Are Plants Intelligent? An Initial Exploration

Can a plant “know” its world? Can it adapt, remember, or even make choices? These questions may sound surprising, but they have captured scientists’ imaginations for more than a century. The following article, reposted with permission from The Nature Institute, explores how plants interact with their environments and invites us to reconsider what we mean by “intelligence.”

The Nature Institute, founded in 1998, is a small but influential non-profit in upstate New York. Its work and research is inspired by such integrative thinkers and scientists as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, Owen Barfield, and Kurt Goldstein, who strived to study the natural world with what Goethe described as a form of “delicate empiricism,” an approach that is contextual, qualitative, and holistic. The institute serves as a local, national, and international forum for research, publications, and educational programs that strive to create a new paradigm that embraces nature’s wisdom in shaping a sustainable and healthy future.

Modern science has increasingly moved out of nature and into the laboratory, driven by a desire to find an underlying mechanistic basis of life. In their view, despite all its success, this approach is one-sided and urgently calls for a counterbalancing movement toward nature. Only if we find ways of transforming our propensity to view and control nature in terms of parts and mechanisms, will we be able to see, value, and protect the integrity of nature and the interconnectedness of all things. This demands a contextual way of seeing science as a participatory process, as a dialogue with nature that does justice to the rich complexity of the world.

What follows is the opening piece in The Nature Institute’s research series on “intelligence in nature,” beginning with the remarkable adaptability of plants.

Are Plants Intelligent? An Initial Exploration

By Craig Holdrege and Jon McAlice

Initially, we might view plants as we see many other things in the world: as objects — each complete unto itself and separate from the things around it. When, however, we attend more closely to plants, we find an intricate array of relations in which they play an active role. Roots growing down through the soil not only take up water and minerals, but also secrete substances into the soil and change it. Plant leaves unfold into the air and grow with the help of the light. They form expansive surfaces that create shade for some of their own lower leaves, the ground, and perhaps other plants. Leaves take up carbon dioxide, give off moisture to the atmosphere and, importantly, emit the oxygen that we and animals breathe. Mycorrhizal fungal networks connect physically and physiologically different plant species with each other via their roots.

These examples point to the countless ways in which plants and what we call environment interpenetrate and mutually influence one another. The life of the plant is one of dynamic interactions. There is in this sense no separateness. Can we say where a plant ends and its environment begins?

In its life history — from seed through germination, vegetative growth, flowering, fruiting, and new seed formation — a flowering plant is in ongoing transformation. Its development is integrally woven into a specific environmental context that is also changing. This dynamic relation comes to expression in all aspects of a plant’s form and physiology. A wild radish seed that comes to rest in relatively barren, compacted ground or another one at the edge of a meadow only 30 feet away find very different conditions for their development. It could be that neither germinate, but if they do and thrive, they develop in strikingly divergent ways (see image). The plant in the compacted ground grows immediately and continuously in relation to those specific conditions. It develops a few very small leaves, a short main stem, with a couple of flowers, and finally a few fruits and seeds. In contrast, the plant at the edge of the meadow displays effusive growth of branching stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds. If it weren’t for the distinctness of the flower, you might not notice that the two plants belong to the same species.

An example of plant plasticity in silhouettes of six pressed specimens of the annual plant species, wild radish (Raphanus raphinistrum). They grew in close proximity to each other but in different microenviroments. All were flowering at the same time. See text for further description.


The compact-ground plant goes through its whole life cycle in a way that intimately corresponds with the relations it takes up in that place. It doesn’t start out with a fixed body plan that prescribes leaves or stems of this or that size or number. No, its becoming is wholly embedded and flexibly active in a specific context. Had the same seed dropped at the edge of the meadow, it would have developed in a radically different way. This is one example of the plasticity that plants reveal in all aspects of their development.The same species of plant has the possibility to be itself differently in different contexts, to subtly respond in its growth and physiology to changing conditions. Clearly, plants have remarkable capacities.


Are Plants Intelligent?

