A new study published in Science offers a stark warning about the climate crisis: Even if we completely halted fossil fuel use in the near term, we would still blow through the carbon budget needed to avoid catastrophic climate change unless we change the trajectory of emissions from the global food sector. Although many have warned about the climate impact of modern food production and land use, this new science is soberingly clear, and it has garnered attention around the world.

Without radically reducing emissions from agriculture, the research shows we won’t meet the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit average warming to 1.5°C – 2°C degrees. And yet, even those targets still position us to face some pretty extreme climate impacts.

Civil Eats talked with Michael Clark, a researcher at the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors on the study, about the findings, what they teach us about collective action to move the needle on climate, and how we might build the political will to do so.

Why does the food system have such a big climate toll?

One of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions from food systems is meat, and within that red meat from ruminants: beef, sheep, goats, and—to a lesser extent—other livestock like pork. The reason why ruminants have a relatively large impact is two-fold: They’re particularly inefficient at converting grass into things we can eat; or, if they’re not being fed grass, converting soy or other feed into food for humans. This matters because you have to include the climate impacts of producing the feed we then give to cows and other ruminants. Another reason why ruminants are particularly high emitters is because during their digestive process, they convert their food into methane, a potent greenhouse gas that they then burp.

The other large source of emissions within food systems is from fertilizer use—from how it is processed to emissions from application. Nitrogen naturally converts into nitrous oxide, which is one of the other very potent greenhouse gases.

This I think has been a blind spot. We’ve disrupted the carbon cycle, but we’ve disrupted the nitrogen cycle, too.

Exactly. Estimates are that humans have doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in the world—that is human sources of reactive nitrogen are at least as large as the amount of reactive nitrogen that is naturally available. Not ideal.

Your findings paint a picture based on current trends. What trends did you track?

Very broadly speaking, emissions from the food system are a function of what we eat, how it’s produced, and the size of the population. We looked at these three factors and trends to date and projected out if these patterns continue over the next several decades.

What we found at a global scale is that the most important driver is changes in dietary habits; populations eating more food and eating a larger proportion of that food from animal sources, either meat, dairy, or eggs. Population growth is an important driver, but it’s not as important as dietary habit change. And while changes in food production—like having better management techniques and reducing emissions per unit of food—could counter those shifts, it would not be by a huge amount.

Now, all this is at a global scale; for any single country, that global pattern may not match up. Diets are changing, but not uniformly. For instance, diets are not changing by a huge amount in the United States, but if you go to a place like China or Brazil, countries experiencing large economic transitions, there are massive dietary shifts happening and with them those emissions are going to be driven up.

Do you feel the story of food systems emissions has been late to the game in climate change?

Rightfully, a lot of the effort, focus, and political will has targeted emissions abatement through fossil fuels. That makes a huge amount of sense. But we’re getting better knowledge about the impact food has had on the environment—and the trajectory of emissions—and starting to see, thankfully, food becoming a bigger part of the conversation.

Talk about some of the main levers for change. First, plant-rich diets: Let’s get into what you mean by that and why this diet shift makes a difference.

We mean a reduction in meat, dairy, and eggs and an increase in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and so on. What’s critical here is that while the endpoint is similar for everyone in the world, the direction you might need to go to get there will be really different. In the United States, for instance, this shift in diets might mean a typical person eating much less meat and much more fruits and vegetables. The second thing I really want to stress is that these plant-rich diets are associated with pretty large increases in health outcomes. While for this paper we focused on climate, plant-rich diets have enormous co-benefits.

Let’s talk about another lever for reducing food system emissions; what you and your co-authors call “healthy calories.”

Approximately half the global adult population is eating too much or not enough. In certain countries the figures are even more extreme. For my co-authors and me, the healthy diet lever means—independent of a plant-rich diet—what proportion of calories are coming from fruit, vegetables, and other healthy sources of calories. We know that so many people are not getting the right amounts of food for a healthy diet. Similar to the plant-rich lever, this means in some places, eating a lot less, in other places, it will mean people eating more [healthy foods].

Food waste has gotten a lot more attention in the past few years—in part, I think, because the percent of food that is wasted is so high and because addressing food waste feels so doable.

Yes, it’s pretty shocking: About one-third of all food that is produced remains uneaten, ether because it’s thrown away, rots, or otherwise doesn’t get to the people who want to eat it. The sources differ widely by country, sometimes it’s a lack of refrigeration, lack of storage, grain silos, and so on. In the United States, a family of four wastes on average $1,600 worth of produce a year. That’s a pretty big incentive to act.

It always surprises people that if the emissions associated with food loss were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world.

Let’s talk about what you are seeing in terms of policy responses.

