Errol Schweizer: Navigating the exploitive food system towards worker justice (ep319)

How might "eco-" or "ethical" certifications fall short of our hopes or expectations for what they mean and guarantee? What is it that leads many socially-driven food startups to become co-opted?

In this episode, we welcome Errol Schweizer (Instagram; Twitter). Born in The Bronx, New York, Errol has over 25 years of experience in the food industry—from grill cook, stock clerk, and purchasing manager, to V.P. of Grocery, a position he held at Whole Foods for seven years. He has developed plant-based, Organic, Non-GMO, and regenerative supply chains and product standards for over a decade. Since 2016, he has been a Board Member, Co-Founder, and Advisor to over two dozen food retail and CPG enterprises. Currently, Errol is active in regional food policy, healthy food access, and labor advocacy, and is the Co-Founder and Host of The Checkout Podcast.

Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Karma by Sarah Kinsley

“The food system is rooted in this plantation slavery model that evolved alongside, and really fed, the development of capitalism. Even today, big food companies still have forced labor, slavery, or trafficking in their supply chain. So how much has actually changed?”

— ERROL SCHWEIZER

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Transcript

Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as invitations to dive deeper into the topics and resources mentioned. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Errol Schweizer: I came up through the ranks because I worked really hard, but also I was really fortunate. I had not only my own privileges but good timing and great mentors. So I always felt really connected to the folks in the stores or on the ground in facilities. For me, it was always about feeding the world good food, and there was always an aspect of justice to it.

The contradictions came in the fact that we were doing it in a capitalist system, which emphasizes the need for profit, productivity, and growth. I realized early on in my career that I was going to have to figure out how to navigate that contradiction, how I was going to personally deal with the fact that not every decision that we made was going to benefit everybody, and what role I was going to play in that.

I left Whole Foods almost six years ago. When I was there, there was very much a grassroots sort of vibe. You could do a lot of interesting, innovative things, but it was also a company that really seemed to take care of its employees. It wasn't unionized, which was always something that I was uncomfortable with, being a lifelong union advocate and supporter. But there, it was the best pay scale in the industry, great benefits, opportunities for advancement, so I stuck with it. I accepted that contradiction. There was an opportunity to build solidarity with your co-workers.

So for me, it was like, "Okay, if we can't have any formal structure, let me do my best to build strong relationships of mutual support with the people that I work with, our suppliers, our vendors." But once again, it's capitalism—the market catches up, competition catches up. The investors got impatient and wanted higher profits, higher productivity. Eventually, expenses get cut... and labor is a variable expense: it's always the first thing to get reduced. And you're seeing that now across the board in retail with the restructuring of layoffs... There's a brief moment now where they're looking for more employees, but that won't last because they're replacing a lot of folks with automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

Even though I've been through the system, I'm still very stubborn about my worldview and about when I do see injustice, imbalance, and exploitation.

The food industry is ground zero for injustice, imbalance, and exploitation.

Even though I still consider myself a food industry lifer, I'm really dissatisfied with how the industry has evolved, how many people, the ecosystem, animals are treated. We've tried to improve upon a lot of things, but there's still so much work to do. And in a lot of ways, things are worse, too.

Kamea Chayne: I've been thinking about how the rise in our need for certifications is very much reflective of a loss of community, where, rather than addressing the root causes for the loss of trust from this fragmented, opaque, complex global supply chain inside of a profit-first hierarchical system, we've turned to policing and commodifying trust instead—which manifests in very limiting certifications.

When I talked to our mutual friend, Loren of A Growing Culture, about this train of thought, he said that you're the person I have to speak to about this because of your decades of experience as an industry insider, having witnessed the fraud and shortcomings of certain labels you've worked with.

So what are some examples you can tell us of "eco-" or "ethical" certifications falling short of people's hopes or expectations for what they mean and guarantee?

Errol Schweizer: Let me get to the punch line first: In a market system, certifications are, unfortunately, one of the only ways to guarantee trust, transparency, authenticity, because we live in a globalized capitalist system.

It's something that has evolved into, particularly in the last 40 to 50 years, what we would call the neoliberal era—the era of privatization and the reduction in state services, a focus on the racialization of capital and how the division of labor cuts across race and class.

