The Future of Food is in Crisis

In an open letter last week, 153 top Nobel Prize and World Food Prize laureates sounded an alarm about the dangerous consequences of the world’s current approach to climate action and food system change.

It’s not just the effect of climate change on food production. It’s the effect of climate change plus soil degradation plus problems with aquifers that are supplying irrigation water. … We’re going to be seeing the effects of all of these factors combined.”

The letter focuses on big-picture solutions to be undertaken by national and global policymakers, but there are local, grassroots efforts that can be put into place in our communities today. 

Top of the list: Prioritize local, seasonal, and Indigenous foods as and when you’re able.

A deeper understanding of what food grows in our communities, and when it’s in season, will go a long way toward strengthening local food systems and making them more resilient. Getting connected with and supporting farmers in your area helps create a sustainability framework that prioritizes local food and elevates local communities in the conversation. 

Chaos or Community

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing'-oriented society to a 'person'-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

--Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community 

Crisis of Confidence: the climate edition

On July 15, 1979, Carter said in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech:

“The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them … I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States…. I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20% of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000… To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation’s history to develop America’s own alternative sources of fuel — from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun… I will urge Congress to create an energy mobilization board which … will have the responsibility and authority to cut through the red tape, the delays, and the endless roadblocks to completing key energy projects. We will protect our environment…. I’m proposing a bold conservation program to involve every state, county, and city and every average American in our energy battle. This effort will permit you to build conservation into your homes and your lives at a cost you can afford…. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense — I tell you it is an act of patriotism.” 

When the Reagan administration removed the solar panels in 1986, Reagan’s Chief of Staff commented that, “he felt the equipment was just a joke.” 

Poetry: I Have Decided

I Have Decided

I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It’s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation.

Of course, at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am.

Are you following me?

"I Have Decided" by Mary Oliver. Text as published in A Thousand Mornings: Poems (Penguin Press, 2012).

The Commodification of Technological Dependence

"In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing."

—Ed Zitron, "Never Forgive Them"

Intelligence

Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

—Earthseed: the Books of the Living 

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

Happy 2025