Category Archives: Climate Change

Sharing systems thinking in our ongoing advocacy

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As our world grieves in the aftermath of the horrific murder of George Floyd, I have become extremely grateful for the knowledge about systematic racism my education at UW has afforded me. My greatest takeaway from this class was learning to think systematically about the world food system, which allowed me to realize how everything from climate change to land grabs to severe income inequality in the food distribution chain levies a disproportionate impact on people of color in their struggle to access affordable and healthy food. Through course content such as Lester R. Brown’s “Full Planet Empty Plates” we have learned that there is an abundance of food in America, yet the reason so many of our citizens go hungry is because of a lack of income, and ultimately, a lack of privilege in our capitalist system leading to the harshest impacts of food insecurity to be felt by POC and BIPOC communities.

Systematic impact of the Pandemic on our food system.

                         

Examples of the disproportionate impact felt by communities of color.

 

Much of my undergraduate education has been focused on race relations in the America, and I was able to incorporate this knowledge into my group work with Our Climate this quarter. We were given the opportunity to meet with Representative Tina Orwall, who has been a champion for racial equity throughout her career. We were able to advocate for bold, equitable climate change policy with a focus on the disparate impact of climate change on poor people of color. Representative Orwall was extremely receptive to our goals and told us that we had taught her new things about racism in the ecological system. From this, I became cognizant of my power of advocacy and sharing information, as Representative Orwall was able to get us in contact with other relevant politicians and added that she would further research and incorporate our findings into her agenda. Now as we are in the midst of a widespread Black Lives Matter movement, I find myself again as an advocate, and I have similarly been able to share useful information about the systematic racism in the world food system as part of the widespread sharing of resources against racism we are seeing. Just as we have achieved recent policy changes by educating our fellow advocates and putting pressure on our politicians, we are slowly dismantling systematic racism, and I am confident that if we can keep pressure on, we can one day create a just and equitable ecological system for all.

Political Lands and Foods; Indigenous Communities in Brazil as Land Defenders

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Bananas, sugar cane, palm oil, soy– theses are just some of the foods tied to the deracination of indigenous communities from their ancestral lands. Land rights for indigenous peoples in Latin America have always been contentious as territories have been appropriated for use of farming, natural resource and extractive industries, and other uses not originally intended by their original populations. While companies like the United Fruit Company quickly and other multinational agricultural companies took over in places like Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica, agricultural development projects in Brazil’s Cerrado and Amazon ecoregions have quickly displaced indigenous populations in Brazil, leaving an estimated 13.8 percent of land as formally designated for these communities, according to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, and 31% as agricultural land (USAID).   

Image by the Rights and Resources Initiative: depicting the RRI’s Forest Tenure Database four land tenure categories. (click here to see enlarged image)

For me, this research makes clear the nexus between land rights and access for indigenous communities, and mismanaged foreign investment which has disrupted local livelihoods and economies. To think systemically about land rights is to understand the ways that vulnerable communities are negatively affected by land grabs (particularly by governments to address food insecurity), or indirectly through foreign direct investment (FDI). 

Land rights are directly tied to our course ideas of transparency, food justice, and sustainability. Through networks like the Rights and Resources Initiative, organizations, governments, and others are vying to increase transparency with access to land globally. Food justice is inherently tied to transparent access to land: when we don’t know where our food is coming from, it’s difficult to identify who’s rights are violated at different stages of cultivation, harvest, processing, and transportation of these foods. Many rights are violated in the simple acquisition of land before it is even developed for agriculture. 

In the case of Brazil, this rings true. Thirty-eight large companies now control much of Brazil’s agricultural land, including large companies like Cargill and Coamo, which have faced significant backlash for their deforestation practices which have primarily displaced indigenous people in the Center-West region. In March 2020, Indigenous leaders from the Yanomami tribe testified in front of the UN security council warning against the genocide of indigenous and uncontacted groups in the region.   

