. But I think that definition is pretty damn narrow. And in fact, if you look at agriculture, you know, as we were just talking about the Central Valley, it has become industrial. Jason Bradford Yeah, it didn't disappear. Rob Dietz Right. And I think that's where we should focus. Our critique of industrialism is in the sector of agriculture, and looking at escape routes from industrialism in light of that. Jason Bradford I think that's entirely appropriate because industrialism leads to this great reduction in the labor of what are called the primary sectors of the economy. Agriculture as the key primary sector. Mining would be as well. So you know, we talked about mining and agriculture in our stories of destruction early on. And what that allows is then more labor into the secondary sector of the economy, which would be the manufacturing. But then also as economies, quote unquote, "mature or develop," then there's even more labor goes into the services, you know, the tertiaries, sales, finance. . . That side of the economy. Rob Dietz Right. Or what David Graeber refers to as bullshit jobs. Jason Bradford Right. And if you look at GDP have of nations in the more advanced, you know, that's where a lot of this quote unquote "value" is. The GDP is in these tertiary sectors, and maybe even what are called quaternary like education and research. Asher Miller Right. So the further you get away from sort of the primary sectors, right, the more money you actually get paid. Jason Bradford Exactly. Rob Dietz So basically, what you're saying is when we work on this podcast, we're in the quaternary sector. Jason Bradford Yes. Asher Miller And we're getting paid some serious big bucks. Especially you, Jason. Rob Dietz But every once in a while Jason goes out in the field. Asher Miller Slumming it. Rob Dietz I helped him weed one time. Jason Bradford That one time was nice. Rob Dietz So, I was in the primary sector for a few minutes there. Jason Bradford Yeah, you dipped your little pinky toe. Asher Miller And we've talked about this sort of ad nauseam. But you know, all of this is only possible through cheap energy to power industrialism, all the machinery that goes behind that, and to replace labor in the primary and secondary sectors, right? So if it wasn't for cheap energy, we wouldn't have cheap food and all the other cheap manufactured goods that we have. And interestingly, food becomes just another manufactured good, right? It's just viewed as a product, rather than like an essential fucking need that if we didn't have, you know, we'd be dead. If you think about the food system, like where's the money in the food system, right? It's probably the quaternary sector of the food system where they're trying to come up with like whiz bang new flavors. You know, how do you turn Cool Ranch Doritos and combine them with, I don't know . . . Taco Bell enchiladas. Jason Bradford There's so many kinds of Doritos nowadays. You know, when we were kids there was like one Doritos. Asher Miller I know, progress. Rob Dietz If I'm not mistaken, sorry for my usual pop culture brain, but I think the Clark Griswold character from "Vacation" was a food additive and flavor specialist. Jason Bradford No way. Was he really? See, the comedians know it's all bullshit. Rob Dietz Yeah. Well, in addition to the cheap energy, I think industrialism also plays into something that is kind of innate in humans. And that's that we're really good at building stuff. Asher Miller And you know, you speak for yourself, man. I can't even put an IKEA set together. Rob Dietz That is true. I helped you put your basketball hoop together one time. Asher Miller You just told me what to do. Rob Dietz But some people, then, are pretty good at building stuff. And even pre-industrially, right? Like the pyramids got built. You had all kinds of ecological disasters. But the thing that's different is that industrialism, the mechanization, the immense power that's densely packed into fossil fuels, of course, has let us take this up to a new level. Jason Bradford Yeah, we've leveled up. Asher Miller Progress. Rob Dietz There's probably not many examples in ancient times of people taking down a mountain with some digging sticks, right. So you know, all you have to do to think about the scale of change, look at the growth of cities in the Middle East, like Dubai. Or look at the Central United States and the conversion of an entire swath of a continent into farmland. Asher Miller If you want to trip out, just go on, you know, Google Earth has this -- I don't know what they call it, but it's basically a way of like tracking through satellite imagery changes and landscapes over time. So looking at some cities in China, for example. It's amazing. Just in the span of you know, since we've had satellite imagery over these places. It's pretty amazing. Rob Dietz Yeah, it's intense. So I mean, that's one of the issues, right? We love building stuff. And the Industrial Revolution and all that came with it has amped that up to a new level. Asher Miller Now, we love to get into the depths of how fucked, you know, the systems are of the modern world, right? What makes us so crazy. We're trying not to do that quite as much. Jason Bradford We're trying to strike a balance. Asher Miller Yeah, but we've got to just try to encapsulate it a little bit. Jason Bradford We gotta stay in our lane a little bit. Asher Miller Yeah. So we're not going to spend a lot of time, but just some interesting factoids, I think, to give us a sense of like how the global food system in this case has changed due to industrialism, right? So we could throw things out like, 10 to 13 calories of hydrocarbons go into every calorie of food that we produce. But let's just look at the number of farms, like statistics around farms in the United States specifically, right? So in 1920, according to census data in 1920, there were six and a half million farms. And the average size of farm was 148 acres. And 100 years later, 2020 -- Rob Dietz Before you give another stat, like how big is that? What's 148 acres? Jason Bradford 148 football fields. Everyone knows football. Rob Dietz Alright. Well, that's helpful. Jason Bradford Yep. Asher Miller That's a lot of land. Rob Dietz That is. That's still pretty -- I mean, even in 1920. Jason Bradford A golf course is about 100 acres. A typical 18 hole golf course. Rob Dietz Okay. Asher Miller So we're talking about six and a half million farms, 140 acres on average. 