In my previous "Yoga of Ecology" post, I shared the truly brilliant and compassionate work of the Green Wheeling Initiative (GWI), a grassroots ground-up local food movement in Wheeling, W. Va. The GWI is helping the diverse peoples of Wheeling to reclaim their backyards and the bounties in their backyards through community gardens, cultural workshops, grant programs, and campus ecology events, amongst much else.
Terry Sheldon, one of the co-founders of the GWI, explains in an article on the GWI in the local Wheeling Intelligencer that "in a very positive way, we are trying to provide an alternative food system that creates a healthy environment for Wheeling. We're convinced through local partnership that we can create a local food economy around the issue of food that are grown by and consumed by people in the Wheeling area."
It is a project at the forefront of the just sustainability movement, which bridges the gaps between the environmental justice and the sustainability movements. In my eco-theology studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York, I was introduced to the conflict between the environmental justice (EJ) movement and the sustainability movement. Critics of the EJ movement may say that the work of EJ groups are too human-centric in their focus. They may argue that by being overtly focused on insuring justice for people in largely impoverished and marginalized communities, on insuring freedom from pollution and toxicity being dumped in their backyards, the EJ movement fails to fully acknowledge broader ecological issues involving non-human life/ life systems. Critics of the sustainability movement argue that by focusing overtly on these broader ecological issues, the gritty issues of incinerators and toxic waste being dumped in impoverished communities, and all the resultant health problems that come along with, are not given specific and proper attention, care, and concern.
The just sustainability movement can create an synthesis of concern and action that works to honor, correct, and improve the needs and lives of those who have been ecologically prejudiced against and marginalized, whether they are human or not. Julian Agyeman, EJ advocate and chair of the Department of Urban + Environmental Policy + Planning (UEP) at Tufts University, in his book Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of EJ, writes:
"Just sustainability highlights the pivotal role that justice and equity could and should play within sustainability discourses. In so doing, it fundamentally challenges the current, dominant, stewardship-focused orientation of sustainability, which has as its main concern the conservation of the natural environment, namely environmental sustainability...Transformative or just sustainability implies a paradigm shift that requires sustainability to take on a redistributive function. To do this, justice and equity must move center stage in sustainability discourses, if we are to have any chance of a more sustainable future."
In spending time with Terry as an apprentice at his Small Farm Training Center in nearby Moundsville, W. Va., I've had the chance to see and experience the Green Wheeling Initiative first-hand and in action. Terry has introduced me to the very people who give life to the local food movement in Wheeling, who understand, despite being in the "belly of the beast" in West Virginia, where the poverty and obesity epidemics reign supreme, that they can reclaim the health and wealth in their own backyards.
Here is a photo essay of a day in the life of the Green Wheeling Initiative, and we hope you are inspired to share what is going on here and that it inspires you in your own just sustainability efforts.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE GREEN WHEELING INITIATIVE
Every Tuesday Terry brings in at least eight boxes of swiss chard, or "West Virginia spinach" as the locals like to call it, to various soup kitchens in the Wheeling area, such as Catholic Charities Neighborhood Center and the Soup Kitchen
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