From Saving the World to Post-Activism: Food, Health, and the Metacrisis

Many of us are carrying heavy questions during these times. The state of the world can feel overwhelming: wars and climate chaos, deepening inequalities, collapsing ecosystems, the fraying of democracy. Alongside grief and worry, there may also be moments of rage at injustice or a sense of powerlessness. We search for ways to act that feel meaningful, but wonder if our efforts matter in the face of such vast turbulence.

This longing to make a difference has been with me since I was a child. It led me to food justice and animal advocacy, to study peace and conflict transformation, and later to law. I was shaped by the belief that if we accurately diagnosed the problems and found the right strategies, we could repair the harms and redirect society toward health and sustainability. Policy frameworks could reward regenerative practices. Capital could align with ecological limits. Corporations might prioritize nourishment over profit. Individuals could shift their eating patterns. This logic felt reasonable, and I followed it into a career of teaching food law and policy, publishing articles and reports, and making the case for transformation.

Over time, a painful truth revealed itself: knowledge and evidence alone did not move entrenched systems built on extraction and denial. Despite years of work by researchers, advocates, and communities, industrial food systems deepened harm, consolidated power, and resisted change. Policy briefs did not stop bulldozers. Evidence did not prevent corporate capture. Reason did not counter the lure of profit.

This recognition drew me toward advocacy against factory farming and environmental injustice, but even there, I saw that these crises were not technical puzzles to solve. They are complex, shifting, and entangled. Addressing one piece often exposes new tensions or creates unexpected consequences. Food choices, farming practices, and local economies all remain entangled within global systems of extraction that seep into our air, soil, water, and bodies. None of us stands outside of it.

Here, the wider conversations about the metacrisis matter. Some analysts warn that humanity could self-destruct within decades unless we mobilize at war scale. Others describe this time as a threshold of awakening, chaos giving way to higher consciousness. Both stories carry insight. One emphasizes urgency, the other reassurance. Each also has blind spots. Whereas one risks repeating the very logics of control that caused harm, the other can bypass suffering in the name of transcendence.

Thinkers like Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Bayo Akomolafe, and Indigenous wisdom keepers open a different path. Vanessa speaks of hospicing modernity by accompanying the dying house with dignity while midwifing seeds of new possibilities. Bayo calls for post-activism, a slowing down so we can act differently, resisting urgency as the tool of the system itself. Indigenous teachers remind us that our role is not to save the planet but to stay in right relationship with land, water, ancestors, and the yet-to-be-born. These orientations invite us into reciprocity and humility, but they do not promise us success in preventing or stopping harm. 

For me, this has meant unlearning the assumption that strategy alone could engineer a way through. Post-activism does not mean stepping away from action. It calls us to show up in ways that protect the vulnerable, refuse violence and dehumanization, invest patiently in shared commons such as gardens, kitchens, forests, and seeds, and build civic practices that foster listening rather than shouting. It asks us to act with humility in uncertainty, rooted in relationships even as collapse accelerates.

The dysfunctions in our food system are not isolated problems. They are expressions of the same unraveling that touches climate, democracy, and health. No one is outside of it, and no one can resolve it alone. What we can do is orient differently to compost dying logics into soil for what might grow, to practice reciprocity instead of extraction, to embody post-activism as a discipline of care.

This is still a journey of reckoning. What feels mine to do is no longer about “saving the world” through perfect strategies. It is about tending relationships, nourishing life where I can, and practicing the courage to live in paradox: collapse is real, and new seeds are sprouting. Both truths hold. The work is to walk with them, with humility, care, and steadiness.