Within mainstream biology, the question of plant intelligence has become a hot — and controversial — topic during the past two decades.1 It is, however, not a new question. In his 1908 address as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, made the statement: “We must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we call consciousness in ourselves” (Darwin, F. 1908). The notice of his address that appeared on the front page of the New York Times (Sept. 3, 1908) bore the title “Plants as Animals” and stated: “Few more imaginative and more original speeches have been delivered from the Presidential chair than his, though the scientific audience shook their heads.” Francis Darwin’s thoughts sparked a controversy that spanned the Atlantic and led to a flurry of articles. The notion that plants could express anything resembling even the most primal aspects of human consciousness or animal nature was inconceivable for those who worked closely with plants. On September 4, 1908, the day after the initial notice of Darwin’s address, an article appeared on page 6 of the Times with the headline “Scoffs at Theory that Plants Think.” The article quotes at length Dr. W. Alphonso Murrill, assistant director at the New York Botanical Gardens. He says: “When a true plant performs actions that might seem to imply intelligence and a nervous system, I am inclined to suppose that they have developed powers peculiar to plants and quite distinct from the faculties of animals, even though their results appear similar.”

Murrill and his colleagues at the time were convinced that assigning animal or human capacities to plants was “unscientific.” Plant physiology and morphology is fundamentally different from that of animals. In phenomenological terms, we could say that plants are in the world differently than animals. Defining plant existence in terms of animal behavior or human consciousness was, from their scientific perspective, untenable.

Francis Darwin was drawing from the extensive experimental work he carried out as a young man with his father, which culminated in the 1880 book by Charles Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants. Without using the term “intelligence,” Darwin ends the book with an enthusiastic and vivid tribute to the remarkable capacities of the tip of the primary root (“radicle”) in plants and ends by analogizing the root tip with the brain of a “lower animal” (see box below with his description).

Through much of the 20th century, the topic of plant intelligence lay dormant. It became, in a sense, forbidden territory as mechanistic explanations for all biological phenomena became ever more dominant. In recent years, a number of researchers have returned to the question “Are plants intelligent?”, answering it in the affirmative. They often cite the authority of Charles Darwin, referring back to his work with plant movement. And like the Darwins, they claim to have identified aspects of plant existence that resemble human intelligence. When you read the books and articles that argue for acknowledging plant intelligence, you see that one major motivator is the desire to raise the status of plants in the eyes of fellow biologists and the general public. They feel that the remarkable capacities of plants have been overlooked or not valued enough. We entirely agree.


Plants, Human Intelligence, and Survival Value

Current plant intelligence researchers lean toward using the way humans experience their own intelligence as the touchstone for their conclusions. This leads them to hypothesize plant modes of perception and representation and conclude that plants “make decisions,” “remember,” “learn,” and “communicate.” They are “able to receive signals from their environment, process the information, and devise solutions adaptive to their own survival” (Mancuso and Viola 2015, p. 5). A recent article provides a good sense of how plant intelligence is viewed:

Plants have developed complex molecular networks that allow them to remember, choose, and make decisions depending on the stress stimulus, although they lack a nervous system. Being sessile, plants can exploit these networks to optimize their resources cost-effectively and maximize their fitness in response to multiple environmental stresses…. In this opinion article, we present concepts and perspectives regarding the capabilities of plants to sense, perceive, remember, re-elaborate, respond, and to some extent transmit to their progeny information to adapt more efficiently to climate change. (Gallusci et al. 2023)

Anthony Trewavas, one of the leading advocates for plant intelligence, writes of seed germination: “The skill in environmental interpretation, that is learning, determines which seeds will most accurately assess the time of germination and environmental conditions for the young plant. These are clearly the most intelligent” (Trewavas 2017).

