Willingness (and ability) to pay is what’s desperately needed!

Simply difficult times ahead or perhaps worse? It’s hard to say that all is well in our food future—extreme weather, climate disruption, natural resource declines, as well as social and economic uncertainties. Those willing to think about such things have a variety of views on where we are heading, ranging from difficulties that we can readily overcome if we put our minds to the task, to much harsher times that will challenge our abilities to adapt (see The Lloyd’s Scenario). Some see us making sufficient progress, others frankly see major disruptions in the near term. Most people recognize significant challenges right now for both growers and consumers, and concern for the future.

Personally, I see it as a matter of probabilities—a small chance of us escaping current trends without major consequences (a very small chance), a chance—undetermined but well worth considering—of major crashes of food and related economic and social systems, and a big chance of increasing challenges and difficulties that diminish our livelihoods and quality of life if we don’t act decisively now.

Most importantly, I see a near certainty that we can avoid many, many hardships if we get busy now and prepare for a bright local food future.

Local food as a sustainability tool: As you probably know by now, we see local food as a strategy for seeking deep sustainability. Committing to pursuing as much localization of our food systems as possible, protecting our local foodsheds, and insisting on sustainably produced foods—whether local or that food which we still must get from elsewhere—is the path forward if we are to achieve a bright local food future. Ultimately, this pursuit can help us find our appropriate place as humans on the landscape and on this planet.

‘Foodability’—how much can we sustainably grow locally? If we are serious about localizing our food systems while protecting and restoring local foodsheds and the surrounding ecosystems on which they depend, we need to consider how much of our food we can, sustainably and appropriately, grow locally. We need to be responsible not only for our local ecological footprint, but also for our impacts—as we import the food that we can’t grow locally—on other people and their foodsheds around our region, nation, and the planet. We can’t sacrifice other foodsheds for the sake of our own. Wonderful work is being done on localizing sustainable food, but much, much more must be done and much, much more quickly if we are to be able to cope with current and emerging challenges, and to shape our future for the better.

Carrots: To check our assumptions and start percolating these ideas here in Southwest Colorado, we have done some “back of the envelope” calculations for a single product with many attributes—the humble carrot— tasty, nutritious, and easy to grow, store and eat. How many of the carrots we eat (or should eat) can be grown here? What are the limiting factors? What is keeping us from just growing them all here? How can this extend to other foods we enjoy here?

In Let Them Eat Carrots, you will find all the details and assumptions that I made, but the bottom line is that only an amazingly few acres of carrots are needed here—and in spite of more than a mile of altitude and being in a water-challenged part of the West, it appears that we could readily (it’s never easy) grow what we need. We grow carrots well now, but far fewer than we consume. Not everyone has the access to land and water needed, but overall those don’t seem to be the biggest limiting factors for such few acres.

Willingness (and ability) to pay: As I see it, this is what remains as the key challenge to achieving a significant amount of local food consumed in a community. “Paying” not only means putting forth the money to keep growers in business, but also the time and effort to buy local. Obviously, we don’t all have an equal ability to pay, and social programs should be aimed at helping everyone access healthy local food through public assistance in the short term, but also help them get to a reasonable income so they can afford such foods in the longer term. If those (large numbers of people) who are able to pay a fair price to growers actually do so, the market can support more growers with prices adjusting to a level that is fair to both grower and consumer. Institutions should be funded so they are able to pay as well.

If growers are paid a fair price, they should be much more able to cope with, and adapt to, weather extremes, climate disruption, access to water and land, and other challenges.

Growing one’s own food should be seen as a critical contribution to this overall effort, and not as a threat to commercial growers. If larger numbers of people spend the time and effort to start growing a substantial amount of their own food, this should make them determined to buy local for those foods that they don’t grow since they have become accustomed to high quality foods and more aware of how much growers need their support. Paying attention to nature and how it is doing in our gardens, farms, and ranches adds to our understanding of producer challenges and the need for fair prices and sustainable food.

Enlightened self-interest & the moral imperative: Willingness to pay is a matter of priorities and to what extent it is important to a person. Local food tends to be tasty, nutritious, and fun for the individual and their family—but saving money can be rewarding as well. Enlightened self interest may prompt one to extend caring and fairness to others—people less fortunate, future generations, other species, and the natural world—since we know that a healthier world will benefit us in the long run. Worldviews don’t change easily, but they can change. Ultimately, one might conclude that caring and fairness and making the world more sustainable is simply the right thing to do, even if we are not sure how successful we will be. I see this as perhaps the ultimate self interest—being at peace with oneself and the world around us.

Looking Forward to More Healthy Local Food from Healthy Local Foodsheds (LF3):

We have gathered our suggestions to address these issues in our Looking Forward project described as:

A positive, yet serious, proactive look into the future. We look forward, with hopeful anticipation, to more and more good local food. We look forward into the future at increasingly serious challenges, especially the connections between the climate and biodiversity crises and food. We look forward to a bright future for our children and our planet as we take the necessary actions now to ensure it, starting with food in our case and extending to all aspects of a sustainable future.

We encourage you to consider this call to action aimed at increasing the “willingness to pay” as outlined, with many resources, on our Looking Forward project page:

1. Grow as much of your food as possible—gardens for the future!
2. Buy as much from local growers as possible—ramp up the local food system!
3. Pay attention to the health of our local foodsheds—monitor foodshed health!
4. Support climate- and wildlife-friendly food locally and globally—buy sustainable!

We need to do this as quickly and thoroughly as possible—our future and that of our children and planet are at stake. What part can you play in this effort?

Three Questions

Are we doing enough of the right things (to save the world, obviously)? Are we doing them fast enough? Why are we doing them? These are the Three Questions I posed over five years ago as we launched our Getting Serious Now Blog, and I would like to ask them of our efforts to address climate change and biodiversity.

