Rory Curtin
MA Columbia University Tibetan Buddhist Studies
MPH New York University Global Public Health
I have dedicated my life to addressing systemic issues of bioregional economics for underserved populations through food sovereignty and ecological resilience around the world. The majority of my career as an academic and food systems leader has taken place in the field, ever-ready to find or create new opportunities for research to take place in-action. As it is only in action, within and alongside communities, that true understanding of self, place, and one another can occur. This has continuously been coupled with, and deeply informed by, 13 years of daily Ashtanga Yoga practice and teaching, as well as being a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and practitioner.
I began working in agrarian rural India on establishing community shared agriculture (CSA) cooperatives while attending The United World College of India; went on to learn from local Bahamians while managing the aquaponics system for The Cape Eleuthera Research Institute; served as a USAID fellow during university, establishing a dairy goat rearing initiative in rural Kenya for a project called Globe Med; was hired to manage the organic farm of Doug and Kris Tompkins in Cochran, Patagonia, to support their ‘Sin Repressas’ (‘Without Dams’) initiative; started a gardening program for several girls shelters in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for young women who are survivors of sexual violence; and volunteered many seasons in Northern India growing small gardens at Gompa Monastery Schools (among other projects).
After graduating from college, I went on to get my MPH from New York University, where I spent half of the program building a rooftop farm and garden nutrition program at an elementary school in a slum outside of Accra, Ghana; and the other half of the program in Florence, Italy, starting a movement for asylum seekers to have access to grow food in the shelters where they are housed ‘temporarily’, as many of these spaces are old Italian palaces. Additionally, she created a collaboration between a local Florentine chef and a migrant Nigerian chef to offer a course together at the local mercado, illustrating that the new future of ‘European’ food culture is one of shared heritage on a shared land.
Following my MPH, I found myself between Ladakh, India and Columbia University, writing my second Masters on ‘The Effects of Urban Migration, Mechanisation, and Modernisation on Networks of Socio-Ecological Resilience in Collaborative Agrarian Communities: Ladakh, India’. With proficiency in Hindi from high school in India, and two years of focused Tibetan language study at Columbia, it was my initial plan to return to India for her PhD research both out of interest and a deep love for Northern India.
However, after visiting the Middle East for the first time, I became enamored with the people, the land, and became immersed in asking the age-old question of how food and land sovereignty can be returned to all people of the SWANA region, peacefully. A deeply humbling journey to embark upon, indeed. . . .
As I wrote this piece on agrarian lineage and the vital importance for displaced people to be granted the inherent right to land, I am asking myself about my own relationship with land and identity. As the child of Irish immigrants, forced out by Ireland’s own history of settler colonialist past, I understand at a fundamental level the need for human beings to share in the rights of nature, whether indigenous or displaced. Land-in-place, rather than place-of-landed-ness is a point I find increasingly missing in the conversation today, and vital if we are to find peace and a new equilibrium in our ever-changing world.
It is my life mission to develop the appropriate tools and technologies for all people to experience sovereign agrarian rights, as it is from growing and sharing food that she believes both individuals and collective knowledge is preserved.