Book #1: Recap
Resources and a Q&A with the author!
Hi friends! I’m Jess and this is Book Club for the Planet, an online community for us to read about the climate crisis and solutions, together. A couple of times a month, I write this newsletter to share our updated reading list, book club updates, and other TBD musings on climate.
We made it!! We’re here on the other side of the U.S. election. We haven’t had much good news this year, so I’m really allowing myself to feel the joy of this one. I’ll have more thoughts on this later—what this win means for climate and what we should all be watching out for in 2021—but for now, let me offer this overdue recap of our first book club for The Fate of Food.
Over 50 of you—from every time zone in the United States, from Canada, from Scotland—joined us for our first book club meetings! An enormous thank you to you all for participating, reading, opening up, offering, and listening to each other. A huge bout of gratitude to my fellow organizers as well—Ellen, Alex, Katie, Laura, and Michele—for all of their help behind-the-scenes and for facilitating our break-out groups with you all. My sincerest hope is that these conversations sparked questions, curiosity, and connection for you.
Are you interested in becoming a book club organizer and staying in touch with the community in between book club meetings? Join us on Slack!
With that, I want to offer a recording and transcript of my interview with author Amanda Little, as well as resources that our book club members shared in the Zoom comments field. I’m also trying out a new thing in these posts—a list at the very end of this blog of things I’m listening to, reading, or otherwise paying attention to right now.
Enjoy the interview!
Jess Schreibstein: We are all here because we read Amanda’s wonderful book, The Fate of Food. It was just published last year, is that right?
Amanda Little: Yes, it was published June 2019 and the paperback comes out January 12th.
JS: Congrats! Very exciting. Well just to kick it off there—this is obviously not your first foray into talking about climate. You’ve written previously about America’s energy landscape in your book, Power Trip. So just really interested and curious about what about food and agriculture drove to write The Fate of Food? Who were you hoping to influence with writing this book?
AL: I am looking forward to answering that question. I also want to say up front that I am honored to be here. It’s such a pleasure to connect with readers and book organizers and I love the dawn of the multi-national book club. I grew up in a household with my mom hosting book clubs in my living room and I love the living room that spans so many states and countries. Jess, thank you for organizing this and for bringing Power Trip—oh, Power Trip and The Fate of Food—to your group.
I will also say that, as much as I love to think that I spent, that I’ve been rigorous enough to get a Ph.D., and to deserve the title of Dr. Little, I have not. I am a professor at Vanderbilt. I teach investigative journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee. I am one of those rare birds that has done absolutely nothing in the way of grad school and yet ended up in academia. So I’m often defending myself to my colleagues—the scholars who are like, “What are you doing here?” And to the real-world people I’m like, “Yes, we can invade the institutions and go through the side door and not go to grad school.
JS: But that’s so important in the topic of climate though, right, where things are happening so fast, you know. You have to be able to bring in folks with all levels of experience to the table.
AL: That’s right, and actually, I advise students all the time to go to grad school. I think grad school is great, I just happen to be one of those people who learned in the streets. I’m kind of a trial-and-error person and that’s how I learned the ropes. But anyway, thank you for offering the respectful title but “Amanda” is just fine.
I got out of college in 96, right at the beginning of the tech boom and the dot boom and I started writing for The Village Voice, this now-defunct New York City independent newspaper about the digital revolution in New York and how tech was changing the city and its institutions. I wrote a piece on the electrical grid of New York City in the late 90s when—I don’t know if any of you are old enough to remember the California brownouts that were going on in the late 90s. Anyway, I predicted that New York City was going to have a blackout because our electrical grid was so fried and ancient. And yet we were adding all this tech into the city and banks were going digital. Everything was going digital—schools, the police force. But we had this old, antiquated electrical grid. Anyway, it turned out, we did have a blackout. It wasn’t exactly for the reason that I predicted, but that sort of launched my career as a journalist on the topic of energy.
