The Local Food Shift: Getting There

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This webinar addresses these key questions: For the Transition movement, what is the role of food localization in building community resilience and self-reliance? How can food localization address the challenges of fossil fuel depletion, climate change, and economic decline? How can Transition Initiatives be catalysts for food localization as economic development? What are the most promising strategies, tools, processes and pathways for localizing our food systems? 

 

Join two seasoned Transition leaders in an exploration of innovative food localization efforts in Colorado and Florida: Michael Brownlee, co-founder of Transition Colorado, and Don Hall, founder of Transition Sarasota. Learn about the evolution of the EAT LOCAL! and Local Food Shift campaigns, and how you can catalyze the local food movement in your community!

 

 

The Vision: Food localization can result in stronger community economies, ecological sustainability, better nutrition and health, more civic engagement, and more resilient local food systems based on deep ecological principles and a more connected populace, with far less dependence on fossil fuels and petroleum-based inputs. The overarching vision is that in such food-localized communities our health will improve greatly, especially the health of our children. We will feel more connected, more alive, more engaged, living more meaningful and satisfying lives. We will be devoted to rebuilding the soil in our farmlands. Our local farmers will be able to buy the land on which they farm. We will transform the landscape. Our agricultural land will mostly be used for food production for local consumption. We will produce thousands of new jobs; our local economies will be robust! We will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation. We will be sequestering carbon in the soil, in plant growth. We will have plans and food stores in place to feed all our people in times of crisis or emergency. We will all have a far greater degree of food security and food sovereignty; major corporations will no longer be in control of what and how we eat. Our local foodsheds will be resilient and self-reliant. This will be a revolution!

 

 

 

I recommend reading Lester Brown’s new book, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity. Also Anna Lappe’s Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It. And if you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s books, especially Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, drop everything else you’re doing and read them now. Along with Richard Heinberg’s brilliant essay, “50 Million Farmers,” which you can find at EnergyBulletin.net (nowResilience.org). 

I also highly recommend Mark Winne’s book, Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture. And Gary Nabhan’s Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food.

Some others:

• The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, by Wendell Berry
• Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher, by Fred Kirschenmann
• Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, by David Holmgren
• The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift, by Raymond De Young and Thomas Princen at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
• Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if food, farms, and fertility mattered, by Woody Tasch
• Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture, by Wes Jackson
• Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, by Bill McKibben

These are just some of the books that you and your team will want to study and feed yourselves with, and there are many more you might want to explore together. And of course there is a host of documentary films that you would do well to watch together.