This Thursday we have the privilege of welcoming Nikki Silvestri to our campus! She will be joining us for breakfast and conversation, so in preparation for her visit, please watch the following keynote speech she gave at the Organicology conference in 2017 (suggestion: the speech is an hour long, including questions--perhaps you will want to listen to it during your drives to and from the farm this week): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LYO_MDG9qo
In the comments area below, please reflect on what Nikki said in her talk and Q&A that either surprised you or resonated with you in some way. How do you see the ideas in her talk being relevant to your life and what you want to do with it?
Then, write a couple of questions that you'd like to ask Nikki while she's here.
A few additional resources you may want to peruse before class:
Nikki's website: http://www.nikkisilvestri.com/
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Page on Carbon Sequestration: http://www.fao.org/soils-portal/soil-management/soil-carbon-sequestration/en/
The Savory Institute: https://www.savory.global/
(It might be worth noting that Allan Savory's work on range management and carbon sequestration has been controversial. If you are interested in learning about the nature of this controversy, just google him.)
1. Where do you fall on the topic of controversy in Allan Savory's data? How has this controversy affected you and other people who work on soil-based carbon sequestration?
ReplyDelete2. Have you seen people who work in carbon sequestration becoming more involved with community outreach or education in developing communities? How do you think your efforts have affected the lack of interplay between economic development, marginalized populations, and soil workers?
1. What's the best way to create incentives for people to act in accordance with the environment (or specifically, with the soil)?
ReplyDelete2. How can Americans return to more wholesome eating habits on a widespread, inclusive platform?
There are several themes that resonate with me in this talk. One is simply the connections between social justice and food and the need to recognize that our country's food system is both historically and currently driven by oppression and the subjugation of people. The more I work within this system, the more convinced I become that one part of the solution is more people taking responsibility for producing their own food instead of "farming out" the labor of food. This is tricky, because many people don't have the means to grow or raise their own food and I'd be curious to hear Nikki's thoughts about this. What role do backyard gardeners, community gardeners, and small farmers have in working for food justice? How could we make sure that more people have the resources and skills necessary to invest in their own food sovereignty? How could we, as a campus, facilitate that for our community?
ReplyDeleteA related theme that I'd be curious to hear Nikki talk more about is soil and cities. When I hear people talking about hydroponics as the solution to producing local food in places where soil is contaminated, I get afraid that this will be used as an excuse not to help protect and rehabilitate the soil. What urban initiatives are happening to care for and restore city soil? There must be good work going on somewhere around this.
Finally, I love the way that Nikki uses the word "fertility" to mean making conditions conducive to life. In my experience in farming, if you set up conditions conducive to life, life happens in amazing ways. I really like thinking about our relationships with each other and ourselves in the same terms. How do we set up conditions that allow our own lives and relationships to blossom. I'm specifically thinking of how so many community gardens have disappeared because the human community tending them disappeared or broke down. The conditions weren't conducive to those communities continuing. I really like her question "what does fertility look like" and I wonder what fertility looks like for our campus community and the food justice and campus gardening initiatives that students have been working toward.
I also want to think about what fertility looks like for me personally and I'd be curious to here everyone in the class's answers to that question. What does fertility look like for you all as you are about to graduate? What conditions would be conducive to your growth and flowering as you transition into post-college life?
In Nikki's talk, it really resonated with me that she was drawing connections between ecological, economic, and social fertility and how, while many told her they were not connected, she focuses on their connections and relationships throughout her work. This was really important to me as these are all really interconnected and dependent on one another. I really like how she mentioned her personal experiences with conflict in her work and how that conflict didn't allow some of the projects she and her colleagues were working on to thrive, which drove home her point of how we need to start with working on ourselves in order to become successful leaders in what we want to do by trying to reconcile the inner problems or pain we have. This is something I have been struggling with lately as I'm preparing to enter the workforce and have been nervous about how I would reconcile my personal pain or personal ideologies with the people around me. So, I really enjoyed this talk and it's left me with a lot of things to think about.
