Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons

by Justine M. Williams

Most of this pollution is caused by industrial agriculture: the monocropping of corn and soybeans. The effects are far-reaching: nitrogen pollution from agricultural runoff travels downstream, where it is the primary contributor to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Industrialized agriculture is toxic, and it is also unsustainable. The fossil fuel use of agriculture (from seed to table) results in up to one quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions, which in turn contribute to global warming.3 It is said that if we were to transition our world to an organic agricultural system, we could sequester one quarter of this carbon. And yet, the USDA wants us, as Native people, to adopt industrial-style agriculture. They want this despite the fact that it is destroying the environment, and that such practices counter what we know to be true: that you cannot treat a plant like a machine—it is a living being. You cannot create a condition where there are more antibiotics served and injected into healthy animals than given to sick humans. These practices will not work out over the long term for any of us living on this land. Indigenous agriculture—based on biodiversity and the use of multiple locally adapted crops—is the real future for agriculture. Already, indigenous food producers and farmers are adapting crops in the face of climate change, utilizing knowledge of seeds selection and cropping systems that have been passed down through the millennia. On a global scale, indigenous fa...

opposition