One of the joys and complications of working on a global study is that the policy responses are going to look very different wherever you are. We talked earlier about the climate impacts of nitrogen fertilizer use. One policy that has really been effective has been the 1991 European Union Nitrates Directive. Now, when it was passed, it was designed to reduce nitrogen runoff because agricultural sources of runoff were one of the main causes of water pollution in Europe. Since then, fertilizer applications per hectare have decreased by about half, yet crop yields have continued to increase as they were before. It’s just one example of a relatively large geographically scaled policy that is working. While it wasn’t specifically designed to address emissions, it most certainly has had emissions benefits.

We can look at farmers choosing different production pathways. Like in some cases adding more crop rotations into their planning or using agroecological approaches, such as planting hedgerows, agroforestry, and more. Honestly, there really is a huge amount that can be done. But it’s important to stress that no single action is going to solve the problem.

One of the big food-climate debates is about soil carbon sequestration and livestock. What do you think about those who argue for livestock’s ability to rehabilitate soils?

We know for sure we can be doing a lot better in terms of soil carbon storage. And we are seeing incredible results from a range of strategies, like some I mentioned: planting cover crops, intercropping, and silvopasture, planting hedges between fields that can prevent soil loss—and more. All of these can help sequester more carbon in the soil, but I think the key message should be: Soil carbon sequestration is part of the solution, but it isn’t the only solution.

Now, for the debate about cows! The instances where I’ve seen cows or other ruminants’ potential to be net negative in terms of greenhouse gas emissions—after accounting for methane emissions—is over short timescales, in certain conditions, on previously degraded land. So, yes, it may be possible for cows to play a helpful role, but in a limited way. How the cows are raised matters; but how many cows you’re raising matters more.

Do you feel like any parts of your paper have been misunderstood as this complex story gets translated for the general public?

I actually think the coverage has been good. There are basically three main points and I think the media has been capturing them well: One, food matters to climate and if we continue eating the way we are, it will result in catastrophic climate change; two, there is a lot we can do; third, everyone has a role to play—consumers, businesses, food processors, everyone.

I know one question those who work on climate often gets asked is, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?”—but, I feel I should ask the same of you.

I’m laughing because it’s an uncomfortable question to answer. We are starting to move in the right direction, but honestly, we’re not moving anywhere close to as fast as we need to. We need to start acting now. It would have been great to have made these changes years ago, but we didn’t.

Right. As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is today.

Exactly.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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These past few weeks, we have witnessed militarized police actions against the peoples of Wet’suwet’en to make way for fracked gas pipelines across Canada. Dozens of solidarity road and railway blockades have been erected in support of the land defenders and Indigenous self-determination. As these struggles unfold, they evoke the memory of Standing Rock — and the many battles to protect Native lands and sacred sites throughout Turtle Island (North America) and beyond.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s new book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock provides excellent context for understanding the inseparable link between colonization and environmental injustice in these ongoing struggles. She also explores the often-fraught terrain of solidarity and the role of alliances in the fight for environmental, food, and climate justice.

I spoke with Dina in November for the Real Food Reads podcast. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Tanya Kerssen: Your book centers on the concept of “environmental justice” and efforts by scholars and activists to indigenize environmental justice. First of all, how did this phrase enter our popular and legal vernacular? And what are some of the ways environmental justice, at least at first, wasn’t addressing the needs of Native peoples?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker: The term environmental justice can mean a lot of different things. It emerges in the early 1980s, born out of Black communities in the deep South who were experiencing what they suspected to be the deliberate targeting of their communities for toxic waste dumps. And it led to a series of community-based studies and then government-sponsored studies seeking to understand if there really was such a thing as what they were calling “environmental racism.” And the studies showed that indeed there was: that communities can be targeted for these kinds of toxic development because of their race and culture. This led to action on the governmental and legal level.

This concept of “indigenizing” environmental justice acknowledges that the way we understand environmental justice is far too narrow to fit for Native Americans. Environmental justice is about the fair and equal distribution of environmental risks and harms that disproportionately expose communities of color. But that depends on understanding all communities as equal as ethnic minority communities. And this just does not fit for American Indian people and communities because American Indians are not ethnic minorities. American Indians are nations with territories, sovereignty, and jurisdiction and entirely different histories that go back millennia on the land as well as histories of colonization, which is not true for any other population on this continent.

Tanya: The book opens with the story of Standing Rock as an illustration of the ongoing environmental disruption and environmental injustice faced by Native people as well as the critical role of alliances in defending Native lands. Why do you start with Standing Rock and what does it illustrate about indigenous environmental justice?

Dina: My book with Roxanne [Dunnbar-Ortíz], ‘All the Real Indians Died Off’ and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans had just come out in October of 2016 when the Standing Rock conflict was escalating. And my editor posed the question: What does environmental justice look like through the lens of settler colonialism? And I said, well gee, it’s funny you should ask. I have a long history of writing about that. And so it just came out of that particular time.

