Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Accept Deny

GoGreenNation news

Local Candidates on the Environment

Trish Riley
News Feed
Sunday, August 21, 2022

Cinema Verde invited local candidates to share their positions on environmental concerns.

Alachua County and Gainesville, Florida Candidates on the Environment

With an unprecedented number of candidates to choose from on election day in Alachua County August 23, it’s been a surprisingly contentious election cycle in a typically friendly community. Candidates have been caught lying to the public, anti-semitic fliers have been floating around town, and one candidate even had the lack of courtesy and integrity to show up at a political event after a positive Covid diagnosis, shaking hands and pontificating without even the protection of a mask. Above all, nearly every political conversation seemed to focus on single-family zoning and whether it should be abolished to accommodate urban development in the face of low housing quantity and the anticipated influx of climate refugees. 

Some members of the community had other concerns and questions for the candidates, so Cinema Verde, with the help of the new Let’s Talk Climate group, organized a candidates’ forum to discuss environmental issues. More than 19 candidates responded to the invitation to the open-air event on the grounds of the Cypress and Grove Brewery downtown, but the crowd was forced indoors by the threat of thunderstorms and lightning. 

Trish Riley, Director of Cinema Verde, kicked off the event with thanks to sponsors and volunteers, then posed a single question to all of the candidates: Would they support development of a new community environmental education center? Ed Kellerman, Professor of marketing and debate team instructor at the University of Florida, led the discussion as moderator, breaking the group into sections by the offices at stake in the election. 

First to take the stage were candidates for Alachua County School Board. Tina Certain recalled her days as a Scout and learning to be a good steward of our natural resources. She said she applied that skill to her job as former school board chair when it came to consumption of utilities and she looks forward to continuing that progress and protection of the environment.  

“I want to see our children become climate change agents in the school, said Diyonne McGraw, another candidate for school board. “That's how they learn. I want to see them become renewable energy ambassadors.”   

Prescott Cowles was a camp counselor and program director at his school. He said he sees how the school board has failed and has a need for responsibility. “Our generation inherited this problem.” he said. “I think it is a moral obligation for the school district to empower our students with education and the tools that they need to improve on those mistakes of the past.”

Next up were contenders for Gainesville City Commission. Jo Lee Beatty opened discussion by recalling the city climate charter established in 2019. “We've got an urgent environmental and financial situation and I don't think we're moving fast enough. The City of Gainesville continues to cut down trees, increasing the pervious surface and creating heat, and then don't finish the exterior, replenishing the air. You know that that proportionately affects the most vulnerable among us.”

Christian Newman said he is a wildlife biologist, conducting research around the world on energy and wildlife. His environmental positions include decarbonization and going solar and renewable, building out infrastructure to plug in electric vehicles. “The other big issue for me is  to actually think about nature-based solutions to address some of the extreme events, whether it’s trees, whether it’s wetlands, there’s so much we can do in our communities and we’re in a great position to do it. And in terms of having an environmental education center, we absolutely do need that.”

Bryan Eastman addressed how critical our zero waste initiative is, pointing out that his wife started Zero Waste Gainesville back in 2017. He wants to start residential composting to reduce methane emissions from landfills and food diversion programs to divert unused food from grocery stores to the poor. “My focus is really on how do we make a more sustainable and brighter future for my daughter and for future generations, not just looking at what's happening tomorrow in Gainesville, but looking 20, 30, 40 years down the line.”

City Commission candidate Mike Raburn was up next. “If you live in southeast Gainesville, and you work on Archer Road, you can't take the bus to work - it takes you two hours plus to get there. I would like to see us improve our transit system so folks can get to work at home and back, which would decrease the amount of cars on the road to decrease traffic and carbon emissions as well.

“And I want to work on ending the transfer here. The way things are structured now, the city is disincentivized from becoming green in its energy because the greener it would become the less money GRU makes, the less money it has for the city."

Raburn continued on renewable energy:  “Biomass is green in places like Ohio, where you have soy and corn byproduct at the end of the season, but here our biomass is dependent on cutting down trees to run the biomass plant. So the biomass plant here depends on overdevelopment, and I am against overdevelopment.”

Alachua County Commission candidates were next onstage. Anthony Johnson discussed the need to limit and remove nitrates from the springs and rivers that flow through north central Florida counties, advocating for a mutual effort that would produce the greatest results in reducing the pollution running off agricultural lands leaching fertilizers and waste into the waterways. “My main concern is to push for leadership in the county to protect our water. We need to focus on the Floridan Aquifer.”

Marihelen Wheeler, current Chair of the County Commission, expressed support for an environmental education center and said she had been involved in protecting our water resources throughout her adult life and cited many examples of problems that she had worked to correct from water issues to drilling and fracking all across the state. "My concern is sustainability, global warming and climate change - that’s going to affect the way that people are actually moving inland into our area and to Alachua County. So we need to work better with our developers. They've got to understand what's happening to the environment and they've got to address those issues. We've got to make sure that our trees stay in place. 

"To answer the earlier question, yes, I support the education initiative that you asked about. Yes, I believe as a former teacher, we need the environmental education center, to protect our water and our environment and focus on our core services like roads and public safety."

County Commissioner Ken Cornell cited the extensive measures Alachua County has already taken toward protecting the local environment. "It's important that we continue to invest in our kids and our neighborhoods, protect our environment and to focus on our core services like roads and public safety. And yes, I support the environmental education initiative - this county commission has demonstrated a real dedication to protecting the environment and planning for the future. I believe I am the only candidate in my district who is a strong supporter of Wild Spaces and Public Places."

