Our celebration of Small is Beautiful draws to a close in December with the theme of Regenerating Local Food Economies: Feeding Eight Billion. Our participants for this online conversation are introduced below.
Join us Thursday, December 21st at 2PM (EST). As with all 2023 Schumacher Conversations, registration is free.
Register here
We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing…
We should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people… and to orient our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty and permanence.
— E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
With social and ecological pressures on our environment greater than ever, the transformation of unsustainable farming practices is vital for responding to our climate and biodiversity crises.
December’s Conversation features leading activists advancing a just, sustainable food system through organizing, education, and innovation. Working locally and advocating globally, our participants’ endeavors uphold the necessity of place-based, human-scale agriculture to nourish a growing population while respecting planetary limits.
December Participants
- Wes Jackson is co-founder and president emeritus of The Land Institute, carrying out a visionary project in perennial grain adaptation. In addition to being a world-renowned plant geneticist, Wes is a farmer, author, and professor emeritus of biology.
- Elizabeth Henderson served on the Board of Directors of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY), co-chairing the Policy Committee for many years. She is Honorary President of Urgenci, the International CSA Network, and farmed for over 30 years in Western New York.
- Vandana Shiva is a scholar, food sovereignty activist and author of over twenty books including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. She is the founder of Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, in India.
- Severine Von Tscharner Fleming is a farmer, publisher and advocate. She is the founding Board President of Agrarian Trust, an innovative land-access organization assembling a cooperatively-owned farmland commons in the US. She runs Smithereen Farm in Maine.