I came in as a tech writer largely because of the timing when I got out of college and what was going on in the world. And then around 2000 there was the first IPCC report from the [sic] International Panel on Climate Change. The first Priuses were introduced. The first solar. It was just the very early stages of what we now call cleantech and clean energy. That was hitting the mainstream and becoming available to consumers and really becoming part of a national discussion. That’s when the early conversations around climate and climate solutions, cap and trade, carbon pricing, and all the kind of stuff that’s now national climate policy—that was the beginning of it. I saw that connection between energy and climate and I was writing for Wired magazine at the time. Rolling Stone—I was doing energy and environmental coverage for them. I started a column for Grist.org, which is an environmental publication that’s online. I really got from writing about energy into writing about the environment and environmental policy and really writing about climate change through this kind of prism of energy.
When Power Trip came out, which was in 2007 or 2008 I believe, the audiences that I spoke to for the book tour were all interested in the chapter that focused on agriculture. Because of course there’s so much intersection between ag and energy and ag uses so much in the way of fossil fuels and petrochemicals. Also, the long-distance distribution of food, etc. So, I had really been looking at the energy-intensive nature of large-scale agriculture and so often, the conversations led back to food and food choices.
I came from a family that loves to cook. My mother and grandmother, unfortunately, not so much. My father and grandfather, though, and my husband is a better cook than I am. But food was a proxy for love, I think. I write some version of that sentence in the book somewhere. But food is, you know, so much more intimate and so much more of an important sort of gateway, to my mind, for bigger conversations around industries and environmental impacts on human and consumer behavior. I was really interested in food—not so much as a food activist or a practitioner or even a very good chef, or cook or backyard gardener for that matter. But food as a highly emotional, deeply intimate decision we make three to five times a day that is so connected to so many hidden consequences.
As a writer and as a journalist, I was interested in how much it resonated with my audiences through the Power Trip book, but then also just as a human and a lover of eating. And as the daughter and granddaughter of two great cookies and devoted foodies I was really interested in it. But for me, it was about the story rather than a particular perspective.
I had interviewed Michael Pollan a number of times throughout my reporting for any number of articles and he came through town in 2015, through Nashville. I invited him out to dinner and there had been an IPCC report—yet another one—that had come out with that quote, I think it’s somewhere in the early chapters of the book, that said by mid-century the world may reach a threshold of global warming beyond which current agricultural practices can no longer support large human civilizations. I was really jarred by that. It was like, wow, that’s 30 years, 34 years from now. We’re not going to be able to feed large human civilizations, populations. “What are we gonna do about that?” I said. “I wish that I were the virtuous eater that you are, Michael, and I was that I could afford to shop exclusively at farmers markets and that I was creative enough with the stuff that I actually grow and do get from my CSA that I could be a kind of successful virtuous eater. But I am really struggling with that and what do you know—how do you see, how do we get to 100% sustainable in a way that’s affordable, not just for the 12% of Americans who can shop at Whole Foods and farmers markets and grow their own food but how do we make that possible for everyone? What does that look like?” And he said, “You know, I don’t know. Someone should look into that!” That’s what I heard him say, basically, and so five years later I published The Fate of Food.
It was largely in response to that IPCC report, those early conversations with audiences for Power Trip, and my own personal devotion as an eater and real recognition of my flaws as an eater. As someone who’s really struggled to become a vegetarian and struggled to be a backyard farmer. So as a narrator, that was really important to me, to not be coming at this as a “Come do it my way” kind of thing, but as an observer and as an investigator. So that’s all the strange threads that led the pursuit of this book.
JS: That’s beautiful, thank you for sharing all that. As the opinion of one person, I think that definitely comes through where you’re a character in this book. That comes through as an observer and a fact-finder, trying to dig into all these companies that are basically trying to solve this problem that you’re looking into it. And you’re just trying to figure out, is this viable? Is this ethical? Will this work?
