Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
How do we get from the current system to the desired one? How do we influence people to change their way of life so they engage again with practical activities linked with their own needs? How do we not target just privileged people but also people from popular classes?
In this blog, part of our Food Sovereignty and Spirituality series, AgroecologyNow interviewed Siddharta, founder of Pipal Tree India, about the role of spirituality and religion in social action for climate justice, gender justice and interfaith peace.
In this last article in the series, I turn to what a resilient, sustainable food system could look like. I will first discuss the agronomic side of the system and then the socio-economic part. In my view they are just two aspects of the same system.
Though I am reforesting, I am also making a food forest, creating far less work for myself and more resiliency while the house, the gardens, the barns, the woods are becoming an integrated whole.
Courtney has learned that all soil can be regenerated with a little work and everything needs cultivation. She started off seeing a community problem and dug around to find other people who also cared, planting the seeds for how their local government could help.
For centuries, the gifts of nature have been thoughtfully nurtured according to seasonal rhythms, and foods now deemed “wild” have been cultivated with the same devotion as a cherished garden. This truth challenges the prevailing notion of untouched wilderness, revealing instead a landscape shaped by generations of mindful stewardship.
This is what it feels and sounds like to be embedded within an intact Indigenous culture. It is alive, vibrant, and strong. The very existence of the Samburu pastoralists comes from and exists with the land, and the land is happy with it.
Of course, in the end, you can’t decouple farming (or any other human endeavour) from the ecological frameworks. The global commodified food system has a global impact on the whole Earth system, primarily through its impact on the critical cycles of carbon, water and nitrogen. These, in turn, also influence the global food system.
Though nature’s cycles are increasingly uncertain, the Nisg̱a’a relationship with the beloved oily oolie is steadfast. Once the grease is ready, the workers will siphon it off and strain it into jars—preserving a taste that links hundreds of generations of human and fish for another season.
These projects and many others like them are quite literally weaving traditional knowledge, culture, and Native values more deeply into these villages and communities across Southeast Alaska.
Through the food gathering and pollination accidents of bees and other pollinators, the world’s most nutritious, tastiest fruits and vegetables are brought to the tables of the world’s 7.9 billion people. Indirectly, bees keep us well-fed.
This focus on resilient agrarianism underlines the point that ‘taking care of ourselves in a world on fire’ – to invoke the subtitle of Adam’s book – is going to be a heavily rural affair.
