PlacerSustain: Voices of Placer County's Sustainability Community

On Tuesday, April 30, students in the Master of Science in Sustainability Management program presented their final Capstone Workshop presentations for fellow students, program faculty, and colleagues at Rennert Hall at Columbia University. This spring’s workshop projects allowed MSSM students to gain experience tackling tough sustainability problems by working with real-world clients, including the New Jersey Audubon and the Chilean Federation of Tourism Enterprises, FEDETUR.

My monthly (first Sunday) column in the San Francisco Chronicle appeared today.

I used the May 1 publication of the tenth anniversary edition of Food Politics (Michael Pollan wrote the Foreword) to reflect on what ‘s happened since the book first appeared in 2002.

A decade later, the Chronicle’s headline writer put it this way: 

Plenty of positive change happening Q: I see that “Food Politics” is out in a 10th anniversary edition with an introduction by Michael Pollan, no less. Has anything changed in the past decade?

 

A: I can hardly believe it’s been ten years (eleven, actually, but who’s counting) since the University of California Press published “Food Politics.” This has been a great excuse to look back and realize how much has changed. Optimist that I am, I see much change for the better.

My goal in writing “Food Politics” was to point out that food choices are political as well as personal. In 2002, reactions to this idea ranged from “you have to be kidding” to outrage: How dare anyone suggest that food choices could be anything other than matters of personal responsibility?

How times have changed. Today, the idea that food and beverage companies influence dietary choices is well recognized. So is the reason: the industry’s economic need to increase sales in a hugely competitive food marketplace.

Business pressures created today’s “eat more” food environment – one in which food is ubiquitous, convenient, inexpensive, and in which it has become socially acceptable to consume foods and drinks frequently, anywhere, and in very large amounts. Given this kind of marketing environment, personal responsibility doesn’t stand a chance.

If the “eat more” food environment is the problem, then the solution is to do something to make healthier food choices the easy choices.

And plenty of people are doing just that. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen the emergence of national movements to promote healthier eating, especially among children. These movements – plural, because they differ in goals and tactics – aim to create healthier systems of food production as well as consumption.

On the production side, their goals are to promote local, seasonal, sustainable, organic and more environmentally sensitive food production. On the consumption side, some of the goals are to improve school food, restrict food marketing to children, and to reduce soda consumption through taxes and limits on portion sizes.

These movements do plenty of good. I see positive signs of change everywhere.

Healthier foods are more widely available than they were when “Food Politics” first appeared. Vast numbers of people, old and young, are interested in food issues and want to get involved in them. The first lady is working to improve access to healthier foods for low-income adults and children.

Wherever I go, I see schools serving healthier meals, more farmers’ markets, organic foods more widely available, young people joining Food Corps, more young people going into farming, more concern about humane farm animal production, more backyard chickens and urban gardens, and more promotion of local, seasonal and sustainable food to everyone.

When my university department launched undergraduate and graduate programs in food studies in 1996, we were virtually alone. Universities viewed food as too common a subject to be taken seriously. Now, practically every college and university uses food to teach students how to think critically about – and engage in – the country’s most pressing economic, political, social, and health problems. Many link campus gardens to this teaching.

Food issues are high on the agendas of local, state, national and international governments. I can’t keep up with the number of books, movies and websites covering issues I wrote about in “Food Politics.”

These achievements can also be measured by the intensity of pushback by the food industry. Trade associations work overtime to deny responsibility for obesity, undermine the credibility of the science that links their products to health problems, attack critics, fight soda taxes, lobby behind the scenes, and spend fortunes to make sure that no city, state or federal agency does anything that might impede sales.

Food and beverage companies faced with flat sales in the United States have moved marketing efforts to emerging economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with predictable effects on the body weights and health of their populations.

Despite this formidable opposition, now is a thrilling time to be advocating for better food and nutrition, for the health of children, and for greater corporate accountability. As more people recognize how food companies influence government policies about agricultural support, food safety, dietary advice, school foods, marketing to children, and food labeling, they are inspired to become involved in food movement action.

I’m teaching a course on food advocacy at New York University this semester. I want students to take advantage of their democratic rights as citizens to work for healthier and more sustainable food systems. Whether they act alone or join with others, they will make a difference. So can you.

