Two years ago, I had the opportunity to experience Woodland Harvest Mountain Farm on a Wellesley Alternative Spring Break and be surrounded by the beauty the land and the owners’ generosity. That week was memorable to say the least: a week of being nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, learning the ropes of a farming lifestyle, and witnessing the unsparing ways that this rural community navigates finances, conservative neighbors, and access to food. Now, COVID-19 has put all of that at risk.

Woodland Harvest is wrestling with the tension between trying to live off of the farm and their dependence on outside support. Amid the pandemic, life at Woodland Harvest is both entirely normal and deep in crisis at the same time. The land remains giving and the farm fruitful. But the farm’s finances, which depend upon outside visitors, are in jeopardy.

Settling in Appalachia for the will to slow down, Lisa and Elizabeth find themselves with an abundance of time throughout these months for what they are best at: farming, family, and reflection.

Sitting across from me on the Zoom gallery view are two hard-working women — Lisa and Elizabeth. In their self-made Appalachian farm, Woodland Harvest, they have just gotten in from their morning animal chores.  Located in the North Carolinian mountains, Elizabeth and Lisa have built a school, farm, and home for themselves, their two teenage sons, and the hundreds? Of visitors who also are drawn to their “dreamstead.”

Elizabeth’s bought the land in 1998, beginning her lifelong pursuit of permaculture practices and self-sustaining living. Permaculture is an agricultural method of intentionally designing harmonious landscapes that maintain diversity, stability and resilience. Since growing up in Louisiana, at the time of the environmental movement in the 1990s, Elizabeth always yearned to live off the grid. Her job as an Outward Bound guide first drew her to the North Carolina mountains. Lisa was a local.  She grew up only two counties away, and a young pregnancy kept her in North Carolina’s Appalachia.

Woodland Harvest Mountain Farm

Their roles as environmental and social justice activists is unusual in West Jefferson, NC. Beyond being two lesbian and progressive women amidst a conservative and patriotic rural community, economic inequalities are obvious to them.

Rural North Carolina is a hardscrabble region, despite its natural bounty.  Many of their neighbors consider the Dollar General their grocery store. That frustrates Lisa and Elizabeth, since their neighbors could be more self-sufficient.  Lisa explains that they have “so much opportunity for food self-sufficiency.” While she doesn’t consider West Jefferson to be an extreme example of a food desert, she does explain that “because of the poverty in our culture, we are in some ways [a food desert], and there is hunger. People are going hungry around here. People shouldn’t go on hungry.”

Even on their thriving vegetable and animal farm, however, even Lisa and Elizabeth worry about access to food. “You know we love coffee here” Elizabeth jokes with a hefty mug of black coffee in her hand. One of many things that they don’t grow is coffee trees. While they have plentiful access to veggies and meat, they still need to make weekly trips to the closest grocery store thirteen miles away for staples like sugar, flour, milk, coffee, and the occasional bottle of wine.

Seeing how they sustainably source the majority of their food, it may come as a surprise to learn they’re living under the poverty line, receiving food stamps that only actually last them two weeks rather than a month. Running a farm is always hard and unpredictable. Since Rarely do they feel comfortable financially, and the past few months has only heightened that worry.

The COVID-19 crisis canceled Wellesley’s Alternative Spring Break annual trip to Woodland Harvest in March 2020. The family relies on visitors and workshops to supplement its income. The cancelled trip, one of three college trips that had been planned, left a deep hole in their budget. Woodland had already stocked up on food in anticipation of what would be a total of forty visitors during the month, what they refer to as “March Magic.”

To make ends meet, Lisa and Elizabeth are going to have to leave the farm for work at some point. They’ve already fundraised to cover their mortgage. But they don’t have enough money to buy supplies, run the farm, and cover their mortgage.  “It’s happening to real people. It’s going to get worse,” Elizabeth says, describing the realities of the pandemic.

A few days ago, they took their first visit to the grocery store in six weeks. Typically, it would be a weekly run, but since they were fully stocked on goods, there was no need. In addition to their grocery store purchases, they got seven more ducklings, four turkeys, nine small Guinea hands and six rabbits. They’re also open to the idea of breeding their goats for dairy. They’ve planted 300 feet of potatoes and close to 200 feet of onions. With their recent planting of plentiful amounts of greens, squash, cucumbers, and asparagus, they are counting on what they can grow on the farm. Their youngest son, Aidyn, has also developed a new talent for hunting squirrels, mastering his great-great grandmother’s squirrel soup that was featured in the New York Times in 1907.

Lisa and Elizabeth’s story makes clear that COVID-19 isn’t just affecting big cities. Rural communities are being hit hard too. Lisa and Elizabeth have built a home for themselves, and they’re relying on their land and passion to help them through these difficult times. As they reflect on their drastically different lives from the 1990s when they met, Lisa proclaims how expansive their love has become.  What sprung from their relationship, she explained, is “the love that we put into our space here at woodland harvest and the space that we create for people like you to come and be.” For Elizabeth, Woodland Harvest and living in Appalachia has had a profound impact, an escape of their past everyday life and a rapidly-moving world: “It saved my life. Probably a number of times. I don’t think I can live in that world anymore.”

