Travel to Learn About Food Sovereignty
Food Sovereignty is
A contemporary movement for the natural right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically balanced and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.
Why is this important?
Today our chemical-based monocultural system actively fights against nature and the ecosystems where we grow our food.
Drive to any farm that utilizes “modern” industrial-based agriculture, and you will notice the lack of life that exist on the land. In order to maintain this system, we need to deplete the land of its life using strong and toxic chemicals to kill anything and fertilizers to keep the sickly plants alive.
These harsh methods turn the most fertile soils into wasteland within years of use. And those chemicals do not just disappear.
A plane spraying Roundup, a pesticide linked to causing cancer
Now, imagine an agricultural system that produced high-quality organic foods, all within a balanced ecosystem that also produces old-growth forests and sustained a complex hierarchy of wild animals that naturally consume pests.
This type of system can produce to scale and support our population's needs. But on a more fundamental level, this system would guarantee access to land for any community to use for sustainable food production.
it would allow for culturally appropriate use of the land in a sustainable manner. Meaning Indigenous populations and populations interested in learning from their ancestral cultures can participate in traditional methods for producing their own foods.
Buffalo once roamed across the continent from Canada to Mexico. From Texas to Florida
When the buffalo can roam their natural habitat again, imagine a fully realized ecosystemic approach to food production.
Contemporary American culture in my opinion has become disconnected from the surrounding natural environments and ecosystems. Or perhaps a more accurate rephrase is to say most Americans never learned about how to manage wild ecosystems. After all, the history of this country was built on the genocide of many of the Original inhabitants.
Often this warfare was conducted by eliminating crucial aspects of the ecosystem for which native populations thrived. The chestnut, the pecan, the ancestral forest gardens, the bison, the waters, and we can go on.
A Banana plant providing shade for a coffee bush
The manifest destiny relationship the settlers developed with the environment made it easy to develop such a toxic food production system that sees nature as its enemy.
A system that thrives when the native flora and fauna die.
I believe through travel, Americans can learn how other cultures and present-day Indigenous peoples grow their foods. We can learn from vastly different perspectives about what it means to share space in a natural environment.
I believe through travel, We can learn about how other cultures identify within their greater ecosystem from which we are all a piece.
Goco Goes seeks to develop travel plans that can give us a moment to breathe and broaden our perspectives so when we come back from our vacations.
We are energized, happy, and ready to share our knowledge.
To share our experiences with others and to improve our communities.
We only have one world. Take care of it!
Goco