I went to Standing Rock that Thanksgiving weekend when the population was at its peak. Prior to that point it had been mostly Native people there. But after the human rights abuses really started with the dog attacks on Labor Day, that’s when people started pouring in. What non-Native people came into was a space dominated by Native culture, specifically Lakota — Lakota protocol and Lakota worldview. Everything was determined by Lakota people, which was a very different orientation for people.
As I document in the book, there were rumblings of people treating it like a music festival; like it was a fun thing. People talked about going because they felt “called” to be there. People sort of made it about their own individual spiritual journey when that was not the focus of what was happening, right? This was a serious protest gathering, a resistance event where people were defending the water and the land with their lives.

Yet these other narratives were playing out in an almost New Age kind of way — which has been very common with the advent of the New Age movement and the counter-culture. [Non-native people] were looking to Native people to imagine a different kind of society and there was a lot of cultural appropriation. It wasn’t that it wasn’t well-intended, but they brought with them their worldviews steeped in white supremacy and white privilege and they demanded their right to practice the religion and spirituality of other people. And this has been a problem ever since.

Tanya: The problem seems to be when non-Native — even Liberal or Progressive environmentalist movements — come with all of this unexamined baggage around the settler colonialist framework in which they operate.

Dina: Absolutely. And it’s kind of a bitter pill to swallow for Lefties who like to think of themselves as politically enlightened. I mean, we can have this conversation, for better or worse, since the Trump election. All this in-our-face white supremacy and racism has given us an opportunity to have an honest conversation about it — to acknowledge that we don’t live in the post-racial state. The scales are not balanced just because we had a Black president.

But for Native people, it’s not just about racial privilege. This is some of the work that I’m going deeper into: understanding that white privilege goes beyond the concept of race. We have to be able to talk about these systems of oppression beyond race because for Native people it’s way beyond that, which is why the discourse of environmental justice and environmental racism is so inadequate.

Tanya: When you say that environmental justice needs to go beyond environmental racism, what you’re explicitly referring to are the different worldviews and relationships to place and conceptions of the sacred. This is something that struck me as a main thread throughout your book — that these things can’t adequately be contained, maybe, within a racial justice or a racial equity frame.

Dina: Exactly. Especially in a legal system that systematically denies Indigenous worldviews of the sacred. That’s the reality of the legal system in this country going back to the 1980s with a decision called the Lyng Decision [Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association] that basically denied the ability to protect a Native sacred site in effect because it didn’t acknowledge Native religions as legitimate in the same way Christian religions, for example, are recognized.

Tanya: I was surprised to read about the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which wasn’t passed until 1978, allowing Native peoples to freely practice their religion and spiritual and ceremonial practices. But also that this act didn’t guarantee the environmental integrity of sacred sites or the conditions necessary for religious practices in those spaces.

Dina: Most people don’t realize that Native Americans are the only people who didn’t have religious freedom in this country. Our religions were outright banned beginning around 1883. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 was the marking point for officially overturning that. But yes, it sounds good on the surface, but it’s one of those kind of toothless laws. And as you said, it might protect access to certain sites, especially in public lands, but it doesn’t protect the integrity of those places. That’s why we see conflicts like the San Francisco Peaks [outside Flagstaff, Arizona] where they fought for years to stop what

Native people see as the desecration of this place by the spraying of treated sewage water on these public lands. This not only has health risks associated with it, but is also seen as a desecration of these sacred places. And there’s absolutely no kind of legal structure to protect from that. These are the kinds of battles we’re fighting all over the place.

Tanya: The conversation about sacred places is also linked to, and probably inseparable from, access to land and territory and food-producing resources. As a food activist, I loved the chapter in your book about food sovereignty and health, which also looks at traditional plant medicines. Can you ground us a little bit in the history of how food has been used as a weapon against Native people and how that legacy of violence is still experienced today?

Dina: We are talking about settler colonialism as a system that is intent on eliminating indigenous existence and replacing Native people with a different population. That’s how we as scholars write about it. It’s in the process of separating people from their lands and placing them on reservations—that’s one way. But it goes deeper than that: settler colonialism is this violent process [that also involves] the targeting of people’s food crops. This is something that happened a lot. It was a technology of war, this scorched earth policy in order to starve people into submission. They attacked their food sources — from plant-based foods to the decimation of the buffalo.

It happened in other ways, too, like with the building of dams in the 20th century. Even well after the Indian Wars period is over, when settler government was building infrastructure and harnessing hydro-power for irrigation and electricity. Well, all these dams had devastating effects in Native communities. These included the blockage of salmon passage in places like on the Columbia River, which led to the near extinction of salmon there.