The development of the food movement is the biggest and most positive change in food politics in the last decade. May it flourish.

The first of a series on the learning, challenges and opportunities seen at Connecting4Community to shift to more citizen-centered, bottom-up ways of living and structuring our approaches to the problems we see around us.

John reminds us that relationships in a personal world are the antidote to following the siren call of progress in a tool-ruled world.

Having to stand in line for this service or that program is one of the most powerful reinforcers of the scarcity mindset. It symbolizes helplessness, hopelessness and the constant concern that there is not enough ... and that it will run out just before it is my turn. Edd Conboy is doing something about that.

Highlights from Peter's April 16 online/dial-up conversation with Tom Dewar, co-director of the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change and long-time member of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute.

"This is the first report that I have ever read that really feels 'community friendly,'" says Roque Barrios of San Diego. He's talking about the story of how local community building leaders came together to share strategies and discuss lessons learned about how to improve conditions in disadvantaged communities.

First of all, it’s not your typical farm tool. It isn’t a hoe, or a shovel, or even a tractor implement. But, it may help you harvest faster, increase your production, and lead to greater profits. By now, with the dawn of agriculture some 12,000 years or so behind us, it is reasonable to believe that every tool we really need has already been invented. Of course, there can never be enough variations of the hoe in the minds of the tool manufacturers. However, during the past......

When people ask me what the Bioneers Conference is, I say it’s a natural anti-depressant. As someone all too well informed about the magnitude of the destruction and intractable predicaments our world uniquely faces today, I’m grateful I also have the privilege of a job that amounts to a kind of “star search” for the greatest social and scientific innovators of our time. When you’re immersed in the inspiration of BioneersWorld and constantly learning about breakthrough solutions for people and planet, it’s simply impossible not to have hope.

Can’t make it to the national Bioneers conference, or want to go local? Our Beaming Bioneers local partners bring home the inspiring Bioneers plenaries plus a treasure trove of live local solutions and leaders to build community resilience and restoration nationwide. Join local allies to activate your region for transformation.

How do we train 100,000 new farmers and instill a larger land ethic modeled on nature’s wisdom? How can each of us apply these ecological design principles and practices in our own backyards and communities? Don’t miss the brilliant design science full-day Permaculture intensive at Bioneers 2012 with leading masters.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to help a 21-year-old gardener realize her dream of creating a mandala garden on land I was stewarding. She was bright, visionary and strong, and could hardly believe her luck at being given the go-ahead to use one acre of a beautiful meadow for her project. And what a garden it was! Two weeks later on the other side of the country in a completely unrelated incident, my 21-year-old musician daughter was approached by a woman about my age who asked her to join the string quartet of her dreams. Unsolicited. She could hardly believe her luck.

Each Cultivating Women’s Leadership Training blows my heart wide open, as I am struck by the vision, dynamism and beauty of strong women stepping more fully into their wholeness on behalf of our ailing world. As we take stands on behalf of what we love, in alliance with women from all walks of life, ages, disciplines and ethnicities, it seems the world bends to meet us. As research reveals, as women’s equity improves, so too does the health of all the human and ecological communities around them.

There’s no “summer break” for Bioneers’ Education for Action Program, where budding initiatives are in fast-paced development to serve our expanding educational community in deeper, more extensive capacities than ever before.

I am a member of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe of California, raised in the heart of the Mojave Desert on our Indian Reservation along the shores of Havasu Lake, CA. My commitment and dedication to my people has afforded me tremendous opportunity to receive degrees in cultural anthropology and photography from Oklahoma State University and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and soon after serve as both a Chemehuevi Tribal Council member and Executive Director of the Chemehuevi Cultural Center. My path and purpose have led me to a life dedicated to the preservation and revitalization of indigenous culture, language, lifeways and landscapes.

Nature does not favor centralization. As climate change escalates and too-big-not-to-fail systems unravel, brilliant effective models of building local and regional resilience and economies are mushrooming. It’s time to create a national and globalocal network of resilient communities to build collective knowledge, transfer leading-edge models and tools, and catalyze collaborations.