We need to be “doing something” about climate change. There is plenty of talk, more and more people recognizing the problem, but much, much less action than needed. Food, actually local food, is a perfect way to start, and an area that all people can make substantive changes in without hardship. Effort—yes; thought—yes; hardship—not really.
Climate change is hitting food production now, is slated to get much more intense, and urgent action is required to keep climate disruptions from becoming catastrophic. This all comes at a time when the local food movement is calling for more local food, and when Native peoples are trying to revitalize their Native foods and farming. To us, this is an opportunity to harness the power of the local and indigenous food movements to support thoughtful and proactive measures to make our local food systems more resilient, more productive in a changing world, and a truly regenerative force combating climate change.
Map, Monitor, Adapt. We at Healthy Community Food Systems have been working this past year on a number of resources to support this effort. We believe that a concerted effort among farmers and ranchers, local food activists, and consumer-citizens is needed to understand and adapt to climate change impacts on food production, mitigate further impacts by reducing greenhouse gases generated by the food system, all while making their communities healthier as well as their future.
Mapping—who doesn’t love maps? Maps help us visualize patterns and relationships, and if you think in terms of foodsheds, the geographic representation is essential. Local food groups have mapped their food systems as part of local food assessments for some time, but we are suggesting that we pay more attention to the land where this food production occurs and the broader landscape that is ecologically tied to these gardens, farms, and ranches.
We see local foodsheds as the area that we should look to first for our food, and that area we should be most responsible for—such as a county or two to start—so maps help us visualize these landscapes in relation to neighboring foodsheds.
Maps, simple or complex, help us consider the health of the land that our food production depends on, so we not only map out economic disparities, food security and access, food production areas, and personal health indicators—but the environmental health as well. For example, in our Four Corners/San Juan Mountain region, we consider water quality (we think of the yellow river here last year), water supply (snowpack changes in our mountains), air quality (Four Corners power plants), climate (heat, drought, floods), and biodiversity (pollinators, bats, sage grouse, and pikas), and more. All must be considered for truly sustainable and healthy foodsheds.
Monitoring—what’s changing? Without tracking the changes in these indicators of health, we simply would have little idea what we have accomplished or how to set priorities. The food system and specific projects need monitoring over time or we can’t catch longer term changes and outcomes. Economic development, health, agriculture, and environmental agencies and groups are logical partners in this effort.
Is anyone watching? What we see as an excellent opportunity to engage people of all ages in this effort is to get them involved in citizen monitoring of foodshed health. It can start with kids learning to be observant of nature in their school and backyard gardens—worms, bees, birds, weather, pollinators, etc. This is our Wild School Gardens project—deeper ecological learning in school food gardens.
What if these kids shared their observations with the farmers and ranchers that sell local food to their schools, and asked these producers what they were seeing on their farms and ranches? What if they needed local experts from the community to help? We envision a whole community effort that raises awareness of the connection between the health of the land, food, and people.
An elegant solution. Citizen Science programs allow the public to submit their observations to help scientists understand these issues and develop improvements. While environmental degradation, climate change, and biodiversity losses can be so worrisome that there is a tendency to be paralyzed into inaction, straightforward observations of the indicators of these problems shared with scientists is an elegant way to be aware of the issues while helping to improve them. Our Observing Indicators of Foodshed Health guidelines are for observers and citizen scientists of all ages.
Adapting—as if our future depended on it. Much of what needs to be done is already known—things we have known that we should be doing as part of a sustainable and wise agriculture. What we have now with climate change is an even more critical need for these changes and a greatly enhanced urgency. In addition to what might be called mainstream sustainable agriculture is a need to revisit systems-changing approaches such as forest gardens, permaculture, traditional knowledge, and biomimicry as Gary Nabhan promotes in his outstanding guide: Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land.
Mitigation is the most important adaptation. As we compiled information on current impacts, possible solutions, and the prospect of much greater climate change, a need became clear. We don’t at all suggest that adapting to withstand climate change is not important, but that unless we act now to reduce greenhouse gases, we face the prospect of catastrophic impacts that we will be hard put to withstand. In this sense, we see mitigation as the most important and urgent change we can make in our local to global food systems. The silver lining is that many if not most adaptations to be better able to withstand climate change will also help mitigate it.
Looking Forward—to more healthy local food from healthy local foodsheds. We currently face the certainty of challenging times ahead for food production, but also the uncertainty of exactly how and when these impacts will unfold. We need to envision the future (we present scenarios that can help), make the changes that will address what we think is likely (especially no-regrets strategies), and be ready to adapt to the unexpected. With this mindset and resolve, we should be able to look forward to more healthy local food as we strive to keep our foodsheds healthy and productive.
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