Climate Change and Food

The Diet We Need for a Sustainable Planet

by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America Forty-four years ago my mother, Frances Moore Lappé, published “Diet for a Small Planet,” a book that dared to suggest human beings could survive, even thrive, on a plant-centered diet and that doing so would be good for our bodies and the planet. Part meatless cookbook, part treatise […]

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5 Amazing Things I Learned from the World’s Leaders of the Organic Food Movement

A few weeks ago, at an international summit of the global network for organic agriculture, delegates from Fiji were excited to share the news that one of the islands in the tiny archipelago nation had gone 100 percent organic. The community had kicked out all toxic pesticides and imported, synthetic fertilizer. The impetus for the decision […]

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Smoke ‘Em Out: Time to Kick Big oil from the Global Climate Talks

by Anna Lappé for Earth Island Journal The climate movement could learn some lessons from the fight against Big Tobacco via EIJ: As a sneak peek into Earth Island Journal’s Winter 2015 print issue, we are unlocking writer-activist Anna Lappé’s new column, “Digging Deeper” At 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 21, the 400,000 people gathered […]

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Yes, Organic Farming Can Feed the World

by Anna Lappé for TakePart A few years ago, I was at a biotechnology trade meeting listening to a panel on GMOs. Throughout the two-hour session, the panelists all sang the praises of the technology—not too surprising at an industry event. (At the time, the GMOs under commercial planting were limited to seeds genetically engineered […]

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What Climate Activists Can Learn From the Fight Against Big Tobacco

by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America   Today hundreds of thousands of people around the world — from Burundi to Berlin to Brooklyn — will take to the streets in what organizers are calling the biggest climate march in history. This outpouring of action in the lead-up to this year’s global climate summit in […]

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Don’t Panic, Go Organic: The IPCC Report Should be a Wakeup Call for Climate-Smart Food

by Anna Lappé for Civil Eats   The just-released synthesis report on global warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has prompted some to start name-dropping Thomas Malthus. Malthus, you may remember, was the 19th Century British economist and demographer who warned that population growth would inevitably lead to global food shortages. In […]

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Grist’s Coverage on GMOs: What’s Really at Stake

by Anna Lappé for Civil Eats   If you’ve been reading the running commentary over at Grist for the past six months, journalist Nathanael Johnson has been opining about genetic engineering in agriculture, diving into the debate and surfacing now with a final “what I learned” piece. His column has gotten a lot of attention […]

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