Sitting in front of a computer here in the United States, I find myself trying to fully comprehend the fact that the future of my generation is even now being negotiated in a city on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  I can’t even imagine what the youth delegation in Copenhagen must be going through right now, and I’m so grateful to each and every one of the young people who has gone to attend in person the summit that may well determine whether the Earth remains hospitable to human life or not.

Every day seems to bring a new crisis or breakthrough in Copenhagen, and the survival of people, nations, and species rests on the outcome.  To the citizens of the Maldive Islands survival may mean a keeping global temperatures low enough to prevent the permanent flooding of their homeland, while to the inhabitants of African nations that repeatedly have expressed frustration with the unwillingness of industrialized countries to listen to what our own climate scientists are telling us, the main threat to survival may be catastrophic drought threatening to engulf huge regions.

One key to survival for human beings everywhere, though, is food.  A few weeks ago for Project Survival Media, I wrote about the struggles of farmers to build communities based on sustainable food in my own home state of Oregon.  In the Northwestern United States we’re lucky that most people have relatively easy access to healthy, locally grown food; meanwhile, in West Oakland, Project Survival Media team members have been documenting the difficulties of maintaining a healthy diet in the “food deserts” of the inner city.  In the end, our reliance on processed, packaged and fast food produced through industrial agriculture is hurting human health as much as an input-heavy oil-based agricultural system is hurting the Earth and the climate.

As the world seeks to stabilize the global climate and provide for the food needs of a growing population, it would be a mistake to assume the only or best way to feed the starving is through the same model of industrial agriculture that’s helped bring us to the point of environmental disaster.  Recent research indicates that sustainable farming practices and a shift in industrialized countries to more sustainable diets hold the potential to feed the world without wrecking the climate.  Indeed, a healthy planet and a healthy human population may each hinge on a diet less dependent on meat and oil-intensive agriculture, and more reliant on locally based food production systems.

One of the most environmentally resilient food productions systems I’ve ever observed exists in the forest villages that line the Amazon River outside of Iquitos, Peru.  In these small, traditional villages, farmers grow an astonishing variety of crops using methods that have sustained them for hundreds of years, and virtually no fossil fuel inputs.  Walking along a path through a village banana plantation, it’s occurred to me that there is no place I’d rather be during a global petroleum shortage or climate catastrophe that wreaks havoc with our import-oriented food supply chain.  Agricultural systems grounded in small-scale local food production not only contribute less to global warming, but may prove to be more resilient to a changing climate as well.

A continent away from the villages outside Iquitos, I have watched what seems to be a genuine trend, at least amongst Oregon farmers; the owners of small farming establishments are growing increasingly conscious of the unique role their industry will play in sculpting a world resistant to global warming.  For decades, the number of farms in the US has shrunk as family farms died out and industrial establishments gobbled up what was left over.  Yet today, small farmers have a new reason to take pride in their work, and society has renewed incentive to value its farmers.  Home gardens and local farms can bring relief to the food deserts of our large cities, while breaking the oil industry’s grip on our food production system.

In a time of global danger, nothing says “survival” like the ability to purchase healthy food that’s independent of a fossil fuel-based import system, and contributes to creating sustainable economies.  As the heads of state from some of the most powerful countries in the world arrive in Copenhagen this week, let’s hope they take note.

When Anne Berblinger delved into the world of small-scale organic farming in 1991, the concept of global warming had not yet entered mainstream consciousness in the US.  “It wasn’t at the top of everyone’s mind,” says Berblinger, while slicing freshly harvested peppers in the kitchen at Gales Meadow farm – a site she and her husband Rene’ have been farming since 1999.  Though climate concerns had yet to penetrate mainstream thought in the early ’90s, Berblinger says she was inspired to take up small farming in part out of her feeling that “the earth was in peril.”  Motivated by concerns about soil, wildlife, and the other casualties of industrial agribusiness she says, “Having a small piece of land to care for and be the steward of seemed important.”

