Writing the Land: Foodways and Social Justice

Writing the Land is a project that pairs poets with conserved lands and creates anthologies in which each chapter is a mix of poetry inspired by the land, and material about the land organization that protects that land. This book focuses on conserved agricultural lands, and contains bonus material on how the arts support agricultural land conservation.

Each chapter of part I tells the story of a land conservation organization---how and why they are passionate about conserving agricultural lands. Every one of these organizations goes about it slightly differently, on and in the ground, day by day, but they are all people who care deeply about the combined fate of humans and land: past, present, and future. Each holds a piece of the larger puzzle of how we keep agricultural land producing food sustainably, and how we interact with the land and with one another fairly.

In part II, we explore the important role the arts play in communicating, embodying, and enhancing the connections between foodways and social justice. Each essay tells the story of an arts organization or artist and how they contribute to this work.

Overall, there are many ways to do good work in this arena. But none of them are simple.

Every organization focuses their energy in one or more key areas depending upon the values and passions that drive them: the arts, individuals, community, land, agriculture, and food production. These concepts may seem tangled, but as we look closer they emerge as a web---a complex circular structure that is supposed to be full of intersections, of threads that cross more than one other thread, sometimes more than once. No untangling required.

Join us in celebrating the complexity of the many ways people can work together ethically, practically, and with joy and hope to conserve agricultural lands for all of nature---ourselves included.