Nick Estes has written about the Pick-Sloan dam project on the Missouri River, flooding so much land that it became the most destructive to Native life of all the histories of dams. It robbed people of food, sources of timber, access to medicines, all of these kinds of things. These are hugely devastating actions that continue to play out. Settler colonialism is a structure of genocide that continually plays itself out.

Going back to the idea of food sovereignty, there’s a lot to learn from Native people and their projects to reclaim their foods. The food sovereignty movement is a way of reclaiming not just culture, but health and life. Because the way this genocidal system has affected Native people has played out in people’s physical bodies.

Native people were known to be some of the most healthy people in the world, and certainly healthier than Europeans. We didn’t have nutrition-related diseases like Europeans had until our food sources were taken away and we had European diets imposed on us. So we went from being people of robust health to being people who were being starved to death. And then when we start having these Western foods brought into our communities in order to stave off the starvation, we went from being starving people to being obese within a generation. And so now Native people are commonly afflicted with diet-related illnesses like heart disease and high blood pressure and cancer and diabetes that increasingly affect all of modern America.

Tanya: Does a particular example come to mind of a way food sovereignty is being used to upend that model of food dependence and dependence on unhealthy foods and return to and revitalize Native foodways?

Dina: I worked on the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project, which is often held up as a model project. The Muckleshoots are in Washington State in an area that, prior to colonization, was so rich in natural resources that the people there didn’t even need to farm. Their natural environment provided them with so many different food sources and ocean resources and they had this amazingly diverse diet. But their reservation now is very small. The way that the environment’s been compromised means that they can’t really practice their food practices the way they used to.

So they’ve come up with different kinds of programs to re-instill their traditional medicines and food banks. In areas when you can do hunting they’ll teach the youth on how to hunt and fish, bringing back those practices. Re-indigenizing their systems is what it amounts to. How do you indigenize your system in the context of a very colonized society? These are big challenges, but there’s lots of innovation that people are coming up with to do this.

We were working on an assessment that looked at how spending money outside the reservation community, in grocery stores for example, is a drain on a tribal economic system. Because that money is not circulating within the tribal community. And when we did that assessment, we discovered that something like $3 million a year was leaving the reservation and not coming back. It’s part of that extractive economy. So we talk about an extractive model, it extracts in all different kinds of ways.

Tanya: Speaking of the extractive economy, in your book you talk about some of the regulations being rolled back under the Trump administration, regulating extractive industry and air and water pollution, drilling, infrastructure, and lots more. You mentioned there were 67 rules being rolled back at the time the book was published. I looked up the most recent figure in The New York Times and it’s now 85, which is really disturbing. This is bad news, obviously, for everyone not just for Native peoples, but can you offer some perspective on this from the long history of Indigenous resistance?

Dina: I want to be sanguine. I want to be hopeful. I want to be optimistic. But what I can say is that for Native people, we are people who are surviving genocide. To be Native today is to have survived a 95 percent genocide. Maybe that’s something to take heart in. I don’t know how else to think about it. I think the reason that we survived is because of our unending resistance. We just kept going. And so here we are. Now we are at the point that we are leading the resistance movement — the environmental resistance movement, the climate justice movement. Native people are the forefront of it. Maybe it’s because of the fact that we have survived this total devastation.

Tanya: I don’t think I would call it a silver lining, but maybe if there is a positive outgrowth of the last couple of years it’s been a greater willingness to understand how real and ever-present racism is in our political and legal structures — and also in our movements, unfortunately. And understanding that is really incumbent on all of us in order to build the movements that we need.

Dina: We have to be brave enough to understand how settler colonialism built a system that benefited a whole lot of people at the expense of a whole lot of people. How do we get our heads around that? How do we decolonize that? What does it mean? Who has to give up what? What is it going to take to build a system that affirms life for everyone that’s not built on the death of other people and the death of the environment and other species? This is what’s being asked of us and it means we all have to look at whatever privilege we have and who sacrificed for that. This is about how anybody who’s not Indigenous to this land benefited from indigenous death — and exploited labor, right? A system in which [enslaved] people were forced into developing stolen land.

We have to grapple with this stuff and be able to talk about what decolonization means — it’s not just racial justice. But what does racial justice mean in the context of decolonizing a settler colonial system? These are obviously structural, paradigmatic issues and they implicate capitalism. And none of us are going to survive if we don’t confront it. You know, Europeans brought with them a worldview that was built on the domination of the natural world. We find ourselves, as a result, in the middle of a sixth mass extinction event. And so how do we shift that? This is where indigenous knowledge is so important.

