then came an unexpected turning point: in october 2020, the america’s conservation enhancement act passed congress with bipartisan support. this new act provides landmark, sorely needed funding for the epa’s chesapeake bay program and other conservation efforts. in this video, drew robinson, of the choose clean water coalition, and dr. solange filoso, of the university of maryland center for environmental science, discuss why this act is so remarkable and how it may change the future of the bay.

“one of them shut down completely and then opened as a drive-through market and that was a complete disaster,” she said. “we would get two or three orders a week, not even making $20. it was just a real dead experience.”

it took markets shifting back to something resembling a traditional experience for behrmann and her small goat herd to see sales recover. this is a bumpy ride that many farmers market vendors in the d.c. area have experienced since the early months of the year.

deemed essential services, d.c. farmers markets remained open since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic – but in order to keep vendors, staff, and customers safe, markets had to make sudden changes.

m.farmers markets across the country provide the unique opportunity for customers to purchase food directly from producers and, likewise, for farmers to connect with customers face-to-face. this can boost local economies and reduce the amount of energy needed to transport food across long distances.

in d.c., farmers markets also provide additional incentives for low-income families. most d.c. farmers markets accept snap and wic benefits, as well as benefits for senior citizens. many farmers markets in d.c. also “match” customers’ snap benefits so that each dollar can purchase more fresh produce.

since march, the d.c. government has required farmers markets to comply with public health regulations by promoting social distancing and mask wearing. markets must provide hand washing stations and vendor stalls may not offer samples. customers also must be encouraged not to touch products before purchasing.

these practices are in place at the d.c. farmers markets currently run by freshfarm, a nonprofit that operates more than 20 markets in the washington, d.c., metro area. derel farmer, freshfarm’s community outreach manager, said that the pandemic has forced market operators “to pretty much reinvent how we do business.”

“we understand that the farmer’s market is one of the few large, open venues left at this time,” he said. “there are very few other opportunities where large amounts of people can come interact and do so safely, so we are committed to making sure we keep this space open for people.”

this means offering pre-orders from many vendors for market pick-up or delivery. market vendors must assign staff to manage either money or product but not both, and they are encouraged to prioritize contactless payment options.

it also means deciding not to open several markets this year, such as the white house and foggy bottom markets, which have lost customers due to the pandemic.

freshfarm vendors said that although they are pleased with the safety practices in place, it is not business as usual. dana garner boyle, owner of garners produce in virginia, said that she has had to hire additional staff to manage her farmers market stall amidst health restrictions.

“we have stuck to the routine of gathering the items for the customer,” she said. “that’s extra work because it ties up our time when we could be chatting with the customer or refilling and restocking. so we have to hire extra staff to help get all that done and manage our lines so that everybody can maintain distance at the market better.”

boyle added that it breaks her heart that customers are not allowed to choose their own products, which is “so much a personal choice.”

“i really can’t pick out tomatoes that would suit everybody because that’s something different,” she said. “so we just kind of make a joke of that, like, ‘i will be so glad when y’all are able to pick your own tomatoes!’”

behrmann of shepherd’s whey creamery misses selling samples of her varieties of goat’s cheese, which she said “is a huge part of our selling strategy.”

“because artisan goat cheese is not a necessarily familiar product to many of our customers – it makes so much variation, depending on the individual producer of the cheese – it’s really difficult for people to know what they’re buying and to be willing to invest in something that they don’t have any idea about,” she said.

sustainability is also a concern. zach vandezande, the head of pr and publishing for number 1 sons, a small business that sells pickles, kimchi, and kombucha at d.c. farmers markets, said the business previously encouraged customers to take purchased products home in their own containers. due to sanitation concerns, the business has switched to packaging the products beforehand.

vandezande said number 1 sons is trying to balance how they can “stay as environmentally conscious and as environmentally responsible as possible while keeping people safe,” and added that this shift has been a “big touchstone” for the business’s customers.

nevertheless, markets like freshfarm’s have taken this opportunity to innovate rather than crumble. while leaving several markets unopened this season, freshfarm also opened a new market in virginia. farmer added that freshfarm also plans to extend several of its markets further into the winter to provide more time for vendors to sell their products.

freshfarm has also extended its snap matching program to all its markets. this comes at an important time, as recent data reveals that the number of american adults who reported that members of their households “sometimes or often did not have enough to eat” surged to more than 26 million americans in 2020, increasing the need for programs like snap.

farmer said that customer feedback to the market’s effort to balance safety and accessibility has been largely positive.