Whether or not you’ve seen Parasite, 2019 Academy Awards Best Picture, you can probably imagine a rainstorm. When it rains, a person with an umbrella is more likely to stay dry than a person without one. I bring this up because Parasite sharply displays the difference between a family with resources and a family without. When a torrential storm hits Seoul, South Korea, where Parasite is set, the wealthy Park family stays inside their house on a hill, protected by high-walled fences and security cameras on a pristine street. They have returned early from a camping trip and their kids have pitched a tent in the front yard. For them, while disruptive to their camping, this storm is just another storm. Posing no real threat, the rain almost seems romantic.

Meanwhile, across town in a basement unit with only one street-level window, the Kim family is experiencing a devastating flood. They run through streets rushing with runoff and sewage water back to their home, only to find that it has already been infiltrated by the water. They wade around in dirty water and sewage overflow that rises up to their armpits collecting their belongings as best they can. Flooded out of their home, they spend the night on the floor of a communal shelter. 

The entire film makes clear the differences between the Parks and the Kims, but the rainstorm scene gets to the heart of why these difference smatter. Climatology and the class struggle are intimately related. In the face of an ecological disaster, not every person is affected equally. This is not a new phenomenon. Climate change has always been an issue that transcends economic, social, and racial differences. 

It is impossible to separate our lived experiences from our environments. Our environments are the homes we occupy, the neighborhoods we live in, and the cities and towns in which we reside. Having control over our environments gives us power and that power comes with the privilege of choice. Did we choose the spaces we occupy? Did we choose our neighborhoods? Did we choose our cities? Did we have any other options? The environments that marginalized people have been relegated to historically are ones with sub-optimal conditions–– outdated infrastructure, lack of grocery stores, close proximity to freeway traffic and factories. This wasn’t their choice; it was made for them.

While Parasite was widely celebrated in the U.S., there has been little focus on the environmental justice issues portrayed. The film clearly distinguishes the wealth gap between the Parks and Kims, something any viewer could pick up on. Looking closer at the environmental conditions of the families— the disparate impacts of the torrential rainstorm and exposure pollution — is easier to miss.  A family like the Kims that lives in poverty will experience less sanitary housing conditions, and be vulnerable to a plethora of health hazards like flooding. It is less likely that a family like the Parks that has the means to afford property in a nicer neighborhood on a hill with paid help would ever experience those same conditions. That few American reviewers have paid attention to the environmental dimensions of the film is hardly surprising —in the United States, environmental injustices like this have long gone unnoticed.

In the mid-twentieth century, people with the ability to choose their neighborhoods and homes (often white, middle-upper class) moved to the suburbs to escape worsening living conditions in cities. Much like the living conditions of the Kim Family, often unclean, close quartered, and unprotected to weather and disease, inner-city housing has long been a health hazard with the expansion of urban development and industrialization. At this same time, housing laws largely relegated Black people to those inner-city housing options and excluded them from buying valuable property outside city centers. 

Generations later, many Black Americans find themselves living in neighborhoods with a plethora of environmental issues. Compared to affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods, neighborhoods with vulnerable populations have historically been forced to confront issues they did not create. Parasite shows what happens in the face of extreme weather: the rich are relatively unaffected while the destitute are devastated. Non-extreme scenarios play out like this every day for those who live in poverty, or are affected by environmental racism. Even in the face of a massive storm, those who have the privilege to not be affected will rarely pay attention to the damage.

As the global climate crisis continues to escalate, the poorer communities on the frontlines, as portrayed in Parasite by the Kim family, will continue to disproportionately suffer the consequences. People with wealth and access to resources will experience the same rainstorms, but can raise their umbrellas for protection. It is because of this that governments must step up to ask who are the most vulnerable, address the systemic issues that disproportionately affect lower-resourced groups (and that people in dominant social groups can often overcome without assistance, and empower those vulnerable communities in the face of climate challenges. Access to adequate and affordable housing, universal healthcare, and jobs to bolster the renewable energy sector are all part of larger solutions needed to address structural inequality. When the rainstorm comes we need government resources to provide umbrellas for those who can’t afford their own.

Convincing individuals to change their diet hasn’t worked.  That’s why we need supply side change—from farmed animals to cultivated meat—to build a sustainable future of food.

I first met Annie Osborn at a reception after a panel on “The Future of Food: Growing Meat to Feed 10 Billion” hosted by Harvard’s Office of Career Services.  Featuring scientists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and movement builders, the panel addressed questions from “What is cultivated meat?” to diverse career pathways into the burgeoning field of alternative protein.  Given the abstract and futuristic topic of cultivated meat—something that most people have never heard of—I figured that I’d likely be one of the few attendees on a stormy February day in New England.  To my surprise, the conference room was jam-packed with eager students ready to make an impact.  Standing at the back, I had to stand on tip-toe to see the panelists through the gaps between others in front of me.  

Such a panel like this is one of the many ways that Annie, University Innovation Specialist at the Good Food Institute (GFI), is fostering engagement and collaboration between universities, students, and the plant-based and cultivated meat industries.  