The main thing is that the role of the state and government is to encourage, underwrite, and subsidize private capital, to subsidize big business.

A quick side note is that the organic food industry and some of the ethical sourcing labels exist almost outside of that because there are not as many state subsidies and underwriting that you'd find in big agriculture. The conventional meat industry is subsidized to the tune of 38 billion dollars a year. The Trump administration underwrote big agriculture: primarily GMO, commodity, monoculture crop production for animal feed and processed ingredients to the tune of 65 billion dollars, in less than three years. And of course, 99.9% of this went to wealthy white farmers—once again, the rationalization of capital.

So why certification? Certifications in the free trade system are an established way of communicating trust through that system. It’s a pressure release. They create certain very narrowly defined attributes for consumers who want to purchase something better, or in many cases, to avoid certain ingredients or substances. It's very different from saying our whole food system is backward, upside down.

But certification is very different from saying that we need to transform our food and agricultural system to one based on principles of agroecology and fairness and justice.

Our food system now is based on the last thousand years of enclosures and privatization of land, the displacement of women as the folks who took care of the land, the commons, the healers and herbalists, which was what the witch burnings were about... That evolved into the slave trade and how folks were stolen from West Africa and Central Africa because of their agronomic knowledge: these were farming civilizations.

The food system is rooted in this plantation slavery model that evolved alongside, and really fed, the development of capitalism. Cocoa, coffee, sugar, cotton—all these crops were developed through slavery. Even today, big food companies still have forced labor, slavery, or trafficking in their supply chain. So how much has actually changed?

All of this is to contextualize why I say that certification is the best you can do within the system, because there are two options here: The first is consumer capitalism, or conscious consumerism. But this is just it's a paradigm; it's fetishization of the commodity. But it's not the only way.

So much of the change that we need to pursue in the food system exists outside of what you decide to buy at the checkout counter.

It exists in the realm of political advocacy, of organizing for a better food system; the realm of public purchasing, public contracts and how food can be commodified, and yet still feed folks; the realm of what we call "food sovereignty" and developing local and communal networks—which you already see in this growing network of Black, Indigenous, people of color producers, cooperatives, communities.

But if you have the access, the ability, the privilege, financial location, knowledge, that folks like us, like myself, feel we have, then you probably should buy better stuff because at least you're supporting some of the folks who are attempting to do things better in a very narrow way, as defined by the marketplace. And that's what these ethical certifications do.

I'll start with the biggest, most visible, and in some ways the most successful: USDA Organic, which is essentially federally regulated, it's a legal term. You can only call something "organic" if it's certified through the national organic program by a third-party private certifier.

Over the last couple of decades, organic has grown—now a 60 plus billion dollar market—and become somewhat watered down and compromised, primarily through the influence of big business and folks who don't necessarily have the consumer's best interests in mind. For example, some of the concerns with organic include how hydroponic is allowed in organic, even though it conflicts with organic regulations about building soil health. There's also definitely a much more lax attitude towards what they call "organic" CAFOs (concentrated animal feedlot operations)—primarily in dairy, where you have these really large-scale, conventional operations that managed to get certified organic without really changing too much of what they do.

Then there was a huge scandal about organic fraud in grain imports. Why are we importing grain? That's because so much of the grain we produce in this country is genetically modified; much of it gets contaminated unless you're very careful.

I need to say that out of all the certifications, organic is still the best and still the most trustworthy, simply because there are thousands of producers and manufacturers that are still committed to it. If you are dissatisfied with organic, the idea is to not walk away from it or reject it, but fight for it—fight to make it better, fight to make it more agroecological, fight to make it more authentic, fight the compromises that are going into it. Because the main thing that organic does is it guarantees to you—and this is something that it still does—that you are able to avoid dangerous poisons, pesticides and herbicides, the hundreds of chemicals.

If there is one reason to buy and support organic, it's because you're actually still avoiding the silent spring that Rachel Carson warned about. But that doesn't stop organic from having many shortcomings and contradictions.

Kamea Chayne: Is there a worker justice element to the USDA organic?

Errol Schweizer: No. That was pulled out in the 90s, from what I recall. There are some organic farms that are unionized, and there are others that are good with their workers in terms of providing living wages and job security.

