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sustainability
A West Bank Field of Dreams: The Unofficial COP Delegate with the Dirtiest Hands
As the world’s climate leaders discuss ambitious goals in Azerbaijan, Motaz’s trees are proof that climate action and social justice can begin in the most unexpected places.
Nov 17, 2024
As delegates gather for COP29 to discuss global climate commitments, there’s a man in the West Bank who knows almost nothing of policy numbers, carbon targets, or finance pledges. But if anyone should be a delegate it’s him. Sunburned and weathered, farmer Motaz Bisharat is deeply rooted to his 2.5-acre plot of green. Here on his small patch of land, Motaz fights two battles with simple tools—soil, sweat, and 250 olive trees. The trees do more than sustain his family—they hold the line against both encroaching occupation and a changing climate.
Six years ago, Motaz began a quiet experiment: Could a Palestinian farmer with scarce resources bring the ideals of sustainability to a landscape scarred by both climate change and occupation? With help from the Palestinian Farmers Union (PFU), Motaz planted the region’s first Freedom Farm—250 olive trees, fenced for protection and irrigated in the dry summer months. A bit of hope, planted in the ground, as Motaz says.
It sounds simple—plant, irrigate, protect—but nothing is easy in the West Bank. Water allocation is starkly unequal: Settlers nearby have swimming pools while Motaz rations every drop. Electricity is forbidden; even a shaded shelter is not allowed—hence, his sunburn. Fertilizers, equipment, and market access are often blocked by checkpoints, turning basic tasks into grueling ordeals. And violence looms—this year alone, settlers destroyed over 4,000 Palestinian olive trees. In total, over 2.5 million trees have been uprooted, a devastating toll on the land and lives connected to it.
Sometimes, when peace feels like an abstraction, the best thing you can do is plant.
This is what it’s like farming under the occupation. So when the Palestinian Farmers Union proposed a trial new farm, Motaz thought: Y’Allah, let’s see what happens. In a single day, they planted his farm, connected a waterline under cover of night, and built a path to make it accessible. They named it a “Freedom Farm.”
They named it well. In the West Bank, farming isn’t just a livelihood—it’s a nonviolent defense of land. An Ottoman-era law allows Israel to claim any fallow land as “state land” for settlements and military outposts. For farmers like Motaz, letting the land go unplanted means possibly losing it forever, but planted land stays in Palestinian hands. His olive trees are a bulwark—that last line of nonviolent defense.
As if politics weren’t enough, there’s also the matter of the climate. The West Bank is changing rapidly, with hotter summers, longer droughts, and erratic rainfall. A recent PFU report underscores what farmers already know: Reduced crop yields, water scarcity, and soil degradation are now the new normal. Yet olive trees are built for this challenge. They drink less water than most fruit trees, shrug off drought, and stand their ground against fire. Basically, they’re climate warriors. And as they grow, these trees quietly sequester carbon—18,000 pounds per year on Motaz’s farm alone. Over their 500 year lifespan, they’ll absorb 9 million pounds of carbon.
Today, Motaz’s saplings have grown into 10-foot trees heavy with olives. This year, he expects to harvest over 1,000 pounds, which he will press into oil and sell locally. With his young daughter, Shaam, wrapped snugly on his back, Motaz moves from tree to tree, gathering olives that will sustain his family through the year.
His experiment has grown into a movement. The once barren area surrounding Motaz’s farm now hosts 15 other farms, inspired by his effort—a green, one-mile circle of resilience. Across the West Bank, this momentum continues to build as Treedom for Palestine, in partnership with the Palestinian Farmers Union, brings this vision to life. These farms offer more than food and economic stability; they form a fragile network of survival in a landscape where both occupation and climate change conspire against peace. Today, over 70 Freedom Farms dot the landscape, but the need for more is urgent.
Sometimes, when peace feels like an abstraction, the best thing you can do is plant.
As the world’s climate leaders discuss ambitious goals in Azerbaijan, Motaz’s trees are proof that climate action and social justice can begin in the most unexpected places. These trees will live longer than he will. They don’t know borders, race, or politics. They quietly root in shared soil, clean the air, pass nutrients to one another through underground networks. In so many ways, these trees are a glimpse of who we might yet become—a world bound together, quietly connecting, quietly sustaining one another, anchored by hope and the strength to endure.
In the meantime, Motaz and his trees are teaching us all a profound lesson: When your roots go deep, you can weather almost anything.
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Measure J in California's Sonoma County Paves the Way for Environmental Health
Examining the hidden impacts of factory farming and how a ballot measure in the heart of wine country could put us on a path to a more sustainable and healthier future.
Jul 13, 2024
In a June article in Politico, the author of “Animal rights comes to ‘America’s Provence’ and farmers are worried” dives into the ongoing debate over Measure J on Sonoma County’s November ballot, which seeks to bar the operation and maintenance of concentrated (or confined) animal feeding operations. The piece overlooks the significant damages that CAFOs have historically inflicted upon surrounding communities and animals.