100 years later, 2.2 million farms. So reduced by a third. And the average size is 444 acres. Rob Dietz That's not reduced by a third that's reduced to 1/3. Asher Miller Sorry that's what I meant to say. Thank you for doing simple math for me. Jason Bradford Big changes. Asher Miller Yeah, big changes. Jason Bradford Now, that doesn't really capture all of the situation because average is going to kind of skew things a little bit, your perspective. Most farms of that 2.2 million, most farms according to USDA records are still considered small family farms. And you know, people have off-farm jobs, they've got a little thing going on. They only make $10,000 a year, or something, and they still qualify as a farm. They may grow some corn and they're small, but it feeds into this industrial scale. Asher Miller Like one buyer basically. Jason Bradford Like Archer Daniels Midland down the street, or whatever, is going to take all their corn and do something with it. So there are huge amounts of consolidation conglomerates in there. And so 90% of farms are categorized as the small family farms, but nearly 67% of "value of production," quote unquote, came from these large scale farms. And that's in terms of dollars, right? It roughly will correspond to acres. Asher Miller So what we're saying is, not only are there far fewer farms, the farm sizes have grown, but the percentage of valuable products, right, the value of what's being produced is actually also even been further consolidated into these larger, bigger farms. Jason Bradford Right. And if you look at, you know, globally, this is the case where if you look at -- I looked at a chart on Our World in Data on farm size related to GDP, and generally if your nation has high GDP, it's going to have large farm sizes. It's almost a perfect correlation. Asher Miller Okay, so then we should have large farm sizes. This is the -- come and get with it everybody. Jason Bradford That's what Our World in Data suggests actually. They have a little editorial side to them. Asher Miller Oh do they? Jason Bradford Oh yeah. Rob Dietz So let me just recap for our listeners: Asher reports really shitty statistics, and then Jason tells you it's way shittier than what he just reported. That's where we are. Jason Bradford So far. Rob Dietz Okay. Jason Bradford We're gonna make a turn eventually. Asher Miller That's a perfect explanation or encapsulation of what this entire podcast is. Rob Dietz That's what we do. And then I come in with some pop culture reference. Asher Miller Six seasons of this. Do we still have listeners? Jason Bradford In Australia we do. Asher Miller Oh, thank God. Yeah. Rob Dietz So all these gloomy stats are just fine. But could we have a real world example? Would that be possible? Jason Bradford Well, when you walk into a contemporary modern grocery store, do you feel how assaulting that is? At every core of your sense of being. Rob Dietz I hate it. Asher Miller I love it. I revel in it. The music, the bright lights, the people walking around with scowls on their faces. It's incredible. Rob Dietz I like that you now do self-checkout in these places. Asher Miller Right. Because you don't have to talk to anybody. Rob Dietz It takes like several more hours for me to get through that as I screw it up every time. Jason Bradford Well, the local Safeway here, you know, goes "Swoosh." The doors open and I grab the cart. I try not to go ever. It's really hard on me. And then you know, I start pushing, and then I like brace myself for it because there's gonna be like a nearly floor-to-ceiling display of mylar balloons of whatever is coming up. It's gonna be Valentine's, it's gonna be Easter, it's gonna be Fourth of July. They're gonna throw some birthday ones in on the side. Rob Dietz Flag day, Groundhog Day, St. Patrick's Day, there's a lot of them. Jason Bradford And I end up picking them up later on the field. Asher Miller Some mylar balloons? Jason Bradford Yeah, somebody's got a quinceañera and the next thing I know, I've got quinceañera mylar balloons all over the field. It's like, it's awful. But what also kills me is that there's warning labels on everything., rght? So we're going to this place to supposedly get the nourishment of life, right? And half of the products in there, especially if you're not on the perimeter of the store, like you go to the interior where the boxes are and stuff, and the BPA laden cans, and the plastic wrap that's probably got you know, forever chemicals in it. Rob Dietz If you eat this Little Debbie, good luck. Jason Bradford Yeah. Is it cancer? Is it heart disease? Is it some neurodegenerative problem we're going to have? I don't know. Is my liver gonna get shot? Are my kidneys gonna, you know, age fast? Whatever it is, I'm like, this is the place you go to eat and die fast. Rob Dietz In fact, they should just start putting a hospital wing right in the Safeway. Asher Miller Well, consolidation is going to lead to that, right? It's a full, what do they call that? Verticalization? Rob Dietz Next season we'll report stats on how countries with the most square footage devoted to combined grocery store hospitals have the highest GDP. Asher Miller Of course they do. Yeah. Not only is it just an overwhelming experience, like you walk into into one of these places and the products there could kill you. I find it incredibly difficult to find food products that don't have 1,000 ingredients in them. Even the most basic thing, right? You think, oh okay, this is just whatever, you know. Rob Dietz Ketchup or something. Asher Miller Yeah. And we've, in my family, we've had a real issue with this. My oldest son, he's allergic to legumes and that includes soy. Jason Bradford And soy is in everything almost. Asher Miller And soy lecithin, in particular. They use it in fucking everything. It's everywhere. Rob Dietz I don't even know what that is. Asher Miller Yeah, it's basically a way of processing fat or binding to fat, or something. Jason Bradford You should go to a food science school. Rob Dietz Yeah, of course. Asher Miller Yeah, you'd get paid a lot of money. Yeah, but the