But the focus of labor justice and worker justice needs to happen at the state and federal policy level; it is not something that you can guarantee with organic.

Frankly, there are some organic farms that are just as bad as conventional farms. I know this from talking with certifiers and activists and farm worker groups, who say that some of these small farms pay just as poorly and they treat their farm workers—primarily migrant, immigrant, or undocumented guest workers—just as bad as the conventional folks do.

Labor justice needs to be enacted with federal policy, which means making sure that farm workers have the same overtime protections, which some states are doing. This means guaranteeing that farm workers get a living wage—not minimum, or even subminimum, wage. This means that there's fair scheduling, that they have all the protections that me and you have, from the legacy of the New Deal, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act. That needs to be applicable to farm workers federally, and it's not. That, to me, is one of the greatest oversights, and shows that that we are not that removed from the plantation model.

The New Deal, the FDR compromise with Southern Democrats, didn't want to include not only farm workers but domestic workers, who, while disproportionately people of color and Black, were actually still majority white—it was an issue of class and economic power...

Now, that legacy means that primarily immigrant, undocumented, mostly Latin American workers are excluded from those labor protections that the rest of us take for granted. Labor justice is not something you can get to with organic, because it would still mean that the other 95% plus of the food that we produce is still grown in this plantation model.

Essentially, the whole food system is underwritten by labor exploitation—the exploitation of the mostly immigrant workforce who pick, harvest, process, manufacture our food all the way up through these big manufacturing plants and processing plants. If you are interested in fixing the food system, the major focus we should have is labor and social socioeconomic justice for food system workers.

Kamea Chayne: What you just said in regards to the limitations of using certifications as a way to address worker justice, I think it's summed up by this quote that you share in "Five Actions to Reboot Food Retail" from Greg of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. He said, "Whatever they call social responsibility in the food industry has been a joke, a fraud... it is absolutely empty and soulless and unreal. It is everything that has not worked and has been done for a public relations purposes for the corporations, not the workers."

Errol Schweizer: Just as a quick background, Greg Asbed was a farm worker for a decade and a farm worker organizer for 20 years and is a co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, one of the leading farmworker justice organizations in the world, which discovered and figured out a way to leverage the marketplace to create enforceable, legally binding contracts that not only protect farm workers from the worst forms of harassment and exploitation, but to guarantee them better wages and working conditions.

So I just wanted to contextualize, because my man Greg knows what he's talking about and has lived it. He has seen, during COVID, how blatant the exploitation was and just how many people suffered, got sick, and even died. And he said no major retailer, no major food processor stepped up and said, "oh, well, this is wrong. This is bad." Their whole focus was on productivity and keeping shelves full and keeping the plants running. This was something that made me physically ill and really inspired a lot of the work that I've been doing for the last year in particular, to say, "Let's stop patting ourselves on the back, people. This is very, very bad."

If you were to extrapolate out these types of conditions within our current food system towards what we're expecting to happen with climate change, it does not bode well. COVID-19 was a test, and the food system failed miserably.

Kamea Chayne: If listeners want to learn more about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, they were highlighted in this documentary called "Food Chains" by our previous guest Sanjay Rawal.

A tangent I want to go on, which goes hand in hand with conscious consumerism, is the amount of food innovation and startups being created in the name of "sustainable" and "ethical" food. I know you've helped bring to market success various plant-based, organic or regenerative food brands and products. But these brands that we see are really just a tiny representation of the larger landscape of all the market-driven, branded solutions to addressing the industry's crises.

I don't want to paint all startups with a broad stroke, because there are brands working to embody justice at all levels and that are centering our collective health. But there is a trend of the initially good intentions of entrepreneurs, who set out to address some of the industry's problems, being hijacked by the same game... of profit and power and domination. So they're attempting to solve certain problems but end up just repeating the same destructive patterns.

I would love if you could share some examples of how the movement of plant-based or regenerative being derailed in their purpose, and what we should learn from that.

Errol Schweizer: I still work with a number of food businesses that are attempting to figure out how to embody those ethics in a for-profit, capitalist business: it's a huge contradiction. I think folks are doing their best with the way the system is set up. There's a lot of folks that really mean what they're saying and want to do right, but there are a lot of challenges.