A non-profit based in the U.S., GFI works with scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs worldwide “to make groundbreaking good food a reality.”  In GFI’s words, good foods are “foods that are more delicious, safer to eat, and better for the planet than their outdated counterparts.”

Simply put, cultivated meat is meat produced directly from animal cells in cultivators.  Adapted from a widely accepted technology used to regenerate organs for medical purposes, this innovative approach grows meat from just a sample of animal cells.  This is different from plant-based meats like the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat.  Done entirely outside of an animal, cultivated meat requires no factory farming or slaughterhouses but yields a product that looks, cooks, and tastes the same as slaughtered meat.  The environmental benefits of this approach are many: it reduces greenhouse gas emissions, avoids manure and antibiotic pollution, and it conserves land and water, to name but a few.  

(Image source: GFI & Mattson.)

Annie did not start her career well-versed in the promise of cultivated meat. The combination of her education and research experiences led her to GFI.  While pursuing a B.S. in Earth Systems at Stanford University, Annie focused on sustainable fisheries as a way to explore her interests in marine biology.  Despite loving her research at the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, she gradually came to a realization: “There was no such a thing as a sustainable fishery at the scale you would need to feed everybody who wants to eat fish.” 

“We have overfished the oceans far more than we have over-farmed the earth,” Annie explained.  “Almost every major fishery is in the state of collapse right now.”  Over the last 50 years, the number of fish in the world has halved.  According to the FAO, nearly 90% of the world’s fish stocks are overexploited, fully exploited, or depleted.  

Aside from issues of sustainability, Annie also became more concerned about the moral status of fish.  Three words from Finding Nemo capture it well: “Friends, not food.” 

When Annie continued to graduate school at Stanford, she shifted her focus away from marine research to studying sustainable agriculture.  Modeling commodity grain prices for her master’s thesis, Annie became aware of the inefficiencies of our agricultural systems.  Today, only 55% of the world’s crop calories are fed to people, while 36% are devoted to feeding livestock.  Meanwhile, only 17-30 calories of food is produced for every 100 calories of edible grains fed to animals.  This explains why animal farming takes up 83% of our farmland but provides only 18% of our calories.  “It’s a really imbalanced system,” Annie stressed.  

After graduating from Stanford, Annie spent a year researching micronutrient deficiency in rural China, another experience that reinforced her belief in “supply-side” transformation of our food system.  The prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies in western rural children in China that she witnessed was deeply depressing.  Day after day, Annie met families who had anemic children.  “They were lagging cognitively and it was really affecting their development,” Annie said, “but we didn’t really have any ways to help them other than telling them ‘you need to feed them meat.’”  This made Annie realize that many people are not able to make thoughtful decisions about what they eat.  

“It’s very hard to motivate people to change their behavior if you don’t provide an alternative option—especially when it comes to food.  If we really want to precipitate a major quick change in our food system,” Annie reasoned, “it needs to come from the suppliers. It needs to be ethically driven as much as market driven, and it needs to happen quickly.” 

A market-driven, technology-based revolution of the food system is exactly what GFI is working towards.  “One of our theses is that the free market, while flawed, is an incredibly powerful resource,” Annie explained.  It is a system that can precipitate rapid change if you can harness it.  That’s why GFI is laser-focused on transforming the food system by leveraging the meat industry’s economies of scale, global supply chain, marketing expertise and massive consumer base.  

Under the market system, “you have to think about what consumers want,” Annie explained.  There are three main criteria consumers base their decisions on: taste, price, and convenience.  Consumers want palatable food that is cheap and easy to cook and to keep.  To precipitate a change in the food system through meat, dairy, and egg alternatives, they must outcompete their animal-based counterparts in the marketplace on all three criteria.  

Another aspect to consider is the ethics of meat production and consumption.  “People currently eat meat despite how it is produced, not because of how it’s produced.”  People are always horrified when being exposed to inhumane practices in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and slaughterhouses, “but because they have no other choice now, they are kinda just accepting it,” Annie observes.    

The supply-side reform to revolutionizing the food system is promising.  When cultivated meat becomes the default, a sustainable future will no longer depend on the careful choices of consumers.  “Supply-side change allows you to impact many individuals without having to tailor your message to each and every one of them,” explains Annie.  “Supply-side change allows individuals to preserve their behaviors for the reasons that are valuable and meaningful to them, which in turn vastly lowers the activation energy required for global change.”

The urgency of change is only heightened under the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has illuminated the myriad risks posed by our current food system.  While there’s no evidence of a direct causal link between CAFOs and COVID-19, pathogens do jump from factory farms to humans.  Globally in the past 30 years, 75% of new human pathogens have originated from animals.  In the U.S., 80% of antibiotics are used in animal agriculture, which contributes to increasing antibiotic resistance.  “Our food system is also a serious disease factor,” Annie remarked. 

