Keepers of the Future

Canadian journalist, media personality and documentarian Avi Lewis, along with his wife, author Naomi Klein, has advocated for radically new social and political structures as the only possible effective response to climate change. In Keepers of the Future, he profiles a community organization that demonstrates how “deep local democracy” can help even a poor population build environmental, economic and political resilience. Recovering from the devastation of the Salvadoran Civil War, the Lower Lempa coordinadora, a farmers’ cooperative, has restored degraded ecosystems, diversified small-scale agriculture to build local self-sufficiency, and fostered political resistance against national initiatives to “develop” the region by establishing a wage-based economy of tourism and large-scale sugar and cotton farming. Can this model succeed? Can it be replicated?