A Better Food Future: PhD Researcher and Hopi Farmer

Food production is responsible for 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions and in the Western United States, 80% of water consumption—but it could be done more sustainably. Michael Kotutwa Johnson is a Hopi traditional farmer, PhD researcher, and opera singer—and he is a proponent of applying Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (or ITEK) to agriculture. Indigenous people across the world have fine-tuned methods for living sustainably in their ecosystems and those methods hold powerful solutions for our biggest environmental problems.