Farming is Medicine: Advancing Whole Systems Health
Professor of Medicine, composer, writer and activist Rupa Marya will offer a framework to understanding how what ails the planet, our fracturing societies and our bodies wracked by inflammatory disease are interrelated. Marya introduces a higher order of diagnosis from the groundbreaking book written with political ecologist Raj Patel—Inflamed: Deep Medicine & the Anatomy of Injustice. In this work, they weave a rich fabric that brings together ways of knowing from health sciences, history, Tribal Environmental Knowledge, ecology, microbiology and storytelling that can help illuminate how to rebuild a culture of care through repairing fractured relationships between groups of people and between people and the web of life, starting with land relationship. In her home in the San Francisco Peninsula, California, Marya puts these concepts into daily practice through the Deep Medicine Circle, a collective of farmers, lawyers, scholars, economists, artists, Indigenous elders, youth, healthcare workers, botanists, health students, ecologists who work to repair relationships through the Farming is Medicine program (opens PDF), an innovative agroecological food systems model that is having transformative impacts. Working in the urban center of Oakland on a 1-acre rooftop farm and on the rural coast of the peninsula with Indigenous Ohlone community on a 38-acre Landback farm, the Deep Medicine Circle is building a local food system based in the practices of care. Marya will share the framework, the practices and data of the ongoing work with the community at Trinity in hopes of seeding what may be useful to support the Irish struggle for health and healing.
