“What unites Blockadia is the fact the people at the forefront—packing local council meetings, marching in capital cities, being hauled off in police vans, even putting their bodies between the earth-movers and earth—do not look much like your typical activist, nor do the people in one Blockadia site resemble those in another. Rather, they each look like the places where they live, and they look like everyone: the local shop owners, the university professors, the high school students, the grandmothers. ”
Climate March, NYC 2010
The Blockadia Klein describes is the name given to all the separate instances of communities engaging in resistance against fossil fuel and mining companies around the world, communities that are on the front lines of the climate crisis. But the reality of the global climate crisis is that we are all on the front lines. The challenges are disperse and daunting—mega-droughts, water stress, superstorms, displaced peoples, fish die-offs, sea level rise—and they affect us all in ways both large and small, immediate and distant.
If climate change is the call to action, the food movement is a powerful way to engage with that call. (The greenhouse gas contribution of our modern industrialized agricultural system is around a third of total global emissions, depending on your system of accounting.) The food movement encompasses a huge range of people and values, but is often expressed as disillusionment with “Big Food” and an interest in creating and nurturing resilient alternative realities of production and consumption—a rupture in business-as-usual.
Public discourse is full of stories about how our generation has checked out—we are not politically engaged, we are complacent, we are addicted to screens. It is hard for us to imagine being part of organized, large-scale sit-ins or strikes that characterized the early 20th century. We live in a society that, in many places, is fiercely individualistic.
Throwing in the towel and claiming that our problems are too large, or that we are too incapable of collective action, or “telling ourselves we’re unfortunately too busy to deal with it” (Klein), is not an option. More than simply an impossibility, fatalism and immobility is a way of squeezing our eyes shut to the pockets of social mobilization bubbling up around the world.
It ignores the 400,000 individuals who assembled for the People’s Climate March in NYC in September 2014, and the thousands of simultaneous events in 162 countries around the world. It ignores the recent wave of student activism against institutional racism on American university campuses. It ignores the fact that social democratic (or democratic socialist) American presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders announced in a recent interview on NPR that he has the single most donors of any candidate in history. It ignores local food policy councils and international agrarian peasant movements like La Via Campesina. It ignores the resistance of Blockadia communities across the globe winning small and large battles against mining and fossil fuel companies.
We are capable of large-scale, grassroots-level change. It may not look consistent or cohesive or even effective from afar, but it is already happening.
What unites all of these social movements is that they are not just fighting against broken systems—systems that do not value all human lives equally; that allow corporations to wield vast economic and political power; that value international free trade over participatory democracy—they are demanding and building alternatives to those systems.
Climate March, NYC
Within the food movement, this work can be seen through collective solidarity purchasing and community-supported agriculture models, partnerships between farmers and land trusts, food hubs, Food Policy Councils, and countless other examples. It shows up as collaborative networks built around small- and medium-scale farmers with a commitment to building soil carbon, avoiding energy-intensive inputs, and feeding their communities. These place-based efforts are one of our best bets to pull ourselves out of the climate crisis.
Grassroots-level civic engagement provides an avenue for impactful change without waiting for national governments and lawmakers to wake up. When building new realities on the ground, it is important not to lose sight of the bigger picture. Growing your own tomatoes and going to food policy council meetings does not preclude advocating for a more socially just, and ecologically sustainable, political and economic system on a national and global scale. But it is a good place to start.
Like climate change, the food movement provides a space for interaction and collaboration between groups and individuals from all areas of society. Health professionals want to end obesity. Low-income communities want access to healthy, affordable food for all. Environmentalists want responsible long-term stewardship of the land. Farmers want access to land and to make a living wage. What’s exciting is the roadmaps to reach many of these goals often, though not always, overlap in achievable and synergistic ways.
In his book After Nature, Jed Purdy describes how the collaborative, grounded work of the food movement is founded on “interdependence, integration, and humility.” By engaging in the work of growing food (or growing food systems), these ecological and, moreover, social values are “woven into the identity of the person doing the work.”
The power of the food movement to tap into these social values of collaboration is precisely what makes it so effective. Food is about more than supply and demand, calories and nutrition—it is about pleasure, culture, conviviality, and community. Changing our food system (and addressing climate change) will be hard, but it doesn’t mean drinking Soylent to get your daily dose of lab-formulated nutrients. It means building vibrant, equitable communities of practice. The changes we need to make are joyous, life-affirming, and good. So let’s get to work.
Photos by: Hillary Lindsay
Emily graduated from Yale University with a B.S. in geology. Don't ask her about rocks though, she is interested in the intersection of fisheries, fisherfolk, and climate change.