The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements

By Sandor Katz

Pgs 79-81

Without access to land, people cannot possibly create or otherwise obtain food. Security and survival depend upon access to physical, outdoor space: farmland, grazing meadows, foraging and hunting ranges, and shorelines for fishing. Unfortunately, getting such access is very often a struggle in itself. The histories of patriarchy, capitalism, racism, colonialism, and many other forms of oppression are long sagas in which people have been systematically torn from the specific ecological niches that previously sustained them, the unique places that are the basis of culture and its glorious diversity.

The earth is our mother. We all come from the mother, and to her we shall return. We are of the earth; it is absurd to imagine that we can “own” it, even in small pieces. And yet the earth has been divvied up as private property.

Property is a legal concept, a cultural production, not an intrinsic quality of land. Notions of what can be privatized as “property” seem to be infinitely expansive: land is privatized; seeds and genes are privatized; and even water is privatized (see chapter 10).

My old friend Bill Dobbs used to say, “Real estate determines culture.” He was generally describing urban phenomena and offering a materialist analysis for cultural trends, but I think of his words often in relation to our food system. Real estate determines culture when indigenous peoples, carrying on age-old subsistence lifestyles connected to the land where they live, are supplanted by land ownership. Real estate determines culture when productive small farms are forced to sell their land because their modest agricultural earnings simply cannot keep pace with rising property-tax rates and competing demands for golf courses, malls, and subdivisions. Real estate determines culture when urban community gardens, which brought vitality and activity to their neighborhoods, are doomed by their successes and auctioned off to the highest bidder.

The social construct we revere as “the logic of the market” doesn’t do a very good job of taking care of the land or of meeting most peoples’ needs. When real estate is allowed to determine culture, that culture is an expression of domination. Culture needs to be liberated from real estate, and liberation movements everywhere have the reclamation of land as a central goal. “Revolution is based on land,” wrote MalcolmX in his 1963 “Message to the Grassroots” speech. “Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”

The “commons” is an ancient tradition of land shared as a community resource, and what few commons remain are shrinking fast. In Britain the commons were privatized beginning in the mid-1600s, in four thousand individual “Acts of Enclosure,” culminating in the Great Enclosure Act of 1845.

The enclosures literally starved many people, peasant farmers who historically had depended on common land for their food. This harsh reality rapidly transformed the formerly landbound peasantry into cheap factory labor and facilitated the Industrial Revolution. The Diggers and the Levellers were two resistance movements that took down the enclosure fences as the landlords erected them. A Leveller tract of 1649 declared:

The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hilland the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows. And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation.2

This process of land privatization has been repeated around the world, as have movements of resistance to it.

“This continual struggle shows that the current inequitable distribution of land and housing, though widely accepted by elected governments and even public opinion worldwide, is strongly disputed on an operational level by people with the short end of the stick,” writes Anders Corr in NoTrespassing: Squatting, Rent Strikes and Land Struggles Worldwide.

This chapter looks at movements struggling to retain and reclaimland for growing food. These activists include small-scale farmerssearching for strategies that will enable them to hold onto their land,urban community gardeners reclaiming abandoned lots in their neighborhoods,and liberation movements taking land redistribution intotheir own hands, such as Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST),settling hundreds of thousands of people on unused large agriculturalholdings. This chapter also looks at some activist movements defined bytheir separation from land, such as landless farm workers organizing forliving wages and safe working conditions.

The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth.

By Stephen Harrod Buhner

Pg 164-65

Plant Chemistry and the Soil

After a plant disperses its seeds, in the colder latitudes, the seasons begin to change. Trees and other perennials begin pulling chemistries out of their leaves, storing them in their trunks and roots for future use. About half of the leaf chemistry is retrieved; the leaves begin to change color in response.64 The annuals die altogether, having sent their life onward in their seeds. All these dying leaves and plants come to rest on and in the soil, creating a thick blanket of plant matter. Not all this plant “litter” is dieback, of course; a consistent portion is living leaves, limbs, lichens, and trees that for one reason or another fall to the ground.

