Support Local Food, Green Jobs, and Social Justice by Supporting Planting Justice

I am writing a special personal appeal this year to call for your support for an organization I am involved with called Planting Justice, an Oakland-based food justice organization.

I have had the privilege of serving on the board of directors since its inception last year and have seen it grow from seed idea to full-fledged force for food justice and urban agriculture over the past year and half. While my role has often been along the lines of communications, board decisions, and supporting in whatever ways I can, I have often been involved with the on-the-ground work that characterizes the daily work of Planting Justice (PJ).  I can tell you personally that you will rarely find a more dedicated, passionate, smart, and skilled couple of people than my friends and co-founders Gavin Raders and Haleh Zandi. They and the rest of the PJ crew have their eyes simultaneously on food access and social justice and on both ecological and financial sustainability.

I have enjoyed the garden work-parties transferring plant starts on the rooftop garden in Temescal and at Explore College Prep Middle School where Planting Justice planted and cultivated a food forest and facilitated a school garden program with the help of the students; I visited San Quentin prison H-unit, where men are learning gardening skills in a collaboration between PJ and the Insight Garden Program.  PJ has just recently hired its first participant from that program, a San Quentin parolee, who without the opportunity of the program to have gained these skills and knowledge and care, may have more likely become another statistic in California’s deplorable recidivism rate. I helped build raised beds at an affordable housing senior center just up the road. I have gone door-to-door in Oakland to connect neighbors with PJ’s work. I learned how to install a greywater system with the low-cost laundry-to-landscape workshop that PJ’s Gavin Raders and Andrew Chahrour teach. On the Global Work Party day 10/10/10, I was one of over 50 who joined a food justice bike tour of West and North Oakland that PJ organized along with Walk Oakland Bike Oakland and Peoples Grocery. We ended the day helping transform a plain Bermuda grass-choked yard into a beautiful edible garden.

Bioneers 2010: Dispatch from an Earth Community Movement

Once again, the 3-day Bioneers mother-ship has landed and departed, and a thousand pods of social and environmental change have dispersed across the globe, refreshed and re-energized.  Or to use the less technological metaphor by Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute,

“This is kind of a seasonal migration ceremony, Bioneers.  If we were migrating birds, this would be our staging ground, where we come and talk about what we have hatched this year and what breeding was like.”

The Bioneers Conference, hosted in San Rafael, CA on what is the ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok, is a leading-edge forum presenting breakthrough solutions for people and planet.  Over its twenty-one years Bioneers has become a global community of some of the most dedicated, passionate, and creative thinkers and leaders facilitating a wiser way forward for the earth community.

Farmers, students, social justice workers, scientists, artists, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, indigenous leaders, environmental activists, peacemakers, and a motley assortment of engaged citizens come together to learn, network, and re-energize their efforts in creating a just and resilient world.  The topics discussed range from organic farming, green chemistry, and women in the media to cross-cultural education, traditional indigenous knowledge, and local democracy.

The experience is as intellectually stimulating as it is personally transformational. Over the next few days I will be discussing some of the most visionary and exciting projects, ideas, and people at Bioneers, including the Million Kid March, the new shift in environmental and community protection using a rights-of-nature framework that is taking root across the world, the Dreaming New Mexico local foodshed & fair trade work, the One World Youth Project that is creating a new paradigm for cross-cultural education, new models of clean energy, the transformation of urban landscapes and the work of Andy Lipkus and the TreePeople, Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots programs in 120 countries, the heroic ethnographic work of Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, the first female fellow of the National Geographic Society, and the move to amend the constitution to limit corporate person-hood and restore free speech for people alone.

Here I want to highlight what I take to be some of its core themes and messages and hopefully in the process capture some of the spirit of Bioneers.

1) Urgency of Action: All the signals from the biosphere and indicators from our body and economy are in: the time is past due for massive shifts in how we do things.

“This moment beckons us all to think big,” said Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons. “To match all we are each capable of with the needs of a planet” in peril.

Another panelist, Ami Marcus from Mt. Shasta, whose community is fighting corporate raiding of their water and manipulation of their weather, said, “It is not enough to feel it here,” she said, pointing to her heart, “we must codify it in our structures on the ground.”

And that takes the hard work of speaking out, organizing, speaking face to face with our neighbors about the issues, of challenging the status quo, saying yes to things not yet born but are in our imaginations, not accepting no, and of not waiting on leaders to come.  It means scaling up the work we are doing already. It means moving beyond bumper sticker activism and clicktivism.