Two recent alarming reports: Just as I was finishing my last piece on the scary 1.5C climate report, the World Wildlife Fund, with the help of 59 scientists, released a report revealing a world-wide “overall decline of 60% in [vertebrate] population sizes between 1970 and 2014.” Putting a number on wildlife losses is actually very difficult and can be done in different ways, but the main message is clear: we have lost a huge portion of our wildlife over just the past four decades. The resulting population distributions between wild and non-wild animals for instance are astounding: humans and their livestock make up 96% of mammals (by weight), leaving 4% wild. Of the total biomass of birds in the world, 70% is our poultry! (In spite of this, I am amazed at how much wildlife there is still around to appreciate and enjoy—and to protect.)

Pausing to reflect on my career: These recent reports show dramatic losses in both climate suitability and wildlife since I started my career 45 years ago, and since most of my work over this time was in the natural science and environmental fields, it makes me wonder whether our generation has been asleep at the wheel. I think it is fair to say that we were aware of these trends all that time and should have seen where we were going, but we failed as a society—so far— to steer away from these tremendous losses. For my part as a professional and as a citizen, what should I have done differently? More importantly, what should we all be doing now?

Are we doing enough of the right things?

Clearly, from the reports above, we are not. Are we at least focusing on the right things? It is clear to me that biodiversity and climate are two of the most critical crises facing us and our planet. The severity and scale of their impacts—coupled with their irreversibility for all practical purposes—puts them at the top of my list. Increasing greenhouse gases and the changes they set in motion will affect our climate dramatically for centuries. Wildlife losses lead to extinctions which are permanent affronts to the biodiversity that our world—natural and otherwise—depends on.

Which is most critical? The intersection of food, biodiversity, and climate are at the center of our work at Healthy Community Food Systems. In our strategic planning, I repeatedly ask which—climate or biodiversity—is most important for us as a nonprofit and us as a society to work on. I can’t escape the conclusion that we must do both—we must see both as top priorities. When we think of the climate crisis, we must think of biodiversity. When we tackle biodiversity, we must address climate.

Fortunately, in the area of food systems, when we use food to address climate, we end up helping wildlife and biodiversity (think chemical-free agriculture). Efforts to maintain farm and ranch biodiversity are very often very good for our climate (think healthy soil biota). To adapt to a more biologically based food production system that doesn’t require fossil fuel and synthetic inputs, biodiversity is essential for fertility and crop protection. Strategies that address both climate and biodiversity are no-brainers.

Which is the most urgent? Reed Noss and several biodiversity colleagues (Protecting the Wild, page 19) have made the argument that too much of a focus on climate at the expense of biodiversity action right now could be counterproductive. They argue that the current direct effect of climate change on nature “is dwarfed” by the impact of today’s land use changes from wild spaces to agriculture as population increases. Further, they assert that land use conversion could make it nearly impossible for species to adapt to climate change. Strategies that address land use conversion while contributing to carbon sequestration would be obvious win-wins. It is clear that both climate and biodiversity must be of our most urgent priorities.

Are we doing the right things fast enough?

To the second question—are we doing them fast enough?—again, the reports cited above say no. The IPCC climate report shows how hard it will be to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—let alone 2C, the very short amount of time we have to avoid either of these temperature rises, and the enormity of the additional impacts between 1.5 and 2C. Jones and Schendler put this required herculean effort in the context of how society has responded to other crises—with some lessons for overcoming the “impossible.” As for biodiversity, all accounts I have seen indicate that we are well into the “Sixth Extinction” with a heartbreaking loss of both species and wildlife numbers. We must open our eyes to see where we are going and do all we can to make sure we don’t get there!

Business as usual: This phrase epitomizes the difficulty of making changes that are of the scale and timeliness needed. We must acknowledge and celebrate improvements and innovations and “wins”, but unless we are making net progress, and net progress that is fast enough to avoid catastrophic impacts, we must also acknowledge that we aren’t truly rising to the challenge. If we reduce soil erosion in a foodshed, but we are still losing soil faster than it is regenerating, the effort is laudable, but not sufficient.

Enough improvements, working around the edges, evolving the system, and incremental advances together can theoretically produce the net progress we need, but the scale combined with the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crises call for system-wide change. Unless we have a dramatic change in the way we see the improvements needed and the speed with which these changes must occur—and mobilize accordingly, we won’t avoid most what scientists tell us is coming our way. Leaving fossil fuels in the ground, committing to a non-industrial agriculture, rethinking consumerism and an ever expanding economy, looking first to the local foodshed, and preserving half the earth for wildlife are the sort of “impossibilities” we must consider.

Why do we do this work?

This third question prompts us to look deeply at why we are working on climate, biodiversity, or hopefully, both. It seems that climate gets more attention currently than loss of wildlife and species. Both crises have profound implications for society, but my guess is that the impact of climate seems more real and personal (for those who do see it) in spite of the fact that many of the more severe impacts on humans will be unfolding largely in the future for those of us in affluent countries. What I find refreshing is that the motivations to address biodiversity and wildlife losses—in spite of the very real consequences for humans—are often more aesthetic and moral in nature. Even though aesthetics and morality may be ultimately self-centered motivations in part, I again find it refreshing to be in a struggle that includes these less human-centered aspirations. None of this is meant to divert our attention from climate at all since climate is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity, but simply to add some additional reasons for caring and engaging in the fight to minimize losses in both crises. For me, a bit of altruism adds richness to these efforts.

What to do?  We must end such serious thoughts as these with a clear path forward—why not start with food and take a look at our strategies for addressing climate change and addressing biodiversity with local food. Taking the time and making the effort to re-envision all our choices around food can be very effective, and at the same time, very rewarding, nurturing, and delicious!