bottom line is even the most basic things have got this stuff in it. And that is industrialization, right? Like, these manufactured processes to like throw the shit together. And a lot of it's just to preserve it, or for a certain texture or flavoring, or whatever that is. Jason Bradford They take the raw product, they discombobulate it into molecules, and then they reassemble in a factory. Asher Miller Yeah, but here we are bitching about this stuff. And I think that, you know, in fairness, trying to be fair and balanced like we are. Rob Dietz Like Fox News. Asher Miller Like a news agency, which we are. Jason Bradford Yes. Asher Miller I want to talk about some of the benefits of all this industrialism. Jason Bradford Okay, let's make a turn to the positive. Asher Miller Okay, so can I share one of my favorite products? Which I learned about through the the great Jon Stewart, who also had a fantastic news program for many years. Jason Bradford Yes, very good news. Asher Miller So, you know, here's him sharing one that came out a number of years ago. Jon Stewart Pancakes and sausage on a stick! On a stick! Finally! The classic taste of chocolate chip, pancake wrapped sausage with the convenience of a stick. Jason Bradford I mean, totally. I mean, it's a logical next iteration. The next step beyond a corndog is not a traditional breakfast food, but this is. Rob Dietz I'm sorry, but I'm picturing you Jason going through those whooshing open doors at the Safeway and every single food is just on a stick hanging off the aisle. Asher Miller I'm picturing him actually just eating a frozen one of those as he walks around, you know, paying for it later because you're so famished. Rob Dietz Look, we're pounding on the retail side of industrial food system here. But how about the manufacturing side? So I used to live in Albuquerque. Jason Bradford I'm so sorry. It was a wildlife refuge at the time. Rob Dietz Don't pound on Albuquerque. Come on. I think "Breaking Bad" already did that to a fine extent. But anyway, when I lived there, I used to bike a lot. It was actually a good biking city, aside from the wind, but some cool places. And there's this big loop ride there around the city that they call the Froot Loop. Asher Miller Oh, and that's a great hearty breakfast cereal. Rob Dietz And that is spelled f-r-o-o-t, the Froot Loop. Jason Bradford Really? Rob Dietz Because the reason is that it used to pass by a General Mills breakfast cereal, used to and still does, passes by this General Mills factory that makes Froot Loops and other really hearty nutritious cereals. Jason Bradford I'd love a tour. Rob Dietz And you could smell the stuff coming off of it. The thing about it, though, I remember thinking like, "Oh, let me look at this place." you know. And I go on Google Earth -- Jason Bradford They got two cans out front. Rob Dietz You're just thinking like, is this . . . this is food? Like, it's just a giant factory with smokestacks and trucks. And it's like -- Jason Bradford Right, right. A parking lot. Rob Dietz What is the relationship between this and eating? Asher Miller At least they're honest. They didn't spell it fruit as in f-r-u-i-t, right? Because that's not actually what it is. It has none of it in it, right? Rob Dietz Yeah. Well, they probably would have been sued if they had actually put that on the box. Rob Dietz This is a message to all you Crazy Townies out there. Sometimes Jason, Asher, and I wish you could be here in the room with us when were riffing on ecomodernist nightmares, the end of capitalism, the collapse of civilization, and lines from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Since you can't be here, maybe we could still be in contact in another way. If you've got a comment about the show, or you want to throw some shade at us, or you've got a question . . . Asher Miller Or you have a suggestion of escape route stuff. Rob Dietz Yeah, maybe you've got a story of your own you want to share. Go over to Apple podcasts or iTunes and leave us a review and write your comment there. In your comment, include your idea, whatever it is, and we'll think about sharing it in an episode. Jason Bradford How's this, "I'll be back!" Is that any good? Rob Dietz Oh my God, that's terrible. Jason Bradford You try it. You try it. Rob Dietz "Get to the chopp-ah!" Rob Dietz We got an email from a fellow named David. He sent us an email called, "News item for Crazy Town podcast. Jason Bradford I love these. Rob Dietz Yeah. So here's his item. He said that in the middle of summer in Adelaide, South Australia. Jason Bradford I'm so glad to have another Australian listener. Thank you Austrailia. Rob Dietz Yeah. So in Adelaide, a city on the edge of the desert, an ice hockey game was being played in a rink in an arena. Asher Miller In the summer. Jason Bradford It's like we'll be doing this in Las Vegas and stuff. No judgement. Rob Dietz But here he says - Asher Miller Do they skate backwards there? Rob Dietz Of course. Yeah. Yeah, they only can turn to the left, yeah. So he said it all went terribly wrong as some carbon monoxide from the Zamboni - Jason Bradford They have Zambonis down there? Rob Dietz Yeah, to clean the ice. It basically poisoned the place. 38 people went to the hospital. It's a great Crazy Town story. Asher Miller I'm glad to know it's not just isolated to the United States. Jason Bradford I heard about Adelaide first through Paul Kelly and The Messengers. Great song about Adelaide. So I want to throw that out, too. Rob Dietz Well, maybe . . . maybe, you know, rugby is an Australian sport for a good reason. There's no ice necessary. Jason Bradford No ice. Rob Dietz I mean, there's other kinds of hospitalizations, but not from carbon monoxide poisoning. Jason Bradford Let's stick with rugby, people. Asher Miller Okay, so we're gonna try to take the Marvin Harris Memorial lens of doom, and look through it at industrialism. Rob Dietz Alright, well you got to remind us of Marvin Harris's cultural materialism then. Asher Miller Yeah. So got our attentive listeners could probably recite this themselves because we've talked about this quite a bit. And over this season we're going to be doing it on the regular, so I will try to be very brief about it. So Marvin Harris, anthropologist. Cultural materialism, basically