Bioneers co-founder Kenny Ausubel invoked Winston Churchill: “It’s no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”

The Four Years. Go campaign was presented, a global effort to awaken the best of our collective awareness and action.  It is based on the premise that what we do or don’t do in the very short term will effect generations to come and that we have the solutions at hand, but we need all hands on deck.  The mission is to empower “individuals and organizations to set and reach goals that will cause a positive global tipping point by 2014, setting humanity on a new path toward a socially just, environmentally sustainable, and spiritually fulfilling future.”  As the video suggests, it is not a new organization, it represents goals for every organization.

Connect with Four Years. Go on Facebook and on Twitter.

We are urged to plug-in, co-create, and act with fierce determination. We are the leaders. As one speaker urged, “Whatever you do, wherever you are, find a way to be ever more involved.”

Fresh the Movie is Giving 1% to a Sustainable Food Organization

In keeping with September’s theme of raising awareness about hunger and food deserts and Ecolocalizer’s ongoing advocacy of transforming our food system, I thought it appropriate to highlight a cool contest in which you can participate.

There are more and more fabulous and creative organizations working hard everyday to transform our unsustainable food system into one that is healthy and regenerative. And most could use some help.  The folks at Fresh the Movie are committing one percent of 2010′s total revenue earned from the film to one lucky non-profit organization.  Out of 43 applicants, they have winnowed it down to ten.

They are asking sustainable food enthusiasts to vote on which organization should win.  Vote here.

One writer at EcoSalon summarized the film: “If Food Inc. was your wake up call, Fresh, The Movie is your call to action” because it showcases positive local solutions all around the country.

By the way, Fresh is entering theaters soon.  If you live in the Bay Area, it will be here the first week of October. Or catch a community screen.  Better yet, get a DVD and screen the film yourself and invite friends to watch and discuss it!

(first published on Ecolocalizer)

Oakland Food Policy Council Turning a Year Old

I’ve been following the course of the Oakland Food Policy Council off and on since the formation of its founding councilmembers last fall. I checked in again in the spring as they hammered out priorities.

This week’s meeting marks the end of its first year of council meetings and introduction of new councilmembers.  I’m excited to hear more about its plan for action.

Raising Our Awareness about Food Insecurity in the U.S.

Have you had your three square meals today? How far do you have to travel to access healthy food? When you get there how much can you afford? Finally, if you can afford it, do you have the time and skills to cook it?

September is Food Desert Awareness Month and has also been designated Hunger Awareness Month by Feeding America.

Alarming statistics reveal more and more Americans are going hungry or are food insecure.  Over 1 in 10 Americans (about 41 million) now participate in SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka food stamps). Millions rely on emergency food assistance and report being forced to choose between paying the utility bill or paying for food–all this in the “land of plenty.”  And for millions of other Americans an over-abundance of junk food outweighs the benefits those calories provide. It is often cheaper and easier to get a bag of Doritos from the corner store or a Big Mac and fries than to buy or prepare dishes with fresh vegetables.

Creating Bay Area Habitat: Green Roofs and Beyond

General Green Roof Alliance Meeting

WHEN: Wednesday, August 25 @ 7 pm

WHERE: Bay Localize, 436 14th St., 2nd Floor, Oakland, CA

The Green Roof Alliance invites you to learn about enhancing biodiversity in our Bay Area cities with Lisa Lee Benjamin, Principal of Evo Design and founder of Alpine Initiatives, and Amber Hasselbring of Nature in the City.

Lisa Lee Benjamin designs and creates sustainable environments that integrate people and structures with their surroundings. She consults on and leads international projects focusing on what is possible in relation to our ideas of sustainability, collaboration, and community. A certified permaculturalist a plant and soil biologist, and recent insect enthusiast, Lisa will enlighten us with the possibilities for habitat creation in our area through living roofs, walls, and other architectural features.

Amber Hasselbring is a San Francisco artist focused on exploring ecological relationships. Her Mission Greenbelt Project (2007-present) explores themes of gentrification, education, and urban ecology through performances and garden building efforts in San Francisco. By harnessing community creativity to construct a contiguous wildlife corridor, the Mission Greenbelt Project fosters urban environmental stewardship.

The Green Roof Alliance works in collaboration with industry professionals, government representatives, and communities to promote healthy and sustainable green roofs in the Bay Area.