Trewavas’ approach here is to start from our own self-conscious human intelligence. We can think through what he is proposing in his kind of terms — vividly and literally. Seeds fall onto the earth. Wind and rain, passing animals, or falling leaves cover the seeds and they sink into the soil. They lie there waiting, collecting information and interpreting it in order to determine when they should break dormancy. Each seed is doing this on its own, informed by the strategy that the right decision will bring forth a plant that will survive. Imagine it even more concretely. One calendula plant can produce hundreds of seeds by the end of the growing season. These fall to the soil beneath the plant. They will be rained on, dry out, be subjected to freezing temperatures, be covered with snow, and exposed once more to the sun and the rain. Some will have been eaten by birds or rodents; some may have been penetrated by worms; some rot. In the spring, a small percentage of those that remain will germinate. They have laid there analyzing data and, secretly competing with one another, they wait for the perfect moment to begin to sprout. According to Trewavas, some of the seeds are more intelligent than others. The more intelligent seeds will have interpreted the data more accurately, made better decisions, and are thereby more likely to survive.

For both mainstream science and contemporary plant intelligence researchers, the ultimate ground for intelligence is survival. Here is a formulation in an article in the journal Annals of Botany:

The inbuilt driving forces of individual survival and thence to reproduction are fundamental to life of all kinds. In these unpredictable and varying circumstances the aim of intelligence in all individuals is to modify behaviour to improve the probability of survival. (Calvo et al. 2019)

The emphasis on individual survival in biology goes back to Charles Darwin, whose highly influential theory of evolution has as its central notion the idea that individual variants of a species compete with each other in the context of a hostile environment. This struggle for existence leads to “survival of the fittest” (a phrase coined in 1864 by Herbert Spencer). What’s puzzling about Darwin is that, in one way, he is clearly aware that when he uses phrases such as struggle or competition he is speaking metaphorically or perhaps even improperly:

A plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent upon the moisture. (Darwin 1859/1979, p. 116)

He was conscious of the different connotations of these two ways of phrasing the same phenomenon. When you say “the plant is dependent upon moisture,” you disclose a vital relationship between plants and their environment. Struggling for life, by contrast, implies an agent who stands over and against the world and is confronting something that is for it a problem. Drought is a problem for a plant. Yet although Darwin admits that the notion of struggle in this context is less adequate, less “proper,” his thinking was dominated by the notion of “us against them” — the struggle of entities against each other. This way of conceptualizing and expressing relations was widespread in the social and economic thinking of Darwin’s time. Darwin found in the ideas of competition, struggle, and the survival of the “most favored” the theoretical framework that enabled him to bring his observations of nature into an intelligible whole, even though — as the previous quotation and others in his 1859 tome, The Origin of Species, indicate — part of him evidently felt that there was something not fully appropriate about this way of articulating the relation between organisms and their environment.

Darwin’s words point to the importance of considering how the language you choose affects the way you see and conceptualize the world. In one case, you posit an initial separateness, place the plant in an antagonist relation to, say, the lack of moisture, and imbue the plant with a centered agency through which it struggles against drought. You frame its existence in a way that resembles a human being struggling against something adversarial. In the other case, you view the plant in one of its connections with the world that supports its existence; you don’t start with separation. You express the dependency of the plant on moisture and don’t go further; you leave open what still can be discovered about the nature of this relation.

Language really matters. It is the reflection of our way of understanding the world. It shapes how we understand and even how we experience the world. In science, phenomena are always portrayed through a certain perspective and the language used embodies and enables that perspective. It is important to give due attention to this framing. The phenomena may show quite different features when viewed from another perspective. For that reason, we should appreciate what truths can be revealed by various perspectives. But we also need to be careful to never limit our approach to only one way of looking — which we implicitly or explicitly believe to be the way to consider things — that can hide more than it illuminates.

The language used in contemporary plant intelligence studies generally portrays plants as having human-like intelligence. We know very well from our own experience about remembering, choosing, making decisions, re-elaborating, or responding. Evidently, the proponents of plant intelligence believe there are phenomena within plants that justify such expressions. They look at plants through the lens of what they know about intelligent human behavior from self-conscious reflection and speculate on plant specific mechanisms that underlie the appearance of similar behaviors. Certain features of reflective human intelligence become the standard for how to understand plants.

