The episode connects soil restoration to human health and climate action, then examines food insecurity in Charlotte as both lack of funds and lack of proximity to healthy food retailers. It defines “food desert” using the federal criteria and cites a 2020 Sustain Charlotte figure that 15% of Mecklenburg County residents—about 180,000 people—lived in a food desert. Leaders from the West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition explain West Boulevard has lacked a full-service grocery store since 1989, describing how grocery store location decisions track median incomes and framing food as a “new age version of segregation.” The community’s response is Three Sisters Market, a community-owned food co-op honoring Amy James, Lucille McNeil, and Dorothy Wade, building on Seeds for Change, a quarter-acre urban farm employing youth. The episode links food access work to environmental justice, community organizing, and food sovereignty, and shares ways to support through memberships and volunteerism.

00:00 Soil and Soul

01:23 Defining Food Deserts

03:22 West Boulevard Grocery Gap

05:15 Why Stores Avoid It

08:15 Food as Segregation

10:41 Community Co-op Solution

12:12 Three Sisters Origins

13:52 Seeds for Change Farm

16:36 Community Gardens Debate

20:12 How to Get Involved

23:16 Environmental Justice Link

29:22 Food Sovereignty Wrap

31:02 Closing Credits

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this bonus episode of The Problem of Our Time, Colin Harden shares a full interview with Dr. Valerie Ann Johnson, a medical anthropologist, scholar-activist, and board member across multiple North Carolina commissions and advisory councils. Johnson explains how her interdisciplinary work connects preservation history, public humanities, environmental justice, and participatory sciences. She defines environmental justice through its origins in 1982 Warren County, North Carolina, describing the injustice of toxic dumping in deliberately marginalized Black communities, and highlights health impacts such as cancer risks and endocrine disruption. Johnson discusses demystifying science through community and citizen science, including NASA programs and projects led by the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network. She details the “Spidey Sensor” method, and describes community mapping and monitoring efforts to support organizing and policy advocacy against industrial waste, CAFOs, and landfills.

00:30 Meet Dr Valerie Johnson

02:56 Interdisciplinary Scholar Activism

07:43 Defining Environmental Justice

10:51 Health Impacts On Communities

13:59 What Is Participatory Science

19:56 Spidey Sensor Explained

24:43 Ways to Join Citizen Science

26:49 Mapping Hidden Poultry Farms

29:57 Data for Organizing and Policy

31:16 Rural Impacts and Environmental Injustice

34:40 Movement Then and Now

44:05 Afrofuturism and Imagining Justice

45:15 Hopeful Closing and Credits

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.