Charlie Jackson referenced his role with the Alachua County Energy Reduction and Water Conservation Program in saving 17 million gallons of water at the jail and in saving $221,000 a year in a county-wide electricity retrofit for lighting. “We are an agricultural state, but we may not be able to grow crops if we don’t control climate change in Florida.” 

Mayoral Candidate Adam Rosenthal said he is focused on making sure all our decisions are based on love and not just the bottom line. “How can we spend a little bit more money to make sure that we are maximizing love in our community?”

Current City Commissioner David Arreola said he believes climate change is the greatest threat facing this generation and his future children. He advocates ceasing to burn fossil fuels, bringing back carbon science-based targets for carbon emission reduction by 2030. He is in favor of an electric vehicle infrastructure throughout the city and has worked to support zero waste and to pass energy efficiency standards for rental properties. “I’m glad the environment is getting the spotlight here at the end of this contentious campaign.”

Ansaun Fisher said that as a single father he has great concern about the climate and future, citing a report that temperatures downtown are six degrees hotter than outside the city at the airport. “I’m happy to be here and I appreciate that you’re bringing awareness to these important issues, and that’s one of the reasons that I’m running for mayor.”

Harvey Ward, who is also a city commissioner, says one of his top goals is to establish utility-scale solar in the next year. “And yes, of course I support the work of an environmental education center which really might bring together a lot of existing environmental education opportunities under one umbrella.”

July Thomas talked a bit about environmental racism and the importance of protecting lower-income families from taking the brunt of the problems, as has happened historically. “The climate crisis is here and it is the challenge of my generation. It is not just a philosophical academic discussion, it is a realistic thing that we need to plan for.”

Gary Gordon, who served as mayor-commissioner in the 1980s, says he helped create a citizen’s advisory committee to review hazardous materials and led the effort to develop a recycling program and that he suggested the idea of developing a green belt around the city to protect outlying wilderness. “What is the impact of growth and development, population growth on the aquifer? Then there are studies that indicate that increased density creates more greenhouse gasses. We’ve got to watch out for the notion that everybody can move here and then everything will be okay. It’s just not going to work.” 

Congressional candidate Tom Wells advocated replacing the Supreme Court to better address environmental issues and Brandon Peters said he wants to defund the proposed turnpike extension through north central Florida and to develop a statewide comprehensive energy policy. 

Danielle Hawk said it up to us to solve the climate crisis. “You know, I'm running in a district that is a very, very red district. And it can be really difficult for me to talk to voters outside of Alachua County about the climate crisis because they are skeptical about the validity of the climate crisis. And that's why I have chosen to talk about protecting our water as the perfect example of how they can relate to how the climate crisis is affecting our rivers, our lakes or streams. And the water problem in Florida is a perfect example of how for decades environmental legislation at all levels of government has gotten it wrong by putting big business profits and corporations first.”

Will Bullen represented State Representative Yvonne Hinson who is up for reelection in November. “She sponsored legislation to test and inform Floridians of unsafe swimming places across the state and she wants to invest in solar energy and make Florida a leader in renewable energy. Third, she wants to make sure we are no longer committed to single use plastics. She prides herself on being a climate activist.”

We wish everyone good luck and thank you for working to make Alachua County and Gainesville the best place to live!

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of
Trish Riley

Trish is founding director of Cinema Verde, an environmental film and arts festival held in Gainesville, Florida, since 2010. She has been dedicated to helping the world understand environmental issues and sustainable solutions since childhood, when she had the good fortune to grow up playing in the forest, then watching it torn down to make way for houses and pavement.

Trish is a national award-winning investigative and environmental journalist and author, with work published in major newspapers and national and international magazines. Her books include The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Greening Your Business (with Heather Gadonniex, Penguin 2009); The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Green Living (2007); Palm Beach, Miami, and The Florida Keys: A Great Destination (Norton 2009); and The Explorer’s Guide to South Florida (with Sandra Friend, Norton 2009).

She is a past board member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and an honorary member of the Golden Key International Honour Society.

She is the founder of GoGreenNation.org, a website designed to promote green jobs, resources, and businesses; and GoGreenGift.com, an eco-starter kit. She also founded Green Drinks Gainesville, a local chapter of an international networking group open to anyone interested in sustainability issues.  

Related News

NYC Comptroller Push to Drop BlackRock Creates Test for Mamdani

By Ross Kerber(Reuters) -New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is urging city pension fund officials to rebid $42.3 billion managed by BlackRock...