Expanding the Idea of Intelligence?

Some years ago, there was an article in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications that listed about 70 different definitions and brief descriptions of intelligence collected from books and articles (Legg and Hunter 2007). Most of the definitions clearly relate to rational human intelligence. For example:

Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.

Other definitions are more general and broad. A definition such as, “the ability to learn or to profit by experience,” can easily be applied to animals. And plants can surely be said to possess “adaptively variable behaviour within the lifetime of the individual” (in Trewavas 2017).

The broadest criterion for calling something intelligent seems to be: “the ability to adapt to the environment” (Legg & Hunter 2007; reference 13). From this perspective, virtually everything in the world is intelligent: A stone that warms up in the sun is intelligent, because it adapts to the sun’s radiating heat. Similarly, water that flows downhill or remains still in a basin would be intelligent, since its momentary state is adapting to the conditions in which it finds itself. If, following the same definition, we move into the realm of the living, then a plant that grows effusively in a nutrient-rich soil is intelligent. A deer that flees when it sees a coyote on the field is intelligent. And a person who lies down in bed and falls asleep is also intelligently adapting to the environment.

One way to react to such a list of divergent ways of being “intelligent” is to say: When a definition is so broad, it ends up denoting virtually nothing specific. The concept of intelligence then tells us everything generally and nothing in particular.

Another way to respond is to say: That’s interesting, maybe there is some sense in which it might be reasonable to speak of intelligence in plants. But then you have to move beyond thinking in terms of definitions. Definitions generally want to create crisp boundaries so that you have a way to determine what falls within the definition and what is excluded. They are in this sense mental boxes. When you peruse these 70-plus definitions of intelligence, what you discover is a spectrum or a continuum and no hard-and-fast boundaries. In this sense, such a compilation facilitates a movement beyond thinking in boxes.

If we are not focused on including or excluding different kinds of beings based on a definition of intelligence, we can shift our perspective. We consider the idea of the ability to adapt to the environment itself. Everything we designate as a “thing” is also embedded in a world we call “environment.” Every “thing” relates to its world. It might change in relation to changes in the environment, and when it changes, the environment might also change. The concepts of “thing” and “environment” are inextricably connected. They belong together; they presuppose each other. Nothing exists in isolation. Nothing exists without a larger world to which it belongs. So when we delve into any realm of phenomena, we focus on something particular and in our attempt to understand it, we strive to move beyond our ignorance of it by discovering, if we can, the meaning-filled (meaningful) relations of which it is a part.

At the same time, we see that the meaning of “adapt” or “environment” modifies depending on what kind of entity or organism we are considering. Water for a rock is something very different from water for a plant. This may pose a bothersome problem for a mind that wants to start with a clear definition as the basis for including or excluding phenomena within the definitional concept. For us it is exciting to engage in a project in which our concepts may grow with each encounter.

Moreover, while we may discover distinct features of intelligence in, say, plants and animals, we may also find different qualities of what we might call intelligence within a given type of organism.

It is easy to recognize how human beings participate “intelligently” in the world in ways that remain beneath the surface of the reflective, intellectual mind. Imagine dashing madly through an overgrown field. You push through thickets of shrubs, attempt to evade brambles, and focus on finding openings that allow you to navigate the overgrowth in the most expedient manner. You breathe more deeply and your heart rate increases. When you arrive at the other side, you discover scratches on your arms and legs that you barely noticed as you were running. Some are still bleeding, others begin to crust over. Healing processes begin immediately following an injury regardless of whether you are aware of them or not. When the skin is punctured, the surrounding or damaged blood vessels immediately contract, reducing the flow of blood. Platelets converge on the locus of the wound and release fibrin proteins that form a tangled web resulting in a clot sealing the wound. Once the wound is sealed the blood vessels expand, bringing white blood cells to the wound area. As the healing process continues, fibroblast cells produce collagen that scaffolds the placement of new skin cells formed by the division of cells in the surrounding dermal tissue.