It is uncertain how the current pandemic might shift the investment landscape in cultivated meat, which had been predicted to be commercially available in supermarkets in 8-10 years.  The challenge is to bring down the price of cultivated meat, which is currently very expensive to produce.  The severe economic impact of COVID-19 may delay the process, but it’s also possible that the crisis will alarm governments to shift away from animal agriculture and support cultivated meat research.  “That feels a little optimistic, even though it is reasonable,” Annie speculated. 

A large-scale supply-side transition to cultivated meat and alternative protein would be devastating for farmers and fishers.  GFI is attentive to the challenge.  While GFI primarily works with researchers and companies who are good food innovators, they remain committed to building connections with those who work closely with farmers so that livelihoods concerns can be addressed.  

Another unique fact about GFI is their strategic use of language.  Take a look at GFI’s publications, and you won’t find the word “vegan.” While “vegan” labels are helpful for consumers who do not want to consume animal products, that language also comes with a stigma that is not helpful for innovators who are recreating the components of meat in novel food products.  

To Annie and her colleagues at GFI, cultivated meat promises to revolutionize our current food system and mitigate the environmental impacts of animal agriculture without requiring conscientious effort from consumers.  

In her role as the University Innovation Specialist at GFI, Annie works to engage high-potential entrepreneurs and scientists with the plant-based and cultivated meat industry.  Across university campuses, she builds and supports student communities and departments centered around the future of meat. 

“An overarching goal is to set up research centers,” Annie envisioned.  “A big dream is to have an alternative protein research center in Boston with experts from Tufts, Harvard, MIT—and Wellesley maybe—all working together to really propel the science forward.” 

Ultimately, GFI wants “to mobilize resources towards solving the technological issues around sustainable food production in an open-access way so that the whole industry can move forward more quickly.” 

The recent Climate Change Summit in Katowice, Poland, brought delegates from nearly 200 countries to address climate change. Many at the Summit pushed forth toward an  updated model that would meet emissions standards with stricter regulation and enforcement. However, this is just one example of collective action working to solve urgent environmental problems such as climate change. In a small village in Guinea Bissau, the Jola are also finding effective ways to help address environmental concerns such as climate change through rice and the power of community.

Dr. Joanna Davidson, a leading cultural anthropologist at Boston University, understands the connection between rice and people. She has studied the relationship between rice cultivation in a Jola village in Guinea Bissau for a decade.  However, Davidson did not always see the direct relationship between culture and the environment immediately. Over the course of a decade, Davidson saw how climate change was beginning to affect the Jola community as their rice paddies became increasingly dry due to climate change. Consequently, food insecurity also increased. This challenge sparked Davidson’s interest in furthering her research and increasing her focus on West Africans’ response environmental and economic changes occurring in this region. Rice is is not only an important part of the identity of villages such as Jola, it has also unexpectedly become a part of Davidson’s research as she points out, “ I, myself, did not go to the Jola region of northwest Guinea-Bissau to study rice. And yet I still find myself, more than a decade after my first Jola rice harvest, returning again and again to rice.”

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Shorter rainy seasons have threatened livelihoods and increased food insecurity, especially in Esana. Through her interactions with the Jola village in Esana, Davidson turned this into a research problem that aimed to capture these dramatic changes and explore further how the Jola people were reinventing themselves as a result of these complex challenges. It was particularly Davidson’s ethnographic research in Guinea Bissau that led her to discover the complexities of food security, gender, and climate change. Through her field research in this fascinating and understudied place, she began to gain a better understanding of how environmental problems may be present to a community and the actions taken as a result to help adapt to the changes. This work culminated into her recent book, Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment and Development in Rural West Africa.   In her book, she stresses the importance of gaining a better understanding of environmental problems when viewed through a cultural lense. She explains, “Jola lives, like those of most rice-growing people in this region, are permeated by rice.” Rice cultivation is intimately connected to rituals and ceremonies in the Jola culture.

Davidson not only highlights the importance of localized efforts to address environmental issues such as climate change, but also the need to take a closer look at the “reconfigurations of women’s power” in the context of the Jola women. Jola women farmers in particular have had to respond to the environmental changes because of rice’s central role in their lives. Traditionally, there is gendered division of labor in rice cultivation as Jola women are responsible for transplanting rice seedlings and harvesting ripe rice. Climate change has presented challenges to agricultural cycles as well as women’s identities. For some, these challenges might seem insurmountable.

While environmental changes continue to diminish the viability of rice cultivation and economic stability of the Jola, they have also found strategies to address these challenges. For example, Jola women organized themselves, forming  gender-based work groups called societé, or societies as a way of adapting to these changes both socially and financially. These societies help women to share agricultural techniques as well as to create a social support network. Through these networks, cultural identity is preserved through their connection to their land and history.

And these groups produce results, specifically through financial assistance. Similar to the model of microfinance organizations, Davidson says, “the success comes from these women pooling their labor and funds to help each other out in the midst of environmental shocks.”  The financial assistance provides women farmers the capacity to Community collectives offer a new way to think about climate change readiness in rural areas. The model that Davidson documents is a promising one, although it is not without its challenges. Such mutual support is a shift in traditional practices, as the Jola strongly believe in self-sufficiency and autonomy. Thus, climate change is forcing them not only to modify their agricultural practices, but to shift their cultural identity too.