(Reuters) -New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is urging city pension fund officials to rebid $42.3 billion managed by BlackRock over climate concerns, the first major move by a Democrat to counter pressure on financial companies from Republican allies of the fossil-fuel industry.Lander's term in office ends on December 31, but his recommendation, to be unveiled on Wednesday, will put Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the hot seat when he takes office in about five weeks. Mamdani's appointees will take key positions that hold some sway over the pension boards that decide where to invest retirement funds for some 800,000 current and former city employees.In a November 25 memo to other pension fund trustees, seen by Reuters, Lander urged the funds to re-evaluate contracts with New York-based BlackRock, which is both the world's largest asset manager and the city's largest manager of retirement assets.Lander cited what he called "BlackRock's restrictive approach to engagement" with about 2,800 U.S. companies in which it owns more than 5% of shares.'ABDICATION OF FINANCIAL DUTY'Under pressure from the Trump administration, BlackRock in February said it would not use its discussions with executives to try to control companies. That ran contrary to the hopes of Lander and other environmentally minded investors, who wanted the investors to press executives on priorities like disclosing emissions.In an interview, Lander said the change was "an abdication of financial duty and renders them unable to meet our expectations for responsible investing."His recommendation must still be approved by pension boards that traditionally take cues from the comptroller's office. Representatives for Mamdani and for New York's incoming Comptroller, Mark Levine, did not respond to questions on Tuesday.Lander, a rival-turned-ally of Mamdani during the mayoral campaign, recommended that the pension plans keep BlackRock to manage non-U.S. equity index mandates and other products. Lander also recommended the three systems continue using State Street to manage $8 billion in equity index assets, and that they drop deals with Fidelity Investments and PanAgora, which he said also do not press companies sufficiently on environmental matters like decarbonization.A number of Republicans, some from fossil-fuel-producing states, have withdrawn money from BlackRock and other money managers, accusing them of basing investment decisions on social or environmental issues. New York City funds would be the first large Democratic or liberal-leaning asset owner to respond in kind.Environmental activists also want Lander and other public officials to take a harder line by backing more shareholder resolutions that push corporate boards to embrace policies that combat climate change. Speaking before Lander's decision was announced, Richard Brooks, climate finance program director for the advocacy group Stand.earth, said dropping major asset managers "will be one of the first tests of the climate credentials of the incoming mayor and comptroller. I hope they will recognize the importance and lead on getting these recommendations passed."(Reporting by Ross Kerber; Editing by Dawn Kopecki and Thomas Derpinghaus)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

Activism
Climate

What’s for Dinner, Mom?