“Living litter” is much more highly active in its chemistry than dieback. The trees and plants continue to hydraulically pump up water from deep in the Earth and release it through their stomata, forming clouds, and then it rains.

Rain percolates through the thick bed of plant matter that is restingon top of the soil and, like water through the coffee grounds in a coffee filter, leaches the chemistries from the plant matter into the soil. The lumpy shape of the Earth allows water to accumulate in standing pools filled with leaves and old plants and twigs and here the chemicals concentrate in strength—like a tea that has been left steeping. All of the plant litter releases its chemistries into the soil at varying rates depending on what kinds of plants it is from and what kinds of compounds are in it.

The soil then separates out and routes the thousands of carbon chemistries being deposited into it.Many of these substances, such as flavonoids, degraded lignin, terpenes, lignans, and tannins recombine to form humus—what we primarily think of as dirt (though dirt actually includes as well the billions of other organisms that live within it).

Humus is mostly two substances, humic acid and a combination of polysaccharides or sugar molecules. No one knows how humic acid forms, but once formed it acts like a living substance and possesses a number of unique characteristics. It forms crystals, much like snowflakes in a sense, and, like snowflakes, no identical ones have ever been found. Humic acid “uncouples” many plant compounds, separating them into their constituent chemistries, detoxifying them, and keeping the soil fertile.

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Gaia’s Garden, A Guide to Home-scale Permaculture

By Toby Hemenway(pg4-5)

WHAT IS PERMACULTURE? I refer often in this book to permaculture and ecological design, two closely related fields upon which many of the ideas in this book are based. Since permaculture may be an unfamiliar word to some readers, I should do some explaining.

Permaculture is a set of techniques and principlesfor designing sustainable human settlements. The word, a contraction of both “permanent culture” and “permanent agriculture,” was coined by Bill Mollison, acharismatic and iconoclastic one-time forester, schoolteacher, trapper, and field naturalist, and one of his students, David Holmgren.

Mollison says the original idea for permaculture came to him in 1959 when he was observing marsupials browsing in the forests of Tasmania, and jotted in his diary, “I believe that we could build systems that would function as well as this one does.”

In the 1970s, he and Holmgren began to develop a set of techniques for holistic landscape designs that are modeled after nature yet include humans. Permaculture’s vision is of people participating in and benefiting from an abundant, nurturing natural world.

Though permaculture practitioners design with plants, animals, buildings, and organizations, they focusless on those objects themselves than on the careful design of relationships among them—interconnections—that will create a healthy, sustainable whole.

Interconnections are what turns a collection of unrelated parts into a functioning system, whether it’s a community, a family, or an ecosystem.

The aim of permaculture is to create ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities. It is guided by a set of ethical principles—care for the earth, care for people, and sharing the surplus. From these stem a set of design guidelines. Some of these guidelines are based on our understanding of nature, such as, “Each element should perform several functions,” and, “Use natural plant succession to create favorable sites and soils.” Others are borrowed from stable, long-term societies, such as, “Use renewable resources,” and, “Begin the garden at your doorstep.”

Many of these design guidelines are given in various books about permaculture, listed in the bibliography. Together they combine to create away to design sustainable gardens, landscapes, towns, and cultures.

From this it is obvious that permaculture is about much more than gardening. But since permaculture emphasizes the role of plants and animals in human life, many people have come to permaculture through their love of gardening and agriculture. What I call ecological gardens draw much from permaculture.This book could easily have been called The Permaculture Garden, but that title has already been used by a British author, Graham Bell. Also, I wanted to use a term that was familiar to most people, and permaculture is not yet widely recognized in North America.

I hope this book will help remedy that. Most of the gardeners interviewed for this book consider themselves permaculturists, and many of the techniques described here were first assembled in Mollison’s books on permaculture.

Gardeners are people who love plants, and by extension, nature itself. For gardeners to be on the forefront of a better relationship between humans and nature seems only natural. It is my hope that the ideas in this book, based on permaculture and other methods of sustainable design, will encourage gardeners to reduce their own ecological impact ,and lead the way, through beautiful, lush landscapes, for others to do the same.

Sanitary Disposal and Reclamation of Organic Wastes

We have made available a searchable PDF of the 1956 World Health Organization manual on Composting.