Yanomami indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa denounces deforestation and indigenous land invasion in Brazil, via Conectas Human Rights

Systems thinking connects this course to fundamental ideas of land and food justice. Unpacking what transparent and equitable food systems will look like in the future will require serious action to protect indigenous habitation of land in addressing egregious issues of climate change, food security, and sustainability within the food chain. 

 

Colonialism, The Environment, and The Global Search For Justice

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More than anything this quarter, I have learned that problems do not exist within a vacuum—that the greenhouse gas emissions from the dairy industry are symptomatic of the same system that has allowed for the rise in obesity in America. Additionally, issues surrounding the environment and climate change do not exist in a separate world from social issues, and are in fact magnified by racism, sexism, and classism. The systems thinking approach that was modeled to me has allowed me to gain a new perspective on my role in the world food system, but my role in the global social system as well.

 

My work with Landesa this quarter has emphasized the relationship between the environment and social systems, especially how that relationship can be manipulated to bring about better living conditions to tackle poverty on a global scale. Much of their work involves securing land rights for farmers so that they are able to exercise more agency over how their land is used. Owning land is essential to the maintenance and development of wealth, because property rights “mold the distribution of income, wealth and political influence”, as scholar Gary D. Libecap writes for the Hoover Institute. By increasing the access to land rights, Landesa aims to counteract the widespread poverty in developing countries around the world.

From ThisIsAfrica.me. The Legacy of the Berlin Conference. By Socrates Mbamalu.

However, in looking at the work that Landesa is doing, it struck me that the racial problems that are disrupting the U.S. today are outcomes of the same historical system that created the massive wealth disparity between developed countries and developing countries. The intersection of white supremacist and capitalist ideologies encouraged imperialist nations to take Africans as slaves and use their labor to build their empires, wiping out indigenous populations as they did so. The same ideologies encouraged the Scramble for Africa, where the largest European players divided up spheres of influence in Africa based on available resources to exploit. Thus, the legacy that slavery has left on the United States is linked to the legacy that imperialism has left on many African nations. The struggle for racial justice, then, must continue on a global scale. 

Enacting change on a global scale is virtually impossible for the individual. One of the most important things I’ve learned in this class, though, is that I have power as an individual and a citizen to fight for the better world I want to see. 

Fixing the Climate is NOT a One Person Job

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For a lot of my life, I thought the idea of voting with your dollars was brilliant, especially when it came to the climate. Whether it was buying organic every now and then or carpooling, I lived by that idea as much as I could. Over time, I learned this method is not the best at fixing the climate, but how effective it could be was something I still wondered.

After reading Michael Maniates’ piece on individualization, I was primed to understand that working alone at the individual level is futile against the power of private corporations. These companies work under the radar and through the consumer subconscious to gain profit under the guise of going green. In doing this, they seek to pin the blame and responsibility of climate change on the people who have the least power to create lasting change (Maniates 43).

Targeting transportation and electricity were of the biggest parts of Our Climate’s Evergreen New Deal. Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/washington-state-carbon-emissions-spiked-6-percent-in-most-recent-tally/

And when I worked with Our Climate for this course’s action project, I gained crucial, direct knowledge on the capability and power of collective action while going directly to policy. On one hand, you have corporations selling you easy activism and pocketing the same money they would have made before green movements. On the other, you have NGOs pushing for policy to the people who the most power. The former has never permeated culture to the point where it makes large or lasting change, but looking at what Our Climate has done in just the last legislative session by updating old carbon laws, impacts will affect this and future generations. Furthermore, we could use votes on previous climate policies to garner even more support for future policies like the Evergreen New Deal.

When we lobbied to Representative Tina Orwall as the final task for Our Climate, I saw how receptive she was to new ideas and policies like the Evergreen New Deal, and it emboldened me. Other fellows told us their experiences were lukewarm. Their representatives were not very approachable and rejected the climate policies. While Representative Orwall wanted to know more about the Evergreen New Deal, beyond that it was broadly for transportation and to hold corporate polluters accountable, she was very interested in learning more when the policy was more solidified, and even connected us to more people who would also want to hear what we had to say. Coming from that, I felt like coming together was more powerful than fractured efforts that end up making the same big corporations richer, confirming what Maniates taught me.