a theory of how change basically happens in societies or how they're formed. And there's basically three levels involved. There's infrastructure, structure, and superstructure. So infrastructure is the physical world. It's not just roads and buildings and bridges, the way people tend to think about infrastructure now. It's the physical world, even things like food, right? And land. Structure is how we organize ourselves, our economic system, our political systems, you know, social, all that stuff. And then superstructure is our belief systems. So we're going to look at industrialism, and particularly industrialism in terms of the food system, through each of these kind of structures, infrastructure, structure, and superstructure. Jason Bradford So yeah, let's start off with then the infrastructure of industrial agriculture. We'll just use that as our lens with the food system. It's amazing if you like go on to farms and you look at how they're actually managed. And we're sitting in a studio right now that overlooks farms. And we can watch this. And actually, you know, we've been watching this particular field near us for years. And what you notice is, the equipment rolls in, and it's huge. It's like nobody is here, and then a crew will show up. And they'll there'll be trucking in equipment, or the big tractor will drive on the road. And they come in, and then they'll be working with this huge machine for hours. And they'll run it for 12 hours straight easily. Across the field, across the field, across the field. Back and forth, back and forth. . . Rob Dietz So this farm that's next door to you, I felt some kind of like deeply emotional offensiveness when they did this last year -- So it was a weird kind of epiphany. Like when they brought in a giant machine and plowed the field, you know, just turned all the soil over. And I was just looking at it as, that is heinous destruction. They're just, I don't know. I really had this very deep emotional reaction to it. And it's just conventional. It's what we do on all the farms, all the time. Asher Miller Well, and that actually is something that sticks in my craw. The fact that we call it conventional. How did that happen? It's so unconventional, you know. Like, it's so contrary to how we have as a species fed ourselves for the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of our history. And how most people still get their food, or a lot of them in the world, right? But we call that conventional, right? Jason Bradford Yeah. Asher Miller Dumping lots of chemicals and bringing in these huge trucks. Rob Dietz Well, and of course that's what they do, right? And it devastates the soil. You've got all these synthetic fertilizers that are wreaking havoc in the ecosystem, flows into the creeks, and then we overuse that water, and pump out the aquifers. I mean, that's the infrastructure of the modern farm, too. Jason Bradford It basically hits you that it's big machines doing all the work really. It's incredible. Asher Miller And we've talked about consolidation of the players in the industrialized food system. One of the things that industrialization has fostered is that ability to consolidate, right? They put in terms of efficiency and markets and all that stuff. But really, what it's done is put the power of the food system in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people. Jason Bradford Yeah, that gets to the structure, I think. Because the structure itself is leading to that consolidation. Asher Miller But again, the infrastructure of us being able to use industrial machinery, and all those fossil fuels, and all those petrochemical inputs -- If that didn't exist, the structure wouldn't matter, right? Jason Bradford Right. Asher Miller They couldn't do that. But you're right. I mean, when you think about the structure of the rules of industrialism, right? It's all the incentives that we've decided collectively to point them towards. So we do that, you know, we have a Farm Bill that in the United States get passed every 10 years, right? Is it 10 years? Jason Bradford I think it may be five. Asher Miller Okay. And so this enormous bill with all of these subsidies thrown into it. It's all these economic incentives that create these, what I think are weird distortions. Jason Bradford Yeah, the crop insurance program. That kind of stuff. Rob Dietz Yeah. Can't you get some money for not growing stuff? Jason Bradford Well, that's actually one of the good programs I like because it's actually trying to keep people from farming everything, especially marginal land. Rob Dietz Oh, you're talking like wetland protection? Because I was talking about like, I don't know, with corn or something. Can't you get some money for not growing corn, or. . . ? Jason Bradford I don't know if they do that anymore. They try to get you to do conservation work and take acres out that aren't as useful, or not as productive. But then it gets to loans. Like a little small farmer can't get a loan, but the bigger farm you are, the easier it is for you to get money at better terms to buy even bigger equipment, and if you do even more consolidating. Asher Miller More equipment, buy more land, further consolidation that way. Jason Bradford Yes. Asher Miller And the subsidies distort things, obviously. I mean, we're growing a lot of produce to feed animals that we then eat. Jason Bradford Well, they wouldn't call it produce, they would call it like the commodity grains. As opposed to fresh fruits and vegetables - they often call that produce. Rob Dietz Then the quaternary guys in Chicago can trade futures on those grains. Jason Bradford Correctamundo. Yeah, they'd be tertiary. Finance is tertiary. Research and education are quaternary. Rob Dietz Oh, sorry. Jason Bradford Yeah. Asher Miller Wasn't that orange juice futures? That was orange juice. Rob Dietz I'm bad at these labels like the primary secondary, tertiary, superstructure, structure, infrastructure. Jason Bradford By the time we're done with the season, you'll be fine. Rob Dietz Okay, good. Jason Bradford But you know, all this is also part of this sort of specialization, do the same thing and get really good at it. That will make your commodities even cheaper, because these farms are all trying to like chase efficiencies. Because