The women who want to change the way America eats

Illustrations by Lucas BurtinSometimes I think I became a mother not in a hospital room but in a Trader Joe’s in New York City. It was May 2020. A masked but smizing employee took one look at my stomach and handed me a packet of dark-chocolate peanut-butter cups. “Happy Mother’s Day!” she said. I was pregnant, with twins, during the early months of the pandemic, and all I could think about was food—what to eat and how to acquire it. Once a week I dashed clumsily through the store’s aisles, grabbing cans of beans and bags of apples while trying not to breathe, like a contestant on a postapocalyptic episode of Supermarket Sweep.Food then was interlaced with a sense of danger, the coronavirus potentially spreading (we worried, absurdly it turned out) even by way of reusable totes. Meanwhile, I knew from my relentless pregnancy apps that what I ate could have monumental implications for my future children’s eating habits. I was scared, and I felt powerless, and food seemed like one of the few things I could control, or at least try to.[Read: Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done]What I didn’t yet know was that I was tapping into a deep-rooted tradition—or that, even as I panic-shopped, it was evolving. Mothers are our first food influencers, and for most of history, they have been our primary ones. The process starts even before we’re born, we now know: The tastes we’re exposed to in utero inform the preferences we’ll have much later in life. Culture, “at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother,” Michael Pollan wrote in his best-selling 2008 book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Up until the mid-20th century or so, we humans ate much as our parents did, and their parents before them, and so on: food cooked at home, from fresh ingredients, made predominantly by women.But a flurry of destabilizing changes followed the Second World War, which had accustomed Americans to mass-produced boxed meals via rations issued to the military. Technological developments on multiple fronts brought prepackaged meals, frozen food, industrialized agriculture, the microwave oven. Marketers were learning how to subliminally manipulate shoppers. Perhaps most significant of all was a shift taking place at home: Women were joining the workforce, happily ceding the task of dinner to Big Food.[Read: Avoiding ultra-processed foods is completely unrealistic]By the 2000s, the consequences of all these changes were becoming calamitous. In the 1960s, 13 percent of American adults and about 5 percent of children were obese; by 2005, the number had risen to 35 percent of adults and more than 15 percent of children. Food companies had long since mastered the art of engineering products to encourage mindless overconsumption with every lab-perfected crunch, crisp, and snap. They’d also figured out how to maximize their sway over U.S. food policy, donating to politicians and directly funding scientists. And they did so while decrying as intrusive any efforts to rein in the ruthless lobbying tactics laid bare by the nutritionist and advocate Marion Nestle in her 2002 book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.Nestle, whom The New York Times has called “one of the most influential framers of the modern food movement,” has spent the two decades since then trying to help Americans understand the extent to which the systems that feed them are implicated in sickening them for profit. Big Food, she was among the first to highlight, often bypasses parents to target kids directly using cartoon mascots and promotional collaborations with toy companies. (One of the prized possessions in her archive is an Oreo-themed Barbie doll.) Until recently, Nestle’s war against the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger looked unwinnable, as she observes in her new book, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters. An update of her 2006 field guide for supermarket shoppers, it demonstrates how lamentably little progress has been made since then.Supermarkets and supply chains are even more consolidated than they were 20 years ago, and corporations are more empowered, as Nestle writes, “to sell food products no matter what they do to or for your health.” Nearly three-quarters of American adults are now overweight or obese. An array of new products since 2006—oat milk and gluten-free pasta, more global ingredients (gochujang, sumac), plant-based “meats,” CBD-infused everything—has added variety, but also confusion. What counts as healthy? The influx certainly hasn’t halted a rise in consumption of ultra-processed foods (those heavily reliant on industrial ingredients and methods far removed from anything you’d cook at home). They now make up more than half of the average American adult’s diet and two-thirds of what children eat. The food system in America, Nestle explains, produces twice the amount of calories we actually need, while ravaging the environment we can’t survive without. (Industrialized farming results in water and air pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, and a loss of biodiversity.)But something perplexing has also been happening for half a decade or so now: Once again, patterns of influence over what we eat are being upended. Enabled by social media, certain mothers have been mobilizing, intent on reasserting their authority over mealtime. I wasn’t the only one obsessed with food during the pandemic; something about the confluence of fear, frustration, and way too much time online ignited an impassioned, women-led, influencer-stoked, food-centered movement. A lot of the focus on fresh, homemade meals that this missionary crew has been advocating for has felt familiar—and sensible—to parents like me, dealing with uneaten strips of bell pepper and endless requests for snacks heavy in high-fructose corn syrup. Much has also felt wholly reactionary, rooted not just in the dietary and agricultural traditions of bygone days, but also in old-style gender politics.The past few years have seen a glut of wellness content about the dangers of seed oils and chemicals, as well as nostalgic imagery disseminated over social media by women labeled “tradwives”: freshly baked bread emerging from a weathered Dutch oven in a lovely country kitchen, cows being milked in bucolic bliss, chubby-cheeked toddlers waddling through vegetable patches. And then “Make America Healthy Again,” a slogan that began life as a winking provocation in a 2016 Sweetgreen ad, morphed into a more politicized mantra among an improbable coalition of personalities who also want milk unpasteurized, food dyes banned, vaccines eliminated—and who also seem to want women re-enshrined in their rightful place in the kitchen.“Who isn’t a food person these days?” the chef Ruby Tandoh asks in her new essay collection, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, surveying a culture in which everybody seems to be “talking about almost nothing else.” What’s striking is that these days, most of us recognize that America’s diet needs an intervention that goes beyond talk—and medication: GLP-1 drugs, however remarkable their effects may be, can’t feed kids. Yet the dramatic showdown between profit-greedy Big Food and proselytizing Big Family is eclipsing a middle ground of parenting pragmatists. Contradictory nutrition advice online drowns out a basic consensus: Experts overwhelmingly agree that a healthy diet still aligns with the same boring guidelines we grew up hearing—eat your fruits and vegetables, avoid ultra-processed (formerly “junk”) foods, limit sugar. How has the discussion become so polarized? And what might it take to actually fix dinner?We’ve seen politicized food fights before. In the mid-2000s, a harried mother in Chicago, navigating a fast-track, dual-career schedule with her partner, began to rely on quick fixes when feeding her kids: takeout, ready meals, prepackaged snacks. One day, at a routine doctor appointment, she learned that both of her daughters were on the path to becoming overweight, a warning that spurred her to overhaul the way her family was eating. “I was grateful for the time and the effort that I saved with these kinds of products,” Michelle Obama told a gathering of food-business executives in 2010, after she became first lady of the United States. “But I was also completely unaware that all that extra convenience sometimes made it just a little too easy for me to eat too much, for my kids to eat too much, and to eat too often.” She was unprepared, too, for the partisan ruckus that was about to begin.The chef, advocate, and policy adviser Sam Kass recounts this story in his wide-ranging and pragmatic new book about America’s food failings, The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis. Kass was just a few years out of college when he was hired by Obama in 2007 to help improve what and how her family ate at home. He then moved to Washington to work with the first lady on expanding her healthy-eating revolution from a personal goal into a political project. At the time, Kass notes, he’d been radicalized by Pollan and Nestle, who were giving shape to an intellectual, leftish, Berkeley-centric movement advocating for sustainable food production and more health-oriented food policies: “I shopped at farmers markets. I ate organic. My beef was grass fed. I thought that everyone should eat that way.” He arrived in the capital, he writes, “ready to decisively take on Big Ag—until reality reared its ugly head.”In February 2010, Obama announced her first major initiative as first lady: Let’s Move, a public-health campaign aimed at lowering childhood-obesity rates in the U.S. Improving the nutritional quality of school meals nationwide was a centerpiece; for children living in poverty, those breakfasts and lunches could be their main source of