Th Jola illuminate a lesson in adaptation and hope. The example of the Jola village shows the importance of viewing climate change through a cultural lens. Davidson’s shows us that there are many complexities embedded in a community that scientific models cannot solely address. A multidisciplinary approach that includes a cultural dimension helps achieve better policy decisions because of inclusion of various perspectives and identities. Davidson’s own narrative and investigative skills shine light on innovative solutions to problems facing smallholder agriculture in Africa. Davidson poignantly remarks on the resilience of the Jola. She explains, “the Jola villagers exemplify dilemmas rural people throughout West Africa face as they try to keep their families together and as they continue to farm and live in ways that give them a sense of accomplishment in their own eyes and in the eyes of their kin and neighbors, but in a world of circumstances that make those efforts increasingly precarious.”  Rice and culture are inextricably linked for many people like the Jola, and only through looking at them through a cultural lens can we find solutions to the pressing challenges of climate change.

Roseville, Minnesota is a city situated between Minneapolis and St. Paul. It may only have 36,000 residents, but it is officially recognized as a city, complete with municipal government. As of about 2016, nearly one-third of Roseville’s population was non-white.  Yet the city council was composed of four middle-aged white members. Dannah Waukazo Thompson wanted to change that.Thompson, a 28-year-old Native American activist and paralegal, entered the race to represent minorities and to fight for justice and equality in Roseville. She decided to run for Roseville City Council with no political background, mentoring, or funding. She took on the municipal political sphere by herself. Impressively, she came within 800 votes of winning a council seat from incumbent Bob Willmus.

Thompson recently moved to Roseville. She works as a paralegal at a debt collection firm, but she was a political science major in college and has always had an interest in the political world. Part of many local activist groups, Dannah devotes much of her time to the betterment of the community.

Dannah said that there were many push factors that led her to run for City Council. Dannah cited events such as Trump’s election and police shootings of young black men including Jamar Clark and Philando Castile as events that stirred up civic engagement in her community. This engagement took the form of protests, teach-ins and talk-back events, and increased dialogue with local politicians.

Amidst this, she said that she, “wanted to be somebody who would be able to bring a change to the system so that we could take a break and not have to fight for our lives all the time and could make systemic changes that could possibly save lives”.

Dannah faced an uphill battle from the start. While campaigning, some people—including the other council candidates—told her not to talk about the fact that she is Native American. Some even told her not to focus on the fact that she is a woman. But Dannah believed that her own experiences as a Native woman could bring progressive changes to the rapidly growing city.

By focusing on issues like affordable housing, higher minimum wage, and removing criminal background checks from rental application processes, she was able to bring attention to issues that disproportionately affect minority communities. For example, with affordable housing, Dannah researched possible city funding sources as well as racial bias in the housing process in order to create a multifaceted and feasible solution for Roseville.

“By talking about minority issues,” she explained, “I was able to bring attention to the problems affecting indigenous communities like Natives as well as other minority groups”. She brought together her professional knowledge and experience with her identity to engage minority communities and encourage white communities to think about these issues of inequality.

While Dannah’s race was just for a small city council, the political sphere she was entering was one still fraught with tension after the 2016 elections. Dannah has many white coworkers who voted for President Trump for business reasons. Those votes felt like a betrayal to her and her minority coworkers. This made Dannah think more about who needed to represent Roseville’s citizens in coming years. Supported by social justice groups in Roseville and civic engagement in Minneapolis, Dannah was driven to be a new kind of politician.

Aside from Trump’s election, Dannah was also greatly influenced by local politics, such as Jacob Frey’s victory in 2016 mayoral election in Minneapolis. Frey was elected mayor with the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party endorsement, and many touted him as being the progressive candidate for the race. Recently, he has made affordable housing one of his main issues as well.

Yet Dannah noted that Frey was behind a lot of new fancy condos built around Minneapolis before he was elected—and on his website he listed ‘residential expansion’ as one of his main issues. With rent prices already skyrocketing in the Twin Cities, Frey’s luxury condos pushed up the cost of living in Minneapolis even more. This rent crisis exacerbated a Native American homelessness, culminating a homeless encampment located in downtown Minneapolis. More privileged communities saw Frey based on his campaign platform alone, unaware of his history in Minneapolis. Struggling minority groups couldn’t avoid that history, and now face the consequences.

This inspired Dannah to run as a candidate who followed through with promises to specifically help minority communities in Roseville. Dannah said that she was taught in her life to always think seven generations ahead. While Mayor Frey in Minneapolis may not have thought ahead when he built those luxury condos, Dannah ran to serve the City of Roseville now and in the future. She also ensured all of her campaign promises were all backed up with thoroughly researched and sustainable financial plans.

The City of Roseville did not make it easy on candidates. There was only one public speaking event for council candidates, held before the primaries by a third party to increase voter participation. The candidates did not know at the time if they would be on the ballot. The City of Roseville did not hold on any formal election events. That made it difficult to get word out about the candidates, and it gave an advantage to incumbents and candidates with more funding.