as they're over producing all these commodities that are subsidized by insurance programs and stuff, the price is always pretty damn low. So they're working with tiny margins. And so that's part of industrialization, also, is they want to make these raw commodities super, super cheap. That's sort of part of policy. Rob Dietz Well, I think that cheapness feeds over into the cultural system, the cultural beliefs around industrialized farming, too. Because the idea there is that you mass produce food using these giant machines, the food is cheap. And now people are able to get off the farm and go do a bunch of other things. And it's actually fed into this culture of, hey, you're a smart person, you don't want to go into these primary sectors at all. You've got to get out there and trade futures on those farm commodities, right? It really reminds me, I know I've said this before on the podcast, but it reminds me of farmer day. Jason Bradford At your high school? Rob Dietz At my high school, yeah. Farmer day, it is no longer there, but at Henderson High School we would dress as farmers to make fun of the rival high school which was Tucker. Jason Bradford Because they were more rural? Rob Dietz Yeah, we thought of them as the more redneck. . . Jason Bradford They were hicks? Rob Dietz Yeah. And it was sanctioned by the whole school. It's like, you'd go to school on Monday and over the intercom the principal would say, "And don't forget Farmer Day is on Friday!" Jason Bradford I think farmers should be a protected class. That's what I think. How dare you. Rob Dietz It's weird how it got . . . the cultural . . . That's I think, part of what industrialism did to it. It's like, yeah, you're not going to do this if you've got the brains. You've got to get off the farm. You've got to get away. Asher Miller Yeah, I remember back in the aughts talking to some folks that with you know, organizations that were really pushing green jobs. And I asked them, I was really curious, like, what do they consider to be a green job or not? And it was essentially focused on manufacturing, right? Asher Miller Solar technology or whatever. Asher Miller Yeah, solar, wind, you know, maybe some EV stuff. And I asked about food, you know, the food system, would you consider working on farms and doing regenerative ag as part of the green job kind of cause? And they were absolutely opposed to it because they saw that as going backwards. These are the worst paying jobs. You know, what we're trying to create are good paying union jobs working at some manufacturing plant. Not working on a farm. Rob Dietz So what we need is a foodless economy. Asher Miller Well, yeah. We're working towards that I guess. Rob Dietz I guess with those 1000s of ingredients, maybe you couldn't even call what we have food anyway. Asher Miller It's spelled f-0-0-d. Rob Dietz Okay, look, before we get into how we're going to escape from this industrialized system, and industrialism in general, we really have to step back and acknowledge how friggin hard that's going to be to pull off. We're right now completely dependent on this industrial food system for our survival. I mean, I know there are pockets of people that are not. But by and large, there's zillions - that's the technical term - zillions of us that if we don't have this food system trucked in (f-0-0-d) to us, we're not gonna make it through the week. Asher Miller And one of the things about cultural materialism is that infrastructure, in a sense, drives structure and superstructure, not the other way around, right? And we're here in a situation where we're absolutely, like you just said, Rob, completely dependent upon this infrastructure. So if we decide somehow collectively, do you know what I mean, that we need to transition and deindustrialize, let's say. And we've done that at a superstructural and structural level, right. We have the shared recognition that we need to do this. We change the rules, you know, incentives of the economy and all that stuff. We have to be really careful about how that happens. And it's a big question of if you could do that quickly. We've seen other nations do this, and it hasn't gone particularly well, right? Jason Bradford They've deindustrialized? Asher Miller They've transformed their food systems very quickly. Jason Bradford Okay, got it. Asher Miller So they've changed the infrastructure of their food system. Jason Bradford Yeah, quickly. Asher Miller So you have the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Rob Dietz That's always where you want to go for an example of something that maybe didn't quite work out the way they wanted. Asher Miller And I think this is a good point to make which is that industrialism, including industrialism in the food system is not synonymous with capitalism. You can industrialize a food system in a communist country. In fact, that's what they did. So you know, Stalin, they had this huge campaign towards collectivism. And it's estimated that between 5 and 9 million people died directly due to famines caused by that collectivism push. And then later in the late 1950s, early 1960s, in Mao's China -- the Great Leap Forward -- the death estimates there are range massively. But they're in the 10's of millions. Jason Bradford That was in the 60s, yeah. This was the destruction of the peasanthood basically in both of these cultures. They wanted to free the peasants from the yoke, you know, of the land and that dependency, and get them into manufacturing and able to like transition these cultures. So I agree, industrialism was a thing whether you were Communist or Capitalist, or whatever. But what ends up happening then in either situation once you've made that transition, is I think we all get this sort of Stockholm Syndrome related to industrialism. And you know what I mean by that is that we're captured by it. Like we've been kidnapped. Rob Dietz Industrialism took us hostage. Jason Bradford Took us hostage. And now we're in all this constant negotiation with it about like, you know, be nice to me. Feed me, but don't give me too many toxins, please. Asher Miller And I still want it super cheap. Jason Bradford And I still want it super cheap, please. Rob Dietz And is there a high paying job for me in this somewhere? Jason Bradford Exactly. Rob