I think there’s a really interesting tension there as well. Just to reflect back a bit on what you shared—throughout climate solutions, not even just in food and agriculture but also in energy and elsewhere—thinking about that tension between personal ethics and decision-making and what’s on us as individuals to do or change, as contrasted to the larger corporations that have way more resources and weight in the game, if you will.
With that, I want to pivot to another question. You bring up—I think this is really a thought-provoking phrase throughout your book—of what you term, I’m not sure if it’s your term but you call it “third-way thinking.” Or, a third way to think about agricultural solutions. Where you’re not just following the farmers market, backyard farmer, only accessible to more elite folks who can afford high-priced produce and meat and what-have-you. Also, dedication to what you call, “traditions,” right. So, the traditional way of farming. And then pairing that with modern techniques. Is there some kind of middle way where we’re not necessarily dystopian, futuristic, Blade Runner-esque tech but we’re also not completely all backyard farmers either. Is there something in the middle?
I was reflecting on that a lot while reading the book because, in many senses, I think it’s Chris at the beginning, and in the end who I think best exemplifies in your book the person who’s finding a middle way. But it’s also not going so great, at least in the book. He and his wife and family are really coming up against some of these same questions about who their food is accessible for, and they’re just trying to make ends meet.
So, I would love to get your thoughts—during your investigation and conversations with others, what could a third way really look like, and is that where we should be investing our time and energy in figuring out, as both corporations and industry as well as consumers?
AL: Yeah, it’s tricky. The book focuses on a lot of tech, right. I mean, it’s kind of saying, look—we have this very binary debate around food. On the one hand, you have the Bill Gates and the Googles, and all of these tech companies that are saying food is ripe for reinvention. And we’re gonna throw technology and Silicon Valley startups at this problem and we’re going to figure out how to build climate resilience and resilient food systems using new technology.
And then you have the sustainable food advocates, among them Michael Pollan, saying “I would like my food de-invented, thank you very much.” It is not the time to reinvent food, it’s the time to de-invent food. Let’s go back to pre-industrial agriculture. Tech is what screwed this up in the first place. We’ve seen what tech does to food and it ends up looking a lot like what we have today.
I think that’s all true. There are a number of chapters that I wanted to write about conservation agriculture and permaculture farms that were figuring out ways to scale and build some efficiency and affordability using tech and this intersection of the traditional and sort of ancient practices of food production, and the radically new.
It’s tricky because in some ways, I end up kind of saying, “Well, wait a minute. There is a lot that artificial intelligence and robotics and vertical farms and even scary things like CRISPR and GMOs can do to actually help restore and support sustainable principles of food production.” It feels like, wait, are you siding with the tech people or are you actually siding with the Chris Newmans or the permaculture folks. Does the book kind of flip-flop there? I think it’s an important question.
What I was trying to do, I think, is that nobody questions the value of small-scale, sustainable, and traditional approaches to agriculture. I think it would be great if we could have local food webs that could feed everyone. Then, there would be no point in doing any of the industrial ag stuff. There would be no point in bringing AI or GMOs or any of it, because we could have really healthy local food webs. And the problem is that, yes, we have skewed subsidies that bring down the cost of industrial food. And there’s not really a fair shake for a lot of the small scall and mid-sized farmers. That’s true there’s a lot that needs to happen to support local, small-scale, and organic approaches to food production.
That said, there’s a lot of value to large-scale food production and there are a lot of ways in which large-scale food production can be improved and draw from the wisdom of local, I mean, smaller-scale and more traditional approaches. So what I was trying to do is say, “Is there a way that you can do both?” That you cannot just dismantle and do away with industrial farms and large-scale farms, but do that kind of farming or that scale of farming and that scale of food production in ways that are truly sustainable and that again draw from the wisdom of agroecology, right.