“the one thing that we hear over and over again is ‘thank you,’” he said. “‘thank you for doing this. thank you for being here.’”

boyle of garners produce said that she has seen steady business at her farm stand since the start of the pandemic.

“i think between our roadside market and the farmers market we’ve consistently stayed busy because people feel like their food has been handled less – it’s picked one day, it’s brought and sold the next – and it’s outdoor shopping,” she said. “so i think they feel a lot safer buying food at a market than they do in the grocery stores right now.”

vandezande of number 1 sons said he thinks customers are still attracted to farmers markets because there are “human stories” behind the products, and “those human stories matter.”

“one of the reasons people go to farmers markets is because they want to return to the idea that the land is connected, the product is connected to a human being who is making their living,” he said and contrasted the markets to grocery stores, where “food just appears as if by magic.”

at the end of the day, farmers markets remain essential to behrmann and her goat herd. she said that farmers markets are the only venues she has found that give small farmers access to the marketplace, and where she can receive immediate, direct feedback from her customers.

“i can’t imagine being a farmer where i just send it off to a distributor and never got to get any direct feedback of what the customer thought i was doing,” she said.

it was there that nobel laureates nelson mandela and archbishop desmond tutu began their illustrious careers. it was there that children brought the cruelties of apartheid into sharp focus in the 1976 soweto uprising. and it was there that present-day environmental justice activist makoma lekalakala realized the world was an unfair place, and that she could help make it right.

there was a lot that felt inherently unjust to lekalakala. and despite south africa now being 25 years into democracy, there is a lot that still feels skewed, she says, a lot that still needs to be fought for.

“there’s a multiplicity of issues that really, as a social justice activist, you look at and say, ‘what can be done? what can we do? what do policies or what does legislation say in the country?’” she said. “because some of what people were experiencing (then) and are still experiencing now is actually in direct contravention of what our beautiful constitution says.”

today, lekalakala is the director of earthlife africa johannesburg, where she leads grassroots efforts to urge the government to limit carbon emissions and transition to green energy for the sake of poor and unrepresented communities. in 2018 she and liz mcdaid of the southern african faith communities’ environment institute were awarded the prestigious global goldman environmental prize for their persistence in preventing the south african government from entering into a massive nuclear deal with russia.

the work of activists like her represents a new effort to elevate environmental justice in south africa, where the legacy of apartheid still weighs heavily on underprivileged and poorer communities.

in communities like the township where lekalakala grew up, the government-mandated racial divide of apartheid is gone, but many communities – predominantly black – still live in crippling poverty. it is a country with the world’s highest wealth disparity, and the poor do not have the resources to take on the industrial elite when industrial smokestacks emanate harmful chemicals, nuclear reactors dispose of toxic waste, and mine runoff pollutes water supplies. in this respect, nothing has changed since the apartheid era.

this is the case in south durban, which academics describe as one of the “most polluted areas in southern africa.” the area is home to two of south africa’s four oil refineries and about 200 smokestack industries, and residents have reported unusually high rates of asthma and cancer, including leukemia, due to industrial pollution.

it was to take on these environmental injustices that the south durban community environmental alliance — a coalition of 19 environmental justice ngos working together to take on industry in the city — was formed in 1995, just a year after the country’s much admired, extraordinary shift to democracy.

desmond d’sa, the alliance’s co-founder and current office coordinator, said that the end of apartheid brought about environmental legislation that ensured protections for non-white communities for the first time. the new south african constitution stated that everyone has a right “to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being,” and eventually the national environmental management act was promulgated, which created a framework for cooperation across various spheres of government to manage and protect the environment.

d’sa added that the transition to democracy led to the establishment of better skilled pollution offices, resulting in better enforcement of the law.

“this never happened during the apartheid era,” he said.

as lekalakala discovered in her youth, however, legislation on paper has little power if not enforced.

jacklyn cock, a professor emeritus in sociology at the university of the witwatersrand, said that many of the rights south africans achieved in the transition to democracy exist “at a purely formal level” and the inequalities that expose poorer communities to pollution and environmental injustices have actually increased in the past 25 years due to government mismanagement.

“many people, i think, have felt that, ‘well, the struggle is over because apartheid is over,’ but what is over is racialized apartheid,” she said. “what is really strong in the present is class apartheid.”

unisa environmental science professor llewellyn leonard, an academic with expertise in south african environmental justice and sociology, agreed, saying that although laws like the national environmental management act are on the books, the state does not enforce them in practice.