The first major challenge is that the odds are stacked against them. The scale of the for-profit, commodified food system, the fact that it's underwritten by public tax dollars, is just so absurd.

If you're producing organic corn, for example, you're competing with GMO corn that's underwritten by tax dollars.

If we're thinking in terms of true cost accounting, if you were to pull the public subsidies out and add in the cost of pollution—the health issues, runoff and water wastage—, conventional agriculture would be a lot more expensive than organic produce.

One of the other concerns, contradictions, and cooptation they have is finance, and how you can underwrite these businesses that are doing the right thing. Most of the food businesses are underwritten through private capital, either the private equity markets, venture capital, or what they call "family offices", etc.

Capital always wants returns. If somebody gives you a dollar, you're signing paperwork to say that within a couple of years, you're going to turn this into three dollars. So you have these legal obligations to your investors. Likewise, the investors have legal obligations to their partners, the people who actually put money into their funds. So you have to make sure that as a business, you're trying to find investors who share your values.

You think that you're picking up a hitchhiker, but they turn into a carjacker, take over your business, change the terms of the investment, and steal your company from you—that happens a lot. It's very hard to scale a business with honest money.

A lot of the money is fast, high-risk money. Folks want hockey stick growth. You have these investors who throw money at dozens of companies with the hope that one or two will end up being the Next Big Thing. There's not enough of what they call "slow money", "slow capital". So what I am saying is that the financing is a major challenge.

During COVID-19, I've been working for a number of different companies, and raising funds was hellish, very difficult. The terms are very favorable to the investors, and some companies went insolvent. Luckily, most of the companies I work with survived and are still figuring out how to navigate this mess. But some didn't get investments and some didn't get the most favorable terms.

I watch the ag-tech investor space very carefully, and what investors are throwing money at are these glitzy new technologies, like cultivated meat and synthetic biology. I'm very skeptical understanding the type of returns that they're asking for and the business model that's needed for those companies to be profitable... After all that money is put into it, I question how sustainable they actually will be, as opposed to companies that are attempting to not only stay organic, but maybe pay their employees well or make sure that all the stakeholders that they know of within their supply chain are being treated well.

There are a number of great companies like Equal Exchange, or Alter Eco, or Organic Valley—which is a farmer-owned, organic dairy co-op that has over a billion dollars in sales every year. They've got very loyal employees. If you see Organic Valley at the grocery store, you should buy it. It's one of the best companies in the world. It's not perfect, and they're still having to function in this market system, but they figured out a way to do it—to keep farmers on the land, and also greatly expand the access and availability of organic foods, which is a great thing.

But folks want to fetishize conscious consumers and say, "hey, this is the answer". As somebody who's probably sold more “ethical” products than almost anybody in this country, I'll say that conscious consumption has probably made much progress in certain aspects of the food system, but it's not the be-all-end-all. There's so much more to food activism, food policy work, and public procurement that can also shift the dialogue around the food system.

I mean, Rematriation of Indigenous lands, for example. There's only a handful of Native American-owned brands. If we were to talk about Rematriating Indigenous lands and allowing some of these lands that are either privately or publicly held now to be given back to their original stewards for food sovereignty and for them to start using Indigenous land management techniques once again, I think that would have a much bigger impact on the food system than dozens of new entrepreneurs trying to launch some cool, kitschy innovative products, which may or may not ever be successful.

Or if we were to transform public procurement and say, "let's look at all government agencies, and transform all their public procurement to what we call ‘good food purchasing program standards’ that are essentially agroecological", that would have a tremendous impact on supply chains in terms of ethical sourcing, use of organic, moving away from pesticides and GMOs, because those public purchasing contracts are legal documents. You have to abide by the standards in those documents in order to sell to those customers.

And finally, just tying that back into one other aspect, the universalization of school lunch could have such a huge impact on a good food purchasing system if we were to not only say, "School lunch should be free forever", but that it should also be produced with good food, good organic food, good wholesome food, whole food ingredients, local farmers, folks that are in the supply chain that are getting paid well, that are able to have middle class jobs and maybe save for a home and send their kids to college by producing and growing food.

You could call me a bit optimistic, but I probably know more about supply chains than anybody, and it's possible. It's a matter of willpower, of organizing, of power, and who's making these decisions.