All of this takes place inside of us and is done by us beneath the surface of what we consider to be conscious. It happens without our conscious input. We are not deciding or making choices. As with most of what happens in the living world, our self-conscious understanding of these highly meaningful and dynamic processes is extremely limited. Yet they are at the heart of our existence as living beings. And do they not provide the organic basis of our ability to think about the world, to employ our conscious intelligence?

There are apparently different layers or dimensions of “intelligence” within human beings. Realizing this helps free us from the limitation of thinking of intelligence solely in terms of reflective human consciousness. It makes us keenly aware of the pitfall of limiting the inquiry to one particular expression of human intelligence and projecting it into all other forms of life. From this perspective, the question of intelligence in nature shifts away from applying a specific definition to different types of beings in the world to asking: What are different ways of being in the world and what do they reveal? The notion of intelligence can in this way become more nuanced and grow when we take different kinds of creatures on earth seriously in their specific ways of being. Our primary focus in the coming year or so will be on plants. As our inquiry proceeds, we may find that we need terms other than intelligence to express the different qualities of organism-environment relations. We leave that open.

Notes

1. See references for a small selection of publications from the scientific literature, both pro and contra. There are also many popular articles and books that have brought topic into broader societal awareness, among them Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (2017), and Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree (2021), both international bestsellers.

References

Calvo, Paco (2016). “The Philosophy of Plant Neurobiology: A Manifesto.” Synthese vol. 193, pp. 1323-43. doi 10.1007/s11229-016-1040-1

Calvo, Paco, et al (2020). “Plants are Intelligent, Here’s How.” Annals of Botany vol. 125, pp. 11-28. doi: 10.1093/aob/mcz155

Darwin, Charles (1859/1979). The Origin of Species (first edition). New York: Penguin Books. Online: http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F373&viewtype=text&pageseq=1

Darwin, Charles (1880/1989). The Power of Movement in Plants. “The Works of Charles Darwin”, Volume 27. Edited by Paul. H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman. New York: New York University Press, pp. 572-73. Online: http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1325&viewtype=text&pageseq=1

Darwin, Francis (1908). “The Address of the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science-I.” Science vol. 28, pp. 353-62. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1636207

Gagliano, Monica, et al. (2014). “Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters.” Oecologia vol. 175, pp. 63-72.

Gallusci, Philippe, et al. (2023). “Deep Inside the Epigenetic Memories of Stressed Plants.” Trends in Plant Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2022.09.004

Kutschera, Lore, et al. (1997). Bewurzelung von Pflanzen in verschiedenen Lebensräume. Bd. 5 der Wurzelatlas-Reihe, Stapfia 49.

Legg, Shane and Marcus Hunter (2007). “A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence.” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 157, p. 17. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0706.3639.pdf

Mallet, Jon, et al. (2021). “Debunking a Myth: Plant Consciousness.” Protoplasma vol. 258, ppl. 459-76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00709-020-01579-w

Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola (2015). Brilliant Green — The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Taiz, Lincoln, et al. (2019). “Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness.” Trends in Plant Science vol. 24, pp. 677-87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2019.05.008

Trewavas, Anthony (2017). “The Foundations of Plant Intelligence.” Interface Focus vol. 7: 20160098. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2016.0098

More from The Nature Institute:

  • In Dialogue with Nature (Podcast) — Conversations that explore our relationship with the living world, often featuring scientists, philosophers, and artists who share ways to see more deeply into nature.
  • Doing Goethean Science — An article by Craig Holdrege introducing Goethean scientific practice: a way of observing and engaging with nature that emphasizes connection, perceiving relationships, and deep attention rather than reduction.
  • Beyond Intelligence: Life in a Relational World — A piece by Jon McAlice and Craig Holdrege that dives into how we might rethink intelligence — not just as a human attribute but as something relational, emerging in our interactions with the more-than-human world.

The Golden Rule, Before Humans: Shirley Strum on the Wisdom of Baboons

For more than five decades, Shirley C. Strum has lived alongside baboons in the wilds of Kenya. What she discovered overturned long-held scientific assumptions and revealed a truth that feels surprisingly close to home: baboons build their societies not on dominance and violence, but on cooperation, reciprocity, and relationships.

