Is the Occupy Wall Street tent big enough to accommodate the environmental movement? It better. While protesters are still figuring out what they want to say about corporate greed and government collusion, thus far the “99 percenters” have focused their anger on the banks that have gotten stinkin’ rich while sticking the rest of us with the bill. This critique is all well and good. I’m amazed it’s taken Americans this long to get off the couch and revolt against a system so blatantly rigged against them. 

But limiting the Occupy Wall Street movement to the excesses of corporate America and their D.C. lackeys misses the bigger picture. The U.S. economy—all economies—depends on the natural economy, i.e., the environment. Without water, air and soil, there is no economy—because we’ll be dead. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has treated natural resources (“life-support systems” might be a better word) like a bottomless lake it can draw upon forever. But the lake is drying up. The environmental bills racked up over the past 200 years are way past due.

As a food writer, my entry into the environmental movement was via my stomach. It’s become all too clear to me that the way we eat is killing us and the planet. Part of the power of the good-food movement is that it awakens people to the importance of an ecologically sound and just food system. It also offers the opportunity to make change each time we eat in favor of a system that works with people, animals and the planet instead of simply enriching Big Ag. Now is the time for the food movement and Occupy Wall Street to make common cause with the environmental movement at large, particularly around climate change.

Last week, environmental activist and author Bill McKibben called upon Occupy Wall Street protesters to stand against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, a proposed oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Due to the dirty nature of tar sand oil, top NASA scientist James Hansen says tapping the oil would mean “game over” for the climate. McKibben is organizing a mass protest Nov. 6 that will encircle the White House in an effort to get Obama to make good on the many, many unkept promises he made including “ending the tyranny of oil.”

You could argue that crowding more causes under the Occupy Wall Street/99percent banner would dilute its message. But that message is still being written, and it will be even more powerful if it addresses the devastation wrought by unchecked corporate power on a planet we all share. Casting the problems we face as the wealthy 1 percent sticking it to the 99 percent is thinking too small. If we don’t wake up to the looming environmental crises we face, all of us, 99 percenters and 1 percenters, will be 100 percent screwed.