Raj Patel And Rupa Marya: Deep medicine for collective healing (ep323)
What does it mean to see the inflammation of our bodies and Earth as interconnected and as signals of what is wrong outside—rather than within? How did the major philanthropies shape the field of modern medicine to privilege or devalue certain forms of knowledge?
In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, co-authors of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.
Rupa Marya Ph.D. is a physician, an activist, a mother, and a composer. She is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, and co-founder of the Deep Medicine Circle. Currently, she is helping to set up Mni Wiconi Clinic and Farm at Standing Rock, and she is also part of the Farming Is Medicine project.
Raj Patel is a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and a research associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing, and the coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. He is the co-director of the groundbreaking documentary “The Ants and the Grasshopper”, and he currently serves on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Indigenous Cloud
“Communities living with their critical relationships to the web of life still intact, not living under a colonial, capitalist cosmology, do not have the rates of inflammatory disease that we suffer from...”
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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.
Rupa Marya: For me, my whole life has been a process of unlearning and coming into relationship with Indigenous peoples in the territories where I live, and learning to see the connections between the social structures around people that are making them sick. I do a lot of that work while traveling with my band, Rupa and the April Fishes. I realized that no matter where we were, the people who were suffering most intensely under the brunt of colonial structures were having similar health outcomes and they were suffering from similar diseases.
I'm speaking to you today from occupied, unceded Ohlone territory of Huichin. I was born in Ramaytush Ohlone territory, which is now called the San Francisco Peninsula. And I was born to Punjabi immigrants who came to this country because of all the wealth that was extracted from our country.
We are refugees of colonial terror ourselves, but then we've become settlers in this land. For me, that awakening started when I was young, spending time in wilder places around here, places where you didn't feel the imprint of the strip mall or the highways, in the redwood groves, in the bay groves, along the spine of the peninsula.
I think it's vital to do this work of unlearning and reexamining who we are, where we are, and how we got there, and really applying our understanding of history and the dissections of power as influencing how illness is expressed in our bodies, in our societies and in our planet.
Raj Patel: Rupa said it beautifully. I don't have a whole lot more to add other than chiming in with also having the experience of being a product of colonialism and its contradictions.
So the reason I speak with this particularly posh voice is that my ancestors were moved, in various ways, from South Asia to Fiji and Kenya, both British territories, and then my folks met in Britain and now I'm here.
The experience of being British-Asian is one that sits at the interstices of all these contradictions. I remember when the film Gandhi came out... it was very odd to see someone who looked a little bit like the rest of us on screen for the first time, and feeling very conflicted about first, the odd representations of what was happening on the screen, and realizing that one had never seen that before, and realizing that there was still quite a lot of racism and hostility towards people who look like us, which I experience every day.
So that experience of being both colonizer and settler, and colonized is something that I've lived with for a while. It's really working on this project with Rupa that it's been a whole lot clearer how my work around food systems, resistance, and peasant movements has really been an education in technologies of decolonization and of healing the body.
Kamea Chayne: What I find is that within the green movement or within the healthcare industry, when people talk about the outcomes that we want, it's not too controversial. People want healthy and diverse lands, nutritious foods, good personal health,and public health. But when we start talking about what it'll take and how, it definitely can become pretty divisive.
I think that's because people have fundamentally different depths of understanding of how our problems came to be. And like you said, part of what has shaped your decolonial lens is looking deep into history to see how colonialism and capitalism have transformed our collective relationships with one another, with ourselves, and with our planet.
So can you take us back to give us some historical context as to how these dominant forces have transformed our relationships—and therefore our abilities to recognize ourselves as a part of Earth and to live as a part of Earth?
Rupa Marya: We can look right now at the air quality in the Bay. Today is pretty hazy from the wildfires that are raging throughout California because of several things, including the mismanagement of the land and the water here, that's happened since this land has been colonized.
Before colonialism, the people who lived here, in what we now call California, for tens of thousands of years managed a complex, vibrant, healthy, biodiverse ecosystem and tended to all of the living entities within that ecosystem, and had relationships with them—whether they were the grizzly bear or the wolves or the coyotes or the beaver or the salmon or the water. But when this area was conquered and the genocide happened, not only were the people removed forcibly from their lands and killed—it was a policy of the state of California to offer bounty on Native Americans heads, to clear the land for the gold rush, for the agriculture and for the settlement of these lands—but their knowledge of how to be in the land here was suppressed.