Strum’s work shows that these animals — without language, symbols, or written rules — still manage to practice something that looks remarkably like the Golden Rule. They treat one another as they wish to be treated, relying on trust and negotiation to navigate daily life. In doing so, they remind us that some of the social skills we prize as uniquely human have far deeper evolutionary roots.

Her perspective is also shaped by her personal history. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Strum set out to study primates to understand the origins of human aggression. What she found instead were baboons modeling alternatives to aggression — options that expand how we think about our own species and the choices available to us.

In this conversation, Strum reflects on the lessons baboons can teach us about power, gender, and community.

Your new book, Echoes of Our Origins chronicles your 50+ years studying baboons in Kenya. When you first entered the field, scientists believed baboons lived in a male-dominated society marked by constant battles between the males. But you write, “improbable as it seemed, it looked to me like baboons were practicing a version of the classic Golden Rule…They treated others as they wished to be treated, using bodies and behavior in an elaborated system of negotiated reciprocity.” What does that mean for our understanding of evolution and humanity?

Shirley Strum: Baboons don’t have language or symbols, yet they manage to create a social contract that is like the Golden Rule, one communicated by behaviors and bodies that every baboon understands. This suggests that the Golden Rule existed before humans, and all humans did was embed it in their unique culture. Indeed, many human skills were practiced before humans “invented” them, and social sophistication existed in baboons long before humans appeared on the scene. I don’t believe that baboons, or any other species, can be used as a model for early humans — but understanding their social interactions helps us see humans in a new light.

Both of your parents were Holocaust survivors, and you were led to study primates partly by your desire to understand the human capacity for aggression. Can you explain?

Shirley: My parents never spoke about the camps, but my child’s imagination conjured up horrific images. By the time I went to university, I wanted to understand the evolutionary origins of aggression in primates, including humans. 

Baboons form complex societies where aggression plays an important and readily observable role, so they were an obvious choice for me. I discovered right away that males don’t have a stable hierarchy, as was assumed. Instead, females form the core of the group, replete with female-centric and family hierarchies. More surprising was that both males and females use alternatives that I call “social strategies” to avoid aggression. And because these social strategies depend on others to work, baboons have to build relationships before they can use them. 

Baboons taught me that aggression isn’t the only option and showed what other options exist. I continued to study baboons because humans seem too complicated in the ways they embed aggression into culture. After 50 years of watching baboons, I have little to say about humans except that there must be alternatives to aggression.

How did human sexism affect the early study of primates and the understanding of the roles females played in their groups? Are there still biases that affect how we view primates today?

Shirley: The baboon model that influenced how scientists saw all nonhuman primates in the 1960s and early 1970s revolved around males. Males did everything: they protected the group, policed transgressions, were the object of troop attention, and the dominant one(s) had the most matings. These conclusions aren’t surprising if you consider that these early studies only identified males. In contrast, I found that females formed the core of the group, as did two other studies then. 

By the 1990s, women scientists started to question the male bias in primate studies, and today more women than men study primates, reversing the earlier trend. Female primates became a focus of study in their own right, so today we know the behavior of females across species. There are still biases, but they’re about methods of study and how easily scientists and the public connect nonhuman primate behaviors to human traits that we might not be so proud of. We see baboons in particular as embodiments of our worst traits, denying and dismissing their agency, intelligence, and their complex social networks.

Which baboon behaviors would be helpful for humans to emulate, especially in terms of social interaction?

Shirley: I often joke that I would rather have a baboon as president than a human. This is because baboons can’t deceive easily; they can’t say one thing and mean another. So that’s one way I wish humans were more like baboons. I would also like to see humans emulate baboons in their other aspects of socialness. Baboons need each other for company and to solve things together that no one can solve alone. A benefit of the COVID-19 pandemic was to make humans realize how important family and friends are. These are baboon lessons that we too quickly forget, enabled by our cultures, language that lets us lie, and ideologies that motivate us to do things we know aren’t right.

