Winona LaDuke at SF Green Fest...

Another really amazing speaker from the SF Green Festival was Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer. She is a beautiful, powerful woman, and I was left really inspired by here words.

Her talk was entitled "Food Security and Seed Sovereignty into the Next Millenium" and I will post the video on here when it is available in 2 weeks. It dealt with the environmental issues and "positive window shopping for your future," which is the question of what we want our future to look like and who is in charge of that, and how we can actualize what we want our world to look like. Making that future is not a spectator sport, and neither is democracy. She said that voting is not enough, and to make our future and create something that is sustainable and nurturing to humans, we have to take control over our destiny, think hard, put our hard work and our spirit into it. America is supposed to be a place full of choices, but our choices need to be about more than what you can choose to buy or how many things you own. Our choices need to be about what is meaningful to us, and what we value, not just what kind of cereal to buy. Empires are no sustainable by their very definition. We need to look for solutions.

The whole talk was beautiful, meaningful and got down to the root of humanity and how we botch things up and figuring out if we have the commitment and courage to fix them. This is definitely something that applies to our health as well as the state of the world, and I believe that with health, comes happiness, which is part of why going raw made so much sense to me. When you understand that illness is caused by imbalance in your body, you can work on restoring balance and getting healthy, and the results are numerous and impact every area of your life. Living in harmony with the earth, and the other people in it is vital. We are all related, we are all in this together, and it's not just us in this world, but it is up to all of us to come to terms with our own issues so we can have a healthier world as a whole. Life is life. It in interdependent and we are all part of this system. Everything is about relationships, whether it be human to human, human to animal, animal to plant, moon to ocean. Man's laws are not higher than nature's laws, and this misconception is part of why we have been so destructive. There are larger issues than we choose to deal with. We need to change our perceptions to change our world, and it is a beautiful one worth restoring and preserving.

For more information on Winona LaDuke check out Native Harvest/The White Earth Land Recovery Project and Honor The Earth.

SF Green Fest & food politics...

I went to the SF Green Festival all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Put on by Global Exchange and Co-op America, it is one in a series of Green Festivals across the United States.

I got to see many great speakers, such as Chuck D from Public Enemy, Dr. Cornel West, Van Jones, Reverend Lennox Yearwood (who presides over the hip-hop caucus in D.C.) Daniel Pinchbeck, and Greg Palast, who spoke about the overall state of our world and how we need to empower ourselves to keep fighting the good fight.

I don't want to make light of Obama winning the election, because it was truly amazing, but it doesn't mean that any of our work is over. It is up to us to make sure he doesn't turn out to be just another version of politics as usual once he gets in there. All the rhetoric of change and inspiring speeches have been truly amazing, and have inspired a people desperately in need of something positive to hold on to, but it does not end with him in the White House. We must take that inspiration and continue to use it to make sure that change really does happen. If it does not, it will not be just because of Mr. Obama. It will be because we failed to speak up loudly enough for him to hear us, because we failed to keep him in check, and because we failed to stand up together, despite our differences and fight for the preservation of human life and this planet we have been graced to live upon. So while this victory is indeed a glorious one, we must watch carefully. Especially when there is discussion of him appointing people like Mr. Monsanto to be the Secretary of Agriculture. Putting someone with ties that close to Monsanto in charge of the life force which we depend on to nourish life on this planet would be a dire mistake. They want to genetically modify everything and destroy the natural properties of our foods. We cannot allow this to happen.

We must stand together and fight, because as one of the speakers said,"If we fail, there will be no 22nd or 23rd century to see the symbols of our fight for justice."

One great talk I saw was "Agroecology and Food Sovereignty in the Age of Biofuels and Climate Change" by Eric Holt-Gimenez, Miguel Altieri, and Raj Patel. It was about how the globalized economy has placed conflicting demands on the world’s croplands, which must produce food for a growing population and meet increased demands for biofuels. With the huge number of pressures on dwindling arable ecosystems, farming is overwhelming nature’s capacity to meet our food needs. We need an alternative agricultural development paradigm that encourages more biodiverse, sustainable and socially just forms of agriculture. All 3 of them were amazing. Altieri gave well-documented proof that small farms are much more sustainable than commercial farms, which is not news to me, but it was great to see so much documented proof to silence the naysayers. Holt-Gimenez talked about agro-fuels and how the myth behind the bio-fuel hype. And Patel was so succinct in bringing everything together. When the talk is available online, I will post it here.