We must subsidize healthy crops and farm biodiversity instead of monocultures. Our food system must be rooted in principles of community-based agroec… - Colette Pichon Battle

to really, really admit that you understand what is happening to the planet, it will break your heart. If you don’t cry deep, hard tears for the state of this planet and all of the people on it, you don’t yet understand the problem. And so once you get to that place, the only thing that can bring you out of that kind of darkness is belief in something greater than yourself.

To survive this next phase of our human existence, we will need to restructure our social and economic systems from root to branch. We must transform from a disposable individual society into a society that grasps our collective long-term humanity-or else we will not make it. The task is not easy. All of this requires us to recognize a power greater than ourselves, and a life longer than the ones we will live. It requires us to believe in things we cannot see. And it requires us to believe in each other. Let's figure out how to reach a shared liberation together.

I’m angry that the people of this country still choose not to acknowledge that social injustice happens on a daily basis in daily actions of everyone who lives here. But most of all, I’m angry that my family, my friends, my neighbors, after three weeks and two hurricanes, still have to wonder, when is this country going to look at us at human beings. The people of the Gulf Coast should no longer be referred to as those people. We are your people. We are citizens of this country. We need your support, and we need your help, and we deserve that. On behalf of those who have lost everything, the Pichon family in Slidell, Louisiana, would like to say to you and to the President of the United States, we need action today. I’m hopeful that today we will choose action instead of indifference. I implore you to care enough about inequality in this country, rather than turn your head away from the injustices not just in the Gulf Coast, but in Appalachia, in D.C. and southeast.