Dietz Do I get to be mayor McCheese? Jason Bradford Do I get to put away for retirement and then just eat my Doritos, you know, and not work? And so we're now constantly making excuses in bargaining with our captor because people are afraid of losing access to it all. George Costanza Every decision I've ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. Jerry Seinfeld If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right. Asher Miller We're trying to explore, how do we escape, right? How do we escape from industrialism? Rob Dietz Well, I wonder if first we can take two examples of other places that are maybe on the opposite side of the scale from the Soviet Union and China and what you described, Asher. And one of the places that comes to mind for me is Bhutan, right? The Himalayan kingdom. So I have this friend from Bhutan, a guy named Sonam. And we met at a wildlife conservation and environmental leadership course. Jason Bradford Oh nice. Rob Dietz This was out in Shenandoah National Park. And for the weekend once, I invited him back to my house in DC and we were walking around the city. He was just floored. Asher Miller Well he hadn't been? Rob Dietz No, he hadn't been. But he was looking up at the sky and the airplanes that were coming over. He was kind of like counting them. You know like the Count, "One, one airplane ah ah ah. Two, two airplane.." But it was kind of like that. He was kind of blown away because he said in Bhutan it'd be like one plane a day, maybe comes in right and lands. And you never you never see them. The noise in DC of course was constant, right? It's not that more planes couldn't go there. They decided we're not going to have more planes going here. Jason Bradford Yeah, they basically made a conscious decision to not fully industrialize. And they've tried to preserve traditional ways of being. And if you look at the statistics on them, they have some of the lowest carbon emissions per capita. Asher Miller I think they're carbon negative. Jason Bradford They are carbon negative, in a sense, because they have so much forest protected. Asher Miller And they also export hydro-energy. Jason Bradford And they export electricity from hydropower. Rob Dietz And the forest protection is actually written into their constitution. Jason Bradford Yes, nature has rights in the Constitution. It's quite amazing. And they have a very low political partisanship. They have a very high bar to become a civil servant. And it's a very good status to have a position like that. Rob Dietz It's a very low bar here. I was a civil servant once. Jason Bradford And they measure wellbeing using what they call the 3G model. So GDP, which we're used to hearing about blah, blah, blah. GHDG, greenhouse gases, and GNH, gross national happiness. Asher Miller And they're well known in our circles for really being the biggest sort of ambassadors/proselytizers of gross national happiness, you know. They've organized conferences around this, and it was really a campaign, I think, from the kingdom to really push that as an alternative measurement of wellbeing. Now, I think we have to note that there are characteristics of Bhutan that were conducive in some ways to make this decision to not fully industrialize, right. It's landlocked in the Himalaya, low population, only 800,000 people living there. It's culturally homogenous, right? They're I think all Buddhists. They have a benevolent king, you know. So it's not an apples to apples. Rob Dietz Has there ever been a benevolent king in a European country or are they all malevolent? Asher Miller That's a really good question. Rob Dietz I had to throw that out for my history buff friends here. Asher Miller There are probably degrees of how bad they are. Are we grading on a sliding scale or not? Jason Bradford Is it Vlad the Impaler, or. . . ? Asher Miller Right, exactly. I mean, Queen Elizabeth, she didn't fuck too much up, right? So we also should talk about de-escalation of industrialization, right? Jason Bradford Yes, because they sort of didn't really adopt any of it. Asher Miller Yeah. And so let's talk about Cuba in that case. Okay. Now, we talked about the Soviet Union earlier, Cuba was very strongly tied to the Soviet Union. And then when the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba went through what they called their special periods. Jason Bradford Nice euphemism. Rob Dietz Isn't that special? Asher Miller It was quite a sudden version. So, you know, I was just saying earlier, we have to be careful when we're talking about de-industrializing, especially the food system. If you do that, too, suddenly, it could suck when we're dependent upon it. And they went through a version of that. Rob Dietz And that's what happened, right? The Soviet Union stopped shipping oil and other fossil fuels. Jason Bradford They stopped buying all their sugar at high prices. Asher Miller So before the Soviet Union collapsed, they were following the standard development model for a communist country, you know, state owned versions of all these industrialized kind of commodities, sugar cane, tobacco that they're exporting. There were folks there that were doing sort of alternative forms of like, organic food experiments and things like that. Jason Bradford These are in the quaternary economy sector because these are the researchers. Asher Miller I don't think they're getting paid big bucks. Jason Bradford These were like academics. Asher Miller Yeah, I don't think they were getting paid big bucks for this at all. Jason Bradford No, they weren't baseball players in Cuba. Asher Miller I don't know what the exact stats are but they lost, you know, like massive amounts of their diesel imports. Jason Bradford About half. Asher Miller And oil imports. And it really, like, screwed them up. So they went on this crash course of trying to quickly train people to grow food. And they were growing food everywhere. They were motivating people, incentivizing people to actually leave cities. But there were people growing food in every kind of available space that they could, even in the cities. They tried to organize a means of transporting things locally. And again, they're doing this without a lot of fuel to work with. So you know, they went through this process and thankfully, they