One thing is evident about Dannah; although she is just over 5 feet tall, she is not to be underestimated. She said that what her opponents may not realize is, she still got 6,200 votes. In Dannah’s words, “that’s not nothing”.

Dannah may have lost her political race, but she says that she remains hopeful. After the 2018 midterms, seeing a record number of women as well as Native American women win their elections has given her hope to keep fighting, and has bolstered her spirit so she isn’t actually too disappointed about losing.

Dannah Thompson is clearly here for the long fight; and to anyone considering following her footsteps into the political sphere, whether municipal, federal, or global, Dannah advises: “when in doubt just go for it because there’s never going to be too many people trying to save the world”.

Images:

My Vision for Roseville

https://www.facebook.com/Dannah-Thompson-for-Roseville-City-Council-430548354038194/

Mitch Hescox wouldn’t call himself an environmentalist. “I’m a Christian,” he said. “I came to this because I’m a Christian.”

“This” is his work to engage the 40,000 evangelical Christian churches in the United States in environmental action as president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). It might seem like an odd community to target – the most recent survey suggests only 28% of American evangelicals believe in climate change. But to Hescox, there’s no contradiction between being an Evangelical Christian and caring about climate change. Rather, he stresses that the two are intrinsically related. It just comes down to how you talk about it.

Many evangelicals are critical of environmentalism. They believe it puts the value of the environment above the needs of humans. In light of this skepticism, Hescox has helped pioneer the concept of Creation Care. Practicing Creation Care, according to the EEN’s definition, means caring for all of God’s creation by stopping and preventing all activities that are harmful to the environment and the humans who inhabit it.

Even Hescox wasn’t always on board. Before joining the EEN, he spent 18 years as the pastor of a local church – and the fourteen years before that working in the coal power industry. His job took him around the world and exposed him to the real human and environmental costs of the industry. He saw children choking on polluted air and realized that the people most impacted by pollution were the poor. All of this convinced Hescox that environmental problems were the cause of some of the largest justice issues in the world.

“If you talk about that [Christians] are supposed to care about what God owns and care for the least of these,” Hescox stresses, “there’s no way that any person of faith should not be committed to Creation Care.” In this context, Creation Care is fundamentally an act of loving God.

That leads the EEN to some unexpected positions. The EEN supports a carbon tax. They advocate for everyone to make reductions in plastic waste, however small, because “the journey of repentance begins with a single step.”  They’re gathering signatures and bodies to march in support of clean energy. And they do this knowing that many evangelicals believe the environment is traditionally a liberal cause.

But the EEN, a self-described conservative organization, urges people not to think of climate change as a liberal or a conservative issue. The EEN, like Hescox, eschews the environmentalism label, preferring to frame issues in ways foreign to many mainstream environmentalists.

“People have different things that motivate them,” he explained. “We studied what would reach most of our community, which is more conservative. We want to target the things that will get a response and open up people’s hearts and minds.”

He paused and then added, “I’ve said to a lot of progressives, let me and people like me reach into the conservative community with our values.  Let’s help people come to terms with working on climate change in a way that resonates with them.”

For the EEN, the winning formula has been a focus on the impact of environmental problems like climate change and pollution on human health close to home, framed through a familiar evangelical lens. Simply put, they want to make climate change a pro-life issue.

The crux of it is this: if you value life beginning in the womb, you can’t stop valuing it when the baby is born. Pollution, the EEN argues, harms all life, from the unborn in the womb to the elderly. To be truly pro-life, you should value a clean earth for all children and all future children.

It’s a powerful argument. The EEN has already gotten 45,000 Evangelicals to sign on to their current Pro-Life Clean Energy Campaign, which aims to get six states to commit to 100% renewable energy by 2030. The eventual goal is have half a million pro-life Christians lobbying their elected officials to support clean energy in the name of life.

This is all part of Hescox’s goal to reach beyond the kind of activism that has people just “opening up their wallets and giving money” and move towards one that changes people’s way of life. He’s convinced that the way to do this is to make an issue local and personal. “The more local you make an issue, the easier it is to open up people’s hearts to other kinds of news.”

“Clean energy jobs are soaring,” Hescox exclaimed. “Talk about that!”

Just as the EEN uses familiar pro-life messaging to engage evangelicals, they invoke conservative economic language highlighting personal responsibility and deregulation to make the clean energy pitch to local business owners and politicians. But instead of talking about deregulation in terms of getting rid of environmental protections, the EEN talks about “freeing communities and businesses from regulations that prevent [them] from joining together” to create and sell clean energy.

The EEN’s approach is paying dividends. The Creation Care movement is growing rapidly, and more and more people are getting on board. “Not only is the faith community seeing advantages, so are the business owners,” Hescox explained. His time working in the coal industry exposed him to the huge economic costs of centralized fossil fuel grids, and he became convinced of the economic power of local, sustainable energy. Beyond getting regular citizens involved, reaching the political and business community has been a central mission during his time at the EEN.

This messaging might sound strange to liberals, but it makes sense to conservatives. “Communicate in ways that people can hear and they’ll come on board,” Hescox emphasized. “I think that’s what we’re doing.”