Native people understand the world in a whole different way. We understand ourselves as related and part of this web of life. We have to change our relationship to the natural world. And this is where Native people and Indigenous knowledge have so much power to effect that change. Part of indigenizing environmental justice is infusing environmental justice with this indigenous worldview, with traditional ecological knowledge so that we can create these changes.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a descendant of Colville Confederated tribes, is a lecturer of American Indian studies at California State University San Marcos and a consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. She’s also an award-winning journalist, co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of the book, ‘All the Real Indians Died Off’ and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, and author of the 2019 book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock.

Listen to this Real Food Reads conversation (and many others) on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, GooglePlay, or Stitcher.

First published on Medium.

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For Native people, colonization and environmental injustice go hand in hand. So argues Dina Gilio-Whitaker in her new book As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. We were pleased to feature it as our November Real Food Reads book as we celebrate Native American Heritage Month. And I was honored to have a rich and fascinating conversation with Dina on the podcast.

Food, we are reminded in the book, has been used throughout history as a tool of war and subjugation. Prior to colonization, Native people were some of the healthiest people in the world—far healthier than Europeans. Genocide, forced displacement, and industrialism led (first) to starvation in Indian country and (later) to dependence on foreign, unhealthy foods.

The loss of access to culturally-appropriate food sources went hand-in-hand with the loss of access to sacred places and traditional plant medicines. This rupture of Native peoples’ relationship with ancestral lands made way for an extractive, capitalist economy that put us on the path to the climate crisis and sixth mass extinction of the earth’s biodiversity.

It’s a powerful story indeed. One that locates colonialism—and the philosophy of domination over nature that accompanied it—at the root of today’s multiple crises.

It also challenges us to ask hard questions: Who controls—and benefits from—land and resources? How are people dispossessed from their lands and what are the health and environmental consequences of that dispossession? What do food, climate, and environmental justice look like when we identify colonialism as the root cause of injustice? And how can we decolonize our movements for the transformation we need?

“We all have to band together and build alliances because all of our futures are at risk now.” —Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Real Food Reads podcast

For Dina, Native peoples can provide hope in this dark time, not least for having survived near-total devastation. Perhaps for that very reason, Indigenous peoples lead the global movement for climate justice. But Indigenous knowledge and worldviews must also be recovered and Native political sovereignty recognized. Our movements must grapple with histories of genocide and land theft, and also seek to understand, uplift, and protect Indigenous conceptions of the sacred and sacred places. 

My biggest takeaway from our conversation? The most important work non-Native people can do is be brave enough to decolonize our ways of thinking and organizing—and understand how colonialism has shaped the political and legal structures in which we operate. This decolonizing work is urgently needed in order to forge effective alliances, and build political power, with Native peoples. 

There is room for different conceptions of the sacred to come together in these alliances. But there’s no less at stake than the survival of all human and non-human life. 

Tune in to my conversation with Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock on the Real Food Reads podcast. 

Featured image: Canoe and Minnesota wild rice. Photo by Eli Sagor/Flickr.

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Indigenous Peoples’ Day has us thinking about all the ways indigenous communities, knowledge(s), cultures, seeds, and foodways are central to building the world we need. This isn’t just about preserving traditions, it’s about recognizing indigenous people as leaders, change-makers, and innovators of food and climate justice movements.

This great article by Nick Estes—which we shared in our latest issue of the Real Food Scoop— argues that the green jobs envisioned in the Green New Deal have been pioneered and are already being modeled by indigenous peoples, whose stewardship of nature is rarely viewed as “productive work”: 

Rarely is Indigenous caretaking defined as work. Yet, like unwaged caregiving work, land defense and water protection are undervalued but necessary for the continuation of life on a planet teetering on collapse.

Demonstrators reach out for food donated by supporters in Quito on Oct. 9. (Photo by Jonatan Rosas/Washington Post)

Indigenous people in Ecuador are leading one of the most powerful protests in the world right now against the extractive industries that are wrecking the climate—with the first and most severe impacts felt by indigenous farmers. The protests are led by the indigenous confederation CONAIE, with strong leadership from women. 

In many ways, indigenous worldviews are better equipped to understand the climate crisis and organize collective responses to it that are rooted in centuries of sustainable land and water management and adaptation to changing weather patterns. Critical to applying this invaluable knowledge to the current climate emergency is protecting, and restoring, indigenous community control over land and territory—especially considering these territories are home to upwards of 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity.     

Modern agroecology—the science, movement, and practice of sustainable agriculture—is based in large part on the many techniques, insights, and principles developed by indigenous peoples around the world. 

Alliances across multiple sectors of society are necessary if we are to address the most urgent ecological and humanitarian crises of our time. But in this new global movement we are building— against environmental destruction and (neo-)colonialism, and for relationships that protect and care for the earth and each other—we would do well to center indigenous peoples and leadership.