sustenance. Conservatives instantly caught the scent of a culture war. Figures such as Sarah Palin and Fox News’s Glenn Beck regularly fulminated against nanny statism and accused the Obamas of trying to overrule the sacred rights of American parents.Some of the backlash was bipartisan. When Kass tried to eliminate a policy that offered White House employees free Coke—after all, the administration was trying to get the nation to drink less of it—Michelle Obama’s deputy chief of staff responded, “Over my dead body.” And when Kass and the first lady spearheaded a national campaign to get people to drink more water, they were criticized by some of their public-health allies—Nestle among them—for not considering the environmental impact of plastic bottles.The uproar, in retrospect, is illuminating. Food is deeply personal. Our natural response to being told what to eat is defensive: We tend to be attached to the foods we associate with family, comfort, and care. Obama had presumed that the straightforward changes that had worked for her family might benefit the wider public—and to her credit, she aimed to provide healthier meals for all American children, through broad institutional reform. Kass cites a study showing that the odds of poor children developing obesity would have been about 50 percent higher without the school-meal interventions. Crucially, though, childhood obesity was soon rising again. And Let’s Move, rather than surging in popularity, was cast as elitist coercion, and Obama as the mean mommy forcing America to finish its vegetables.[Read: RFK Jr. is repeating Michelle Obama’s mistakes]In hindsight, Kass concludes, almost nothing Let’s Move could have suggested would have pleased conservatives at the time. But he also infers that the biggest failure of Let’s Move was one of communication. If you come across as instructing people on what to eat or, especially, what not to eat, you’re more likely to prompt a raised middle finger than compliance. Slide gracefully into people’s subconscious by enlisting the power of suggestion—visually presenting healthier products in a way that elicits an emotional response, say, or evokes a sense of home or prosperity—and you can help an idea take hold. There’s a reason the MAHA movement caught fire as social-media use escalated. “Marketers will tell you this,” Kass writes: “When you are trying to shift culture, seek out the influencers.” Illustration by Lucas Burtin One thing that Big Food, and now MAHA moms, understands is that what we see fundamentally affects our attitudes about what we eat. In 2010, the same year that the Obamas were hustling to pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, two software engineers debuted a photo-sharing app that they named Instagram, unwittingly ushering in a new hyper-visual food era of “serial virality,” as Tandoh puts it. Three years later, when the French pastry chef Dominique Ansel debuted the cronut (a hybrid of French patisserie and American deep fat frying), Instagram had 100 million users, many of whom responded to photos of his concoction with ravenous abandon. “People just shared the cronut, a platonic torus of golden dough with a sugar-salt-fat ratio to please the gods,” Tandoh writes. “Instead of spreading person to person through word of mouth, it spread exponentially, like a contagion.”The cronut wasn’t remotely healthy, but it was totemic of food trends in the 2010s, as community bonding through photo sharing took off. While the Affordable Care Act fueled attacks on Democrats as the party of Big Health Care, an alternative subculture was gaining momentum. In September 2008, the Oscar-winning actor Gwyneth Paltrow launched Goop, a newsletter of recipes and recommendations intended to foster—and eventually monetize—a more intimate relationship with her fans.Paltrow, who had lost her father to cancer, was now the mother of two young children, and believed passionately in the connection between food and health. “I am convinced that by eating biological foods it is possible to avoid the growth of tumors,” she told an Italian newspaper, drawing fierce pushback from doctors and dieticians—but not from her audience. Paltrow seemed to intuit the mood of many women in the aftermath of the Great Recession: their concerns, their exhaustion, their eagerness for an escape from their own cramped kitchens offered by images of delightfully wholesome domesticity. Goop gave an air of both glamour and accessibility to the kind of alternative lifestyle that had previously existed only on the crunchy fringes.[Read: The baffling rise of Goop]Since Goop’s debut, the wellness market has ballooned and is now worth more than $6 trillion, with the U.S. making up about a third of that figure. Paltrow’s association of food with health helped instill in people’s minds a connection between what they ate and how they felt. “I would rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can,” she told an interviewer in 2011. And mothers were especially vulnerable to this messaging. We worry endlessly; we (traditionally) manage doctor appointments and household budgets, to the tune of an estimated $2 trillion a year in America.Over the course of the 2010s, even as the Alice Waters–inspired farm-to-table cause of the 1980s was enjoying a boost from Pollan and company, a different cottage industry of food and wellness advocates gained influence online. It tapped into valid concerns about health in America, while also hyping fearful ideas about a contaminated state of modernity (ridden with parasites, carcinogens, and GMOs, as well as vaccines and prescription drugs). Zen Honeycutt, a pro-organic-farming and anti-vaccine activist—now one of many mom acolytes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—founded the pressure group Moms Across America in 2012. “We, the mothers who buy 85% of the food and we women who make 90% of household purchasing decisions, have the power to shift the marketplace and protect our people and the planet,” the group’s website proclaims.In 2020, amid the anxiety and embattled politics of the pandemic, the 21st century’s wellness fads, paranoid tendencies, and regressive gender dynamics consolidated. The horseshoe gap between leftist naturopaths and libertarian farmsteaders began to close, enabled by health influencers, podcasters, and the cheap thrill of algorithmic engagement. Today, the people most likely to be advocating online for slow food are homesteaders and tradwives, canny content creators who post reels of themselves churning butter and pulling dirt-dusted produce out of the soil.Yet you don’t have to be a homesteader to be anxious about the food systems and environments that your children grow up in. Many of us parents have been buying organic and baking from scratch and trying to get creamed spinach off upholstery since our kids were born. We give them whisks and make cooking time part of family time, and do our best to serve them fresh, colorful meals. Though we may rarely live up to Waters’s edict about lovely food preparation and presentation—“Beauty is a language of care,” as she writes in her new book, A School Lunch Revolution—there’s always the joy of messy participation.What few of us have is the tradwife’s luxury of retreating to the Instagrammed home, of opting out of an external reality where food conglomerates go unchecked and food deserts unchanged. “Don’t overcomplicate it,” the homesteader known online as Greenview Farms posted this summer, in text overlaying a video of a sunset. “Just marry your best friend, have his babies, spend your days on the land, plant a garden, get a few chickens and a cow, and live a simple life.” (This surfaced in my feed, shared approvingly by a distant relative, a woman who—for the record—works in finance.)[Read: The wellness women are on the march]If you overlook the very real public-health ramifications of vaccine hesitancy and raw milk, the rise of the MAHA movement might offer some promise. Trump “sounds just like me when he talks!” Marion Nestle exclaimed back in February, laughing at the absurdity of a hard-core McDonald’s eater railing against “the industrial food complex.” RFK Jr. and his merry band of mothers have, if nothing else, made the importance of good food in encouraging good health more prominent in our culture, and more bipartisan.But unlike, say, Michelle Obama, MAHA proselytizers simply want moms to take on more responsibility, turning what should be a multifaceted effort into an atomized, individualistic one. The onus isn’t on the administration to regulate food companies or restrict marketing to children. It is on mothers to obsess over what their families are eating.[Olga Khazan: Doomed to be a tradwife]The irony is that plenty of parents who don’t dream of returning to the land are already on board for back-to-basics meals, made as manageable as possible. The Instagram account for Feeding Littles, which gives guidance on how to raise “adventurous, intuitive eaters,” has 1.9 million followers. The most popular Substack newsletter under the category of food and drink is titled “What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking”; it dishes out quick, practical recipes oriented toward exhausted parents and has more than half a million subscribers. We care not just because we’re fixated on health, or on our own homes. We’re also reminding ourselves, and showing our kids, that eating is more than a solo need; it’s a communal enterprise, one that thrives on dealing as carefully and fairly with food resources as we can. “You eat. Willingly or not you participate in the environment of food choice,” Nestle writes toward the end of her new book. “The choices you make about food are as much about the kind of world you want to live in as they are about what to have for lunch.”This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline “What’s for Dinner, Mom?”

