November 2025: regenerative agriculture
Each month, we break down our topic into four weekly modules. Catch up on previous editions here.
This week's module: ACT
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
Here's what we'll learn today Reader
Hi!
This marks the last official Changeletter of 2025. Thanks for sticking around! In December, I'll share some exciting Soapbox Wrapped-type stats, stories, and who knows what else, but this is your last bite-sized action plan of the year.
If you live in the United States, you might be celebrating Thanksgiving, a complicated holiday that plasters gratitude over colonization. I really do love the gratitude that Thanksgiving highlights, but I think it's also important to turn it into reparative action.
On that note, I donated $200 to Earth Guardians, which was one of the actions I highlighted last week. I'm on their board and it's absolutely amazing to me how much land restoration they're able to accomplish through their youth-led movement around the world. I hope you'll join me in contributing!
Before I set you free to REFLECT on the beautiful poem I've found for us today, as we close out our November topic of Regenerative Agriculture, one more thing:
If you're spending time with friends and family in the next two months, please remember to tell them about the things you're proud of.
Tell them the Buy Nothing find you're obsessed with. They might ask you what that's all about.
Tell them about the sweater you thrifted. They might want to join you next time.
Tell them about the hopeful climate fiction short story you wrote, or the one you loved reading in Grist's anthology, and send it to them.
The best thing we can do to heal this planetary crisis is to talk about it. Not in numbers or stats, but in personal stories and warm invitations.
Oh, and tell them about your favorite bite-sized climate action newsletter and get them to sign up ;)))
I am confident you've done SO MUCH this year that's worth being proud of and worth sharing. Share it! Because sharing? It's how we save the world.
Okay! Onto the poem.
It's my birthday month! Wanna give a gift?
Hey! I turned 30 a few days ago, whoooaaa. Wanna make a donation that starts in the number 3?
$3? $30? $300? $3000? And make it monthly?
100% of this work is me sitting behind my keyboard stressing about if anyone cares about this stuff, so encouragement and financial support is so greatly appreciated!
Thank you Mary for contributing this week ❤️
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Your bite-sized action plan Reader
✅ REFLECT by reading this poem at your next shared meal
And remember, a daily climate action you can do is to take a minute before you eat a meal or a snack, and think about who grew your food, processed your food, made your food, and brought your food to you.
If you're gathering this week with friends or family, in addition to the what are you thankful for?! question, pose some new ones:
Where did this food come from?
How can we give gratitude to the stewards of our land, and be better stewards ourselves?
I hope you have a wonderful week of care, love, and nourishment.
Grateful for you,
Nivi
"Photosynthesis" by Ashley M. Jones
When I was young, my father taught us
how dirt made way for food,
how to turn over soil so it would hold a seed,
an infant bud, how the dark could nurse it
until it broke its green arms out to touch the sun.
In every backyard we’ve ever had, he made a little garden plot
with room for heirloom tomatoes, corn, carrots,
peppers: jalapeno, bell, and poblano—
okra, eggplant, lemons, collards, broccoli, pole beans,
watermelon, squash, trees filled with fruit and nuts,
brussels sprouts, herbs: basil, mint, parsley, rosemary—
onions, sweet potatoes, cucumber, cantaloupe, cabbage,
oranges, swiss chard and peaches,
sunflowers tall and straightbacked as soldiers,
lantana, amaryllis, echinacea,
pansies and roses and bushes bubbling with hydrangeas.
Every plant with its purpose.
Flowers to bring worms and wasps. How their work matters here.
This is the work we have always known,
pulling food and flowers from a pile of earth.
The difference, now: my father is not a slave,
not a sharecropper. This land is his and so is this garden,
so is this work. The difference is that he owns this labor.
The work of his own hands for his own belly,
for his own children’s bellies. We eat because he works.
This is the legacy of his grandmother, my great-granny.
Ollie Mae Harris and her untouchable flower garden.
Just like her hats, her flowerbeds sprouted something special,
plants and colors the neighbors could only dream of.
He was young when he learned that this beauty is built on work,
the cows and the factories in their stomachs,
the fertilizer they spewed out—
the stink that brought such fragrance. What you call waste,
I call power. What you call work I make beautiful again.
In his garden, even problems become energy, beauty—
my father has ended many work days in the backyard,
worries of the firehouse dropping like grain, my father wrist-deep
in soil. I am convinced the earth speaks back to him
as he feeds it—it is a conversational labor, gardening.
The seeds tell him what they will be, the soil tells seeds how to grow,
my father speaks sun and water into the earth,
we hear him, each harvest, his heartbeat sweet, like fruit.
It's our last month for Soapbox events in 2025!
- If you want to start a Soapbox near you, please let's chat, especially if you live in New York City or Portland. My calendar is here: calendly.com/niviachanta and our goal is to establish two new locations in 2026.
Our entire events calendar for ALL locations + virtual can be found here.