And he’s right. The EEN works to get people on board by targeting people with messages they’ll relate to, even if it’s not the same message that will convince their neighbor. By using language and concepts familiar to conservative, evangelical communities, they’re able to reach a significant number of people who might initially be skeptical of climate action. The Creation Care movement might make people who aren’t religious uncomfortable. But the point of it isn’t to reach everyone – and Hescox thinks that’s okay. Other people can work on their own, and at the end of the day, it’ll all come together, whether or not you call yourself an environmentalist or practice Creation Care.

“My standard illustration,” Hescox reflects, “is that to raise the action on climate change, we’re not yet at a big tent moment where we raise one tent and everyone fits underneath it. We need a lot of smaller tents raised up by individual values. And if we raise enough tents using the values of different communities, we’ll have enough tents to make a big tent – except it won’t be one tent, it’ll be a lot of little tents touching at the edges.”

Community Supported Agriculture: it’s a concept that’s been catching on across the country for some time. Customers purchase an early spring subscription from their local farm or food hub in order to receive bags of fresh, local, and organic produce weekly throughout the growing season. Why has it gotten so popular? Farmers love CSA because upfront spring payments can provide financial stability and reliability for the rest of their season. Customers buy in partly due to the rise in “eat local” and “eat organic” movements, and partly because it can be cheaper or more convenient than other produce purchasing options. But there’s an organization in Maine with a new take on the trend – at Fresh Start Farms works to ensure that it’s not just that the community supports agriculture. The program works to help agriculture support the community.

Fresh Start Farms is a farmer training program designed to help refugee farmers from Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and South Sudan transition to a new life in the US agricultural climate. Fresh Start’s New American farmers are each given a plot on a collective farm located in the rural outskirts of Lisbon, Maine. There, they learn how to operate a farm in the United States from both an agricultural and business perspective. The farmers are encouraged to grow some of their favorite crops from back home, tapping into the niche market of their fellow refugees, who are unable to find certain crops elsewhere. They sell their produce wholesale to restaurants and food pantries in the region, and directly to customers through farmers markets and the Fresh Start Farms CSA. In the off season, farmers take classes on topics like business strategy, crop planning, and marketing.

Anna Tracht, the CSA manager for Fresh Start Farms, divides their CSA customer base into two main groups: fellow refugees, and Portland urbanites. To fellow refugees, the program offers a unique opportunity to purchase culturally relevant produce at affordable prices that support their community. Fresh Start offers flexible payment plans and even a limited number of subsidized CSA memberships for members of the refugee community who can’t afford to pay the subscription.

In a recent survey, the office workers who purchase Fresh Start Farms CSAs nearly unanimously told Anna that they purchase because they “identify with the mission” of Fresh Start Farms. Living in the liberal city of Portland, these customers could afford to purchase local and organic produce elsewhere, but they choose Fresh Start Farms because of its social justice mission. Fresh Start’s partner organization, Cultivating Community, has done a great job of spreading the word about food justice in Portland, and customers can’t wait to use their grocery spending to “support refugee farmers.”

Fresh Start Farms is clearly doing some groundbreaking work promoting social justice and food security across multiple communities. But Anna admits there is one important customer base the program has failed to win over thus far. “We aren’t getting the same buy in from customers in Lisbon.” That is troublesome, since that is where Fresh Start Farms is based.

Why? It’s complicated. Anna explains, there’s a “really interesting dynamic of farming in a very very red rural town, but working with refugee farmers, and selling mostly to urban customers.”

While Fresh Start does sell produce to the local food pantry as part of their wholesale program, Anna has struggled to get even a few CSA customers in the Lisbon area. Some town members are hostile towards the farm and don’t identify with its mission. Without an organization like Cultivating Community starting local conversations about food justice, it’s harder to get the community behind a farm run by “outsiders.” For now, progress comes one person at a time. Anna’s first step has been improving relations with the owner of the neighboring farm. He “rides around [the farm] on his four-wheeler, with his dog on the back,” which is a pretty typical activity for someone living in rural Maine. But it is threatening for the refugee farmers, the majority of whom are Muslim. Culturally, they tend to avoid or even fear dogs. Since Fresh Start first moved into Lisbon, their neighbor has been “pretty unfriendly to the farmers.”

This year, though, he’s started warming up. Just a few days before Anna and I talked, he brought a peace offering of venison to the farm. Anna reflects on the significance of that act of generosity: “he’s really just gotten to know [the farmers], and eventually he realized they’re all working really hard every day like he is.” They have been showing him some of the food they’re proud to grow, and he is starting to share the food he’s proud of with them.

While Fresh Start Farms is already going above and beyond what most CSA programs do to promote social justice with their urban clientele and refugee farmers, Anna hopes that these small moments of compassion and understanding from their rural neighbors indicate the beginnings of real progress towards a CSA program that uses agriculture as a means to support all the communities it touches.

Apocalyptic reports about rising sea levels and shrinking job prospects roll in by the hour. They announce that just as lower-earning factory workers are the ones displaced by robotic workers, climate change will push aside less affluent communities that cannot afford to move or invest in infrastructure to protect themselves. Just as the poor and already marginalized have borne the brunt of past social problems, these same groups will be faced with more challenges in the future.