had some of these key ingredients in place to do that. Now this special period did lead to I think the average Cuban losing 15 pounds and they weren't . . . Like a lot of Americans could probably stand lose 15 pounds. I don't know that they were in a situation like that to begin with. So it wasn't necessarily the easiest time. Jason Bradford Yeah. So, you know, it is important to recognize that Bhutan and Cuba have some characteristics that aren't not easily applicable to places like the US. So there's physical barriers, right? One is an island nation, one is very mountainous. And there are cultural barriers. In other words, these barriers sort of allow them to have the isolation, or forced isolation on them, that kept them separate from the industrialized world in the large sense. And so both of these countries now are looked upon by some awe by outsiders, as they have some amazing outcomes in the context of these limits that have been either self-imposed, or imposed because of some catastrophe. And again, this is a reveal, I believe, on sort of the downsides of all the affluence that we have through industrialism. And the benefits of showing some restraint, you know. I kind of think of it like, you know, those who are very rich, very wealthy, often they get into really bad habits. They become addicted to alcohol, or whatever, or to shopping, and Anhedonia becomes a problem. Rob Dietz What becomes a problem? Asher Miller Who's Anhedonia? Jason Bradford It's the notion that everything in your life is a pleasure and so it's hard to find pleasure again. Like, you know, you need the struggle, you need the pain, the balance, and life becomes too easy. And industrialism does that to people who have the money to like purchase all the benefits. So this sort of reveals that a lot of positives happened. Like the people - wellbeing went up actually in Cuba, ironically, even though they had to ration their diet and stuff. Asher Miller The other thing to reflect on here is, we've been talking about all the downsides of industrialism, specifically with a food system, and why we should try to escape it. But we haven't talked about the fact that it's going to go away at some level, right? So it's a little bit like we could say, hey, we don't necessarily want to go through what Cuba went through, but we could see how dependent and vulnerable we are to that industrial food system. And you talked about a Stockholm Syndrome, but in a sense, we are a captive, right, of the system. And if we try to escape it, you know, suddenly, it can kill us. But at the same time, we either escape it, or it is gonna kill us. So we really should be thinking about, you know, how do we at least move towards a better way. Weaning ourselves from the teat of industrialism. Rob Dietz And think we need to have a very strong disclaimer here that just like everything we talked about, there's nuance, right? Like, the idea of industrialism and the food system is, you know, we don't have so many people producing food anymore. Well, then they can specialize in other things that we need. Now sometimes they specialize in shit that nobody needs. But sometimes they specialize in things that really everybody needs. Asher Miller Like creating sausages wrapped around pancakes. Rob Dietz Right, right. Jason Bradford The idea is, are we gonna be a complete romantic and say we should all be peasants? Well, maybe there was something good about the fact that you didn't have to have 90% of the people in the peasant class anymore. And there was some science, there was some advance, right? Like infant mortality and the probability your wife would die in childbirth is really low right now. It used to be pretty darn scary, right? Asher Miller The lowest ever I think. Jason Bradford Yeah. So like I say, we have to realize there are some things that I appreciate about -- Asher Miller And as we were saying before, we also have to acknowledge just how difficult it is for those of us in the modern world to escape from industrialism. We were just talking about the risks of it at a systemic level. But even for us as just individuals deciding that we want to escape from it, when you compare it to a form of addiction, you see how difficult it is to walk away from something. But in some ways, I'm not trying to downplay how difficult addiction is, but you know, if you think of that as sort of the analogy, you know, like an alcoholic, some of the advice that you get would be don't hang out with the people that you drank with. Don't go to the bar or whatever. Jason Bradford We live in the bar. Asher Miller Exactly. Jason Bradford We live in the bar. Asher Miller So it's really hard to do that. Jason Bradford I sleep in the bar. Rob Dietz We live in the bar of industrialism. That's what you're saying? Jason Bradford Yeah. And I also I don't want us to drop - I don't want everyone to drop out of society altogether. Do the whole Ted Kaczynski thing and live in a cabin in Montana. Asher Miller No, we need people. We need our listeners to stay in the game. Rob Dietz That's another disclaimer that we have to make every episode. Don't be a Unabomber, okay? Asher Miller That's a low bar, guys. Rob Dietz Well, if we're gonna think about escaping, maybe it's gonna be more like Andy Dufresne in "Shawshank Redemption." Jason Bradford You remember the name? Rob Dietz Of course. Who doesn't remember the name? It's Andy Dufresne. Jason Bradford What was the actor? Rob Dietz Tim Robbins. Jason Bradford Okay, okay. I didn't know which one. Rob Dietz So yeah. Red was played by - Asher Miller Morgan Freeman. Jason Bradford Thank you. Rob Dietz You know, you gotta do it a little at a time if you're gonna get out of Shawshank Prison, or industrialism prison. You can't just suddenly escape. Jason Bradford You need a spoon to start scraping. Rob Dietz Well he had a rock hammer, but yeah. Hidden in the Bible. Sorry -- spoiler alerts. You should have seen Shawshank by now though, people. Asher Miller And do it on the downlow, you know. Like people don't have to know. You don't have to be a total radical. You can just sort of work on it at night while the guards are sleeping. Rob Dietz Do some little bits. So yeah, maybe we can go through some of the Marvin Harris stuff and figure out how to escape as individuals from