People were afraid to be Indigenous because they would be murdered, so a lot of that knowledge went underground. Songs and languages were forgotten.
What we see now in California is with the years and decades of fire suppression, we're having massive fires, trees that have never grown to the sizes that they are, or shrubs that have never been cleared.
I'm working on a project in Ramaytush Ohlone territory, on a farm that we're working to rematriate to the Ramaytush Ohlone people... I've been walking through the land with traditional ecological knowledge keeper Sage LaPena, who'll look at the woodland corridor through this farm that's been overrun with this invasive ivy, and the fish life has dwindled, and all the farmers around there are sequestering millions of gallons of water while the creek is running dry. She sees how deeply mismanaged the land is—there hasn't been a fire there in a long time, and those places need the purifying medicine of fire.
This isn't simply that Indigenous people just know better, which they do, in terms of tending to biodiversity; it's that their knowledge and their sciences have been disrespected and disregarded by a white supremacist Eurocentric perspective. And that perspective—the colonial cosmology—is not going to fix the problems that we're in.
This cosmology is not going to reattach people to their relationships to one another, into the web of life around them. It is this specific colonial capitalist cosmology that sundered those relationships in order to exploit and extract from the living world around us. It's a mentality that seeks short-minded gains, and to hell with the rest.
What we're living with right now is the outcome of several centuries of that... which is fire. Now you see how it's compounded with COVID—COVID and the wildfires make each other worse. These things intersect.
It's important to look at the root cause of what ideology and what mindset it is that has ripped us apart from our relationship to the things that bring us health and wellness; and what cosmologies will guide us back to that.
Because all of us come from a lineage that was once earth-based, that was once in critical relationships with all the things that supported their wellness and health.
Kamea Chayne: Traditional ecological knowledge is a form of knowledge and a mode of healing that has been marginalized. But it didn't use to be this way. Various forms of healing were widely accepted, practiced, and valued. They aren't today, however, within the dominant culture that places a higher value and privileges certain ways of thinking and knowing over the others.
Raj, you've said before that philanthropy oiled the engine of colonization and really furthered this disconnection. How exactly did philanthropy, which is often seen as a balancing force of good in this extractive system, shape the field of modern medicine and education, and also what is deemed acceptable modes of healing and what is even considered "medicine" today?
Raj Patel: In our book, Inflamed, we talk about how the Carnegie Foundation bankrolled an investigation into establishing "basic criteria" for "modern" medical schools in the United States, which produced the Flexner Report, which found that while the majority of Black medical schools were not up to snuff, quite a few white medical schools were. This led to an exclusion of certain forms of healing.
Behind this example is the longer history of white supremacy and benevolence. And I think this is part of what Rupa was talking about a little earlier on, where the idea of colonialism needs, at some level, basic justification. For example, when the Spanish came to the Western Hemisphere, they needed some moral license in order to be able to do the horrid things that they did to Indigenous people. In that case, the license was provided by the Pope, with the idea that the people of the Western Hemisphere hadn't yet heard of Christ, and that they were going to be given the opportunity to learn about Christ on their days off from being enslaved.
This idea that Western civilization is doing it "for your own good" is the guiding thread behind modern philanthropy. There's no accountability there.
If you look at how the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, or the Carnegie Foundation comports themselves, there are no moments of accountability for sins past, there's no redress for people who suffer at the hands of these foundations' spending priorities.
For example, when a range of American foundations sponsor the Green Revolution in India, what happens is the disenfranchisement of the poorest people who are kicked off their land so that middle peasants are able to access the largesse of American industrial chemistry and get funding for poor wells that irrigate their land. Now those areas that suffered from the Green Revolution are areas with incredibly high rates of suicide and social despair.
And of course, there's no consequence for these American foundations... Many of these foundations are still around and are still giving money to "save the world".
It's important to recognize philanthropy as a way of entrenching patriarchy. There isn't really a line to draw between patriarchy and philanthropy, in that sense.
