4. Launch a massive local-to-global campaign against factory farms and factory-farmed foods. This campaign must emphasize the mortal threats posed by Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), which house about 70 percent of all farm animals on the Earth—threats to human health, the environment, climate stability, animal welfare, and small farmers, ranchers and forest dwellers. We must use this campaign to develop public education, public policy reforms, and create mass-market rejection of factory farmed and industrially produced foods, in every region and nation, while creating mass- market demand for grass-fed, pastured, humanely produced meat and animal products, and locally and regionally produced organic grains, fruits and vegetables. Just as the global anti-GMO movement has demonized Monsanto and the genetic engineering industry, we must also demonize the largest consumer of Monsanto’s products—factory farms. 5. Join ranks with the climate movement to phase out fossil fuels ASAP. Replacing our industrial, energy- and toxic chemical-intensive modern food and farming system with regenerative, organic farming, ranching, forest, and wetlands restoration practices is the number one solution to not only mitigating, but reversing global warming and rural poverty and strife. It is dangerous, disempowering and irresponsible to talk about eliminating greenhouse gas emissions and dismantling the fossil fuel industry without also talking about maximizing natural carbon sequestration through agro-ecological agriculture and regenerative land use practices. Theres no way we will ever get back to 350 ppm of CO2 without a global food, farming and land use revolution that literally sucks downs and sequesters in the soil 50-100 ppm of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, utilizing enhanced plant photosynthesis and regenerative grazing practices. On the other hand, it is equally dangerous and irresponsible to pretend that regenerative organics can solve the climate and environmental crisis without taking down the Carbon Criminals and their Fossil Fuel Empire. We must all become climate activists, as well as regenerative food, farm and forest activists. We must work together to drastically reduce fossil fuel use; to implement fundamental energy conservation policies in the housing, transportation, utilities and industrial sectors; to put an end to destructive extreme energy extraction and export practices such as mountaintop removal, deep sea, tropical rainforest and arctic oil drilling, tar sands production, and fracking; and to convert as rapidly as possible to renewable forms of energy. Our literal survival depends upon uniting the climate, food, environmental and economic justice movements—both North and South. 6. Join ranks with local, region, national and international forest movements and the ocean conservation movements to stop the destruction of the Earth’s tropical, temperate, and boreal forests, as well as wetlands, surface waters and the oceans. Just as we must work with the global climate movement, we must also interface with and support local and global conservation movements. This will require connecting the dots, by emphasizing the destructive role modern industrial agriculture plays in deforestation and the pollution of surface and ground waters, and our oceans. 7. Unite with the natural health movement. Most experts agree that despite advances in modern medicine (or perhaps in part because of them), as a population, we face a serious health crisis. This is particularly apparent in western nations, where there is plenty of food—but much of that “food” is highly processed, nutrient-deficient junk food. If there is one theme that unites every segment of the human population, it is that we want ourselves, and our families, to be healthy. Yet the food produced by our modern industrial agriculture system detracts from, rather than enhances, our health. By transitioning to organic, regenerative agriculture practices we can vastly improve our health and our financial well-being, by reducing obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, autism, and other chronic diseases, while at the same time reducing medical expenses globally by trillions of dollars.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 11:35:20 +0000
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