Check out our four Real Food Reads book picks in celebration of Indigenous People’s Day, and for more reflection, discussion, and action on the climate crisis, see our Climate Toolkit.

Header image: People demonstrate in Quito on Oct. 9. The march is made up of a union of all ethnic groups originating in the Ecuadoran Andes. In the coming days the Amazon communities will also join the rallies. (Jonatan Rosas/Washington Post)

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out this week with a new report on the intersections between food and climate. I published Diet for a Hot Planet nearly a decade ago to shout from the rooftops that if we are serious about the climate crisis we have to invest in a global food transformation, starting with bringing ecological principles into otherwise extractive agricultural practices and protecting our vital forests from agribusiness expansion. I am beyond thrilled to see this message getting out in such a big way. We’ve been promoting our food and climate organizing toolkit on this theme and our Real Food Reads convo about Diet for a Hot Planet to those inspired and activated by this news. (We were also pleased to see this fabulous oped on similar themes in The New York Times by a farmer who works closely with the fabulous California Climate and Agriculture Network.)  

Land use is getting the best of us, according to the IPCC. Whether it’s agave production in Mexico (yup, that’s right tequila drinkers—we can’t have nice things), soy and corn production in Brazil, or charcoal production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: deforestation is happening rapidly all over the world for commodity production. Industrial agriculture is emitting carbon, and deforestation is reducing the ability of our forests to store carbon. 

If you want to learn more about food and climate change, we’ve got you covered. Check out our Real Food Reads conversation on my book Diet for a Hot Planet. And get active with our organizing toolkit, Tackling Climate Change Through Food. The solutions are under our feet and all around us—in the soil and in our communities.

Photo by Sergio Souza / Unsplash

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–Anna

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Last month, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to demand action to prevent catastrophic climate change, I was 30,000 feet in the sky, the jet-fueled irony not lost on me. I was heading to Paris to talk food and climate change with 260 scientists, civil society leaders, and advocates from 40 countries at a meeting hosted by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. The overarching message was clear: If we want to address climate change, we have to talk about food.

What we eat is responsible for a whopping one-third of all atmospheric warming today. Global meat and dairy production together accounts for roughly 15 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, making the livestock industry worse for the climate than every one of the world’s planes, trains, and cars combined.

At the meetings, Christine Figueres, who led the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, reminded us that climate stability requires limiting warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius. To do that, we need to start reversing current emissions trajectory, start a downward turn, by 2020. Yes, 2020. That means engaging every sector, food included.

“We must all swallow the alarm clock,” Figueres said. “We cannot give it to the next generation. We must solve this.”

You might be thinking, “But we have to eat. We don’t have a choice the way we do for (ahem) flights to Paris.” Except we do. If we’re lucky, we choose what we eat three times a day. And we make choices as societies all the time when we decide what research to fund, which farms to subsidize, and what foods to serve in our schools and institutions.

So how do we change food and farming to help prevent catastrophic climate change? First, we need an absolute reduction in methane and nitrous oxide—gases with as much as 298 and 36 times the heat trapping power of carbon dioxide respectively—and food is key. To do this, we’ll have to slow, then reverse, the spread of the industrial livestock model into new markets around the globe.

We’ll also have to halt the growing demand for meat and dairy that’s sending soy for feed production soaring. And, we’ll need to dramatically reduce industrial farms’ use of synthetic fertilizers, the overuse of which releases significant nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

We also must stop agribusiness from encroaching on forests and carbon-rich peatland, as it is with palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. As the processed foods industry increasingly turns to this relatively cheap palm oil, production is rising. Palm oil is now nearly ubiquitous in cookies, granola bars, and other processed foods. (Like your peanut butter pre-mixed? Thank palm oil). We need to reduce demand—for us consumers that means going for less processed fare—and call on suppliers to source only from sustainably harvested palm.

Christine Figueres noted that we also must also cut—by half—the amount of food we waste, which stands at a staggering 30 to 50 percent globally. This means those emissions associated with wasted food are contributing to the climate crisis while conferring no social benefit, but it also means food is adding up in landfills, where as it decomposes converts to the powerful greenhouse gas methane.

In fact, food is the single largest component of solid waste found in municipal landfills, according to the NRDC. That means addressing waste at home, ensuring that farmers have access to markets, and ending our obsession with picture-perfect produce. Like the recent consumer campaign launched in France says, we need to embrace fruits et légumes moches.

And, we’ll need to manage farm and ranchland to maintain carbon in the soils. “Carbon is like real estate,” Figueres said. “It’s all about location, location, location. Carbon in the atmosphere is your enemy. Carbon in the soil is your friend.” At the meetings outside of Paris, experts shared research on how agroecological farming practices and managed grazing can promote greater soil organic matter, AKA carbon, and how these practices might enable us to sequester a significant portion of atmospheric carbon, especially in the short term, when we need it most.

