Environment

From the end of this month through early December, much of the world’s attention will be focused on Paris, the site of the upcoming round of UN climate negotiations. This is the twenty-first time diplomats and heads of state will gather under the umbrella of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The 2015 US Food Sovereignty Prize was awarded on October 14 in Des Moines, Iowa. This year, one of the two winners is the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a network of cooperatives, almost all of them comprised of Black family farmers, across the deep South. The Federation upholds a vision of local production for local consumption, and of defense of their family land needed for that local production.

The 2015 US Food Sovereignty Prize goes to two organizations that are demonstrating just how much Black lives matter, as they defend their ancestral lands for community-controlled food production. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, primarily African-American farmers across the deep South, shares the prize with the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras, Afro-indigenous farmers and fisher-people.

For me, the road to This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate begins in a very specific time and place. The time was exactly ten years ago. The place was New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The road in question was flooded and littered with bodies.

"The future of humanity is in great measure in your own hands, through your ability to organize and carry out creative alternatives" – Pope Francis at the Second World Meeting of Popular Movements in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, July 9, 2015.

"We say that every square meter of land that is worked with agro-ecology is a liberated square meter. We see it as a tool to transform farmers' social and economic conditions. We see it as a tool of liberation from the unsustainable capitalist agricultural model that oppresses farmers." - Miguel Ramirez, National Coordinator of the Organic Agriculture Movement of El Salvador.