While multi-colored alarms about alleged threats from foreigners make citizens jittery, a more deeply rooted anxiety has also tightened its grip on some Americans. Are the food we eat and the water we drink safe to consume? Trace amounts of man-made chemical compounds linked to cancer and neurological damage keep being discovered in fish, meat, and vegetables. Such news brings on a sense of helplessness that may be deeper than the one evoked by the spectre of potential suicide bombers.

Each scary finding tends to be followed by assurances from credentialed authorities that the noxious substances detected occur only in minuscule amounts, way below the health hazard threshold. But we also know some of them accumulate in our ecosystems and in our bodies.

An unusual study led by Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, published in January 2003, tested the blood and urine of nine volunteers for 210 chemicals, industrial compounds, and other pollutants that occur in consumer products and industrial emissions. None of the nine held jobs that required working with chemicals nor lived near industrial facilities. Yet researchers at two laboratories detected an average of 91 chemicals, and a total of 167. The study refers to the human-borne load of pollutants as the body burden. The Environmental Working Group and Commonweal, a Marin-based research center focused on health and the environment, collaborated on the research.

Some facts hit home, some we pass over. I can’t forget reading about a dead whale that washed up on the coast in Washington State with such a high body burden that someone suggested it be buried in a toxic waste dump. Like that whale, we humans live high on the food chain. Every time we hear of someone diagnosed with cancer or some strange neurologic affliction we wonder what caused it. But proof is elusive, and debate continues on whether cancer rates are even rising.

Meanwhile, 30-year-old legislation protecting air, water, and other aspects of our life-support system is now being weakened when surely it should be strengthened. The fight in Washington is to shore up what was won long ago. But close to home, where ordinary citizens can be most effective, there is some good news.

Worried about food supplies long promoted as the best in the world, many people have been turning away from supermarkets to seek out local and organic food. We buy directly from growers, usually at farmers’ markets, and encourage our neighborhood food shops to carry organic items. By creating a demand for such food, we helped to fuel a resurgence of small-scale farming near urban centers throughout the country.

Farmers and ranchers who had feared they had no option but to sell their land are charting a new course, often prompted by their grown children. They are diversifying to meet the demand of a health-conscious clientele for high-value products.

In this issue we report on this phenomenon, focusing on Marin County, which has served as a model for other communities. The county took major steps 30 years ago to protect its farmlands, and has since furthered that goal by crafting an unusual alliance among groups and entities that tend to be at odds with each other. Growers, environmental groups, and county government are working together.

Among recent initiatives are the Marin Organic label and county certification of grass-fed beef—the first such certification program in the nation. You can now buy your beef directly from the rancher who raised it and even select it on the hoof.

Support for a locally sustainable food system is not part of our national defense system, as is the protection of oil resources. Perhaps the importance of local agriculture is not sufficiently understood, as no war has been waged on this country’s soil since the Civil War. In Europe, people survived wartimes by relying on what they grew and on relatives and friends who were farmers. How many of us know farmers we could turn to if food supply systems were to break down?

Federal agricultural policies have worked against family farmers, emptying the countryside. “A policy that destroys farmers and farmland…directly contradicts our goal of national defense,” Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer and poet, wrote in a 1999 article published on the op-ed page of the New York Times. “A country that is heedlessly destroying its capacity to feed itself cannot be defended.”

Citizens have lately lost, or yielded, much of their power to giant corporations. Some of that power is now being reclaimed by small personal choices—where to shop and what food to buy, for instance. The cumulative effect can be major: protection of urban edge landscapes, changes in food production, a sense of connection with the places where we live.

Farmers’ markets continue to sprout. A tiny one opened recently in my neighborhood in San Francisco as a response to the sudden closing of a popular natural food store. Saturday mornings it’s the place to go to meet neighbors, gossip, share news, register to vote if you still haven’t, listen to live music, and pack your market basket with fresh-picked produce from Watsonville, Coyote Valley, and other places in the Bay Area and beyond. Many of us walk to the market, just as people do in Paris, Amsterdam, and other cities where such markets are common. It’s delightful and easy. And hey, we’re doing something for our health, for those green hills around our cities, and for our country’s security too.

—Rasa Gustaitis