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Climate Change, Human Rights, and Foodways
Climate change has profound consequences for the habitability and sustainability of the planet. It also affects food, water, energy, economies, security, and quality of life through its impacts on human health, agriculture, ecosystems and water resources.
Some communities are disproportionately affected or considered more susceptible to impacts of climate change. Unfortunately, it has been a challenge to include universal human rights protections in climate change responses and vice versa. The most recent International climate treaty, the Paris Agreement (AKA Paris Climate Accords), adopted in 2015, recognizes universal human rights in the preamble, but does not include them in any of the actionable provisions contained in the Agreement itself.
This severely limits accountability by signatories, especially in protecting the rights of the most vulnerable as our climate changes. Developing countries, particularly those in the global south, are hit hardest by climate change. This is widening the economic gap between nations, damaging fragile ecosystems, and furthers inequality.
Wabanaki Sovereignty and Climate by Mali Obomsawin and Lokotah Sanborn
Waterways in central and western Maine, and their outlets to the Atlantic, were once home to countless Wabanaki communities engaged in food sovereignty. They grew diverse crop varieties along their banks, harvested salmon, sturgeon, and shellfish, and through food maintained a deep intertribal trade and political network.
Alongside warfare and financially incentivized genocide, Euro-American colonists targeted Wabanaki food systems in an attempt to disrupt self-sufficiency and political alliances. The damming and pollution of vital rivers that began in the 1700s aimed to starve communities from their homes and continues to inhibit safe and sustainable fish consumption today. The destruction of forest ecosystems which bolstered Maine’s proud timber industry severed many Wabanakis from their hunting territories, and European systems of private property ended millennia of communal landholding. Gradually over centuries, a landscape once teeming with food, medicine, and relationality has been destroyed in attempts to subdue Wabanaki people.
In 2023, our communities still experience these disruptions through food insecurity and diet-related disease. We lack access to lands where our cultural traditions can be practiced and are legally inhibited from collective landholding as Wabanaki people. Bomazeen Land Trust is working to secure Wabanaki land access and re-center our foodways in order to restore the traditional economies, alliances and cultural practices of our ancestors. Rematriation–the return of land to Indigenous peoples and the renewal of cultural traditions that accompany it–is Bomazeen Land Trust’s work across Abenaki/Wabanaki territory.
Wabanaki leaders Wiwurna (Warumbee), Darumkin, Nimbanizett, Neonongansket, WeconDomhegon, and Wihikermett deeded lands in the Merrymeeting Bay, Androscoggin River, and Kennebec River regions to Richard Wharton for settlement in 1684.
Wabanaki ways of life radically changed with the coming of European explorers and settlers around 500 years ago. Epidemics, wars, genocidal bounties, treaties, land theft, the splitting of territory, damming rivers, and cutting forests all tried to erase Wabanaki culture and communities.
A page from "New-England’s rarities discovered in birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, and plants of that country," 1865 reprint of original 1672 publication
John Josselyn (active 1638-1675), English
Collections of Maine Historical Society
Baskets made in the forms of vegetables, fruits, and nuts are common in Wabanaki cultures, links to food sovereignty and connections to land. Wabanaki peoples, usually women, are the keepers of ancestral knowledge about Indigenous varieties of corn, beans, and squash in what they call Three Sisters planting mounds. Historically, Wabanaki diets also relied on foods like acorns and butternuts—trees that European harvesting decimated for timber and masts.
John Josselyn traveled to Maine in 1638, and again in 1663. His book, New-England’s rarities discovered in birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, and plants of that country, first published in 1672, recorded New England flora and fauna in colonial times, Indigenous uses of plants, and a listing of the invasive plants introduced by Europeans, particularly by their livestock, including cows. Some of the invasive plants include Dandelions, Knot Weed, and Mullen, all plants found in Maine in contemporary times.
Maine botanists and plant lovers, including Kate Furbish, honored this early explorer’s work by establishing the Josselyn Botanical Society of Maine in 1895 at the Portland Society of Natural History.
The PSNH published the Portland Catalogue of Maine Plants to help both aspiring and established botanists, whom they called, “old and young,” to create a checklist of observed species. It is split between Indigenous plants, and Plants Introduced to the State.
The authors acknowledged the catalog was incomplete as species are regularly "discovered," and asked people to send in their species lists and notes to the PSNH. The catalog also requested amateur botanists—the citizen scientists of their time—send in plant specimens since the Society’s entire Herbarium burned in the fire of 1866. Prior to the fire, the PSNH collections contained almost every species reported in the Catalogue of Maine Plants.
Animal agriculture, diseases, and vegetarian diets
In 1835, Dr. Horace A. Barrows of Phillips described “Fewer colds and febrile attacks” among Maine patients practicing “entire abstinence from flesh-meat” and “strict adherence to the simplest vegetable diet,” as vegetarianism was then known.
Colds, influenza, tuberculosis, measles, smallpox, plague and COVID-19, group under zoonotic diseases, which pass between humans and animals. One major zoonotic breeding ground: Animal farms. Birds harbor influenza, and some scientists theorize influenza viruses jumped to humans 4,000 years ago when ducks were first domesticated.
Wabanaki peoples did not engage in animal agriculture and lived free of epidemics until European fishermen and explorers arrived. Passamaquoddy historian Donald Soctomah documented an epidemic “between 1564 and 1570” and “typhus in 1586.” In 1617, an epidemic killed an estimated 75% of Wabanaki people, with epidemics through the 1600s and 1700s.
By 1832, Maine and the nation nervously watched the advance of another zoonotic pandemic, this time cholera, which transfers from aquatic animals. The first suspected Maine case came that March in Topsham. Dr. Reuben Mussey, a vegetarian, of the Medical School of Maine consulted on the case. Mussey prescribed pure water, rather than the fashionable remedy of liquor and meat, as a cholera treatment.
That same month in New York, Sylvester Graham delivered a now-famous lecture on cholera, urging attendees to eat only vegetarian food and drink only pure water. After cholera swept through the city, Graham published his lecture along with dozens of testimonies from people who’d followed his advice and avoided disease. Maine native Dr. Charles E. Page wrote A Natural Cure for Consumption in 1883 prescribing vegetarianism to help treat tuberculosis.
By 2022, data from the COVID-19 pandemic published by the National Institute of Health revealed those eating plant-based diets had lower rates of infection and severe illness, recognizing a relationship between vegetarianism and staving off illness.
Museums and pandemics
Why should museums and other repositories collect and keep animal and plant specimens, especially those that are hundreds of years old? Because the bones, skins, and tissues document historic biodiversity that can be deployed in future research.
Zoonotic diseases jump from animals to humans. Most emerging diseases are zoonotic, including COVID-19, rabies, MERS and Ebola. Preserved wildlife specimens, often collected for completely different purposes such as ecological research, are a baseline for scientists to monitor changes in species habitat and disease distribution over time.
Using technologies like DNA sampling and RNA sequencing, the Field Museum in Chicago surveyed their mammal collections for COVID-19 candidate host species, like Bats, collected from 1896 to 2023. Scientists at the University of Nevada examined Butterfly specimens dating back to 1910, collecting pollen grains from their bodies and comparing it to pollen from historic plant specimens, identifying how their food sources have changed and how climate change will affect Butterfly and plant populations.
Many natural history museums are digitizing collections, further enhancing their potential use and helping us to learn about habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change.
Friendly URL: https://www.mainememory.net/exhibits/CODERED