“if we think about governance, you can have strong civil society organizations, but if you also don’t have strong governance to enforce the laws and regulations, that really doesn’t help,” leonard said.

many of earthlife africa’s campaigns are devoted to forcing government bodies to abide by the constitution and laws that are already in place. in 2017, the group won the first climate case in africa by challenging the department of environmental affairs’ authorization of the construction of a coal-fired power plant on the grounds that the department did not consider the plant’s effects on greenhouse gas emissions.

lekalakala hopes this will set a precedent so that greenhouse gas emissions will be included in future environmental impact assessments to prevent carbon emitting projects from being pursued.

earthlife africa has had several successes in using the judicial system. one month after the landmark climate case, the group used the courts to challenge the national government over the nuclear deal with russia. the massively expensive deal would have expanded south africa’s nuclear power industry but would also have produced more nuclear waste which up until then, south africa’s sole nuclear power plant had been improperly disposing of on indigenous lands. again, earthlife africa won, resulting in a cancellation of the nuclear deal and the goldman environmental prize for lekalakala and mcdaid.

earthlife africa is unusual in this approach, as most environmental justice organizations lack the resources to pursue costly court cases, and instead frequently focus on protests and mass mobilization campaigns to make people’s voices heard.

it is easier for people to become concerned about environmental justice issues if they can relate them to personal struggles in their own lives, lekalakala said.

“if people are living in poverty, and they don’t have water, it becomes easier to explain why there’s so much drought and you link the drought to people’s everyday struggles,” she said, making it easier “for people to also be part of a movement to make a difference and bring about change.”

cock noted that in south africa, a number of political organizations are advocating for environmental justice but are using more universally accessible terms.

“many of the issues that people are protesting about – access to clean water, access to refuse removal, to street lighting, to good roads, to housing, let alone adequate food – many of those are what we would call environmental justice issues but they’re seen as service delivery issues, so they’re not framed in that light,” she said.

cock suggested that many activists in south africa do not use environmental terms to describe similar issues because of the apartheid baggage of environmentalism in the country.

“during apartheid, environmentalism was understood as protecting threatened plants, animals and wilderness areas and it neglected human needs,” cock said. “so to some extent, environmentalism was a contaminated ideology, for a lot of poor black people particularly.”

rupert koopman, a botanist serving as the conservation manager of the botanical society of south africa, said conservation in south africa has a difficult past, with suspicion arising from its eurocentric history and the country’s legacy of land dispossession that allowed previous governments to set aside large tracts of land for national parks. in some instances, such as kruger national park, black people were moved off park land in living memory. land claims on portions of the park have been processed in terms of post-1994 land redistribution legislation. several claims remain unresolved.

its association with the country’s history of dispossession makes conservation a sensitive topic, he said. violent removals of people off the land has determined who has access to it and this has made it difficult to persuade black communities to embrace conservation widely, even now, so long after the new dispensation. but this is changing through outreach work by organizations like the botanical society, and as the narrative around the value of biodiversity is becoming more widely accepted.

lekalakala said that the notion that black communities have not been interested in conservation oversimplifies the issue and overshadows indigenous connections to the land.

“if people today are challenging companies who want to mine in their lands, doesn’t that mean that people are protecting their lands?” she said.

she believes strongly that environmental justice is interconnected with other social justice issues.

“all the issues that are confronting us are interlinked, so it’s just very difficult to disentangle social, economic and environmental issues and make them separate,” she said. “they all are one.”

one additional challenge facing especially rural communities is that in some cases, when the environmental fight is against industry, traditional leaders are not on the side of the protesting community.

d’sa put it even more strongly.

“chiefs and indunas can become killers,” he told new frame in april. “so we have to be aware that any exposure of the work that we’re doing to help communities comes with a risk. the chiefs are being paid off by these mining companies and threatening to kill people. many activists have had to move out of their areas.”

according to leonard, the power of mining companies comes from the fact that they supply one of the most valuable resources in south africa: employment. the unemployment rate in south africa is one of the highest in the world, at 29.1%. the percentage of south africans aged 15 to 24 who are not employed or pursuing education or training is even higher, at 32%.

from the research he has done on the mining industry in st. lucia — noted as south africa’s first world heritage site — leonard discovered that a weakness of the local environmental justice activism was the lack of youth involvement.

“when i spoke to them, they said the leaders don’t consult them so they are on the fence whether they should support mining or whether they should get involved in this movement because nobody’s speaking to them,” leonard said of the youth in st. lucia. “they said if the mines are giving them an opportunity, they’re going to take it because there’s no opportunities anywhere.”

leonard added that environmental justice solutions must address not only issues like pollution but social and economic inequalities as well.

