Food sovereignty is an issue we will likely hear a lot about in coming years. Basically, it is the right a community has to determine where its food comes from. Outbreaks of food-borne illness receive great attention, but concerns about our food system are growing even when it is ‘working.’ We need to take a hard look at the system that stocks our grocery store shelves with products full of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and preservatives – and see if we can come up with a better way to feed a nation.

If you had a magic wand, and you could wave it and create a world full of light, love, justice and peace, when do you think you would choose to use it? Would you get around to it as soon as you were done with your education? Would you do it once you found the right job? Would you think about doing it “someday”? Of course not.

2010 has been a year of missed opportunities for the environment. From no progress or worse on the international climate action stage, to a clean energy bill in the U.S. Senate that is still on ice despite the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, it’s enough to make you want to throw up your hands and buy beach-front property on the Bering Sea.

In the mythology of many of the native peoples on Earth, there is a prophesy that when the Earth is most in peril, a spider woman will weave a web connecting people with one another in order for them to do what has to be done to save the world.