Subscribing to Canopia on Substack gives you access to a writing and research project that takes a deep dive into food sustainability culture and information. The research is distilled into essays, articles, presentations, and an upcoming book that is a consolidation of work from the past few years.
I do Canopia because I am fascinated with food, finding it, preparing it, cooking it into expressions of what the land and the seasons provide. My fascination mainly stems from being in a close dance with the undulating rhythms of the seasons through the food that we find, prepare and eat, and from being closely synched and connected with the landbase in this way. I believe there are solutions, answers, and tremendous value in relearning to live and eat with the land and the seasons, a bioregional practice.
Lastly, as a writer and activist, I do Canopia in my search for truth. In the food systems sustainability discourse of today, there is a lot of misinformation harmful to the earth. Food sustainability culture has come to be largely dominated by the narrow and grossly oversimplified binary of vegan/plant-based vs omnivore. This is a narrative that is trapped and molded by the mainstream food paradigm of global-industrial agriculture. This paradigm is way of thinking that normalizes the idea that we can have any food we want, from anywhere in the world, at any time of the year, and this leads to a cultural paralysis making it very difficult to imagine anything different.
In comes Canopia’s mission on a few fronts. A simple and effective metric that I have designed to help us evaluate food systems and food production models is whether they meet five key ecological priorities. They are, in no particular order, the following: 1. Protecting water 2. Protecting ecosystems, biodiversity and habitat 3. Sequestering Carbon 4. Building soil 5. Building local and bioregional food economies. If our food systems are doing these things, then we are on the right track; if they are not, then we need to be thinking about how to do things differently. Our cultural inability thus far to design healthy ecological food systems stems from not seeing and embracing these five priorities, and from our lack of understanding between annual and perennial food systems. Shedding light on this topic is a big part of Canopia’s work.
Canopia’s mission for clarity and accuracy in the food systems discussion has also led me in an attempt to expose and understand why the vegan/plant-based agenda has become such a powerful cultural phenomenon, and to deeply explore and research the misleading, ill-researched and incomplete set of information that it presents. A task, by extension is to illuminate the beautiful, valuable and genuinely ecologically harmonious alternatives such as permaculture, regenerative agriculture and indigenous land-based knowledge that are too often unseen.
This second piece is profoundly important because in an era where protecting ecosystems, biodiversity, soil and water is indispensable for the health of the earth and for the future of our children and grandchildren, truth and information are important in order to make the right decisions. To that end, the last crucial and indispensable piece of Canopia’s work is to make resources and practical solutions available for families who wish to plug in but may not know where to start.
My most candid wish is for you to please reach out with any ideas, feedback, or questions. Canopia’s mission above all is information and the sharing of ideas. I await conversation and dialogue with open arms.
julienoftheforest@yahoo.ca or greenlawfoodhub@yahoo.com
