Building a grassroots movement for the regeneration revolution (interview with ronnie cummins of organic consumers association and regeneration international)
Ronnie Cummins (@ronnie_cummins) is the co-founder of the well-known Organic Consumers Association (@organicconsumer) and its affiliate in Mexico, Via Organica, as well as a member of the Steering Committee at Regeneration International (@regenerationinternational).
His latest book is Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food, and a Green New Deal.
In this podcast episode, Ronnie sheds light on his path to building a grassroots movement of millions of organic consumers; why he views fake foods, such as fake meat, as a false solution to our broken food system; how this new regeneration movement can help to unify our varied siloed movements focusing on different aspects of our social and ecological crises; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Ronnie and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Mining for Steal by Fuchsia
“When you have a radical crisis, you don’t solve it with a minor change. You have to solve it with fundamental radical change.””
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This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological balance, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any podcast app to stay informed and updated on our latest episodes.
On expanding upon our understanding of organic:
"When people ask what regenerative food and farming is, the simplest way to explain it is that it's the next stage of organic food and farming.
There was already a tradition of taking care of the soil, not using environmentally destructive chemicals, appreciating biodiversity, and allowing animals to exercise their natural behaviors in organic farming.
But when we first started the modern organic movement, we didn't understand a lot of things about the soil and about forests and about the climate crisis that we know now."
On undoing the ecological damages from European colonization and restoring our prairies and grasslands:
“We need to transform, in the U.S., several hundred million acres, where we're growing genetically engineered corn and soybeans for factory farms, back to what they were before the European settlers came—prairies and grasslands.
Prairies and grasslands can only be converted away from row crops and chemical-intensive agriculture with a cooperation between the farmer, rancher, and the animals… the way the buffalo roamed, the way the wilder beasts roamed in Africa, the way that the keystone species we used to have in the U.S. like beavers and prairie dogs.
We had a very healthy ecosystem back when Native Americans were the stewards of the land. We've caused an amazing amount of damage since then, and we've got to get these landscapes back to their natural, carbon-sequestering, fertile state.”
On the real ‘national security’ threat the United States faces:
"We have to realize the only national security issue that really matters is the climate emergency.
We need to stop this nonsense about how Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela, or Cuba is a threat to the United States.The real threat to the United States is our climate-denying, profit-at-any-cost government and the multinational corporations who have put their profits ahead of our survival.
We've got to turn this climate emergency around and do it really quickly—starting right now."
Final words of wisdom:
"I write in my book that we had a saying back in the 1960s which we've repeated over and over again: There's only one reason for becoming a revolutionary and that's because it's the best way to live.”