Activism
Agriculture
Business

Tunisians Escalate Protests Against Saied, Demanding Return of Democracy

By Tarek AmaraTUNIS (Reuters) -Thousands of Tunisians marched in the capital on Saturday in a protest against “injustice and repression”, accusing...

TUNIS (Reuters) -Thousands of Tunisians marched in the capital on Saturday in a protest against “injustice and repression”, accusing President Kais Saied of cementing one-man rule by using the judiciary and police.The protest was the latest in a wave that has swept Tunisia involving journalists, doctors, banks and public transport systems. Thousands have also demanded the closure of a chemical plant on environmental grounds.The protesters dressed in black to express anger and grief over what they called Tunisia’s transformation into an "open-air prison". They raised banners reading "Enough repression", "No fear, no terror, the streets belong to the people".The rally brought together activists, NGOs and fragmented parties from across the spectrum in a rare display of unity in opposition to Saied.It underscores Tunisia’s severe political and economic crisis and poses a major challenge to Saied, who seized power in 2021 and started ruling by decree.The protesters chanted slogans saying "We are suffocating!", "Enough of tyranny!" and "The people want the fall of the regime!"."Saied has turned the country into an open prison, we will never give up," Ezzedine Hazgui, father of jailed politician Jawhar Ben Mbark, told Reuters.Opposition parties, civil society groups and journalists all accuse Saied of using the judiciary and police to stifle criticism.Last month, three prominent civil rights groups announced that the authorities had suspended their activities over alleged foreign funding.Amnesty International has said the crackdown on rights groups has reached critical levels with arbitrary arrests, detentions, asset freezes, banking restrictions and suspensions targeting 14 NGOs.Opponents say Saied has destroyed the independence of the judiciary. In 2022 he dissolved the Supreme Judicial Council and sacked dozens of judges — moves that opposition groups and rights advocates condemned as a coup.Most opposition leaders and dozens of critics are in prison.Saied denies having become a dictator or using the judiciary against opponents, saying he is cleansing Tunisia of “traitors”.(Reporting by Tarek Amara; Editing by Kevin Liffey)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.Photos You Should See – Nov. 2025

Activism
Chemicals
Crisis

At UN Climate Conference, Some Activists and Scientists Want More Talk on Reforming Agriculture

Many of the activists, scientists and government leaders at United Nations climate talks underway in Brazil have a beef: They want more to be done to transform the world’s food system

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — With a spotlight on the Brazilian Amazon, where agriculture drives a significant chunk of deforestation and planet-warming emissions, many of the activists, scientists and government leaders at United Nations climate talks have a beef. They want more to be done to transform the world's food system.Protesters gathered outside a new space at the talks, the industry-sponsored “Agrizone,” to call for a transition toward a more grassroots food system, even as hundreds of lobbyists for big agriculture companies are attending the talks.Though agriculture contributes about a third of Earth-warming emissions worldwide, most of the money dedicated to fighting climate change goes to causes other than agriculture, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization.The FAO didn't offer any single answer as to how that spending should be shifted, or on what foods people should be eating.“All the countries are coming together. I don’t think we can impose on them one specific worldview,” said Kaveh Zahedi, director of the organization's Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment."We have to be very, very aware and conscious of those nuances, those differences that exist,” Zahedi said. An alternative universe at COP for agriculture When world leaders gather every year to try to address climate change, they spend much of their time in a giant, artificial world that typically gets built up just for the conference.One corner of COP30, as this year's conference is known, featured the alternative universe of AgriZone, where visitors could step into a world of immersive videos and exhibits with live plants and food products. Those included a research farm that Brazilian national agricultural research corporation Embrapa built to showcase what they call low-carbon farming methods for raising cattle, and growing crops like corn and soy as well as ways to integrate cover crops like legumes or trees like teak and eucalyptus. Ana Euler, executive director of innovation, business and technology transfer at Embrapa, said her industry can offer solutions needed especially in the Global South where climate change is hitting hardest."We need to be part of the discussions in terms of climate funds," Euler said. "We researchers, we speak loud, but nobody listens.”AgriZone was averaging about 2,000 visitors a day during COP30's two-week run, said Gabriel Faria, an Embrapa spokesman. That included tours for Queen Mary of Denmark, COP President André Corrêa do Lago and other Brazilian state and local officials.But while the AgriZone seeks to spread a message of lower-carbon agriculture possibilities, industrial agriculture retains a big influence at the climate talks. The climate-focused news site DeSmog reported that more than 300 industrial agriculture lobbyists are attending COP30. In the face of big industry, some call for a voice for smallholder farmers On a humid evening at COP30's opening, a group of activists gathered on the grassy center of a busy roundabout in front of the AgriZone to call for food systems that prioritize good working conditions and sustainability and for industry lobbyists to not be allowed at the talks.Those with the most sway are "not the smallholder food producers, ... not the peasants, and ... definitely not all these people in the Global South that are experiencing the brunt of the crisis," said Pang Delgra, an activist with the Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development who was among the protesters. “It’s this industrial agriculture and corporate lobbyists that are shifting the narrative inside COPs.”“We have to decolonize our thoughts. It’s not just about changing to a different food,” said Sara Omi, from the Embera people of Panama and president of the Coordination of Territorial Leaders of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests.“The agro-industrial systems are not the solution," she added. "The solution is our own ancestral systems that we maintain as Indigenous peoples."The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Nov. 2025