 This manual is one of the best resources on composting we have ever seen.

Click here to download.

From Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a community

Published by Chelsea Green Publishing

Many people see ecological living as something they will do later, when they can finally afford a big place in the country, but I say, “Start now!” Even, or perhaps especially, if you live in a tiny apartment surrounded by a concrete jungle, you should always try to find simple ways to repair the earth, educate others, and prevent further destruction of the natural world.  

Growing ecological gardens, wherever you can, is never a waste of time. Nothing lasts forever, and if you can get a few baskets of food without damaging the environment, and perhaps leave behind some long-living fruit trees, then the larger ecological community will surely benefit from your labors.

If you can do these things while also educating others, then your work will succeed many times over.  

In addition, not everyone wants to live in the country, and if everyone moves there it will all become the city. Many people plan to spend their lives in the city, happily, and have no plans to go rural. This is good, because if we want to support the growing human population for more than another few centuries, we are going to have to grow up,not out. We also must ensure that urban communities can provide for their own needs, using resources from the local area. These needs include food, building materials, water, medicine, and much more, and currently there are no cities to provide a model.  

We can, however, create our own models by simultaneously caring for the earth, caring for the people, and recycling resources. In these models rural food surpluses will supplement urban subsistence gardens, and the ecological integrity of each bioregion will depend upon how well the city dwellers can provide for themselves. Improving the ecological health of cities is crucial to achieving a healthy bioregional community, and if the ideas in this book inspire you, then begin doing these things now regardless of where you live or whether you rent or own your garden site. Do it for the land and to experience the personal transformation; consider the harvest a bonus, rather than the goal.

The sooner and more fully we embrace an ecological ethic in our daily lives, the better our ability to place ourselves within the deep ecological context of our communities, and the clearer that context, the more accessible our vision of paradise.  

Urban ecology is not so much a matter of “saving the earth” as it is a chance to improve the integrity of our own human lives and, thus, our chances of survival as a species on earth. The earth probably does not care whether we save her. She will most likely continue to turn and breed life long after humans have gone extinct. If we continue our current trend of wanton consumption and shameless waste, this may occur much sooner than later.

I know I sound like Chicken Little saying, “The sky is falling!” but if we don’t change our direction, we will get to where we’re going, which is currently extinct. This deep impermanence, while it may seem grim at first glance, is actually a blessing: Our own fragility gives us the impetus to act now to create healthy lives that harmonize with nature, and to know the comfort, joy, and inspiration brought on by an organic life. Why waste years and decades locked into jobs and consumer boxes that kill and oppress us when paradise is the alternative?

In my experience most people want to eat healthy food, care for the earth, and do other things that help create a better future for humans and other species, but they feel powerless against economic and social constraints. This has a lot to do with the fact that millions of people don’t have a place to grow food, and the people who do have access to land, such as in rural and suburban areas, rarely steward it to the extent we need.  

In addition to land, we also need tools, seeds, plants, and other materials, and most people can’t afford to just go out and buy it all. It is a common misconception that you need a lot of money to transform your home, garden, and community into paradise. But you can’t buy your way to a healthy ecology–you have to innovate it.

Integral to growing paradise gardens is recycling resources to do so. Every city in the world is rife with useful waste, and recycling it is an essential component of a healthy urban ecology. By understanding the flow of resources in the community around our gardens, we can better place those gardens within their deeper ecological and social context. Yes, growing organic food is always worth doing, but what of the truckloads of good organic produce that farmers and distributors throwaway?

Using this waste for food and growing something else makes so much more sense.

Get acquainted with locally available, free resources–land, food, and otherwise. This is the first step in turning your yard into a garden and your neighborhood into a community, and recycling those resources is the next step. Focus on making best use of what is near you now, and buy new stuff only as the very last resort. The more we recycle the waste stream toward meeting our basic needs, the closer we come to closing the ecological loop.

Urban ecology is a big issue, and one that will take many years and many ideas to understand, but if we start with growing food where we can, we will be moving in the right direction. We can find space and resources that don’t cost money; we can build gardens and communities that make social and ecological sense.  