“if you don’t address issues such as social justice and unemployment, then that’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “we’re going to have a big problem.”

leonard also said that youth engagement is critical, not only that they should be consulted in decision-making but involved in all parts of activism. one good example of this, he said, is the south durban alliance, which has specifically involved young people in water quality assessments. d’sa is also joined by seven young activists on the alliance board.

“the youth have surprised me as they have come out in numbers to all climate change and environmental issues that affect the people, especially pollution,” d’sa said.

one instance of this was in 2014, when the alliance successfully rallied the community to protest the environmental health implications of constant pollution from wasteman’s bulbul drive toxic landfill site. the landfill was shut down, and d’sa was awarded the goldman environmental prize for his use of public hearings and water quality tests to put pressure on industry.

another success was forcing oil giant shell to replace rotten pipelines in durban, drastically reducing the plant’s sulfur pollution.

d’sa said people repeatedly warned him he could not win against the giants of industry. “but,” he told new frame, “we showed even a small man can win.”

lekalakala said her biggest achievement has been galvanizing ordinary people into action and inciting others to become environmental justice activists.

“it’s not work,” she said. “it’s pursuing one’s ideals.”

the lorax, as he famously states, speaks for the trees. but to speak for individual trees is one thing; how might one speak for as large a body as the river?

with the help of my friend grace bautista, we put together this storybook guide to “speaking for the river,” inspired by the work done by the potomac conservancy, a d.c.-based group devoted to protecting the potomac river.

when proposing ideas for this video project, many of my classmates had wonderful ideas, ranging from interviewing experts on palm oil in indonesia to experts on ape conservation in africa. my idea felt small in comparison: to interview a professor at our own university. however, after speaking with him and hearing his expertise on environmental health and sustainable living, my eyes have been opened to innovations happening in my own backyard.

professor lapuma has been involved in a variety of environmental areas, including researching fossil fuels and teaching environmental health, but what amazes me most about him is his personal lifestyle and how seriously he applies the concepts he teaches in the classroom.

many ideas of sustainable living – such as natural insulation, complete solar power, and subsistence food production — often seem like high-minded ideals that we would use in a best-case-scenario, absent of realistic economic and physical pressures, but professor lapuma lives this ideal and enjoys it immensely. this intriguing interview ultimately gives me hope for the mainstream application of other ideas revealed and discussed in spaces like planet forward.

while brainstorming ideas for this video, samantha suggested that we could challenge ourselves not to waste food for a week.

okay, i thought, quite self-righteously, but i don’t waste food. i eat whatever leftovers i have and if uneaten food goes bad, i deliver it to the compost collection on campus. having been raised by a mom whose favorite activity is saving, limiting food waste comes natural to me.

the problem isn’t just about the inequity of letting food go to waste – it’s also that food waste is a driver of climate change. decomposing food in landfills exerts methane, which is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. according to the un fao, “if global food waste was a country, it would be the third highest ghg emitter after the us and china.” in addition, the un fao states that the production of uneaten food takes up nearly 30% of the world’s agricultural land area, wasting water and other key resources.

so maybe i could pat myself on the back for reducing my personal footprint, but my existence isn’t limited to the home. the impact of where i choose to buy groceries and eat out, and how those institutions deal with food waste, ripples through the community and the environment.

according to feeding america, 40% of us food waste comes from businesses. much of that waste is due to state date labeling policy. federal law sets almost no guidelines for the sell-by dates of perishable foods – instead, states determine what these sell-by dates are and what food can or can’t be sold past that date, according to refed. in nevada, date labels are only required for milk and “potentially hazardous foods,” and hazardous foods cannot be sold after their sell-by date.

here in washington, dc, though, the restrictions are higher than in any us state: city policy dictates that you cannot sell any dairy, eggs, meat, perishables, or hazardous foods past their sell-by date. this means that lots of food in dc grocery stores goes to waste – which is grievously ironic in a city that is notorious for being a food desert. in turn, this means that even if i’m reducing food waste in the home, by shopping at wasteful stores, i may be encouraging food waste on a greater scale.

that’s why stories like the partnership between the las vegas hospitality industry and three square food bank are important: large-scale recovery like this makes a bigger reduction in food waste than any one person could. as maurice says in the video, this type of program could be set up anywhere – and i, for one, would love to see it across the country in dc.