So that’s where that Jorge Heraud chapter—you know, the robotic weeder chapter—became so important in my research. And actually, Ruth Oniang’o and my reporting in Kenya was very important in kind of the early thinking about that concept of third-way. Ruth basically was, you know, who works with thousands of maize farmers throughout Kenya and southeastern Africa. She was basically saying, “Look, we love indigenous crops. We want to grow them. And the reality is that our circumstances are changing so dramatically, whether it’s drought, heat, flooding, superstorms, invasive insects, etc. We can’t grow traditional foods if we don’t breed new strains of heirloom crops that can adapt to and withstand these pressures.” So I was like, “Oh, so you mean you’re doing traditional farming, using new tools to basically preserve food heritage,” and she said, “Yes.”
You have this sort of one-way-or-the-other-way discussion around food in the U.S. and it’s completely irrational. Like, you’ve got to be able to bring new tools and methods to continue to do traditional farming, basically. That was number one.
Then Jorge Heraud said, “Hey, you know, I grew up on a 200-acre farm outside of Lima, Peru.” And now he’s a graduate of Stanford with, I think it’s electrical engineering and robotics, and he basically said, “I don’t want to develop AI and robotic techniques to compete with natural food systems. I want to develop these methods to support and enable them,” essentially. The robotic weeder was a way of again, radically reducing the use of agrochemicals on farms. That was the vision for it and then it turned out that the even bigger advantage of something like an AI weeding robot is that it can bring diversity and intercropping to large-scale farms, that it can preserve biodiversity on farms, or actually restore biodiversity to food production. And he hadn’t even intended that at the get-go. But that then became, again, this intersection of the principles of agroecology and the goals of sustainable food production combined with, you know, really sophisticated tools and technologies.
In some cases, it’s, “Let’s bring back ancient plants and let’s find a way to adapt ancient plants to modern growing conditions!” And it’s not one or the other, right? It’s a more kind of subtle and complex conversation than, “Let’s go back to pre-industrial agriculture or let’s reinvent food.” No, it’s got to be a combination of both.
Now, if technology is competing—I mean, there were any number of examples in the book where I went off into these directions. When I go into the plane to look at the cloud seating above Maharashtra in India. I thought that was going to be the way I opened the book. Then, I’m in this thing and I’m going, “This is not an example of third-way thinking.” And I encountered so many more of those examples. The beef cloning that’s going on in China. There are any number of examples of technologies applied to food that did not, to my mind, use technology to really support and enhance, or, not necessarily enhance but support principles of sustainable food production.
So in no way is the book trying to say, “Guess what, technology will save the day!” But there is a way in which this kind of marriage—human innovation that combines old and new approaches to food production—will redefine sustainable food on a grand scale. And that would become one of the driving questions for this book.
Number one, look, how are we going to feed and redress all of the problems of our current agricultural moment and prepare for all the problems to come? How will we do that if we can’t necessarily rely on a critical mass of backyard farming vegetarians to do it from the ground-up? If I’m feeling so miserably and I’ve visited all these places, how are we going to expect everybody to do it right?
And number two, what does “sustainable food” really mean? What if it’s, “How do we do sustainable food equitably?” And those questions were really what drove me toward that third-way concept. I sold the book, the proposal for the book in 2015, as I mentioned. I said, “OK, I’ll have this done for you in December 2016.” And it came out, you know, in late 2019 or 20. The point is, the book took me more than twice as long as I expected and in large part because I had no idea how complicated it was. I had no idea about what this third-way concept was at the time.
The first two years that I was reporting this, I couldn’t really see that and if I had had it my way I think I’d still be writing this thing and still be reporting it. There were two or three chapters, as I said, that I wanted desperately to keep reporting on—one on soil remediation and carbon sequestration and soil, which is such a big part of the story. And I just couldn’t, I didn’t have time on reforming the dairy industry. Like, I had all these things and I had 10 other books. My editor was like, “All right, let’s do this.”
JS: I want to be cognizant of time and I selfishly want to ask one more question, and then I want to make room for one other question from the group.
