Food, Climate, and the Myths that Keep our Planet Hot

Featured photo by Shannon Debelle. Click here to view this Backgrounder in Spanish. 

Food First will be launching a climate series in Fall of 2017. We are happy to have received this submission from Food First Fellow Annie Shattuck before the formal series launch. For more information on Food First’s focus areas, please visit www.foodfirst.org. 

Trump may be trying to let the likes of Exxon burn down the planet – but that isn’t stopping hundreds of thousands of activists from working to stop climate change. From Pittsburg to Paraguay, the fight for climate justice at the grassroots is growing.

And this fight isn’t just about greenhouse gases – it is about land rights, agriculture, natural resources, and the right to manage them for the greater good. The food system is a central part of this fight – what we eat is responsible for more carbon pollution than all the world’s planes, trains, and automobiles. Between the forests and fields converted to agriculture and pollution directly from farming, what we eat accounts for nearly a third of all the gases contributing to climate change. What does climate justice look like in the food system? To tackle the problems, we have to see beyond the myths and look to the solutions that embrace a more just future:

Click here to download this Backgrounder, or view in full below. Document endnotes included below.

Endnotes:

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36. Government Accountability Office, 2008. Cited in Wendee Nicole. 2013. CAFOs and Environmental Justice: The Case of North Carolina. Environmental Health Perspectives 121:A182-A189
37. Ibid.