I'm not against folks being food entrepreneurs and food innovators in the private sector, and there's a lot of folks that I love doing it, but I do encourage them to say it's not everything. In fact, I'm of the opinion that we need to greatly reduce our dependance on the marketplace, on private markets, in the food sector in particular.

We need to greatly expand the public sector. We need to expand the commons to create a food commons. We need to work towards food being a right that everybody has access to.

And to do all this, you need infrastructure, logistics, and supply chain, personnel, folks who are working in the system.

Kamea Chayne: Relatedly, you've noted before that we're not having holistic enough of conversations about the food system and who's making decisions and who's benefiting. Instead, we're fetishizing particular techniques and practices, going back to our earlier discussion.

Of course, these things are important, like certifications, but I wonder if this could be an inevitable byproduct of first democratizing and decentralizing power in the system itself. So, maybe addressing the power injustices first can then translate into changes in those practices as a result.

Errol Schweizer: Of course. In fact, I would say that if you were to democratize the decision-making and the power dynamics, you would already have a completely different set of technologies and trends that would be prioritized. Some farm worker organizations don't support "organic" because they're coming from a broad agroecological analysis of not just how the food is grown but also the financing, the decision-making, and who's benefitting from it.

This applies to the "regenerative" label, too, and "regenerative" has huge potential to mitigate climate change and create healthier, nutrient-dense food, but so much of its discussions and policies and certification organizational frameworks exclude Indigenous peoples and farm worker groups and a diverse cohort that is essentially who's working in the food system—primarily working class people of color, disproportionately women as well. They are not the ones making the decisions. This is the issue with food tech as well, whether it's cultivated meat or it's the new waves of genetically modified organisms.

It's not the technology itself that's the issue; it's who's driving it, who's prioritized in getting the finance capital. It's investors, it's entrepreneurs, it's scientists, and they're brilliant at research, but they don't know sh*t about the food system, about the food industry.

Decisions and prioritization would be different if you had different folks at the table, if you had folks who are rooted in food justice and food access, if this was put in the public interest, in the public domain.

[If only] this wasn't all about intellectual property rights and patenting the building blocks of life. All these GMOs are patented—you can't save GMO corn seed and plant them next year or you'll go to jail. You have to buy it every year. So it's not the technology itself that's the problem; it's what we call the "political economy"—who's behind it, who's investing, etc.

I really feel if the decision-makers actually reflected the food system, food trends would look a lot different. I think it would be a lot more contextualized to how people live, what their challenges are, and what they're trying to get out of it, as opposed to fetishizing the next big thing just because it has some value in the marketplace.

So I'm really interested in what folks like HEAL Food Alliance is saying, in what the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility Network is talking about, what Warehouse Workers for Justice is doing around Amazon, what Teamsters Union is doing to unionize Amazon... People of color, working class people in the food system, and their people... these are the folks that need to be at the table, folks who are involved at that level of justice.

Kamea Chayne: I do think it is important to keep remaining critical of food tech in general, since food tech drives the centralization of power with things like patents, for example, that perpetuate issues of access, because it makes things less democratized and more controlled by a few major powers within the field. So we have to remain critical of food tech—regardless of the latest thing that is being hyped up as the solution to X, Y, Z.

Something that really stood out to me is that in at least three of the past interviews that you did that I listened to, the hosts preface those episodes by telling their audience that Errol's going to say things that you're not going to like to hear, that you're going to disagree with.

First of all, I never go into a conversation expecting to agree with everything that's being said, and I actually enjoy having dialogues that challenge my preconceptions and help me to expand my perspectives and knowledge. But I'm curious to hear if you have any inklings as to why past interviewers have had to share the same warning to their audiences about you, or what it was about your message that they might have found challenging or uncomfortable, either personally or for their audience.

Errol Schweizer: Yeah, it's so weird because that's happened to me and these are interviewers who I like, and they reached out to me wanting to hear my weird perspective, and yet they're saying that their audience is fragile and sensitive and doesn't like being challenged or hearing things that may shatter their world view.

I think it just speaks to the fact that there's a lot of closed-mindedness, vested interests, and sensitivity around this. Folks need to be pushed towards things they're not willing to do on their own. What I feel my role is is embracing the fact that I have certain privileges, and thus a platform, to shine a light and elevate folks who are not necessarily in the spotlight.