At the heart of these solutions are farmers. By 2050, there will be 750 million peasant farmers—and they’re vital to securing a resilient food supply and ensuring that we store carbon in our soils, stressed Dr. Sonja Vermeulen, a leading food and climate expert who spoke at the summit.

I also met with Elizabeth Mpofo, the international coordinator of the global peasant movement, La Vía Campesina. With 164 member organizations worldwide, La Via Campesina’s 200 million members are on the frontlines of the fight against catastrophic climate change. As Mpofo reminded us, we can’t have a sustainable food system without small-holder farmers.

Protecting indigenous communities is also key. Phrang Roy of the Indigenous Platform for AgroBiodiversity, who I also interviewed, has said, “Seventy-five percent of the world’s biodiversity today is located on indigenous people’s lands… The loss of this land could mean the loss of planet Earth as we know it.”

Meanwhile, those of us living in the United States and much of the industrialized world must radically change our diets, shifting away from diets filled with processed foods and loaded with industrial meat products toward whole foods and plant-centered fare. For those who eat meat, it means eating less and better: grass-fed beef, for instance, and organic-certified poultry and pork.

And so, there is a kind of glorious coincidence: Every one of the bold actions around food is also a step forward for farmers, communities and our health. Oh, and these changes can be delicious, too!

Today, the global food sector is an extractive industry destroying forests to make way for commodities (think: corn, soy, and palm fruit) plantations. It relies on polluting natural gas or gasifying coal to generate nitrogenous fertilizer. It devastates topsoil and dries up aquifers—irreplaceable in our lifetimes. Instead, we need a regenerative food system—and we already know many of the pathways to get us there.

Thankfully, this message is resonating. Ten years ago, when I was starting to report on my book Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork, I found virtually no food advocacy groups running a major climate campaign and few environmental groups turning their attention to agribusiness. Now, many are.

Ten years ago, policy responses to food’s impact on climate were barely a blip on the radar. Today, there are groups like California Climate and Agriculture Network that has real policy in play to encourage farmers to embrace more climate-friendly practices. And at the last climate negotiations in Paris, 38 countries and provinces signed the “4 per 1,000” commitment to increase soil fertility through a focus on carbon sequestration in soils.

Summits like the ones I attended near Paris are bringing experts together to explore real action; global leaders are taking note. In President Obama’s first public presentation abroad since leaving office, his remarks zeroed in on how food will be impacted by climate change and how agriculture contributes to the crisis, noting the sector is the second-largest contributor to emissions after energy—and those emissions are going up. And this week, I joined with more than 200 others to co-sign a letter published in The Lancet calling on the World Health Organization to confront factory farming.

I’m heartened. I am also frustrated to the bone. We don’t have the luxury of time. To date, the major global climate negotiations—known as COPs—have largely ignored tackling food sector emissions. The next COP will take place in Bonn, Germany this November. Hopefully, food will finally be on the menu. It has to be. The clock is ticking.

Originally published in Civil Eats

The post Eating on the Brink: How Food Could Prevent a Climate Disaster appeared first on Real Food Media.

Get in the “it’s-winter-let’s-hunker-down and have a meal together” mood with your friends this Monday, December 12: the one year anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement. You’ll join hundreds of others in the #EarthToDinner climate conversation dinner series to keep climate action on the table. 

The global food system is not only a casualty of global warming, it’s also a central culprit: how we produce food, where we grow it, and what we do with it are key drivers of the climate crisis.

The global food system is the source of roughly one third of all greenhouse gas emissions, from coal-fired power plants for fertilizer production to rainforests destroyed for soy plantations in Brazil to peatland demolished in Indonesia for palm oil. But, here’s the good news: Our food system is also a key part of the cure—a cure we can all be part of every time we make a choice about the foods we cook, the policy we advocate for and the food companies we support.

Watch the video:

The post Earth to Dinner: Six Tips for a Climate-Friendly Meal appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé 

“Doubt is our product,” wrote executives for tobacco giant Brown & Williamson in a now infamous 1969 memo on industry communications strategy. The memo was revealed during discovery in class-action lawsuits against tobacco companies that would eventually yield a trove of 85 million pages. Among those pages are details about the public relations playbook of an industry that — as far back as 1958 — knew that smoking caused cancer and used public relations to fight regulation for decades.

“Merchants of Doubt,” a brilliant new film from documentarian Robert Kenner (of “Food Inc.” fame), reveals this spin and tracks how other industries, from chemical manufacturers to pharmaceuticals, are ripping pages from Big Tobacco’s playbook to fight their own regulation and public scrutiny.