Cultivating Connection and Capacity Through Story

An excerpt from the introduction of Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart. Edited by Nina Simons with Anneke Campbell

This book is dedicated to everyone who has ever felt powerless, experienced being the dissenting or minority voice, or felt unfairly judged, devalued, or dismissed for being different. It is intended for anyone who has experienced a culture that elevates some while denigrating others. As women in a society that privileges attributes and people who are ‘masculine,’ I believe we all have a particular empathic window on injustice.

Around the globe, women are rising up in creative and unexpected ways to defend what they love–protecting their families, villages, neighborhoods, homelands, and lifeways, while creating community and connection to strengthen resiliency and healing. Responding to urgent calls from the earth, and to  social harms that threaten the liveability and fabric of our world, women are leading efforts to defend what they love, reinventing and challenging facets of society everywhere. Recognizing the ineffectiveness of conventional approaches, we’re midwifing new models and ways of relating to the earth and each other that want to be born.

Women are inventing new forms (and reclaiming old ones) in every area of life, ranging from childbirth to education, and spanning peacemaking, healing, economies, and restorative justice. Many are also reimagining business, governance, and education. 

These women and men are leading as pathfinders, whose vision and passion for a.better world motivate others to act to help heal our collective home and advance the common good. We may choose to risk reaching for our dreams not only for the benefit of those around us, but because making a stand on behalf of what we most love, of the future we yearn for, is the most fulfilling, joyful, and meaningful way to spend our short and precious lives. 

Though people today often lament a lack of leadership, a new form is arising everywhere – largely from women – and is as unstoppable as grass that grows up through the cracks in concrete. Since it does not resemble what we were taught to expect leadership to look like, this emergence is largely unseen. 

In the new leadership landscape described in this book, women (and some men) are wielding power in different ways than what we have been taught to expect. Like Sarah Crowell, whose students keep her practice vulnerable and deeply honest, many are experimenting with collaborative, win-win structures, in which each participant is enriched and expanded by her engagement. Some, like Judy Wicks and her vision to improve upon business, what we eat, and how we treat each other, are sharing their accomplishments openly and freely, to better equip even their competitors in order to help transform a whole community. 

Leslie Gray’s story offers insight into an alternative use of power that comes from within, reminding us of the profound value of somatic and intuitive cues. Women leaders often opt to lead from behind or alongside their colleagues, and less frequently from out in front. As the stories here so amply illustrate, being a leader does not necessitate asserting dominance, but rather asks that we listen actively and inwardly, reach across the differences that tend to divide us, initiate and choose the hard work of collaboration, stay connected with our passion, and inspire enthusiastic engagement to strengthen and catalyze others into action,  often lifting up others into leadership. 

Nina Simons

To learn more or purchase this book, visit here.

Bioneers Newsletter 9.11.25 — On 9/21, let’s prove that the solar movement can’t be stopped

In Washington, Rollbacks.
On Rooftops, Revolutions.

The clean energy story is unfolding on two fronts. In the U.S., the Trump administration has rolled back support for wind and solar — pausing projects, ending subsidies, raising costs, and even canceling developments already underway (see timeline →). But globally, the momentum is undeniable: Renewable energy investment hit a record $386 billion in the first half of 2025, with Europe, Asia, and Africa racing ahead on rooftop solar, offshore wind, and batteries (read more →).

Against this backdrop, longtime climate leader Bill McKibben argues that we still have one powerful tool at hand: the sun. His latest work calls for a rooftop solar renaissance — and a coalition big enough to make it real. On September 21st, that call becomes action with Sun Day, a global day of parades, clean energy showcases, and rallies to light the way toward a brighter future.

In this issue: why solar is our brightest hope, how it’s rising worldwide, and ways to join in on Sun Day.

