Healthy Community Food Systems
Healthy Land, Healthy Food, Healthy People
As part of our recent report, The Promise of Farm to Preschool in Southwest Colorado, we offered two challenges to encourage everyone to get serious now about Farm to Preschool. This is the first of those challenges, in infographic form – What would it take to provide 20% of preschooler snacks and meals locally?
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he yellow plume winding its way through the beautiful Animas River Valley and Durango last August is a well publicized visual — one that many wish would just go away. Not so fast. This was a real disaster and one that we must learn from — a teachable moment on many counts.
I hesitated to write about it at the time – so much talk, so many accusations, so much political posturing, so many unknowns at the time. The public conversation was curious but ultimately predictable: sadness, followed by madness, then gladness. The sadness in our community was the most striking to me; how could this happen here in this area known for its grand beauty and beckoning environment? The sadness remains. Madness quickly emerged as fingers were pointed — now mostly in the very capable hands of lawyers and politicians. As soon as the color subsided, there was a rush to declare it all over — back to pre-spill conditions for the river, river sports, and the Durango tourist economy. Gladness was officially proclaimed.
My self-imposed throttle on feeling glad was as unscientific, self-centered, and arbitrary as some of the commentary I heard this Summer and Fall. My favorite residents of the Animas River are the ouzels or American Dippers as they swim into the shallows even in winter after the tiny invertebrates that were of such concern during the August spill. I worried that these plump little birds might have given up on our river, and my highly scientific method was to keep looking for them whenever I happened to be in town, if the lighting was right, and if traffic on River Road allowed me to pull off safely. When I finally saw them this Fall, I was glad, and finally ready to more openly ponder what had happened and what it all meant.
There are plenty of more immediate causes of this spill, but the underlying causes seem clear, and not surprisingly, similar to the underlying causes of dysfunction in our industrial food system. Our hands-off attitude toward mining corporations mirrors that toward the agribusinesses that control our food system from seed to plate. Our ability to not see the often ugly impacts of mining (the yellow sludge is gone after all) stems from the same character flaw that allows us to ignore the all too common ugly treatment of farm animals, farm workers, the land, and the environment. We are just as unwilling to pay upfront the true costs of minerals and fossil fuels as we are to pay the true cost of food.
With my lens of local food, I was concerned about the irrigating farmers and ranchers, the immediate impact of shutting down ditches, losing an entire cutting of hay in some cases, Navajo and other farmers downstream, and lingering worries about sediments waiting to be stirred up. What became clear was that this was an eye-opening illustration of how the health of our local foodshed — that area we should look first for our food and that area we should feel most responsible for — is so connected to the health of the surrounding landscape.
What to do? Our efforts to clean up our rivers or rebuild healthy local foodsheds will not get very far if we don’t also address those underlying issues: corporate control including campaign finance reform, willingness to see the impacts of our consumerism, and willingness to pay true costs. We must work on the immediate and the underlying issues.
We also would be wise to pay closer attention to the indicators of health of our whole beautiful foodshed — for us that would include the mine discharges upstream, changing snowpack due to more warm winter storms, the plight of heat-intolerant pikas in the high alpine. Bees, bats, beavers, and birds. Essential carnivores. Soil, air, and water quality. And of course, our ouzels.
In our recent HCFS report, The Promise of Farm to Preschool in Southwest Colorado, we made the argument that such programs must include the whole community and are ultimately dependent on a healthy local food system. I would further propose that it is both instructive and essential to think of these efforts in the context of healthy local foodsheds—a more tangible concept than the “food system” and one that additionally emphasizes the importance of the whole local landscape and its inhabitants—human and otherwise—to our food production endeavors.
We at HCFS are increasingly looking at all our local food work in terms of the healthy local foodshed—that area to which we should look first for our food, and that area we should feel most responsible for. Local foodsheds present both an opportunity and a responsibility, greatest at the local level, but extending out to neighboring local and regional foodsheds. Our work on connecting food, climate, and biodiversity drives us to champion the importance of deeply sustainable healthy local food systems on the environmental level, in addition to the social and economic levels.
Farm to School and Preschool programs require this context in order to achieve all their associated benefits over the long term—healthy food, kids, local economies, the environment, and communities. The only way to ensure that the food served our children is of the very highest quality is if the soil and ecosystem it is grown in is the healthiest possible. The only way those producers can stay in business is if the land is healthy, resilient, and regenerated over the long term—and if the landscape surrounding those farms and ranches is healthy as well. The only way our children will have a good world to grow up in is if we care for these whole landscapes in deeply sustainable terms.
Deb Moses, our Garden Education Specialist, helps engage childcare providers in edible education and small-scale gardening, including helping them overcome site-specific garden challenges and connecting farmers and their food with childcare centers. She and her husband even constructed a raised bed on wheels to donate to the preschool that their son attends (see photo of that raised bed here).