So my question for you is, well, let me backtrack. I couldn’t help but read the first chapter where you’re talking about preppers and food and think about the year we’ve gone through, where I think many people on this call probably now have a prepper closet or cabinet where maybe they didn’t used to. There’s been a lot of comparisons put out there between COVID and the climate crisis. In many ways, COVID is like the accelerated version, happening in days and weeks, rather than climate change happening over years and decades.
So, from your perspective and through your experience, I’d love to hear your thoughts on some key things that have stuck out to you this year, and maybe things that we keep in mind in terms of learnings or applications from your work in climate and energy policy and agriculture. What went well and maybe what didn’t go well with COVID, things that we can apply to climate.
AL: I agree with you that COVID has been an accelerator. It’s really exposed a lot of the problems and vulnerabilities in our food system and what’s so antiquated about our supply chain.
I started a column when it was June for Bloomberg on food in the pandemic. In large part, really was rethinking and trying to explore a lot of what’ I’ve learned in the book and using this framing and understanding all the disruptions that were happening in food production as a result of the pandemic. It was April that it started, but we remember in April, those two kinds of images that became so emblematic of our current food crisis. We had, on the one hand, lines and lines—I think it was ten thousand cars lined up at a San Antonio food bank—and the same day there were mountains of potatoes being left to rot in fields in Idaho. How is it that we can have this overabundance of food in some places and this undersupply of food in other places? It’s the 21st century and somehow, our country can’t figure out how to get food to the people who need it. What’s going on here?
It’s true, we have huge vulnerabilities. We have a very centralized food system. Decentralization, I think, is essential to really making robust local food webs. Now, the problem is that there are so many regions, particularly in the southwest, that are very drought vulnerable. You can’t necessarily produce the full range of crops that their populations need. Long-distance distribution for food is clearly vulnerable during COVID. All the centralized meat processing and meat production are very vulnerable, not only from the standpoint of worker health and worker safety, but also once one facility shuts down it paralyzes thousands and thousands of producers who were supplying those facilities. So, decentralization has been one of the key lessons of the pandemic.
The fact is that the way we govern food supply chains and food systems is also deeply antiquated. Like, the way that the USDA and the FDS and the EPA all communicate in managed food systems, it’s incredibly byzantine. So, first, it’s a structural problem—these very centralized, large-scale food production facilities.
I wrote one piece arguing we should have a food safety czar, or if it’s a problematic word for a lot of reasons, we need to be thinking in a much more integrated way about food sustainability and safety across all the different departments that manage it. A lot of reforms are going to be necessary politically, and decentralization of some food production, particularly in meats, but in any number of commodity crops.
Then, the other crucial thing is that some of what you read about in the book—in particular, plant-based meats and vertical farms—which are, you know, still really early days and need to become much more energy-efficient but create an opportunity for decentralized protein and crop production in regions like the southwest that have a great deal of water scarcity and limited arable land.
If you live in Berkeley, California or Hudson Valley, New York, there’s a lot you can grow. You have a lot of real inherent food security in certain regions and other regions it’s much harder, particularly with water scarcity. We’re beginning to see that COVID has really accelerated a lot of these conversations about what we need to do from a policy standpoint and at the level of meat production, large-scale, centralized facilities. How do you deal with that?
In some ways, this is preparation for this broader conversation. The operative word is “resilience.” Population pressures are bearing down on food producers, environmental pressures are bearing down on food producers, and public health pressures are bearing down on food producers. Meat production is at the center of it. The vulnerability of meat production from an environmental standpoint and a human health standpoint are crucial. That’s a tough one.
I obviously wrote in my book about my own challenges with becoming vegetarian and vegan and so on. And really understanding how significant the problems are in that industry in particular, it’s been, in some ways, a crucial sort of preparation for what are the much more chronic and complex problems of climate change. COVID is a much simpler problem, really, because climate change is… it’s heat, it’s drought, it’s flooding, it’s superstorms, it’s bacterial blight, it’s invasive insects, it’s shifting seasons, it’s weather volatility, it’s warmer winters.
JS: There’s no vaccine that will end it.