Works Cited

Maniates, Michael F. “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global Environmental Politics, vol. 1, no. 3, Aug. 2001, pp. 31–52.

Reflection on Climate Change and the World Food System

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My group had the opportunity to work with the Citizens Climate Lobby, the CCL is a grassroot, non-profit and nonpartisan environmental group primarily focused on the passage of the Energy, Innovation, and Carbon Dividend Act. The act aimed at reducing the use of fossil fuels and encouraging industries, companies and people within the United States to reduce their carbon footprint and find alternative methods that are cleaner for the environment and cheaper for both the companies and the American people. With climate change becoming more impactful and disruptive in our lives and the world food system that we live in, it is now, more imperative as ever, to address the problem of climate change before it truly does irreparable damage to our world food system and our livelihoods. 

The Energy, Innovation, and Carbon Dividend Act aims to drive down American carbon pollution and fossil fuel usage in order to bring climate change under control.

Climate change has already caused direct damage to the world food system and to how some people can live their lives. This experience is documented by Kirk Semple in his article “Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change.”. Within that article, Semple notes that climate change in Central America has led to large amounts of crop failures, especially in coffee plants, the economic lifeblood for many in these Central American farming cooperatives. With these failures, many farmers and workers in these coffee plantations fear that with nothing to sell, they cannot pay for food leading to hunger among families. This has led to many to migrate to the United States hoping to escape hunger and find better economic opportunity. 

Graph showing immigration change from Central American nations to the United States. Coincides with the increase in climate change that has occured in Central America causing harm to farming cooperatives.

These Central American farmers are not the only ones affected by climate change, as noted by Dr. Litfin in the 2nd Contemplative Practice on Systems Thinking, our food systems has developed from what was once a local endeavor, into one that is international and large in its scale and effects. We see this interconnectivity in an article by Thin Lei Win called “Climate Shocks in Just One Country Could Disrupt Global Food Supply.”. Within the article, Win notes that researchers found that if American wheat production and supply underwent a four-year drought, then the 174 countries in which America exports wheat to, would see their reserves decrease, despite not suffering from failed harvests themselves. 

How Climate Change such as global warming can effect production of agriculture and lead to food shortages, in this case: Corn.

With the interconnectivity of our world food system and with the dangers climate change poses for our future. It is time to take action whether that be joining the CCL in their June 13th virtual conference “A Community Stronger than CONVID” where you can talk to your local congressional representative about actions that need to be taken on climate change or simply reusing bags when grocery shopping. It is important to take action for the sake of ourselves and the world food system.

Moving Forward

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My action group this quarter was given the opportunity to work with Our Climate. Our Climate is a non-profit organization that is working with young people to help put together a Green New Deal. This opportunity combined three things that I am incredibly passionate about: the climate, politics, and food. My group was able to integrate what we learned in this class into our work with Our Climate. The reality is that we cannot address climate change without making changes to our food system which will require political action. We were able to bring up our food system in our discussions with fellow interns and make sure that it will be included in the Green New Deal.

I often find myself focused on the personal changes that I make in my day to day life in order to do what I can to help reverse climate change. I recently convinced my family to try out a vegan diet after learning about the staggering effect that animal agriculture has on the environment. My sister and I have been sharing our cooking projects on an Instagram that we made together in the hope of spurring others into giving veganism a try.

Infographic from Cowspiracy

However, in working with Our Climate it was amazing to see what a vast community of people there is fighting for systemic change. My personal actions do make some leeway to combat climate change, but I was able to make a much more significant difference by advocating for policy change. Personal changes are the first step, but systemic and political change is necessary for large scale change. 

Working with Our Climate and taking this class helped shift my perspective towards understanding systems theory and looking beyond my personal actions and experiences. I do what I can in my own life to alter the course of global warming, but I’m also continuing to push for change at a systemic level. Moving forward, this class has shown me how interconnected our world is and has given me the tools that I need to enact change. 