When I talk with folks in the food industry, they're used to hearing the same old sh*t. So much of food media is just tautology. It's circular logic. "This is good because it's good." It's almost paid advertisements. Thankfully, there are a number of other folks who are thinking about food more critically, and I'm trying to join them.

For me, it's really important to talk about the processes and ways that you can actually implement change. I'm very practical. It's not about the distant ideal; it's about how you get there. It's building the road as you travel. It's making the road as you walk.

If you have a vision of what you think you can achieve, or what you want to do, take it step-by-step. Build it as you go, and don't say tha when we get there, things are going to be paradise, because we know how utopias end up. Every utopia has always been a sham. It's been a grift, and it's usually failed miserably and violently.

We need to make changes, to build by accompanying folks that you're working alongside who could benefit from these changes—not leading them, not being the Messiah or the prophet. Let's do it together—collaboratively, democratically.

That's sometimes hard for people to hear because they're set in their ways. I'm hoping to see particularly younger food activists or younger folks in the food industry unionize your workplace. Start there. Start with organizing, creating solidarity, mutual aid, and fellowship among your fellow workers. And if your workplace isn't viable or you're a freelancer or there are other reasons, start with your community. Get active in your community. Does your city have a food policy board or Food Policy Council? Is there a school board, a PTA, or is there something that you could start?

Don't wait for the next presidential election and hope that you get some messianic figure that will come and fix everything, because it's going to be messy. Start locally as much as you can, and start creating those systems of equality and justice and diversity and access within your network, within your sphere, within your community.

*** CLOSING ***

Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?

Errol Schweizer: I love A Growing Culture. I feel privileged to be friends with Loren Cardeli and his team. One of the things that really inspired me early on was reading and learning about the Zapatista rebellion. It was something that I heard about as it was happening. And it was very much about land, food, and autonomy, and it was from this social justice angle that spoke to Indigenous communities, but that was also rooted in economic justice and fair trade and fair trading relationships. And for 26, 27 years, it's inspired me, and I still try to keep up with it.

In terms of other amazing books... I'm reading a lot about the Black radical tradition: Cedric Robinson, Robin D.G. Kelley, Gerald Horne. I'm trying to really be rooted in that history. I'm also reading a lot about Indigenous history—Nick Estes, Rowen White, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States... If you read that alongside Paul Ortiz's An African American and Latinx History of the United States, those two are probably all that you need. Obviously, you can still check out Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. And finally, I really love Julie Guthman's work on the food industry. She wrote two seminal books: Agrarian Dreams, which is about the history of the organic food industry, and Weighing In, which is a critical analysis of obesity and the social construction of obesity and who wins and who benefits.

Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?

Errol Schweizer: Just that there's work to be done. I look in the food industry, I look outside my window, in my community, and we have so much work to do. We have to fix these things. Things are set up to benefit a particular set of actors. The system is rigged in so many ways. It was built this way. And if you could dedicate your life towards justice, yet still figure out how to make a livelihood... tikkun olam.

Diaspora Jews believe in something called doikayt, which is hereness. You make your home where you are, not somewhere else, not some promised land, etc. And for me, that sort of justice and struggle and equity is something to try to perform in your daily life and something to work towards as much as possible.

If you have the privilege and option, or you have the necessity—for many people, it is a necessity, to struggle—for me, that's something that I figured out how to do, sometimes in a market context when I was working in grocery and creating great products and creating great supply chains. Now my focus is on not only supporting the businesses I work with but also trying to really work towards labor and social justice and racial justice.

Kamea Chayne: And what makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment?

Errol Schweizer: I always feel like tomorrow could be better than today. But also, you have to have more than hope. You have to have motivation. And for me, as I said, it's about knowing there's work to be done and figuring out what you can do to impact that work.

And we have to be very careful about hope. If you have it and you can share and project it, that's great, but don't lose it. And I think one way to not lose hope is to stay disciplined and focus and to create a practice and ultimately a praxis around social justice work and positive change.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much, Errol, for your time and generosity and for sharing your wealth of knowledge and experience with us. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?

Errol Schweizer: Keep loving. Keep fighting.