FOOD and Climate Change : A few thoughts and Sources 

We are well into the 2023 Synergia MOOC on Transition with some 1000 participants. 

And I want to share a few ideas on the FOOD module. 

As a co-lead I have had my say on its design and contents. But things fall off the table as we compromise, prune and focus down to a tight commentary. And things emerge while teaching.  

So, occasionally, I thought that I would scan my research and reading notes for emergent writers, resources, and ideas as they relate to basic needs, climate justice, and degrowth thinking (the latter a topic that I introduce in M1 but wish to dig into as we traverse the MOOC themes).

To keep things short in the MOOC forums I posted these ideas in my old blogspot. Who knows, maybe blogs will come back into style.😎

 

Food Module – Mike Gismondi’s Mind is Going Here in 2023.

1. Check Your World BioClimate Regions

A useful map that shows you the bioclimate regions of the world. Locate those parts of the world that share the same moisture and temperature patterns of your home region. It makes sense to me that what others are doing in each bioregion (facing comparable climate challenges) should be one focus of our research into vulnerability, adaptation and alternatives, and not just national approaches to CC. As to food and region, food is living and “Bioclimates are understood as the most important factor influencing the distribution of living things, but terrain variables are also important, mainly because they modify macroclimates into mesoclimates and microclimates.

World Climate Regions (arcgis.com)

 

2. This year, the uneven social impacts of “extreme events” caused by CC (storms, floods, fire, heat waves) received more attention. See the impacts of heat waves and floods on undocumented agricultural workers and the relationship to the foods we eat. Seems obvious but worth emphasizing that it's not just about commodity chains, food miles, depleted aquifers, but also labour and human misery.  I follow the approach of Deborah Barndt and her full circle methodology in my previous sustainability and development research. Tomasita Project | Deborah Barndt 

Recently, these two writers add a climate change dimension to consider:

The flood in Pajaro isn't just a 'natural' disaster - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

California Farmworkers Still Tending Fields in 114-Degree Heat (capitalandmain.com)

 

3. My early research and teaching career focussed on industrial democracy and workers control. I put that down to growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, a steel and heavy industry city. I worked a series of unionized jobs there and paid for my education in the 1970s and 80s.  Deindustrialization means those  jobs are gone now, and my co-workers (and some uncles and aunts) have even lost their industrial pensions. Precarity and precarious work are the words we use today. A Canadian example is to watch for is the Temporary Foreign Workers Program/ and how it relates to the FOOD industry in M3, and Module 4 on Work and Precarity. And such programs operate in most countries.

Anelyse Wieler. (2018) Commentary: “View of A food policy for Canada, but not just for Canadians: Reaping justice for migrant farm workers.” Canadian Food Studies. September. Open-Source PDF. 5 pages.  Wieler connects the dots between equity, race, food sovereignty activism and the unfair labour practices faced by temporary migrant labourers working on Canadian farms and food processing plants in Canada. As she concludes “food security in Canada cannot occur on the backs of migrant farm workers, their families and home communities.” This is an important reminder to look for contradictions in our self-sufficiency efforts.

 

 4. Water Issues/ California/ Food for North America: The topic of depleted aquifers and industrial agricultural farming and food across North America came up early in Module 1 discussions. On this topic, I recommend the critical journalist Mark Arax (imagine an American writer who does research ala George Monbiot) author of The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California. Here is his food and water essay from the Atlantic in 2021…

A Well Fixer's Story of the California Drought - The Atlantic – “That’s…1 million acre-feet of overdraft each dry year. That’s water taken out of the earth and not returned by rain or snowmelt.”

  

4. Last couple of year's I have followed the meat-eating and climate change debate. I suggest a few  readings in the M3 Supplemental Wakelet collection. I try to approach the topic as systems thinker. In recent years, I’ve come to think more about the rights of other than human species and to investigate human over-consumption of animals as food and the links to biodiversity loss. That said, I am also aware that many indigenous communities rely on country food, especially wild meats. I learned from how this author links diet to CC

The Climate Activists Who Dismiss Meat Consumption Are Wrong | The New Republic

“Today’s climate pragmatism offers a frustratingly narrow vision of reform. Rather than challenging the instrumental view of nature that led us to this pre-apocalyptic moment, it asks us to imagine a world much the same as our current one, minus the climate change. That’s grim news for the other species with whom we share this beautiful, fragile planet. From the 80 billion land animals and trillions of sea creatures killed annually for food, to unchecked deforestation displacing habitats and migrations routes, to biodiversity loss and accelerating rates of extinction, the Anthropocene has made the world hell for earth’s other inhabitants. Rapacious consumption by the world’s wealthiest humans has driven countless ecosystems into disorder. Runaway climate change may drive one out of every three plant and animal species to extinction over the next 50 years.”

 

5. Laura Colombo, Adrien Bailey, Marcus Gomes, "Scaling in a post-growth era: Learning from Social Agricultural Cooperatives." Organization pp. 1-22 January 2023. Its copyright. So you need access via a library, probably at a university.  

I retired from university and still read the academic journals. I found this article using Google Scholar. The authors discuss "scaling" up of sustainability solutions and then imagine out loud the problem creates in an era of post growth/degrowth/post capitalism. They draw from Italian agricultural cooperatives in to explore nine other forms of scaling and do so in ways relevant to land issues in Module 2 and Module 3 on Food, as well as Module 5 - where we explore Italian social care coops as part of a larger ecosystem of policy and institutional supports. They write: 

" Scaling is typically understood as scaling-up. This article demonstrates that, in the context of post-growth organizations, scaling involves a more complex set of dynamics. Directing scholarly attention to scaling in the context of Italian Social Agricultural Cooperatives (i.e. organizations that hold a different rationale and modus operandi from the capitalist enterprise), this research contributes to the literature on scaling the impact of post-growth organizations by identifying nine different scaling routes: organizational growth (vertical and horizontal); organizational downscaling; impact on policies; multiplication; impact on organizational culture; impact on societal culture; aggregation; and diffusion. This article demonstrates that post-growth scaling: (1) requires the synergistic interaction of different strategies; (2) focuses on impacting societal culture; (3) does not necessarily require organizational growth; and (4) is a relational process, embedded in socio-ecological systems. "

 

 Mike Gismondi- March 15, 2023.