Food, relationality, and the climate: Implications for agency and inclusion

• In Event: In the news, still on the margins: LGBTQ, Indigenous, and environmental inclusion efforts in education

Proposal

Discussions pertaining to the growing climate crisis continue to grow as climate emergencies and disasters appear more frequent with more fervor than before. Paradoxically, humans distance themselves from the very systems and relationships necessary for the transformation of these structures. As humans distance themselves from Nature, relationships among each other also suffer. As the distance widens and deepens, mistrust, misinformation, and division grow. Currently, meritocracy and neoliberal individualism have taken root in the fight against climate change rather than a deep fostering of socio-ecological relationships and care.Gadotti (2008) positions Earth as among the oppressed, echoing Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Rethinking inclusion means ensuring that Nature is included in our educational programming, recognizing the agency and personhood of Nature.

As humans extract increasingly from the Earth, humans also extract from humanity. Our relationships with the world, with each other, and with ourselves have changed – this is a system of extractive competition as we measure success in dollars and commodities, knowledge in test scores and degrees, and health in steps, inches, and pounds. This is a world not unlike what Ivan Illich (2021) has described in Tools for Conviviality, the world in Hartmut Rosa’s (2013) Social Acceleration, or how John Trudell (1997) described DNA. However, Robin Kimmerer (2014) rings true – “What we do to the land, we do to ourselves,” (p. 258).

This idea is especially true in the realm of food and agriculture, which is an important entry point and pedagogical tool for us to learn about our relationship with the wider natural world. Food does not merely emerge out of nowhere. In an era of increasing desertification, droughts, flooding, and other extreme climate conditions, food helps us understand the ways in which we shape and are shaped by the planet’s ecosystems. “Food is the single strongest lever to optimize human health and environmental sustainability on Earth. However, food is currently threatening both people and the planet. An immense challenge facing humanity is to provide a growing world population with healthy diets from sustainable food systems” (EAT-Lancet, 2022, p. 5). Echoed throughout this report with many sustainability advocates – “There is substantial scientific evidence that links diets with human health and environmental sustainability” (EAT-Lancet, 2022, p. 5). Food is often the most overlooked aspect of the environment in the fight against the climate crisis, the fight against division, and the fight against ill-health. Food has been oppressed as well – through euthenics (and eugenics), nutritionism, and expansive displacement.

In order to heal the displacement and extractive ideals that contribute to the growing climate crisis, socio-ecological relationships require repair, care and fostering. Attention must be taken away from extractive ideals that result in what John Ruskin (1860) referred to as illth – “Illth is bad stuff: accumulation of waste, pollution of air and water and even climate change offer good examples. But so do erosions of social solidarity and mutual support systems” (Misiaszek, 2023, p. 33). For, to echo Kimmerer, what we do to our food, we do to ourselves.

Author

• Michaela Ensweiler, UCLA