Earth Day 2021: A snapshot of global plans and current conditions for farmers
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We’re all coping to a new life around the global pandemic, an event key to Farm2People’s inception to help the broken food supply chain for small farmers. As we slowly evolve with COVID-19, days like Earth Day remind us what we’re really up against at the grandest scale.
There’s a mountain of interrelated environmental, ecological and social justice crises happening at once. While we should be observing Earth Day every day - especially since we’ve witnessed continuous delays by global leaders to take bold, decisive action to curb the harmful effects of climate change - we know this work cannot be accomplished in silos. We need assertive policy actions that confront the problems facing the environment when it comes to climate, forests and wildlife, urgently and immediately.
Earth Day began on April 22, 1970, and is widely known as the birth of the modern environmental movement. Air pollution was widely accepted and most people didn’t connect how pollution could affect human health. The watershed moment was Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which raised public awareness about living organisms, the environment and its links to public health. Then in 1969, there was a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, which sparked political and young college student activism, and the movement went nationwide. In the decades since, Earth Day has gone global and continues inspiring millions, including a fresh, mobilized generation refusing to settle for bureaucracy and further delays to action.
The Biden-Harris administration’s climate plan
Many are calling on the new administrations of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to implement measures that prioritize biodiversity protection and rapid emissions mitigation while centering environmental justice and good governance.
Globally, there are calls on the U.S. to support institutional reforms for stronger enforcement and protections against illegal trade, tackle deforestation and prioritize stronger enforcement against illegal logging, and support a new legally binding global agreement on plastic pollution, among several high priority actions.
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At the virtual Earth Day summit, Biden pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.
"These steps will set America on a path of a net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050," Biden said as the White House opened the two-day summit, attended by 40 leaders from around the world.
This goal is nearly double that former President Barack Obama set in 2015.
The Biden infrastructure plan also has measures to reduce climate change. Its measures include retrofitting buildings and homes, funding for electric vehicles and millions more charging ports for them. The plan aims to boost many sectors of the U.S. economy, such as basic materials, utilities and industrials.
On Biden’s plan, he vows to rally the world to meet the threat of climate change, stand up to polluters who disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities, and make a “historic” investment into clean energy. See the full plan here.
Earth Day and what it means for farmers
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As we highlighted from our extensive debrief on the Kiss the Ground documentary, farmers and ranchers hold the key to carbon storage. When Earth Day began, few environmentalists were talking about the importance of small, diversified farming, with or without livestock. There was also little awareness of the collateral damage that industrial food production had on the environment and the farm workforce. Back them, the term “conservation” focused on wilderness preservation and environmental emergencies, while ignoring the benefits of regenerative agriculture and agroecology.
Kiss the Ground brings together scientists, activists and farmers to address one of the biggest human impacts of climate change: soil degradation.
Today, food-producing activities extend to nearly 40% of the planet’s land surface, not counting the aqua-cultural production that spans a large swath of the world’s estuaries, lagoons and wetlands as well, according to High Country News.
A reminder that we cannot work in silos, figuratively and literally. Climate-friendly farming will not bear fruit unless environmentalists become allies to the farmers and ranchers who are trying to produce food in ways that heal both the land and the rural communities that depend upon it.
We’ll leave you with this piece in Civil Eats by Caitlyn Hachmyer titled “Farming Through the Climate Emergency.” Like many small farmers, she is seeing a drastic change to her family’s farm in Sebastopol, Calif. For the first time in her 37 years, nights are silent where there used to be sounds of frogs. Methods have adjusted to dry-farming techniques, and California is staring down the possibility of another drought emergency this year.
“Ever since the old well on the farm collapsed six years ago, I’ve been dry-farming,” she writes. “Usually, the residual moisture from annual flooding makes it possible to get a lush harvest of late spring and early summer crops, from lettuce to summer squash, as well as delicious dry-farmed tomatoes in the fall. But this year, I am looking into whether I can afford to dig a new well.”
Learn More:
Earthday.org
Environmental Investigation Agency
The Natural Resources Defense Council