Environmentalism is not, nor has it ever really been about “saving the environment”.

The environment does not need to be “saved”. The Earth is an incredible organism that will always renew and rejuvenate Herself. Sure — she may have to throw a few thousand species off the planet in the same way that people lose organs or most of their energy while battling terminal illnesses, but then recover. But she’ll always survive.

Environmentalism is not, nor has it ever really been about “saving the environment”.

Environmentalism is about saving humanity. Environmentalism is about the choices that we, as a species, need to make about how we interact with our environment to ensure that the planet will continue relating with us in a way that’s habitable. In other words — sustainability is about our ability to court the Earth in such a way that she will decide that She wants us to stay here, even though we’ve caused irreversible damage to her existence. It also requires us, as human beings, to decide whether or not ensuring our children have a home is important enough to change. It always boggles my mind the extent to which people (particularly middle class, middle-upper class, and upper-class people, white people, American people) are willing to struggle, sacrifice, beg, borrow, and steal so that their children will have houses and legacies in the future without considering how the activity required to make that possible endangers the landscape those houses and businesses need to exist.

People are tired. People are sick. People are developing strange un-diagnosable conditions at staggering rates. The immune systems of countless people (especially women) are shutting down and/or attacking themselves, transcendent of race and class. And I can’t help but wonder if it’s because we have created toxic environments — physical, ecological, and energetic environments (as if those things aren’t all the same thing) — that are attacking us, and rightfully so. The Amazon, the lungs of the entire Earth’s ecosystem, the source of most of the Earth’s medicine, the most important cathedral in the history of our planet (LITERALLY!)— is burning at an alarming rate.

And yet … people are still out here talking about drinking straws.

I have spent half of my life experiencing, researching, and studying the politics, resource distribution, economics, and consciousness of each and every aspect of the food system. When I started doing this, people laughed at me and thought I was crazy, asking what food had to do with peace, justice, freedom, health, sustainability, and the equity of all people? Food is the cornerstone of everything I do as a researcher, writer, academic, teacher, artist, chef, healer, grower, poet, and human being because we still haven’t figured out how to exist without it. The intersection between politics, food, and everything surrounding it is my life because food is one of the few things that unites us as a species, it connects us to all living beings, and we need to consume it almost every day — a few times.

Over the past seventy years, especially, incredible research, thought, and activism has emerged to inspire and move us towards consciousness through food. Food, as a basic need, is political. I believe that the personal is political. I am actually trained as a political philosopher. I believe in consciousness to extents that most people can’t begin to imagine because I’ve been privileged enough to sit around and think about it more than most people. I believe that being conscious means that we are aware of the power of each and every decision we make in our lives.

But straws are not political.

**This article originally appeared on August 22, 2019 on Medium.