The piece cites CAFO operators’ commitment to sustainable practices and “compliance monitoring,” such as recycling manure by applying it to agricultural land as a natural fertilizer. Such land applications, however, frequently lead to groundwater contamination through runoff. Sonoma County has the most wells per capita of any California county, with around 23,000 properties relying on groundwater from a private well for their water supply. Sonoma County residents deserve access to clean water, uncontaminated by manure.
These facilities also impact air quality and human health. A 2019 University of Wisconsin-Madison study corroborated previous findings stating that the closer children lived to a CAFO, the more likely they were to develop asthma. According to the California Air Resources Board, one in six children living in California’s Central Valley suffer from asthma.
Measure J offers a path to a more sustainable future for Sonoma County. Voting for Measure J this November would allow the county to lead by example—pushing for environmental and public health protections and making a collective effort to protect our environment and public health.
Asthmatic symptoms caused by hazardous contaminants are not the only consequence of CAFO air pollution. CAFOs emit egregious amounts of greenhouse gases that heavily contribute to climate change. Methane and nitrous oxide emissions are 23 and 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases, respectively. Animal agriculture is the leading source of U.S. methane emissions, while agricultural soil management is responsible for 75% of U.S. nitrous oxide emissions, primarily because of the use of manure from animal agribusiness.
CAFOs are also associated with the increased spread of diseases—including avian flu—among animals and humans. In the original article, farmer Mike Weber admitted that he had to kill all 550,000 chickens in December due to an outbreak. Several states have recently suffered from avian flu outbreaks, 48 with affected poultry and 12 with affected cattle. The extremely high-density environment of a CAFO facilitates a quicker transfer of the virus, exacerbated by wastewater that is often improperly treated and discharged. These cruel conditions are a perfect storm for a public health disaster, while also causing high levels of stress, discomfort, and illness among the animals housed there.
Although the piece argues that Measure J would impede family farm livelihood, it is actually the opposite. As a matter of fact, small family farmers are often the strongest adversaries of large, industrial-scale CAFOs. For example, family farmers in Iowa are calling for reduced federal subsidies for large CAFOs in favor of increased funding for conservation programs targeted at smaller farms. These are not activists wanting to “eradicate animal farming entirely.” The opposition to CAFOs is a community-led effort to ensure all Californians get a cleaner and healthier food system and environment.
Measure J seeks to prohibit the establishment, operation, expansion, or maintenance of CAFOs in the unincorporated areas of Sonoma County. This prohibition aims to protect the environment, safeguard public health, and address environmental justice concerns. It even provides existing CAFOs with a phase-out period of three years to modify or cease operations.
The measure does not simply cast CAFO owners aside. It includes provisions to ensure that farm workers receive the assistance and training they may need to transition to government-sanctioned agricultural operations. The measure does not require these animal feeding operations to close outright but rather gives them a three-year period to modify their operations so that they no longer qualify as CAFOs. That time period presents the perfect opportunity for owners to lean into sustainable agricultural practices, for which Sonoma County has long been known. Sustainable approaches, such as implementing pasture-based feeding and taking a circular, whole-systems farming approach, are increasingly feasible, economically viable, and almost always more humane.
Measure J offers a path to a more sustainable future for Sonoma County. Voting for Measure J this November would allow the county to lead by example—pushing for environmental and public health protections and making a collective effort to protect our environment and public health. It's time to prioritize human and environmental health over industrial farming practices that harm our communities, animals, and planet.
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Why I Don’t Rely on Hope
I have gravitated toward projects for social justice and ecological sustainability because they have provided some meaning in my life, not because I imagined success.
Mar 09, 2024
“Where do you find hope?”
“How do you sustain hope?”
Those are probably the most common questions in response to more than three decades of writing and lecturing about today’s multiple cascading social and ecological crises.
For years I struggled with how to answer, wanting to be honest but sensitive to the anxiety that typically motivates questioners. My answers have changed over the years, but my various responses always seemed inadequate to me.
I developed a rather banal workaday attitude: Get up in the morning, day after day, try to find something worth doing, and then do it as well as possible, realizing that failure will be routine but that small successes—sometimes really small, maybe even too small to see in the moment—make it possible to continue.
In the past few years, after much reflection about my life, I have settled on a simple response: I do not find hope anywhere, and I cannot sustain what I do not have and never had.
Hope has never been terribly relevant in my life and has never been a large part of my motivation to act in the world. I know that hope is important for most people and that many find reasons to have hope. Neuroscientists and psychologists have called this tendency in most people an “optimism bias,” and I have no quarrel with those who hold onto it.
But even if hope is about more than optimism—more about faith in humanity’s possibilities than about belief in a positive outcome sometime soon—I still do not feel it. Hope is not necessary for everyone, and living without hope does not condemn one to despair or cynicism.
