Writing the Land

Foodways and Social Justice: Writing a Complex Web

Writing the Land: Foodways and Social Justice focuses on the intersection of community, food production, conserving agricultural lands, and the arts. It shows how this work is getting done and by whom, in real life across the US.

Part I: conserving, restoring, and creating food-producing lands and communities, has a separate chapter for each of 7 land trusts that work to preserve agricultural land or fisheries. Every one of these organizations goes about it slightly differently, on and in the ground, day by day, but they are all people who care deeply about the combined fate of humans and land: past, present, and future. Each holds a piece of the larger puzzle of how we keep agricultural land producing food sustainably, and how we interact with the land and with one another fairly. In Part II: The arts, foodways, communities, and conserved lands, we explore the important role the arts play in communicating, embodying, and enhancing the connections between foodways and social justice. Each of the 6 essays tells the story of an arts organization or artist and how they contribute to this work.

Overall, there are many ways to do good work in this arena. But none of them are simple.

Every organization focuses their energy in one or more key areas depending upon the values and passions that drive them: the arts, individuals, community, land, agriculture, and food production. These concepts may seem tangled, but as we look closer they emerge as a web---a complex circular structure that is supposed to be full of intersections, of threads that cross more than one other thread, sometimes more than once. The structure is stronger for these multiple interactions.

Join us in celebrating the complexity of the many ways people can work together ethically, practically, and with joy and hope to conserve agricultural lands for all of nature---ourselves included.