AL: Right. It’s in some ways, very concerning when you think about it. This is small potatoes relative to climate change. But it is fundamentally the same thing. It is, “How do you build resilience?” It’s the beginning of, hopefully, an era of much wiser solutions that will undo, not just prepare us for the future, but undo a lot of the kind of problems of the past.
JS: Man, I hope so, Amanda. Well, I want to be cognizant of your time. If you have time to answer one more question, I’ll bring up a question from the group. But if you also have to go, just let me know.
AL: No, by all means!
JS: OK, I really love this one question from Allison because we’re just over a week away from an election here in the U.S., so I think her question gets at the root of polarization here in the U.S. but obviously beyond our borders.
She writes, “Early on in the book, you’re speaking with an apple farmer about climate change, and he essentially evades labeling what he sees as ‘climate change,’ presumably because of politics. Were there certain analyses you felt you had to deliberately avoid for any reason? I was especially curious about this when reading the chapter that opened with the smart water pipes in Israel.”
AL: I’m so glad that you picked that one because I have been actually working on a piece that will come out, I think, this week in my Bloomberg column in which I interviewed a wine producer, a grape farmer who works on a vineyard in Napa Valley. They have 1600 acres that have been burning for eight weeks. They’ve lost their entire 2020 vintage. They actually lost their 2017 vintage. And I was asking this farmer very much the same questions that I was asking Andy Ferguson in that chapter, and I can’t even remember what year that was… it was 2016.
Four years later, same thing with farmers dealing with unprecedented challenges, huge losses… I mean, multi-million dollar losses on that one ranch. I talked to the Farm Bureau President of Napa Valley and he said that we’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in wine production in eight weeks since the fires in that region. All of it has been hugely traumatic for food producers and food workers who are dealing with the air quality crisis resulting from the fires. I said, “Is this climate change?” and he said the same thing Andy said. He said, “I’m not a scientist, I’m not going to call it ‘climate change.’” He said, “I will tell you, I’ve been farming grapes for 22 years and I’ve never, this is something new and terrifying. My ranch has been around since the middle of the 1800s and every year is now a battle for survival.”
And I’m thinking, how does that not motivate you as a voter to ask your elected representatives to address the climate issue and consider food as central in the challenge of mitigating the climate crisis? This, by the way, was not even part of the conversation a couple of years ago, the single greatest challenge or threat of climate change is the collapse of food systems. There are so many other threats, of course—migration, displaced populations, drought and storm damage and fire damage and so on—but on a total global scale, the single biggest impact on everyone will be the pressure on food systems if not the collapse of food systems because food production is so integrated. The U.S. imports more than half of all of our fruit […] right now, we import 40% of our vegetables even though we have incredibly fertile, vast farm territories. So yes, we’re all so interconnected and interdependent in terms of global food webs that there’s nothing that will have a broader impact on humans in terms of climate. And he said, “You know, I don’t know if it’s climate change but we’re definitely in a new era of crisis.”
We have to remember that only one of the ag-centered states, which is the states whose economies depend largely on agriculture, only one—California—did not vote for President Trump. President Trump was hugely supported by ag states and states with rural, conservative populations. It is a very politicized issue, farming. There were all kinds of controversies as to whether farmers should still support President Trump, given his trade wars with China which hurt farmers pretty badly. There’s been some sort of defection in terms of support for President Trump for two reasons. One, because of the impact of the China policies and the China trade wars. But also because of these more and more evident stresses of climate. That you can’t do sustainable, equitable food if you don’t address climate and if you don’t begin to think about the intersectionality of climate and food production and social justice and all of these issues. So farmers are increasingly addressing and coming to see the politics of climate change will affect their well-being and their solvency long-term. That is very much something that’s happening right now.
