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There is one shared goal and a single destination for this effort: an Organic Planet.
(Photo: woodleywonderworks/flickr/cc with overlay)

This October, I took a walk.  A walk that, I hoped, would change the way that we look a climate change and think about how we can reverse this disastrous phenomenon.

I walked to bring awareness to research proving that a global transition to regenerative organic agriculture can reverse climate change and to hand deliver this data to the United States Department of Agriculture.

This journey took me from the Rodale Institute in Kutztown, PA to USDA headquarters in Washington, DC. Along the way, I had the honor of meeting with farmers, local public officials, community members, students and activists. Every person I met was impacted by the effects of climate change. From the disastrous hail storm that occurred in Reading, PA earlier this year to the local fisherman and their concern that Atrazine was found in spawning beds of small mouth bass in the Susquehanna River. Climate change affects us all and the impact and destruction caused by catastrophic weather events is more noticeable with each passing year.

On the sixteenth and final day of my walk, staff from the Institute joined me on the final leg into D.C. where we presented our white paper on reversing climate change to USDA experts on climate change, organic transition, and conservation. The meeting illuminated specific areas where Rodale Institute’s research and perspective could be important contributions to the work of the USDA. For example, Rodale Institute will begin utilizing GRACEnet (Greenhouse gas Reduction through Agricultural Carbon Enhancement network) practices, a system of metrics for measuring carbon emissions and sequestration on agricultural lands. By adopting GRACEnet, Rodale Institute’s research data will be ‘in the same language’ as USDA data.

This meeting also helped us to realize that we must strengthen the voice to bring global attention to this word in particular: ‘reverse.’ There has been plenty of talk from policy makers about reducing carbon emissions, but even if we reduce emissions, we will still face climate change due to immense excesses of carbon and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.