Earth Democracy and the Development of Two New Earth Democracy Campaigns

By Nancy Price and Randa Solick

September 2021

Vandana Shiva inspired us all by saying, “Our power is the power of resistance.” Our work is to create a beautiful peace with each other and the earth, creating our own system for a just  world grounded on love for all living things.

The panels we review below will inform the new programs we’ll launch this fall.  We urge you to listen to the passionate, inspiring, and expert voices of the panelists who are themselves committed to “change the system.” Links to the specific YouTube recording are provided below.

We invite you to share ideas for educational materials, actions, out-reach to members and branches, and social media so please email Nancy Price nancytprice39@gmail.com and Randa Solick rsolick@gmail.com with Earth Democracy in the subject line.

Two New Earth Democracy Campaigns

One campaign will focus food sovereignty, regeneration and agroecology, ecofeminism, and CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and informed by these panels.

"A Conversation on Women’s Power to Change the Environment"

It was inspiring to listen to Vandana Shiva and Patti Naylor, an Iowa farmer, discuss that we have the power to resist and transform the current highly toxic industrial-chemical GMO agricultural system of crop and food production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x06oZsp3jhA&t=1694s

Vandana laid out a broad vision for change, challenging us to work on the “interconnectedness” of the ecological movement with the water, climate, bio-extinction, pesticide, and small farmers’ movements, also including now food and health. She emphasized the importance of creating all kinds of alliances – for example -  the farmers of Iowa with the farmers of Mexico - and for highlighting alternative farming models such as collectives that work the land together. Though “dark money speaks,” Vandana replied that Mother Earth speaks more loudly! She focused on creating a more inclusive sharing and caring economy that increases the power of everyone and our communities and exerting our power to resist and transform the top-down patriarchal, destructive, undemocratic agro-capitalist corporate-dominated system that wages war on the earth and our health, and is one of the biggest under-reported carbon in most climate solutions. Amazing initiatives to learn from, Vandana reported, are not based on principles of private property, but on care for the land and all living things, regeneration of the soil as the basis of life and agroecology, and production of nutritious food. A recurring theme was that through regenerative agriculture we grow more nutritional food per acre. 80% of the food we eat today comes from small farms and across the world, women are the providers of much of that. We, women in WILPF can change the system – Another World Is Possible!  This wide-ranging conversation prepared us all for the following:

“Who's Coming to Dinner & What's on the Menu: Upcoming Food Systems Summit”

This July over 300 civil society organizations of small-scale food producers, researchers and Indigenous People met to protest the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit meeting in Rome, July 25-28 and prepare for the UN Food Systems Summit, Thursday, September 23^rd, a completely virtual event during the UN General Assembly High-level Week. This panel focused on the most important question about how this September Summit has been organized and who will benefit. Share the youtube website link: https://bit.ly/2VtS2pK

You should not miss these panelists each of whom - Nettie Wiebe, Patti Naylor, Jessie Macinnes, Maywa Montenegro, and Jennifer Taylor – bring a wealth of experience as organic farmers, members of Via Campesina and of UN committees such as the Civil Society and Indigenous People’s Mechanism that is part of the UN Committee on World Food Security and Growth and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and People Working in Rural Areas, and university teaching positions.

Here we highlight two points:

1. First, Nettie Wiebe emphasized that food systems have a huge impact on the many crises we face: rising hunger, harms from types of food production, decimation of fisheries, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, growing rural poverty, displacement of people, and climate change.
2. Second, former food system summits were multilateral, democratically and transparently organized by a wide range of many civil society groups and organizations including young people and women with attention to human rights, equality in participation, accountability and genuine sustainability.

Alarmingly, this UN Food Summit in September is advertised and described as a multi-stakeholder event. It was co-organized in strategic partnership with the World Economic Forum composed of 1000 of the world’s largest corporations with the President of AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), a project funded by the Gates Foundation, appointed as special envoy.

As the panelists make clear, this amounts to corporate capture to establish stake-holder capitalism under the UN for the whole planet; it raises questions of accountability, transparency, conflict of interest, respect for human rights, and inclusion of civil society. It raises the question: how will the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2030 be realized under corporate stake-holder influence?

"It All Runs Down Hill: The Price Of Cheap Meat"

Organized by Jan Cordeman, Des Moines Branch and Iowa Alliance for Responsible Agriculture, and Lib Hutchby, Triangle NC Branch, on CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and the impact on nearby mostly frontline communities of color of polluted water, noxious fumes and air quality leading to asthma, lung disease and worse. Treatment and discard of the immense quantity of animal sewage is poorly regulated, discarded into streams and rivers with open storage ponds over-flowing from storms. The CAFO style of meat production must be transformed or CAFOs shut down. Share the youtube website link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWhGhe235o4 

Here are two important articles: “Regulating Global Meat and Dairy Companies, Cutting Methane, and Avoiding Climate Breakdown” and the influence of corporations in agriculture. https://tinyurl.com/h7mmzvpv

“Protecting Community Water: A Human Right and a Public Trust (Canada's Blue Communities)”

The Blue Communities project is being introduced into the US by Food and Water Watch. and is our second new project under our Human Right to Water Campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63CuGMoKoPw&t=2949s

Canadian Maude Barlow, chair of Food & Water Watch, and co-founder of the Blue Planet and Canadian Blue Communities project emphasized that water belongs to the earth and all species; we have a responsibility to take care of that gift.is a human right and a public trust that we should protect as such a gift. Maude pointed out that water pollution, the cost of water services, drought and disastrous storms will increase migration and conflict and war will follow.

At this time of global water crisis, multinational corporations see water as a source of profit, a commodity on the open market. 2 billion people every day must drink contaminated water; 2.5 billion have no sanitation; 50% have no place to wash hands during COVID.

Blue Communities is something positive you can do in your community to express values of keeping water in public management, inclusiveness and protection of water for all.  Presently, there are 50 Blue Communities in Canada; almost 25 million people world-wide now live in Blue Communities with only Los Angeles and Northampton, MA in the US. It is time to put our WILPF communities on the map.

Mary Grant, Director of Food and Water Watch Public Water for All campaign, went over the TookKit and pointed out a Blue Community:

Recognizes water and sanitation as human rights
Rejects water privatization in all its forms, and
Bans or phases out bottled water in government buildings and at municipal events
Supports Food & Water Watch’s WATER ACT to fully fund water and wastewater systems with corporations paying their fair share of the annual $35 billion. The current infrastructure bill would only provide 1/3 what is needed.

Our current programs will continue:

CLIMATE JUSTICE+WOMEN+PEACE is needed more than ever. The UN Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP 26) meets in Glasgow, Scotland, October 31-November 12. https://ukcop26.org/ . We’ll send eAlerts on actions to take here in the US and information WILPF International is organizing in Glasgow.

THE PENTAGON: EXPOSING THE HIDDEN POLLUTER OF WATER project continues with our militarypoisons.org website. Pat Elder is posting more articles on PFAS contamination of fist, a major source of food.  the extent to which fish, a major source of food. https://www.militarypoisons.org/latest-news/americas-fish-are-contaminated-with-pfas