Please join us for a round-table discussion on the politics of urban agriculture, featuring activists from Food Forest projects in both Seattle and Christchurch, New Zealand—one of Seattle's sister cities. We will discuss the implications of such projects for food security, food sovereignty, and social and environmental justice in an era of environmental and economic turbulence.

"Food forests" represent one version of urban permaculture, an approach to agriculture that emulates the sustainable, self-regulating processes of natural ecosystems. They also represent a free public resource for eating and environmental education. Seattle is home to the nation's first large-scale food forest project, the seven-acre Beacon Food Forest in Beacon Hill. Similarly, Christchurch is home to an exciting movement to develop food forest–type projects in the wake of the city's 2010 earthquakes, which left much of the city's land unusable for commercial development, and also revealed fundamental vulnerabilities in the city's industrialized food system.

Our round-table discussion will feature Glenn Herlihy, one of the founders of the Beacon Food Forest, and Bailey Perryman, the founder of Christchurch's Garden City 2.0, Agropolis, and a member of the city's Food Resilience Network, along other food justice and agroecology activists from each city.