Alternative Milk, Our Earth, and Systems Theory

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I really valued what I took away from this course, as it presented new and challenging topics that I had never considered before. It also gave me the opportunity to conduct research on a topic I took a great interest in: the sustainability of alternative milk products. I was inspired by a previous blog post I wrote, about a climate change food calculator that calculates the ghg emissions, water usage, and land usage of 40 different foods.

With the massive changes in the dairy and alternative milk market, I decided to use this as a jumping point to look into three milk products: milk from dairy cows, almond milk, and oat milk. I researched and compared all three products with reference to water usage and GHG emissions. I was mostly interested in determining if alternative milks were actually more sustainable, and if so which was the most sustainable milk?

I looked closely at the sections about food systems and the effect of climate change. I determined that the ecological system and the food production system are incredibly intertwined and interdependent. The ecological and biological systems greatly affect how food is grown and produced, and the food production system has had very adverse effects on the environment.

My research only scratched the surface of sustainable food production practices, but it is a critical piece in the future of food production. This course gave me a deeper understanding of systems theory that allowed me to analyze a topic in a more meaningful way.

Works Cited:

Guibourg, C., & Briggs, H. (2019, August 09). Climate change food calculator: What’s your diet’s carbon footprint? Retrieved June 09, 2020, from https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714

Image:

Lucas, A. (2019, November 13). 5 charts that show how milk sales changed and made it tough for Dean Foods to avert bankruptcy. Retrieved June 09, 2020, from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/13/5-charts-that-show-how-milk-sales-have-changed.html

Turning Individual Action into Systemic Change

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During this course I had the opportunity to work with Citizens’ Climate Lobby on HR 763, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend act. CCL is a national, bipartisan, grassroots lobbying organization that supports volunteers through online trainings and connects them to groups in their area. We started social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter and learned how to lobby.

HR 763 would put a price on carbon that would reduce US emissions by 40% in the first 12 years. Economists agree that this is the most effective and cost-efficient way to reduce emissions which is why it has drawn support from Republicans and Democrats. Additionally, the Act is revenue-neutral which means that the government doesn’t keep the tax collected. Instead, it gets sent back to low- and middle-income American taxpayers who will be most affected by the higher prices of a green economy.

Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. Effective, good for people, good for the economy, revenue neutral.

In working with CCL, I found that the politics of food and the politics of climate change are similar in many ways. People tend to be very opinionated on both sides, both issues are complex and affect everyone differently, and both require a combination of personal choices and systemic government change to be solved.

It is key that the Act is bipartisan because the only way that we can fight climate change is together. A resolution such as this is only the first of many legislation actions we will need to take, so it is important that everyone is behind it.

Systems theory shows us that everything is connected, and climate change is no different. A lifecycle analysis of any product shows the ecological impacts along the entire commodity chain. Ecological impacts are usually higher during the production/processing stages, so the externalities are often placed on low income communities. This is just one example of the Triple Inequality of climate change.

Scene of the Oncler's factory from the Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Stories like the Lorax teach us that it’s okay to replace traditional citizenship duties with purposeful individual consumption, and it shifts the blame from producers to human nature (Maniates). When people are made aware of a dangerous product, they can make the individual choice not to buy it (Szasz). This protects them from the product but does nothing to address the problem for others. We need more than individual choices to combat climate change. HR 763 is one way of collective change, but people still have to make the individual choice to be politically active.

This is a picture from Environmental Lobby Day in Olympia, WA in 2019 that I went to with WashPIRG.

Collective Action and Change: A Reflection

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2020 has been exhausting. Between murder hornets, escalating tensions among adversarial countries, a global pandemic, and racism, it’s getting harder and harder to see the light at the end of the tunnel – and the year isn’t even half over yet.

As tempestuous as the world seems right now though, I’ve gained levity in working with my Citizens’ Climate Lobby action group, to lobby for the passage of the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. I’ve built on my collaborative work skills and gleamed valuable insight into the process of collective action and deliberation, and had the chance to work with a diverse coalition of people from across the country and the globe to relate the knowledge we gained in the course to the real world. This work has given me hope that systematic change is possible through collective action.

