We must begin with the land

Food is glorious. Food is glorious, but it is also increasingly precarious. This may not make headlines, but we all need to care. Office for National Statistics figures suggest that domestic food inflation has seen prices rise by more than a third since 2020. This is currently leading to a proliferation of food banks, unimaginable only a few years ago. Shockingly, world hunger has increased during the past decade, according to the United Nations. The reasons for this situation are complex but likely a combination of multiple ecological crises, corporate and state control of land and food-supply chains, armed conflicts, and rising demand. Yet Stephen Hunt’s new book “We Must Begin with the Land: Seeking Abundance and Liberation Through Social Ecology” is not another account of global doom. Using social ecology’s anti-colonial lens, it aims to spark conversations about how we might diversify and democratise how we grow, share and eat. As a member of the Bristol Radical History Group, his talk will discuss the historic roots of “dominatory agriculture” and the flowering of political ecology from the ideas of Murray Bookchin and others in the 1960s and 1970’s counterculture to present-day alternatives.