Philanthropy says, "medicine's over here, and food is over here". It's rehearsing and recapitulating the ideas that to other civilizations seem absurd.
Most civilizations don't see a line between food and medicine. But when you have a professionalizing, capitalist, medical hierarchy, in which the pharmaceutical industry is very keen on producing certain kinds of profit, and in which certain kinds of knowledge need to be deprecated, even if they're stolen from, in the process of manufacturing pharmaceutical products, then you have this line between food and medicine.
People who are outside the licensed, patented, and profitable lines of pharmaceutical production are "witch doctors" or "conducting voodoo". You have a very concentrated and embedded-in white supremacy form of discrimination, a line between what counts as medicine and healing, and what doesn't.
Kamea Chayne: Something you mention in the book is that disease is thought to be located within the body when in fact, it's located outside the body.
I think this just sums up so much of what's being said here so eloquently. But I wonder if you can speak more to this, and perhaps how medical education has set the entire healthcare system up to take on this approach of decontextualizing health and illness from the greater systems that they are inevitable responses to.
Rupa Marya: The history of medical understanding of physiology is so interesting to me, to look at Western medicine and see how they figure things out about how we're getting sick. There was a real revolution in medicine in the 1800s when a French physiologist identified the cause of inflammation as being a phenomenon in the body, so when there was irritation of an organ or a place in the body that generated an inflammatory response, we understood that disease was coming from somewhere within the body, and not some ambiguous miasma—it was from a physiological, pathological experience in the body.
What we do in our book is see inflammation as the body's response to damage and to the threat of damage. It's the immune response working in very close coordination with all these other systems.
And so we say, along the lines of Rudolf Virchow who was saying this back in the 1800s—when he was on the barricades, fighting against the rise of colonial capitalism within Europe and the inability for working-class people to determine their own health and their own fate—he identified that it wasn't organisms like the bacteria that causes typhus, that leads to an epidemic; it is the body's reaction to typhus.
And that is exactly what we see as well—that it's not COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease; it is the body's reaction to that virus that causes the disease. And it's worse for those people who are most socially oppressed and who have an additive impact of toxic exposures in their lives—whether those toxic exposures are environmental toxins, wildfire smoke, lack of good drinking water, police violence, colonial terror ongoing through one's tribal lands, debt. These things create damage in the body, and the immune system is responding with inflammation.
Usually, when there's damage in the body, the inflammatory response is activated, triggering what we call "homeostasis". However, when that damage is ongoing, the body doesn't have a chance to regain that balance, so the inflammatory response continues. And what we get is this chronic, smoldering, systemic inflammation.
Of all the diseases of modern industrialized people that we see, of all the main killers, inflammation plays a major role.
This presents us with an interesting opportunity to look at communities who are living with their critical relationships to the web of life still intact... they're not living under a colonial capitalist cosmology, and they do not have the rates of inflammatory disease that we suffer from.
This really struck me when I was called to Standing Rock to do medic response, as the pipeline protest was encountering increasing violence from the state and hired mercenaries. I met with local health leaders and Elders, and one of them said to me, "We never had these diseases before the colonizers came".
And my Western mind said, "Oh, they just didn't know how to diagnose diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, but of course, they had those diseases.”
In fact, if you look at modern Indigenous societies that are living with their culture intact today, they don't have the same rates of diseases—while modern colonized Indigenous communities have devastating levels of these inflammatory diseases.
We don't think of this as a biological mediator, but language and a continuation of cultural knowledge through it somewhat protect against diabetes. And diabetes, we know is an inflammatory disease.
When you see that, it speaks to something way more complex happening in the body than simply their beta islet cells not working as well as they used to, or that their fat cells are preventing their cells from being as sensitive to insulin as they need to be... This suggests there is a very complex interaction between the mind, the knowing, the cosmology, the understanding of who one is in the world... and health.
So that is what we are really saying:
We cannot expect health to improve at a population or even an individual level until we start contending with these structures that are making us sick.
And this latest IPCC report... shows that we actually cannot be healthy when our world is on fire. So we need to start working collectively and following those people who have known for thousands of years how to do this right.