In my writing and organizing work—starting in the radical feminist movement challenging men’s sexual exploitation of women in pornography, through organizing to challenge American militarism, to current work on the ecological crises—I have assumed that whatever positive change might result would be small and that even small changes were not guaranteed. At the same time, I have tried my best to engage in collective efforts that could achieve as much as possible, reaching as many people as possible, trying to be as strategic as possible to achieve realistic short-term goals while still focusing on the need for radical change over the long term.
But I never had hope.
As a professor with a steady income for 26 years, perhaps it was easy for me to renounce hope, to keep working without expecting significant success. A friend challenged me once, pointing out, “You can afford to live without hope.” That is accurate—I always had a roof over my head, I ate regular meals, and I could go to the doctor if I got sick. In material terms, my adult life has been comfortable by any reasonable standard. That is important to acknowledge, but lots of people with similar privilege do not find it so easy to work without hope. Some sense of hope, however small, seems to be necessary for people across the political spectrum.
Why has a kind of joyful hopelessness been second nature for me?
While introspection is not a perfect method for answering such questions, here is my best guess. My early experience in the world was defined by trauma, on multiple levels from multiple sources, fairly relentlessly and with no safe harbor. I will spare readers the details; that sentence is adequate in explaining one reason I am so tone-deaf to talk about hope. Long before I was capable of understanding the forces that produce such trauma—not only for me, but for countless others—I had to live with it for the first dozen years of my life, without support and with no expectation of better days ahead. I survived and was lucky to eventually have opportunities for higher education and satisfying professional work, and by that time I had found a way to live that did not require hope.
I have gravitated toward projects for social justice and ecological sustainability because they have provided some meaning in my life, not because I imagined success. By the time I made those choices, I had concluded that the only meaning in our lives is created through our own thoughts, words, and deeds. I do not recall ever searching for the divine or seeking epiphanies to provide meaning. Instead, I developed a rather banal workaday attitude: Get up in the morning, day after day, try to find something worth doing, and then do it as well as possible, realizing that failure will be routine but that small successes—sometimes really small, maybe even too small to see in the moment—make it possible to continue.
Through all this, I have had to give a fair amount of my time and energy to a boss. Like most of us, I met the demands of various employers so that I could pay my bills and live a kind of normal life. But I have carved out as much space as possible for activities that challenge me personally and intellectually. I have sought the company of others who also seek those challenges. I have tried to create opportunities to help remedy problems in whatever small ways possible.
I have done this not out of hope for dramatic change in the world but because it has been for me the best way to live a decent life. Positive change happens, of course, and should be celebrated, even when it is the clichéd pattern of two steps forward, one step back. Even when it is two steps forward and three steps back, we can take a step to the side to try another route. Creative responses to rejection and failure are always possible.
People have told me that this approach is a kind of hope in itself, that I have found hope in the way I abandoned hope. At that point, the words we choose do not matter much. What does matter is getting out of bed in the morning and finding work worth doing. I believe in this path not just because it has sustained me, but because I have seen it sustain others, and sharing this perspective with others has made it possible for me to plod forward.
In my life, that approach was lived most fully by my late friend Jim Koplin. Although he played an integral part in most of my writing, he never wanted to share a byline with me. Jim valued his privacy, and it was not until after he died that I wrote a book about him.
Jim’s early experience was also defined by trauma, and his struggles to live with those harsh realities resonated with me. Growing up as an only child on a Depression-era Minnesota farm, Jim was often alone. As an intellectually minded kid, he spent a lot of time reading and in self-reflection. He told me that at one point as a child, he realized that every person on Earth had basically the same cognitive and emotional capacities as he did—that we were pretty much all the same kind of creature. That meant that every person had the same capacity as he had to feel pain and to suffer. The suffering he and his mother endured at the hands of an abusive father was considerable, and he knew from reading that others around the world suffered as much, sometimes much more. The awareness of the scope of pain in the world overwhelmed him, and so he took the family rifle out to the woods with the intention of killing himself. He sat alone for some time before deciding to live. But, from that point forward, Jim told me, he knew that he had to find ways to acknowledge the pain of the world but also insulate himself from a constant awareness of it, or he would not survive.
He not only survived, but thrived. Up until his death at the age of 79, Jim was committed to radical political activity and loving community connection. I was fortunate to know him for his last 24 years, and I now am part of a circle of friends of Koplin, people whose lives were changed by his quiet commitment to decency, by watching him honor the dignity of others. He was the first person who talked to me about the grief that was inevitable if we told the truth about the world, and he remains my model for being honest with myself and others.
Did Jim Koplin have hope? I do not recall the word ever coming up in our many conversations about these subjects. Jim simply got out of bed in the morning, tended his garden, volunteered with community groups of all kinds, showed up at rallies and protests, laughed with his neighbors, struggled with his own unresolved demons, and went to bed early so that he could get up early to do it all over again.
If that is hope, so be it. Whatever we call such an approach to life, it is more than enough to get me up in the morning.
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