Today, Anne and Rene’ Berblinger and a team of youthful helpers, many of them recent graduates of Pacific University, cultivate more than 200 varieties of certified-organic herbs and vegetables on the nine flat acres of Gales Meadow Farm. Many crops at Gales Meadow are heirloom varieties not found in the industrial farm zones that have given way to endless high-yield monocultures.  Each plant variety has a history, dating back to its origins in the traditional farming communities of Europe, North America, or elsewhere.  Every carefully cultivated strain represents a reservoir of genetic diversity – a diversity that’s become all the more important to bolster our agriculture’s resilience in a world where modern high-yield crops may turn suddenly vulnerable to changing climates.

Today, Berblinger cites global warming and the dangers of fossil fuel dependence as a major reason to reduce the scale of agriculture.  Small-scale farms cultivating a diversity of traditional plant varieties are not only more resilient to climate destabilization, but have the potential to replace industrial agriculture operations – today among the leading contributors of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.  The fertile farmland of Oregon’s western Washington County, where Gales Meadow Farm is located, is home to both types of operations.  And the monotonous stretches of monoculture fields, propped up by heavy inputs of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, could hardly be more different from sustainable, organic operations like Gales Meadow.  In addition to vegetable fields, greenhouses, and a large chicken pen, Berblinger’s property also supports a forested hillside and a stretch of riparian zone where cottonwood trees thrive beside the waters of Gales Creek.  According to one rough estimate, Berblinger reports, the farm is actually carbon negative, with its trees and other vegetation absorbing more carbon from the air than is produced by machinery and other sources of emissions.

Asked if government policies need to be reformed to smooth a transition to sustainable farming, Berblinger replies, “Absolutely.”  Like renewable electricity start-ups attempting to compete with coal and gas providers, sustainable farms face an uneven playing field.  Just as the US government has handed out subsidy after subsidy to make electricity from coal appear cheap, so industrial agriculture has benefited time and time again from policies favoring energy intensive, oil dependant, large-scale agriculture.  If the world’s international powers are serious about addressing the threat of global warming, they cannot afford to ignore the contribution of Big Agribusiness.  Re-scaling agriculture to feed a growing population with sustainable food will mean eliminating unfair subsidies, and doing away with international trade pacts that favor giant corporations over small home businesses like the Berblingers’.  Were the barriers to localized farming removed, Berblinger believes that many more young people would flock to a way of life that carries with it a certain self-sufficiency and the ability to contribute to a community’s needs.

Walking the rows of heirloom peppers in the Gales Meadow front garden, or watching a red-tailed hawk circle above the forested ridge behind the farm, it becomes momentarily difficult to remember that like small, sustainable farms across North America, this place is the scene of a frontline battle against the forces of corporate globalisation and industrial climate insanity.  Yet the truth is, Gales Meadow is even more directly impacted by government policies favoring the fossil fuel industries than are most small farming operations.  If giant energy companies get their way, Gales Meadow could be sacrificed through eminent domain to the right-of-way for a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) pipeline, proposed by Oregon LNG to shunt imported gas through Oregon to the California market.  This fossil fuel infrastructure development project threatens to destroy years of hard work at Gales Meadow, making it impossible for the Berblingers’ home business to survive.  Right now Oregon LNG and other LNG developers are seeking eminent domain status for their projects, which would allow them to lay pipelines through landowners’ property without receiving permission from the landowner first.

Perhaps there is no more apt symbol of the current political system’s skewed priorities than a pipeline built directly through some of the Northwest’s most fertile farmland, to deliver a foreign fossil fuel to an increasingly globalised gas market.  Yet beside the rows of giant yellow, green, and red peppers at Gales Meadow, it’s impossible not to feel a certain faith in the future – the same faith that the traditional farmers who cultivated so many plants now grown on Berblinger’s property must have felt as they passed on the seeds of their crop to the next generation.

In attempting to follow the complex ins and outs of the international climate negotiations in the lead-up to Copenhagen, and the intricacies of the Kerry-Boxer climate bill’s slow progress through the US Senate, it’s easy to get bogged down in a feeling that such high-profile discussions sometimes devolve into mere political bickering.  However for communities that are already preparing to deal with the impacts of a changing climate, and for which struggles for survival against the globalised fossil-industrial complex are a daily fight, there can be no compromise on sealing a global deal that works for the planet.  With the Copenhagen climate now happening, the peaceful scenery of Gales Meadow Farm is a poignant reminder of what we stand to lose with a failed global treaty – and of what we can gain with a return to local, climate-sane policies for all.