Citizens' Climate Lobby - take action on climate change solutions

Citizens’ Climate Lobby, via https://citizensclimatelobby.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/CCL-Logo.gif

Group work has, no doubt, been complicated by the fact that we’re living through a global pandemic. However, my group mates and I made the best of a difficult situation and flexibly scheduled our weekly Zoom and Whatsapp meetings. Arranging a time for a videoconference that worked for people in Washington State, Ohio, and France was not easy, but we made do. To ensure equal distribution of work, we collectively decided to finish one training per person, per week, and then summarize that training for the rest of the group.

Our work for CCL builds upon Michael Maniates policy prescription in “Individualization”. Rather than plant trees or ride our bikes to work, we will be lobbying for systemic change in policy. Our work will necessarily invoke systems thinking in this way. By considering the inputs and outputs of the act, as well as its potential downstream effects (both economic and environmental), we’ve taken a holistic approach to the understanding the act, systems thinking in essence.

Citizens' Climate Lobby | Our preferred climate change legislation

via https://citizensclimatelobby.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/eicda-2019-benefits.png

Ultimately, I’ve walked away from this experience with a feeling that I can make a material difference in the world. Although my lobby session isn’t until June 17th, I am confident in my abilities to persuade my member of Congress, and look forward to being a force for real good in the world – something that I could not have accomplished without the hard work of my group mates, and the volunteers at CCL.

Rain, Thibault, Rachel, Alan, and Jess: thanks for a great quarter.

– Dakota

Lobbying for Climate and the Unknown about Industries

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In this class, I had the chance to examine the world food system from closer perspective. Indeed, the system thinking that we have been discussing all along the quarter perfectly applies to the industrial system.  Industries and companies are quintessentially looking for a maximum profit by using additives, pesticides, and fertilizer to increase the yield and minimize losses. Without looking at the consequences, for instance, food additives that are always used by industrials company are harmful for our body, causing obesity and other diseases, and also have an impact on the biosphere such as monocrops cultures, declining wild fish stocks, GMS crops, biofuels uses, etc.

However, the real wrongdoers in this situation are all people, especially politician, who know what is happening but do not lift a finger to change our mode of production, and therefore consumption. In fact, it is the role of our politician to establish regulation and make sure that companies who are not respecting norms and rules will be punished.

In these ideas some of my classmates and I decided to join a group of lobbyists who support the Energy Innovation Act. This Act should reduce America’s emissions by at least 40% in the first 12 years, and create 2.1 million new jobs, thanks to economic growth in local communities across America. Such results could be attained by taxing all companies who are producing greenhouse gas and giving benefice to U.S consumers. Therefore, consumers are not the one paying for a better carbon footprint. Nonetheless, this regulation has exemptions for fuels used for agriculture, the U.S army, and others. Otherwise, it could have the impact of a bomb in all the mass food industries such as in production of pesticides and fertilizers who are required to keep high yield. This policy will force industries to adapt their greenhouse emission effectively in order to keep making money as they meant to do, but with a better respect for our planet.

Until now politics are protecting industrials processed food because it brings a low food price to the population (U.S spend under 10% of their income on food). Therefore, industries in generals have very few regulations to leave the room for them to produce mass cheap food such as the industries who are not constrained, therefore polluting the environment further. Indeed, if a majority of us are showing support and interest to new type of regulation such as the Energy and Innovation act, we will force industrial companies to adapt their mode of production. Let’s not be naïve and wait for industrial companies to deliver us real food and be sustainable!

https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbon-dividend-act/

https://beef2live.com/story-americans-spend-under-10-income-food-0-124534

Picture 1: https://www.carbonpricingleadership.org/blogs/2019/2/3/bipartisan-carbon-fee-and-dividend-bill-now-before-us-congress

Picture 2: http://www.ecobase21.net/Lesmotsduclimatsmartphone/Companies.html