Succinct bullet list of things that I tend to obsess about that will likely make more than one appearance on this forum:
- All things farming, farm compost to consumption
- Monsanto's ability to hide their plan for world domination
- Cheese
- Food, more generally
- The pros and cons of a nomadic existence
- Movies
- My rather vocal hatred of hipsters and the complete obscenity of spending £500+ on to look like a homeless person who steals clothing and accessories from pimps and grannies
- Inspiring stories/people/events I somehow find along the way
- My mother/ the women in my family because most everything I know and care about came from them
- photographs
- The word of the day I set for myself (today's is Factotum, if you're wondering)
- My network, i.e. Boyfriend, dancer friends, friend friends that inspire, challenge, and support me especially when my eyes are bigger than my stomach.
This whole thing really started coming together for me after a rather tumultuous few years at uni. I decided flying the nest wasn't big enough, and I always wanted to live abroad, so I used college as my ticket out the door. All in all it's been pretty successful but it's taken a good two and a half years to get my head around life, mostly out of sheer luck and finding positive people to have in my life. It took making a huge amount of mistakes and isolating myself from the people who cared about me to realise something had to give. The academic year of 2009/2010 was especially tough, with serious impacts to my over physical and emotional health.
One good thing to come out of that year though was a class entitled 'Globalisation and Its Disjunctures.' It's with this crazy professor whose goal in life is to absolutely terrify students in the IR department in the first two years that only the mildly insane or masochistic among them will venture into his classroom come third year. The aim of the semester was to examine globalisation as a buzzword and to understand the different factors in place under such an umbrella term. For example, globalisation can mean anything from Facebook to the WTO putting sanctions in place to allow Monsanto entering developing agrarian sectors. We looked at the disparity between the developed and developing worlds (The Global North and South, if you will....) to better understand global factors responsible for the rift between the rich and poor, and to potentially use different global factors to then break down those barriers.
My new obsession became finding out more about the globalised food system and its impact on food security. In class we listened to interviews given by Vandana Shiva, and we talked about WTO sanctions on Ethiopian grain supplies during one of the worst famines in their country's history. We talked about the rise of cash crops and the domination of the US development model. I decided right then and there, virtually as my life was pretty much falling to pieces at my feet, that I was going to hightail it to India and do a voluntary internship with Vandana's organisation called Navdanya. I guess you can say "I found myself" in India although I'd rather shoot myself in the foot than use a phrase like that. Saying that also gives me more of the credit. If anything, I was too far gone to deal with my mess on my home turf and went for the furthest thing from my comfort zone. That's about where my responsibility end. I met ridiculously amazing people, like the type of people you know books and movies will be written about because their sheer intelligence and passion has to be disseminated to the masses. It was so nice to be around people, while they were incredibly bright and motivated, didn't feel the need to one-up each other. There was no grading, no competition- just a simple exchange of information while working towards a common goal..... Being in an incredibly supportive environment, talking with spiritually strong individuals, doing introspective exercises like yoga and meditation, meeting farmers, and traveling around the country made a huge impact on me.
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| Fruit of the earth and work of human hands. Copyright 2011. |
NOW jump forward 8 months and I'm working to spread my passion for sustainability and what I like to call social justice agriculture.
My friends and I are starting a 'green' initiative in our area of Fife, Scotland. We're hoping to change common perceptions of sustainability and to create an inclusive definition of 'green' that supports our community and protects our environment while bringing people into a grassroots movement who might have otherwise shied away.
As this blog grows and develops I hope to have a number of diverse contributors (take that, HuffingtonPost!). But for now, it's just me.
I'll keep you updated.