I don't think we're going to have the solutions we need to solve climate change by following the Sierra Club, for example. I think we're going to find it through organizing and working with peasant farming movements, practicing agroecology, Indigenous peoples who've been fighting this colonial cosmology for 600 years.
Kamea Chayne: Whenever I critique this form of advancement, progress, or development, there are always some people who will be like, "At least be grateful for modern medicine because we're able to treat and cure a lot of these diseases that we never were able to before.” But, modern, Western civilization has brought forth a lot of, or at least the rise in, chronic inflammatory diseases. So it's trying to address the problems that it helped to aggravate. This is not to say that modern medicine hasn't brought any value at all, but to contextualize it.
And it's interesting because oftentimes, chronic illnesses are framed as issues of poor lifestyle choices, or the climate crisis is often framed as issues of carbon imbalance or carbon emissions, that also get pinpointed on people's individual lifestyles. Again, it's not that those things aren't factors within the equation, but there's tremendous value in seeing inflammatory responses of the human body and of the Earth's body as symptoms and responses that are trying to tell us something, that are calling upon us to collectively transform our relationships and ways of living and being.
What baffles me is that when we maintain a decontextualized understanding of the problem, it creates room for commercialized, surface-level solutions to take hold. So when people think that carbon is the problem, things like carbon capture technologies get propped up. Or when people think that an unhealthy microbiome is a problem, people turn to purchase probiotics, which are incrementalist solutions that grow profit for the companies that make them—who will then have larger marketing budgets to indoctrinate people into thinking of them as the solutions.
But at the same time, I wonder if these might just be distractions that prevent us from seeing the deeper transformations that all of these symptoms collectively are calling for.
Rupa Marya: Yes, and I think that there's so much power and beauty in Western medicine and Western science, so we're not going to throw those under the bus, but we do recognize that the decontextualization of these institutions is part of their package, as they were part of the colonizing enterprise here in these lands. So it's no surprise that those lines of power, and those dynamics, are hidden and need to be brought to the surface.
While Western medicine has served some people really well, it hasn't served many others equally well. That is part of the work of decolonizing medicine: understanding how medicine has been a part of the colonial project and how that impedes our ability to secure health for people.
It could look like understanding the cultural and historical context of the people that you're seeing and treating, and also their relationship to the medical structures and the structures of science.
And yes, I think focusing on the individual—like telling a poor person that they are just eating badly and therefore, that they should just get it together and eat better—is a cruel way of positioning or framing health problems.
Because the problem is in the food system, that makes it impossible for that person to make a good food choice. The problem is in the manufactured crisis of poverty and homelessness in a capitalist society.
I think that our priorities in our society have been glaringly revealed to us through COVID, so it's a good time to sit together and think about what is going to secure our health and wellbeing for the most people.
And these issues are systemic.
Our microbiome is a living portrait of our relationships to the world around us. So anyone selling you a pill is not getting at the root problem of why the microbiota of the U.S. people in urban environments is so denuded.
It's not denuded because they're not taking the right pill. And so that is our call—to really inspire people to demand their right to be healthy.
Raj Patel: When you talk about folks saying that modern medicine has brought us good dental care... modern medicine is terrific, and yes, colonial capitalism has brought us lidocaine, but it's also brought about the extinction of the planet. And that's not a great trade-off.
And speaking of trades, the widespread availability of anesthetics and its history is something that we touch on in the book: Modern medicine experimented, particularly on Black women in the United States, and did so without anesthetic, because under this white supremacist model, their pain and suffering were deemed minor and less than that of white women.
This still persists today, which we also talk about in the book. In the United States, in 2016, 58% of white people believed that Black people's skin was thicker than white people's, including 40% of first-year medical students. And even after four years of medical school, 20% of white medical students still thought that Black people's skin was thicker.
So it figures that Black babies born under the care of Black physicians are far more likely to live than those born under the care of white physicians. All of this is to point out that, yes, one can celebrate certain elements of modern medicine. But we need to make sure that when science works best, it works for everyone. The way to make sure of this is to make sure that everyone is recognized as a peer reviewer of science.
Part of the trope of modern science—and we see it today not just in the climate change report but in the UN Food Systems Summit that's happening right now—is that there is a policing of whose knowledge and wisdom counts.
