Looking Forward at HCFS

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

Our New “Looking Forward” Project is 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.

Interest in local food continues to grow, and presents a wide range of opportunities to capture multiple benefits and deeper sustainability. This interest in local food is always a positive, but sometimes can be relatively shallow and subject to complacency if not harnessed for greater good. It can, with some strategic awareness-building and support—which we are committing to in this project—lead to multiple, robust, deeply sustainable outcomes in our food system, and beyond.

The First 100 Days, the Next 100 Years: At the beginning of this year, there were a number of calls to action to address fears of what the new administration might do. I struggled to determine exactly what we should commit to—what should be our plan for the first 100 days? While many organizations in our area were ready and able to set some wonderful responses into action, I knew our local food work could contribute, but it took an extra couple hundred days to articulate a longer-term comprehensive response. We don’t have time to waste waiting for a new administration, but must do what we can on more local levels while keeping pressure on the federal government. And for us, that action starts with food—but doesn’t end there.

The Intersection of Food, Climate, and Biodiversity: Once the connection is made in the public’s mind between the health of our food and the health of the soil it is grown on, a progression of increasing levels of concern can be set in motion. How can the food be healthy without healthy soil, without healthy ecosystems in gardens and on farms and ranches? And how can they be healthy if not surrounded by healthy natural ecosystems—a healthy regional landscape, or “foodshed” as we call it?

As we look at the health of our local foodsheds, we see a number of challenges—air, water, soil, pollutants, and more—many of which are being addressed by some excellent agencies and organizations. Yet, we see that the climate and biodiversity crises are not being addressed at a level that their importance, irreversibility, and urgency demand of us. Try as we might, these two crises cannot be separated. Climate change has become the primary threat to biodiversity. Many if not most strategies to combat biodiversity losses due to agriculture will address climate change as well, and vice versa. Biodiversity is absolutely essential to the type of biologically based agriculture that our climate’s health requires. In terms of public engagement, addressing biodiversity can be an easier starting point for those people who find climate action difficult.

Our “Looking Forward” Plan: As we look to the future, we wear several lenses: that of local food as a multi-faceted tool for good, that of the necessity of healthy foodsheds, and that of biodiversity and climate being two of the most critical things, among other critical things, to address. We plan to do our part working toward a bright future, using local food as our tool to add to the efforts of many other groups and initiatives by focusing our promotion, resource development, and support efforts on four areas:

• Gardens for the Future: Not only gardens for all kids, for all backyards, at all institutions, and in all neighborhoods, but gardeners who are continually adapting to the changing climate while working to reduce further climate change, protecting and monitoring biodiversity, incorporating climate-adapted seeds/trees/growing techniques, and reducing food insecurity for all.
• Observing Foodshed Health: Observing indicators of foodshed health—by farmers, ranchers, gardeners, school children, and the community at large—is critical to building awareness of the challenges producers face and the urgency for us all to address climate and biodiversity. Citizen Science observing of weather, pollinators, beneficial insects, birds, and the like can help scientists monitor issues and actually develop solutions.
• Local Producer Support: Producer support in the marketplace, the community, and the voter booth as well as public awareness of the need for healthy foodsheds and climate adaptation should help producers provide healthy local food into the future in the face of a changing climate and biodiversity losses—both domestic and wild—among other challenges.
• Wild Farming & Ranching: Farms and ranches that are compatible with wildlife and with the natural ecosystems that surround them can be powerful forces in combating not only the biodiversity crisis, but climate change as well. These sustainable producers need public financial and technical support to implement wildlife-friendly practices, but loyal customer support as well to stay in business.

Beyond Food: Whether you start with food to address climate change and biodiversity, or with another strategy involving transportation, renewable energy, land use conservation, energy efficiency, water use, etc., it is critical to move on to the other sectors in our pursuit of long-term sustainability. It is our firm conviction that local food can be an effective entry point for many people in this overall effort—one that can be very positive, engaging, nurturing, therapeutic, and effective. We hope you will join us!