Based on the book of the same name by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, the film reveals, in particular, Big Oil’s role in climate change denialism. It makes the argument that the world’s biggest energy companies funded PR and lobbying firms that fomented doubt about climate science and thereby stalled action on climate policy. The film pulls back the curtain on the backstage battle to win the hearts and minds of the American public, with nothing short of a stable climate in the balance.

Big Oil’s PR machine

When I was writing “Diet for a Hot Planet,” my book about the connections between the food industry and climate change, my editor suggested I cut the chapter addressing climate change denial.

“Anna,” she said, “the debate is settled. Denial is over.”

You can’t blame her for thinking so. It was 2006. “An Inconvenient Truth” had just come out. Al Gore’s painstakingly researched film about global warming, which would go on to gross $24 million and win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, built its message on years of accumulating clarity about the crisis. As far back as 1979, scientists Steve Schneider and Roger Revelle had testified before Congress about global warming. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen made front-page news for bringing the global warming crisis to the national spotlight. In front of a Congressional committee, he testified that evidence proved, with 99-percent certainty, that global warming was the result of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The same year, future-President George H.W. Bush said on the campaign trail, “In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House … We will talk about global warming … And we will act.”

But as “Merchants of Doubt” shows, and what my editor didn’t know, is that the Big Oil PR machine was just greasing its wheels. The offensive had yet to come.

Big Oil developed a well-funded communications campaign inspired by Big Tobacco’s techniques — funding fake science, think tanks and front groups with innocuous-sounding names such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). Supported by energy companies such as Shell Oil, Exxon and BP, the GCC lobbied on Capitol Hill, fighting a global climate treaty and domestic climate legislation by producing issue briefs with the patina of truthiness.

As Kenner shows, such front groups claimed that global warming advocates were manufacturing the crisis as a Trojan Horse for greater government intervention, a claim that riled up the libertarian base and conservative groups such as Americans for Prosperity. The ascendancy of the Tea Party in the mid-2000s stoked fear among conservative candidates that speaking out about climate would make them unpopular with this increasingly powerful voting bloc. This was how the false notion that there was “no consensus” on climate change began to take hold in the public consciousness.

In 2009, 31,478 scientists allegedly signed a petition claiming there was “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of … greenhouse gases is causing … catastrophic … disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Ron Paul quoted from it in testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives that year. Never mind that among those signatories, only 39 were climatologists and many were non-experts (including people on the payroll of Big Oil). Some were even obviously fake names, such as members of the Spice Girls (the mention of which produced my favorite B-roll moment in the film).

But the damage was already done. By late 2009, the Pew Center was reporting a “sharp decline” in Americans who believe that there is “solid evidence” of human-caused climate change: Only 36 percent of respondents agreed that “global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels” — down from nearly half just one year earlier.

It has been nearly three decades since Hansen’s warnings about global warming. But you can watch C-SPAN footage — from just two months ago — of Sen. James Inhofe throwing a snowball on the Senate floor to poke fun at climate science. (Inhofe, mind you, is the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.) You can also read the news about Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s unwritten ban on using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” under any circumstance.

The spin machine of the oil industry, in other words, is alive and well. The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) — whose members include BP, Chevron, Exxon and Shell — is one of the most powerful lobbying forces in California. Since 2009, it has spent millions of dollars in lobbying and in supporting a tangled web of front groups, including Californians for Energy Independence, California Drivers Alliance, Californians Against Higher Taxes, Kern Citizens for Energy and Californians for Affordable and Reliable Energy, according to a leaked PowerPoint presentation — all groups that are promoting the interests of the trade association. Doubt is the product, indeed.

Learn from Big Tobacco

Still, if Big Oil can learn from tobacco, so can we. As documented in a forthcoming companion piece to Kenner’s film, the fight against Big Tobacco was won largely because of sustained organizing that exposed what the industry knew — and when it knew it — about the harms of smoking. Groups such as Corporate Accountability International (for which I am a strategic advisor) and the Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals succeeded in blocking the tobacco industry from participating in international treaty talks. It took decades of organizing, but the World Health Organization’s tobacco treaty finally entered into force in 2005. So far, it has been ratified by 179 countries.

There’s a shot in “Merchants of Doubt” of a woman smoking in a hospital bed, with baby monitors attached to her pregnant belly. Today’s reaction to that image — a gasp of disbelief — is a sign that while it took 50 years, the truth about tobacco finally won out.

The more climate chaos we experience — deadly hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and cold shocks — the more Big Oil and its ilk will spend to peddle doubt. The only trouble is, as Oreskes says in the film, we don’t have 50 years to win back the public.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Septentria/Flickr

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