the Crazy Town of industrialism. Asher Miller Right. So, let's talk about -- How would you do that from infrastructural, structural, and superstructural level? What do you guys think? Jason Bradford Well, there's people that take breaks from drinking, like dry Januarys or whatever. Rob Dietz I'm on one right now. Asher Miller Yeah, actually so my family's done this not as much as we should have. But there are folks that we know that do a tech Shabbat, which is basically like you unplug from all your devices, your phones, TV, computer, everything, during the Sabbath, right? So maybe you're not doing a full 24 hours, maybe you're doing a stretch of it. Jason Bradford Pick a day. Asher Miller But you're just basically detoxing in a sense. And that's around technology. But you could sort of try to apply a similar thing towards industrialism, right? But it could be other things like you could, I mean this sounds stupid, but you could bake your own bread instead of going to the store to buy bread with soy lecithin. Rob Dietz Instead of getting a chocolate chip pancake sausage wrapper on a stick. Jason Bradford You can shear your own sheep, you can straighten your own wool, you can make your own yarn, you can knit your own socks. This is the thing, all these things just sound so ridiculous when you can just go to Goodwill and get industrial made products. It's so frickin' hard. Asher Miller It's hard to do, but it's maybe good practice. Rob Dietz Goodwill? What are you talking about? You should go to Walmart, or Costco, or Target, or Amazon.com. Jason Bradford Well here's how to make it easier, okay? It's very hard to do anything by yourself, right? We always say this. So part of, then, to think from a structural perspective, is organizing yourself. So invite others, you know, like they say also with addiction, you know, you have to have friends who aren't addicts. Hang out with them. So try to get friends who are also willing to go along with your ride and your hobby, right? So I met a bunch of people that do crafts stuff, the Tarweed Folk School kind of things. Then you have a place to go. You have a social group. Join others, even if it's a few hours. The other thing you know, we first started the episode talking about the stats on wildlife and loss of plants on my dear mountain in New Caledonia. So repairing that as much as you can. There's a notion of everything we build, we talked about how we like to build things, whether it's pyramids or in Dubai. All the stuff that we build, decays. It degenerates. If you help restore an ecosystem, you're putting something together that will regenerate itself. So it's a regenerative investment. So make those regenerative investments that help other forms of life, besides humans, have a better chance? Asher Miller Well, and as you said, do it with others. Jason Bradford And do it with others. Asher Miller So volunteer with other things that exist, or start something. Jason Bradford And that's easy. Anywhere you can look, there's groups that would like you to help them do nature restoration. Rob Dietz Yeah. I was thinking about this notion of the cultural side. And how do you get out of the culture of industrialism that like you said, Jason, we're living in it. We live in the bar. So this thing happened to me the other day -- I was trying to hang these shelves in my house. I gotta hang shelves so I can organize all the shit that I don't need, right? But these shelves have these brackets that I screw into the wall using these hex screws, right? And I could screw it in by hand with a socket wrench that I've got. It takes a while. These are long screws. I'm screwing them into a stud, and -- Jason Bradford Oh, that's a lot of work. Rob Dietz And I'm just cranking away on these things. Jason Bradford Oh, you need a power tool. Rob Dietz And I thought, "Wow, I should get a socket attachment for a drill." I could just put -- like when you watch people changing tires. Asher Miller Oh like F1? Jason Bradford Or NASCAR? Asher Miller It's like 0.3 seconds - Four tires on. Rob Dietz Like I should get me one of those, right, and I'd be done with this project. Asher Miller Actually, you need a whole crew. You need eight guys to show up. Rob Dietz I thought about it. I was like, "Oh, I should go get the tool." And then I was like, Do you know how much time it would take me to drive or go over to some shitty hardware store? And I'm not talking the mom and pop hardware. You have to go to Home Depot or something. Jason Bradford I mean it's massive. Yeah, you're walking so many miles. Rob Dietz How did it get made? How did it get shipped there? And by the time I get that back home and Like, no, just frickin' turn the damn wrench, and put the thing in, and have some time with it. I don't know. There's something where I needed to readjust my mindset, the culture that I have around that stuff. Asher Miller I don't know, dude. I don't think you went far enough. You're still using a wrench. I think you got to do it by hand. Bloody those fingers, man. Rob Dietz Maybe by teeth? Jason Bradford Yeah, use your teeth. Come on. Step it up, Rob. Rob Dietz I start banging in nails with my head. Asher Miller With your head, exactly. Jason Bradford What were the pre-industrial false teeth? Were they wood? Asher Miller Yeah. Jason Bradford That's cool. Let's do that. Rob Dietz Yeah. Jason Bradford Alright Melody Allison That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing. Jason Bradford As the poly- perma- meta-crisis gets underway, it is time to slow down, degrow, focus on the local, and find purpose in a culture that cherishes family, community, and nature. Mattel Corporation recognizes and supports this Great Turning. And their response is once again refurbishing its most iconic product to maintain cultural relevance. Welcome, Bhutan Barbie. A doll that captures the spirit and grace of the kingdom of Bhutan. Dressed in a traditional Kira, this Barbie celebrates Bhutanese culture and elegance. But she is not just a fashion icon. She also embodies the values that Bhutan holds dear, with a warm smile representing the happiness and contentment of the simple Bhutanese way of life. Let Bhutan Barbie enchant and inspire you as you embark on your own path towards enlightened living through the Great Unraveling.