I’ll leave you with this and I’m sorry to overtalk here because I know you guys have to get into your own conversation, but the most important topic going forward, I think, is carbon sequestration on farms. Ag is a huge contributor—somewhere between 15 and 20 percent—of greenhouse gases are produced from the ag sector. No industry is more motivated to transition from climate center to climate saint than agriculture for the very fundamental reason that agriculture can’t exist in a world so deeply rattled by climate change. I mean, you can run a coal plant through a storm, for the most part. I mean, I’m sure there are some problems associated with it and you can drive cars through storms but you cannot grow food through storms.
So, so, so many farmers are feeling the impacts of climate and the pressures of climate in a way that, for example, auto producers are not, energy producers are not. It’s the conversations of the politics of farming and climate that are in a state of flux in a way that is not true for transportation and energy sectors and it’s important to keep in mind, again, because this is so new and this is fairly unprecedented in U.S. politics. It’s something to keep an eye on in certainly this election and going forward. That ag states have been generally conservation and increasingly are getting backlash from resistance to addressing climate and really developing ambitious climate policies.
I’ve interviewed, certainly in the book, but I’ve interviewed any number of CEOs at major companies and a lot of them are going, “We are screwed.” Like, “We can’t function in a world that’s not addressing and preparing for and trying to preempt the impacts of climate change.” And of course, a lot of small-scale farmers are very well aware of that, too, but yes—this intersection of food production and climate change is becoming increasingly evident and increasingly politicized in terms of, “How do we get to solutions.” I think that bodes well because I think we do need farmers and ag industry folks to be advocating for really significant reforms and climate and federal policies.
JS: What a response, Amanda. Thank you. Actually, I have one question come up from Joanna. Joanna, I’ll drop a resource in the chat for everyone. She asks, “Does anyone know of organizations that are organizing farmers around climate action?”
I can’t speak to farmers but I recently learned about a pretty new nonprofit run by youth conservatives who are looking to shift the binary and polarized nature of climate change and bring more conservatives onboard to being more vocal about their support for conservation and climate action and climate solutions. So I’ll share that with folks.
But in the interest of time, Amanda, it was such a gift to have you with us tonight to share all of your knowledge and expertise. I’m sure we’ll all be checking out your Bloomberg column and the new article that’s coming out soon. I’ll speak for myself, I loved reading your book and I learned so much and really grateful you could spend time with us this evening. Thank you, I know you’re super busy and this meant a lot to all of us, so thanks so much.
Additional resources:
Question from Joanna:
Does anyone know of organizations that are organizing farmers around climate action?
Answers:
From Melanie: https://viacampesina.org/en/
Conservatives for climate: https://www.acc.eco/ ; (me, Jess!) learned about them through this episode of How to Save a Planet podcast.
Chris Newman’s blog: https://medium.com/@cnative100
And here’s his Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sylvanaquafarms/
A book recommendation on "third-way thinking" from Maria: Tomorrow's Table
From Michele: To the question on organizations, I think Patagonia has been involved with activating farmers and has done interesting work with kernza (important carbon sequestration crop) ; from Jess (me!) - Patagonia started a "Regenerative Organic Certified" certificate which you can read about here and here.
Book recommendations from Amanda:
The Sixth Extinction
The Big Ratchet
Sapiens
Youth / Gen Z activation platform, Kidizenship
What I’m reading and listening to:
What if we run out of time, or all of these measures just aren’t enough to check an accelerated rise in temperatures? Where’s our emergency button, and how can we make sure any action services us, the people, and not those in power? These are the questions posed in After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration by Holly Jean Buck, which is a mix of science reporting, fiction writing, and leftist analysis of drawdown solutions. Or if you’re not ready for a full deep-dive on the issue, check out this article from The New York Times on solar geoengineering. I always love reading Emily Atkins’ Heated blog, but have been thinking a lot about this article about how we reframe and redefine what it means to be an environmentalist and care about climate. We’ll be digging into this more with some of our book picks in 2021. And yes, I know, everyone was talking about this WNYC podcast about Dolly Parton, like, a year ago, but I just started listening and it really feels like the perfect balm for our fractured country right now. Oh, and for this week, this song.