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ReplyDeleteI was not expecting Nikki’s talk to be so intriguing and relevant to me. Part of what made her talk so engaging was her use of personal anecdotes. From the very beginning, I was hooked by her mother’s lesson of food as an expression of care (her mother keeping an extremely healthy diet for ten years during pregnancy and breast feeding so she and her siblings would grow up healthy/strong). During college, Nikki realized dark truths about health that I have also discovered during my time at K—that many diseases can be traced to diet; that our society separates the medical field from the health field; and that health comes at a financial cost that disempowers certain groups of people. I can also relate to Nikki’s conflicts of identity and career choices (integrating racial and environmental justice). In her own words: “the integration of these has been the journey of my entire career—trying to figure out how to be the white chick with dreadlocks and the Black-power Afro chick, and how both of them can love each other.”
ReplyDeleteNikki eloquently weaves parts of her story into the explanation of her professional work. By doing so, she reinforces the idea of integration of disciplines; specifically, the interrelationships among ecology (soil fertility), economy (economic fertility), and equity (social fertility), of which she has cultivated together to create sustainability. The connection between economy and equity is very familiar to me; in fact, it is this connection that I aim to pursue in my career (working with communities of color to combat systemic racial and economic injustice). However, I had never considered how ecology relates to economy and equity, and being generally unfamiliar with ecology/agriculture, am still struggling to understand how it fits. Yet Nikki’s overall passion for social justice and her ability to combine her many interests into a career, motivate me to look for hidden connections in the world while forging my own path.
Questions:
In your talk, you mention how your company works to change the societal “outcome-driven” paradigm to “creating the conditions for life.” Can you give an example(s) of how you’re doing this? Also, what are some “conditions for life?”
Can you elaborate on the connection between “personal transformation” and economic development? How does your inner work influence social and economic equity?
Nikki's goal of connecting her passions resonated with me in this talk. I have often tried to merge my interests of biology and ecology with social justice work but have experienced how easy it is to fall prey to hopelessness. I'm curious about Nikki's inspiration by Allan Savory, who seems to work primarily with livestock. I'm wondering: Does Nikki work with livestock herself, or has she found a different way to incorporate the work of Allan Savory into her own endeavors? How does she stay inspired as even less funding is given to environmental organizations than at the time of her talk (last year)? How can small, isolated groups that are passionate about different aspects of the same topic (such as soil health) join forces to work for a common goal? (As we were discussing last class with seed saving).
ReplyDeleteNikki's point about placing blame on behaviors rather than people, and how hard that is, resonated with me. It can be quite easy to see people taking advantage of the current system and hate them, but the system creates the incentives for bad behavior.
ReplyDeleteWhat would be your advice for a community like Kalamazoo that suffers from a food desert condition?
Something that I found interested in Nikki's interest is how she connects her work to her family roots. Her quote on how "healthy food is negotiable" really spoke to me. I remember when my parents would put in effort to feeding us. My dad would sometimes bring lettuce, radish, and tomatoes from his old job as a truck driver. He would tell us how the fieldworkers were nice enough to take some crops for him, keeping in mind that what they were doing would get them into trouble. Unlike my family, Nikki’s would push for food that would do good because of the potential health issues such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease. When touching on her roots and family story, it made me want to preserve my culture but also bring healthier options to my future generations. In doing so, there needs to be more relationship between living organism and the soil to create fertility. I would like to ask about the fiber-system cycle and her work towards soil-carbon sequestration.
ReplyDeleteI found Nikki's talk to be interesting, especially the power of soil carbon sequestration. In Thailand I learned about how by increasing soil carbon sequestration we could mitigate the effects of climate change.
ReplyDeleteQuestions for Nikki:
Why don't you think the power of soil carbon sequestration is more widely known?
Is it possible to farm on a large scale in a people and environmentally friendly way?