Activism
Climate
Food

How U.S. Universities Used Counterterror Fusion Centers to Surveil Student Protests for Palestine

Internal university communications reveal how a network established for post-9/11 intelligence sharing was turned on students protesting genocide.  The post How U.S. Universities Used Counterterror Fusion Centers to Surveil Student Protests for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

From a statewide counterterrorism surveillance and intelligence-sharing hub in Ohio, a warning went out to administrators at the Ohio State University: “Currently, we are aware of a demonstration that is planned to take place at Ohio State University this evening (4/25/2024) at 1700 hours. Please see the attached flyers. It is possible that similar events will occur on campuses across Ohio in the coming days.” Founded in the wake of 9/11 to facilitate information sharing between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, fusion centers like Ohio’s Statewide Terrorism Analysis and Crime Center, or STACC, have become yet another way for law enforcement agencies to surveil legally protected First Amendment activities. The 80 fusion centers across the U.S. work with the military, private sector, and other stakeholders to collect vast amounts of information on American citizens in a stated effort to prevent future terror attacks. In Ohio, it seemed that the counterterrorism surveillance hub was also keeping close tabs on campus events. It wasn’t just at Ohio State: An investigative series by The Intercept has found that fusion centers were actively involved in monitoring pro-Palestine demonstrations on at least five campuses across the country, as shown in more than 20,000 pages of documents obtained via public records requests exposing U.S. universities’ playbooks for cracking down on pro-Palestine student activism. Related How California Spent Natural Disaster Funds to Quell Student Protests for Palestine As the documents make clear, not only did universities view the peaceful, student-led demonstrations as a security issue — warranting the outside police and technological surveillance interventions detailed in the rest of this series — but the network of law enforcement bodies responsible for counterterror surveillance operations framed the demonstrations in the same way. After the Ohio fusion center’s tip-off to the upcoming demonstration, officials in the Ohio State University Police Department worked quickly to assemble an operations plan and shut down the demonstration. “The preferred course of action for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass and other building violations will be arrest and removal from the event space,” wrote then-campus chief of police Kimberly Spears-McNatt in an email to her officers just two hours after the initial warning from Ohio’s primary fusion center. OSUPD and the Ohio State Highway Patrol would go on to clear the encampment that same night, arresting 36 demonstrators. Fusion centers were designed to facilitate the sharing of already collected intelligence between local, state, and federal agencies, but they have been used to target communities of color and to ever-widen the gray area of allowable surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has long advocated against the country’s fusion center network, on the grounds that they conducted overreaching surveillance of activists from the Black Lives Matter movement to environmental activism in Oregon. “Ohio State has an unwavering commitment to freedom of speech and expression. We do not discuss our security protocols in detail,” a spokesperson for Ohio State said in a statement to The Intercept. Officials at STACC didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. The proliferation of fusion centers has contributed to a scope creep that allows broader and more intricate mass surveillance, said Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Between AI assessments of online speech, the swirl of reckless data sharing from fusion centers, and often opaque campus policies, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Mir said. While the Trump administration has publicized its weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies against pro-Palestine protesters — with high-profile attacks including attempts to illegally deport student activists — the documents obtained by The Intercept display its precedent under the Biden administration, when surveillance and repression were coordinated behind the scenes. “ All of that was happening under Biden,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, “and what we’ve seen with the Trump administration’s implementation of Project 2025 and Project Esther is really just an acceleration of all of these tools of repression that were in place from before.” Not only was the groundwork for the Trump administration’s descent into increasingly repressive and illegal tactics laid under Biden, but the investigation revealed that the framework for cracking down on student free speech was also in place before the pro-Palestine encampments. Among other documentation, The Intercept obtained a copy of Clemson University Police Department’s 2023 Risk Analysis Report, which states: “CUPD participates in regular information and intelligence sharing and assessment with both federal and state partners and receives briefings and updates throughout the year and for specific events/incidents form [sic] the South Carolina Information and Intelligence Center (SCIIC)” — another fusion center. The normalization of intelligence sharing between campus police departments and federal law enforcement agencies is widespread across U.S. universities, and as pro-Palestine demonstrations escalated across the country in 2024, U.S. universities would lean on their relationships with outside agencies and on intelligence sharing arrangements with not only other universities, but also the state and federal surveillance apparatus. Read our complete coverage Chilling Dissent OSU was not the only university where fusion centers facilitated briefings, intelligence sharing, and, in some cases, directly involved federal law enforcement agencies. At California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where the state tapped funds set aside for natural disasters and major emergencies to pay outside law enforcement officers to clear an occupied building, the university president noted that the partnership would allow them “to gather support from the local Fusion Center to assist with investigative measures.” Cal Poly Humboldt had already made students’ devices a target for their surveillance, as then-President Tom Jackson confirmed in an email. The university’s IT department had “tracked the IP and account user information for all individuals connecting to WiFi in Siemens Hall,” a university building that students occupied for eight days, Jackson wrote. With the help of the FBI – and warrants for the search and seizure of devices – the university could go a step further in punishing the involved students. The university’s IT department had “tracked the IP and account user information for all individuals connecting to WiFi in Siemens Hall.” In one email exchange, Kyle Winn, a special agent at the FBI’s San Francisco Division, wrote to a sergeant at the university’s police department: “Per our conversation, attached are several different warrants sworn out containing language pertaining to electronic devices. Please utilize them as needed. See you guys next week.” Cal Poly Humboldt said in a statement to The Intercept that it “remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.” “The pro-Palestine movement really does face a crisis of repression,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow. “We are up against repressive forces that have always been there, but have never been this advanced. So it’s really important that we don’t underestimate them — the repressive forces that are arrayed against us.” Related How Northern California’s Police Intelligence Center Tracked Protests In Mir’s view, university administrators should have been wary about unleashing federal surveillance at their schools due to fusion centers’ reputation for infringing on civil rights. “Fusion centers have also come under fire for sharing dubious intelligence and escalating local police responses to BLM,” Mir said, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests. “For universities to knowingly coordinate and feed more information into these systems to target students puts them in harm’s way and is a threat to their civil rights.” Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations. The post How U.S. Universities Used Counterterror Fusion Centers to Surveil Student Protests for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

