There's a homegrown way to address climate change

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Seattle Tilth has a lot of things to celebrate this year. Thirty years of nurturing the region's communities and environment through organic gardening is certainly one. The organization can also celebrate its place in the ranks of climate change heroes.

Now, you might ask, what does Seattle Tilth's work promoting organic gardening and local foods have to do with global warming?

After all, when most of us think about food and farming, we tend not to think of climate change. Mention global warming and most conjure up images of industrial smokestacks or oil-thirsty planes, trains and automobiles.

Asked to name climate-change bad guys, most would tag Shell and ExxonMobile before Sara Lee or General Mills.

That the food industry has avoided the hot seat is no surprise when you consider the mainstream media's lack of coverage of the food system's role in the crisis. Even major environmental NGOs and films such as "An Inconvenient Truth" have mostly ignored the connection.

We've been missing a huge part of the story.

The global industrial food system -- from how we grow crops to the way we raise livestock and what we do with the waste -- accounts for at least 33 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, according to analysis of data from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. The livestock sector alone is responsible for nearly one-fifth of the world's total emissions -- more than the entire transportation sector.

Industrial farm