soil, food, oceans & people—it’s all connected!
With spring in bloom, the month of April gives us an opportunity to honor nature on Earth Day. As a young man, back in 1990, I helped organize Arroyo Seco Earth Festival—which was Southern California’s largest-ever Earth Day event, with nearly 40,000 attending in the watershed and flood channel close to the Pasadena Rose Bowl.
A quarter-century later, many Americans are becoming more aware that how we grow our food is directly linked to the health of people and our planet. The dying algae in the ocean is directly linked to Monsanto and friends’ carbon-centric industrial agriculture practices that dump carbon from the soil and air into the ocean. Industrial agriculture is contributing 20 to 30 percent of greenhouse gases—more than Chevron, Exxon, and the entire transportation industry—versus regenerative organic agriculture, which honors the carbon cycle and builds soil carbon.
At Nutiva we are contributing by launching our “Soil, Food, Oceans & People—It’s All Connected!” educational campaign to highlight what may be the single most important issue facing humanity. Algae just happens to provide two out of our every three breaths of oxygen. I invite you to become “carbon-literate” and be part of the solution. Below are a list of resources on the subject.
Whole Foods Market recently published my article on their blog: The Solution Under Our Feet: How Regenerative Organic Agriculture Can Save the Planet.
Excerpt: One critical and virtually unknown issue is still missing from today’s conversation about food, and it’s literally under our feet. It’s also a solution to climate change. . . . In his recent Huffington Post piece “Nature Wants Her Carbon Back,” Larry Kopald wrote, “How is it possible that with the entire planet focusing on reducing CO2 emissions we’re not even paying lip service to the single largest contributor?”
Regenerative organic agriculture removes carbon from the atmosphere and oceans and sequesters it into the soil, expanding the soil’s water-holding capacity and building organic matter. Read the full post here.
At Nutiva we support and are involved with many projects, including:
- Earth Day at the Brower Center – Saturday, April 18, 2015
- Fibershed Carbon Farming Field Trip – Friday, May 1, 2015
soil not oil international conference
Join the movement, by attending the first ever Soil Not Oil International Conference September 4-5, 2015 in Richmond, CA. Inspired by Dr. Vandana Shiva’s book, Soil Not Oil, the 2015 Soil Not Oil Conference examines the crisis in food security while highlighting the implications of oil based agro-chemicals and fossil fuels in soil depletion and climate change.
Do you want to learn more? Check out these three resources on carbon farming:
- Grass, Soil, Hope
- Nature Wants Her Carbon Back
- Soil Carbon Cowboys
Organizations we love, working on this vital issue:
Now you tell us, what should be done to fix our broken food system and address climate change? Tell us in the comments below.