There's quite a lot of emphasis in recognizing that the people who make carbon sequestration technologies are scientists, but that people who plant trees aren't.
And right now, the people who are guardians of biodiversity are just following traditional ways of hunting and gathering—when in fact, what appear to be hunting and gathering systems are incredibly sophisticated, well-managed systems of biodiversity.
Turning to a better future isn't about turning back the clock. The world that many of these technologies were invented in is gone; we are headed towards a hotter world. But the systems of knowledge and exchange that we need to be able to live in harmony with the planet don't involve throwing out science. In fact, it depends on it. But what it does involve throwing out is colonialism and capitalism.
Kamea Chayne: Through the process of colonialism, there was really a split and severance of culture, spirit, and nature, and that was one of the relational changes that I think took place. And so inspired by your book, it's been fascinating for me to think about how different foods hyped up as, "superfoods" for certain benefits have completely been extracted and decontextualized from the cultural traditions and practices that they come from.
I know, Rupa, you've brought up the example of salmon before. Could you speak more to this and how many of these anti-inflammatory foods have actually become even inflammatory due to the ways that they've been extracted and commodified and separated from their greater contexts?
Rupa Marya: For the salmon, we had the great pleasure of speaking with Chief Caleen Sisk, who is the chief of the Winnemum Wintu and a protector of the salmon.
Wild salmon is one of life's greatest gifts as an anti-inflammatory food. It lowers levels of systemic inflammation, has all sorts of benefits for the brain, for the cardiovascular system, for the endocrine system. When salmon were overfished to extinction on the Atlantic side, they came over to newly colonized California to talk with the Winnemum Wintu, and ask, "How does this Pacific salmon work, and how do we farm salmon?"
The Winnemum Wintu shared with these scientists the practices that they knew from observing the salmon, that the salmon came up and would spawn in the places where they were born, and that their corpses would nourish all the animals around them. And the scientists thought, "These salmon don't die because that's not what happens to the Atlantic salmon." So they thought that Indigenous peoples were crazy—until they saw it.
So they learned about this spawning and this cycle, and then they left with that knowledge to develop their extremely violent practices that we see now in modern hatcheries.
What Chief Caleen would say is that they came and took that knowledge, but they didn't learn the songs, they didn't learn how we light the fires all the way up the river so that the salmon knew where to go, and they didn't know the dances.
They didn't see the whole architecture of culture, of relationship to the salmon. It wasn't simply about extracting them or taking from the salmon; it was also about giving and assisting and relating to them as they came on this magnificent journey from the ocean all the way up to the base of Mount Shasta.
Now, with modern salmon and farmed salmon, there's been some documentation that some farmed salmon are actually pro-inflammatory. We've also seen, in farmed salmon, a rise in inflammation themselves. The close quarters and unhealthy dynamics of farming salmon causes a rise in salmon viruses that cause inflammation... So it was shocking to see how it was being recreated not just in us, but in the animals.
Looking at the way that we treat and breed animals and the violence within industrial farming practices, you'll find inflammation throughout those animals, because it really is the architecture of domination, of non-respect, of non-relationship, of treating some person as if they were a thing.
That creates a toxic exposure for that person—whether that person is a salmon or a Black person in the United States, or a woman in a patriarchal society. Any axis of domination will create this impact.
Kamea Chayne: So maybe there isn't such a thing as an "anti-inflammatory" food, drug, or supplement. Maybe all there is is an anti-inflammatory culture and system.
Rupa Marya: Exactly. And that's the cosmology that will get us out of this mess. There are people living on planet Earth who are doing it very well. But this is not something we learn as we are raised in this society. Looking for solutions in the mindset of this society is not going to lead us very far.
Kamea Chayne: In terms of looking to our path forward, you've both noted that historically, the most transformative movements have not been funded by charities or philanthropies, but they came about in grassroots manners, through community building and community organizing.
So my question is: Given that our current economic disparity continues to widen and the injustice of everything, including land ownership, continues to grow, what sorts of wealth do you think can be created through mutualism and community building from the bottom up—without waiting on those in power to give up their monetary wealth? And what sorts of changes still require a sort of economic wealth from the top being decentralized and redistributed?
