If there is a connection, and I think there is a very deep one, it’s that if we are to address the climate crisis, if we are to address the origins of COVID and the rage of the pandemic, we need to engage in a kind of decolonization. That’s what Rupa and I were talking about. When we’re thinking about deep medicine, what we mean is to repair the bonds that have been severed by colonial capitalism, bonds between human beings, bonds between humans and the rest of the web of life. And what Anita Chitaya and her colleagues in the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities project are doing is learning certain kinds of agroecological farming techniques on the land, but also learning that you can’t end hunger without addressing gender inequality. And addressing not just inequality within the home but inequalities between countries.
And so her journey to the United States was one that really wanted to put in the front lines the wisdom of communities of people of color and the solutions that they are coming up with. Because too often when it comes to thinking about how are we going to solve this problem, either we medicalize it, and we’re like, “Okay, take an injection and everything’s going to be fine” or we point to sort of individual therapies, or we have white saviors going to the Global South saying, “If only you have more wind turbines, everything is going to be great.”
But in fact, some of the best technologies, some of the best solutions for addressing the climate crisis and the health crisis are coming from frontline communities, whether in the United States—we have a scene in the film with the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network’s Malik Yakini, where he’s talking about the steps that frontline communities
— source democracynow.org | Aug 02, 2021