In the face of such daunting problems, some would call it quits. Yet Jon Shaffer, Executive Director of the Boston Network for International Development (BNID) and Ph.D. student in Sociology at Boston University, is optimistic. He thinks that everyone sitting in a place of privilege has an obligation to help make the world a better place. “We should be critical based on a study of how we think about global health and development,” Shaffer says. “But I think we can do that.”

Working as the Executive Director at BNID allows Shaffer to do just that. The Boston Network for International Development is a platform for discussion, a place for siloed projects and people in the development sphere to come together. While speaking with Shaffer, it was clear to me that he is an expert not only on global health, but also at engaging an audience to think more deeply about their beliefs. In his work at the BNID, Shaffer brings together practitioners, students of development, and academics to discuss topics in international development. Some people are liberal, some are market fundamentalists, and others are far left, Shaffer says, but BNID opens up the space so that everyone is on equal footing to debate.

Development is a big topic that requires these larger discussions. For some, it means raising a country’s GDP and increasing manufacturing capacity. For others, it’s the process that increases literacy and decreases infant mortality rates. For Shaffer, development is about redistributing resources from richer parts of the world to areas with fewer resources.

As he sees it, resources determine health outcomes and livelihood opportunities. Shaffer began thinking more deeply about global health as an undergraduate student at Northwestern University. A biomedical engineering major, Shaffer was “steeped in tech stuff,” yet his family values pushed him to think about his obligation to those with less. He became involved with GlobeMed, the national organization aimed at forming lasting partnerships between university groups and community health groups in underserved areas. “[GlobeMed] started to build this organization … that was about redistribution, about moving stuff –money primarily–to places that stuff had been taken out of,” Shaffer said.

From his perspective, those struggling with the AIDS epidemic in Lesotho or with rising sea levels in Tuvalu have much more in common than might appear at first glance. In Lesotho, the epidemic has been especially devastating because of the lack of resources for treatment and prevention. The small atoll nation of Tuvalu doesn’t have the money that wealthier coastal areas like Boston do to protect itself from rising sea levels. In his work and research, Shaffer focuses on how the poor have limited access to healthcare, and connects the causes of the problems faced by Basotho and Tuvaluans: the unequal distribution of resources.

In his analysis of these problems, Shaffer points to another commonality: events in the recent and not so recent past that led to this unequal distribution of resources. In order to understand the root cause of health crises, and other international development issues, Shaffer says, we need to learn a history lesson.

Consider the 2014 Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone. While the immediate cause of the epidemic was the Ebolavirus, Shaffer sees the causes of the outbreak in a longer history. “You have to go back to colonial times,” he explains. Since colonists arrived in the country, they have been extracting Sierra Leone’s most valuable natural resources, especially diamonds. As resources flow out of the country, so do the profits. That leaves Sierra Leoneans without the health care systems or infrastructure that they need and deserve.

But the story doesn’t end here. Post-colonial states got caught up in the debate about the best way to provide social safety nets: through government spending or through the market? When these newly independent countries fell deep into debt in the 1970s and 1980s, institutions like the International Monetary Fund imposed conditions on loans that kept states from providing welfare services. In exchange for the loans, states had to deregulate, decrease barriers to trade, and reduce government spending. This meant that essential social services like education and health care were to be provided by private actors instead of being guided by the states.

While some economists celebrate the success of these loans, Shaffer sides with those who are more critical. In Sierra Leone, the lack of resources was devastating: when Ebola struck, a legacy of underfunding in the health sector meant that there were fewer than 150 doctors for 6 million people.

The weight of historical inequality continues to bear down on the parts of the world that have been subject to colonization and natural resource extraction, explains Shaffer. But how do we unravel the past to create a healthier and more just future, especially with the doomsday reports about climate change and global epidemics?

Foreign aid can help, Shaffer believes, despite the flaws in major development institutions. It’s clear that foreign aid is key to keeping programs that people depend upon in check. Many rely on it to meet their everyday needs, including those who receive drugs to treat the HIV virus or food to feed their children. But aid—whether it is through direct foreign investment, World Bank Group grants, or microloans from NGOs—must be carefully watched and analyzed, Shaffer says. We must use forums like BNID to discuss what’s going on and to find the most just outcomes.

According to Shaffer, everyone who is trying to help address these multifaceted problems has their heart in the right place. “Even if people are going at it in what I would consider boneheaded ways, there’s the idea that we all have some sacred shared humanness and that that ought to be protected,” Shaffer says.

Despite the challenges facing our world, Shaffer brings a message of hope. For him, helping others isn’t just a hobby or something to do to look good. It is a moral imperative based on a shared humanity. Those of us in rich countries need to become conversant both in terms of volume of aid and the important details about how it is structured and where it goes. We need to talk to our politicians, and think about how foreign aid, donations, and loans could be more effective at redistributing resources.

“We have to fight for moving money into programs we know make a big difference for folks that are otherwise marginalized,” Shaffer says. Only by doing this can we make the world a better place.