This chapter will focus on making these resources more accessible. We will look at how to find a garden space if you don’t have one, and how to make the most out of the spaces you find. Then we will see how to tap into the flow of useful surplus that goes to waste every day, in every city in America, and how to divert that flow toward your garden and community.

"Food sovereignty" is a term originally coined by members of Via Campesina in 1996 [1] to refer to a policy framework advocated by a number of farmers’, peasants’, pastoralists’, fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples’, womens’, rural youth and environmental organizations, namely the claimed "right of peoples to define their own food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries systems," in contrast to having food largely subject to international market forces.

At the Forum for Food Sovereignty in Sélingué, Mali on 27 February 2007 about 500 delegates from more than 80 countries adopted the Declaration of Nyéléni in which it says:

"Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.

It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation.

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It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers.

Food sovereignty prioritises local and national economies and markets and empowers peasant and family farmer-driven agriculture, artisanal fishing, pastoralist-led grazing, and food production, distribution and consumption based on environmental, social and economic sustainability. Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that guarantees just income to all peoples and the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage our lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food. Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes and generations."

Writing in Food First’s Backgrounder, fall 2003, Peter Rosset argues that "Food sovereignty goes beyond the concept of food security… [Food security] means that… [everyone] must have the certainty of having enough to eat each day[,] … but says nothing about where that food comes from or how it is produced." Food sovereignty includes support for smallholders and for collectively owned farms, fisheries, etc.

, rather than industrializing these sectors in a minimally regulated global economy. In another publication, Food First describes "food sovereignty" as "a platform for rural revitalization at a global level based on equitable distribution of farmland and water, farmer control over seeds, and productive small-scale farms supplying consumers with healthy, locally grown food." [2]

In the Preface to the ITDG publishing / FIAN paper on Food Sovereignty, it says: "The Food Sovereignty policy framework starts by placing the perspective and needs of the majority at the heart of the global food policy agenda and embraces not only the control of production and markets, but also the Right to Food, people’s access to and control over land, water and genetic resources, and the use of environmentally sustainable approaches to production. What emerges is a persuasive and highly political argument for refocusing the control of food production and consumption within democratic processes rooted in localized food systems."

Quotes 

"Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets; and to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources.

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Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production."

-"Statement on Peoples’ Food Sovereignty" by Via Campesina, et. al
 

External links

• Nyéléni 2007 – Forum for Food Sovereignty, Sélingué, Mali 23-27 Feb 2007

• "Statement on People’s Food Sovereignty" by Via Campesina, et. al.

• War on Want’s Food Sovereignty programme

• "FOOD SOVEREIGNTY: towards democracy in localized food systems" by Michael Windfuhr and Jennie Jonsén, FIAN. ITDG Publishing - working paper. 64pp. 2005. This paper provides a comprehensive history, overview and analysis of the Food Sovereignty Policy Framework. Links to many key statements and documents produced over the past decade. Downloadable PDF available.

• "International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty" The International NGO/CSO Planning Committee - IPC is a global network of NGOs/CSOs concerned with food sovereignty issues and programs.
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It includes social organizations representing small farmers, fisher folk, indigenous peoples, agricultural workers’ trade unions; sub-regional/regional NGOs/CSOs which act as regional focal points; and NGO networks with particular expertise and a long history of lobbying and action and advocacy on issues related to food sovereignty and agriculture, which act as thematic focal points. The IPC serves as a facilitation mechanism for diffusion of information on, and capacity building for, food sovereignty and food security issues. It is not a centralised structure and does not claim to represent its members and the wider movement. Instead, it is a regionally-based Network with constituency and thematic representation in its membership. Its members include grassroots social movements. Its legitimacy is based on its ability to be the interlocutor for the concerns and the battles which a broad diversity of civil society organisations and social movements are conducting daily in their practical and advocacy work at local, national, sub-regional, regional and global levels.

Notes

   1. ^ "Global Small-Scale Farmers’ Movement Developing New Trade Regimes", Food First News & Views, Volume 28, Number 97 Spring/Summer 2005, p.2.
   2. ^ ibid.