Deb recently caught the attention of MaryJane’s Farm Magazine (MaryJanesFarm.org) and the Dec/January issue’s “Every Woman Has a Story” section features her and her involvement in Farm to Preschool. The article highlights not only the benefits of Farm to Preschool, but Deb’s views on the subject through the lens of a mother, biologist, and gardener:
It feels great to see kids who are all excited about pulling a carrot out of the ground. It gives me hope, it makes me feel like we can go in this direction of a healthier food system and healthier children. And through this, we can even create a healthier planet.
View a PDF version of the article, or pick up a copy of the magazine at your local newsstand.
Fall 2014 – Fall 2015
“Getting Serious Now” is what I firmly believe we must do regarding the state of the world and its future, especially regarding biodiversity and climate change — and for my part, how food systems fit into that work. I believe we must see with fully open eyes what is happening to our world and its future, but retain the ability to act to improve things. We need to hold in our minds both the devastation of our natural world that we have caused, are causing now, and what needs to be done to reduce further impacts, and, the amazing beauty, abundance, resilience, mystery, and enjoyability that remains to be appreciated, preserved, and restored. This is essential if we are to evaluate our priorities objectively, gauge the urgency of various actions needed, and avoid the paralysis of denial and hopelessness. Not easy, but I am convinced we can hold both concepts in our minds, and I think we must, in order to help make the changes necessary for our future and that of our grandchildren.
There was a notable week last Fall, as I was working on these thoughts, where a rapid-fire sequence of devastating reports came across my desk. Corals have a dismal future, Rocky Mountain Forest are dying — including my favorite Whitebark Pine, wildlife populations worldwide dropping by 52% just since my career began, and much more followed. From a very human-centered perspective, it’s sad to see the colors and the syrup of maples that I grew up with moving toward Canada, Minnesota’s loons and Baltimore’s orioles leaving their “proper homes.” For a lover of the Pleistocene, melting glaciers are distressing indeed.
I agree with Bill McKibben and many others that we should be saddened, perhaps mad, and mourn these changes we have brought to our world — for me, less because of the impact on our human needs and wants, but much more so because we have no right, in my opinion, to allow our excesses to wreak such havoc. Certainly, as poet-farmer Wendell Berry says, we ultimately “live by the deaths of others,” but we need to do so “knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently”. That has not been our way, and we should be ashamed.
But we also should be adamant about changing our ways, reducing our impacts, and restoring whatever we can. Two ways I find to sustain the resolve to improve things are to get out and enjoy the world we have now and secondly, to devote whatever energy and opportunities one has to making a positive difference, in spite of the odds. In both respects you could say the glass is half-full. Surely, we have devastated the world, but much, much remains. Surely, the momentum of our species’ impact is huge, but there is much, much we can do.
Last January, we spent some time with our daughter in South Florida, enjoying the Everglades and ocean with their amazing diversity of wild creatures. Nothing like there used to be, but in the face of such diversity and numbers, it is hard to imagine that there was once so much more. Much is left to enjoy, protect, and restore.
Last August, I revisited the beetle-ravaged slopes of Wolf Creek Pass in Southwest Colorado — a place I held close as my favorite forest. Good to mourn the loss, but also to make it a point to look for the emerging young trees, colorful flowers and rich understory, and be ready to appreciate and protect whatever comes back.
As I write this in the shade of a massive elm tree we planted 17 years ago, I see more dead pinyon pine trees on our farm than live ones — the 2002 drought and beetle kill was disheartening — but this is still one of my very favorite spots — under the elm watching birds, insects, weather, and of course the ever-inviting La Plata Mountains.
To me, the concept of ‘the glass half-full” is not about unfounded hope or optimism, not a rigorous balance sheet of environmental liabilities and assets, not a comfort zone of complacency. Rather, it is a deliberate decision to try to see the world in this way — see the good and the bad, the problems and the possibilities.
My predictions for the future? I gave that up when I left the Weather Service decades ago. Changing the course of history, getting population under control, and shifting the balance of good and bad in human nature all are daunting tasks. Hope and optimism are complex terms – fraught with nuances only touched upon by the dictionary. I feel most comfortable with what Michael Soule, the father of biological conservation who visited us recently in Durango, calls “possibilism” — which I take to mean that good outcomes are possible, and therefore we have an obligation to try.
Just being cheerful is a good start. As our two-year old granddaughter taught me — or reminded me — why not wake up and just start the day happy? I must admit, such cheerfulness may seem overdone to some. I do sing all three stanzas of “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” to our sheep at morning feeding even on days when there is no bright golden haze and the corn is challenged by drought — maybe too much, but they haven’t complained yet.
So, the glass-half-full approach is the best way I have yet found to describe my outlook on the world and my place in it — I do recommend it!
Fickle Monsoons, Summer in March, and Hot Summer Nights: Climate change is here, has been seriously affecting local agriculture, and will certainly get worse. It will take some serious effort to adjust our local food production and local food systems to the extent needed, so why not ramp up efforts now to adapt and help […]