Raj Patel: When you dollarize something and think of that as wealth, the modern industrial food system is in the business of wealth destruction and commonwealth destruction. There was a report out recently that showed that in 2019, Americans spent 1.1 trillion dollars on food, but the food system caused 2.2 trillion dollars worth of damage.
If we're waiting on capitalism to transfer wealth, we're waiting for the wrong thing. Capitalism is in the business of appropriating wealth.
History points out that the only way that that stops is through organizing.
But you can't and you shouldn't put a dollar value on the kinds of things that communities are in the process of building right now in order to survive: the links of care, the relationships of nurturing and tenderness and love that exists between all kinds of persons.
I think it's important to bring the word "commons" back into the discussion because there is a lot of commons wealth that can and is already being created by movements around the world. These are, sadly, the kinds of things that neoliberalism takes for granted. So when there is an austerity program, the neoliberal architects of those austerity programs will just say, "Look, fine, they've got such great social connections that people, or the churches, or the food banks are going to step in and take care of people.”
In any case, there are bonds of reciprocity and care that exist not just within communities, but as COVID has demonstrated, between rural and urban communities.
These relationships move away from the market and move towards the commons, and they are incredibly rich—and not in a dollar way.
In fact, our impulse to turn everything into a dollar value is a sign that we have been colonized—in multidimensional ways that cannot and should not be collapsed into a dollar.
Those kinds of relationships are relationships that allow joy, that allow resilience, and not in the sort of crappy way of just being able to survive capitalism, but resilience in a way that allows human flourishing.
Kamea Chayne: And finally, through the lens of medicine, you say that justice is the medicine. I really love that.
The big words that people often use in conjunction with understanding our path to justice are things like dismantling capitalism, decolonization, or also abolition. And a lot of this is seemingly framed as a deletion of systems that aren't working. But there actually is so much beauty and love at the heart of this work, because it's actually about building systems and politics of care and reciprocity that can render those extractive and punitive systems obsolete.
So as we learn to move away from individualistic understandings of what we need to do, what are your calls to action or further inquiry for our listeners so that we can collectively play our roles in rebuilding this reality?
Rupa Marya: There are so many ways in which people can act right now—whether it's through offering support to our frontline warriors on Line Three, through getting in the face of local and state and federal governments to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline...
For myself, I tend to fall in step with the invitation and leadership of the Indigenous folks that I'm around and who I'm working with. Finding people, entering relationships with people you might not know, and asking, "how can I help", and learning to listen. I think that's a big thing for those of us who are settlers here on stolen land—learning to be humble, listen, and not have the solutions, but be prepared to learn and take the marching orders and offer your privileges and skills.
We have a tremendous amount of skill together. We have tremendous potential to build other alternatives.
This isn't about negating so much as it is about creating a more beautiful world that is centered on care.
And it needs all of us, all hands on deck, through general strikes, through saying we're no longer participating in that system, we're withholding our labor, we're withholding our children. These processes of saying no to something allow us to say yes to other things.
And there are active movements in every corner of the globe, of people who are building these alternatives, right now. So for folks who don't know about it, I'd say they start learning about what's going on in their local environment. If you live in colonized, settled territories, start working with the Native communities and asking, "What can I do? How can I help?" And then take your orders from there.
Kamea Chayne: Raj, what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us off with?
Raj Patel: In the book, we talk about the care revolution, and in the writing of this book, in the work that I've been inspired by Rupa in following, and in the work that I'm doing with peasant movements around the world, what's exciting about this moment is that there are so many new ways that we might learn to care. There are so many beings with whom we can and should be caring.
And that's the invitation of this moment: The green dream is something that has to be dreamed together with so many more people than we've been allowed to have in our cosmology. And that's a dream worth cherishing and sharing.
Kamea Chayne: And Rupa, please take us home.
Rupa Marya: I just think it's a beautiful moment to remain optimistic. I have a deep optimism for the creative capacity of people to move to healing, a healing perspective, and dynamic. It's a great time to embrace humility because there's so much we don't know, in the face of all the challenges that are right ahead, and to really connect, to start building those relationships with your foods, with your plants, with your soils, with your friends and community, and then extending beyond to the people you don't yet know, and to start working to build that solidarity so we can start dismantling those things that are hurting the Earth and so many people.