Activism
Crisis

Suggested Viewing

Jetty Cats

Jetty Cats explores contemporary animal rights issues through a focus on a feral cat colony that has survived on a rocky, seaside jetty in Southern California for decades. There is an ongoing debate over feral cat colonies involving advocates who support the trap, neuter, and return -- or "TNR" -- model of management, and those who argue that trapping and euthanizing the cats is more humane. This documentary’s point-of-view supports the TNR model and the related “no-kill” animal shelter policy, and features an exclusive interview with Richard Avanzino, the "Father" of the no-kill movement.

Animals
Government
Activism

In His Own Home

Heavily armed officers of the University of Florida police department in Gainesville, FL, responding to a 911 call from a neighbor who heard screams, break into the campus apartment of Ghanaian graduate student, Kofi Adu-Brempong. Clad in SWAT gear and ready to attack, they see the disabled doctoral student, sitting with a metal table leg in his hand and within a minute of entry, shoot the unarmed man in the face. Adu-Brempong, who because of childhood polio, needed a cane to walk, and had been suffering from mental illness, now has severe facial injuries, and is charged with resisting arrest. He is guarded outside his hospital door, his legs shackled together when going to the bathroom. The officer who shoots Kofi, and who had previously been caught cruising through town throwing eggs at residents of a Black neighborhood, is not suspended or fired. Student protests lead the administration to drop charges but calls for revoking SWAT-like teams on campus go unheard. Kofi’s shooting is not an isolated incident but part of an ongoing pattern of police brutality against Blacks and a stark reminder of the dangers of increasingly militarized campuses nationwide. In His Own Home came out of outrage by a small group of concerned community members committed to seeing social justice happen on a local level. This documentary is an educational and organizing tool, especially calling for our communities to be safe from violence by racist and over-armed police.

Social Justice
Health
Activism

Still River, Silent Jungle

When a novel dam proposal threatens indigenous communities in the Bolivian Amazon, an Uchupiamona woman named Ruth Alipaz Cuqui must step into the unknown and become a spokesperson for her people. To the Uchupiamona people, the river has its own life and personality, just as a woman does. Returning to her land for guidance, Ruth and her people explore an alternative future for their rivers based on adventure tourism and whitewater rafting. While opposing powers much bigger than her, she must come to terms with how much she is willing to risk to protect her river and her people.

Water
Indigenous
Activism

Fracking the System: Colorado's Oil and Gas Wars

Fracking the System is a political thriller documentary from the front lines of climate justice activism in Colorado. When a fracking mega-site gets moved from a White neighborhood to a BIPOC neighborhood, a concerned mother fights to try and stop it. This feature film is an investigative exposé about the harms of fracking, the lengths to which the government is complicit with industrial pollution, and the nefarious tactics that the oil and gas industry uses to undermine democratic elections.

Activism
Government
Documentary

Between Clouds and Glass

A look at the monumental problem of bird collisions in Chicago, the deadliest city for birds, just ahead of Houston and Dallas. According to scientists, what happens in Chicago can affect bird populations across North America. As many as one billion birds die each year in the United States due to building collisions, but there are people who care and work hard to change this.

Family
Conservation
Activism

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.