Sun drawings from the SunDay community, courtesy of SunDay. Credits (left to right): Anonymous; Vano / Georgia / Graphic Designer; Emily / teacher

Stories, Voices & Perspectives

Bill McKibben: Back to the Wall, Face to the Sun
McKibben argues that amid record-breaking heat, the plummeting cost of solar gives us a fleeting chance to transform our world — if we all step up.
Watch now →

More from McKibben:

After America: Asia’s Rooftop Revolution (Climate & Capital)
As Danny Kennedy reports, Asia — home to half the world’s population — is leaping ahead in rooftop solar and clean energy independence. From Pakistan’s rapid solar boom to Australia’s grid breakthroughs, the region is proving how fast a transition can take hold when the politics align with the technology.
Read now →

More Global Perspectives:

What You Can Do

On September 21, communities around the world will take to the streets, rooftops, and public squares to show that the clean energy future is already here. From e-bike parades to solar installations, heat pump tours to rallies for stronger laws, Sun Day is about celebrating progress and demanding more.

Learn more about the vision behind Sun Day in our conversation with Third Act strategist Deborah Moore.

Here’s how you can be a part of Sun Day:

  • Join an Event: Find a Sun Day celebration near you and stand up for clean energy in your community.
  • Organize an Event: Host a Sun Day action big or small — every gathering helps build momentum.
  • Donate: Chip in to help Sun Day’s organizers create art, register events, and spread the word about clean energy.
  • Sign Your Sun: Add your own sun drawing to the global gallery — a symbol of hope and the power we already have.

Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.

Bioneers Learning Course Spotlight — From Reactivity to Resilience: Responsive Leadership and Fractals of Healing

How can we move from stress and reactivity into grounded, authentic leadership? In this six-week live course, therapist and educator Pamela Rosin, MFT offers practical tools for nervous system regulation, unwinding limiting patterns, and cultivating resilience that ripples through our lives and communities.

Register now

Sun Day 2025: Deborah Moore on Building a Nationwide Movement for Clean Energy

On September 21, communities across the United States will gather for Sun Day — a coordinated day of action calling for more solar, wind, and renewable energy. With more than 300 events already registered, the campaign is uniting schools, faith communities, farmers, frontline neighborhoods, and clean energy advocates in a powerful display of public support.

To understand the goals and momentum behind Sun Day, Bioneers spoke with Deborah Moore, Campaign Strategist at Third Act, the organization spearheading the initiative. In this conversation with Bioneers President Teo Grossman, Moore shares how Sun Day is mobilizing people in red, blue, and purple states alike, why local and state policies matter, and how anyone — from homeowners to renters, from elders to youth — can plug in to the clean energy transition.

Teo Grossman, Bioneers: How many Sun Day events are currently planned, and what kinds of activities are people organizing?

Deborah Moore, Third Act: Check out sunday.earth/events and see the map of all the events! As of September 8, there are 325 events in 44 states, and there are still more getting added every day. It’s not too late to join an event or host one of your own, even a small one. There are all kinds of events, big and small: from larger Sun Day festivals and educational fairs to smaller individual solar home tours. You could invite some neighbors over to check out your solar panels or electric vehicle, heat pump, or induction stove. Or host a book group reading of a book about solar, or watch a movie. You could host a rally at your town’s city hall, calling on local decision-makers to streamline solar permitting and make it easier to get small-scale plug-in solar.

Teo: What impact are you hoping to achieve through this day of action?

Deborah: For Sun Day, we want to visibly and vocally show decision-makers that Americans everywhere want solar, wind, and renewable energy. We want to demonstrate this public support in red states, blue states, and purple states, and we’ve got amazing and varied partners, from Sierra Club to New York Solar Energy Industries Association, from GreenFaith to NAACP Greater Grand Rapids, from Women’s March to Solar United Neighbors.

There is a lot we can do to scale up and speed up the building of more solar, wind, and batteries that will make electricity cheaper, more reliable, cleaner, and less polluting. Sun Day is an opportunity to shine a light on the solutions we have in hand right now and to build big, broad, and varied public support to advance these solutions. There are all kinds of events showcasing this variety of solutions and community support: schools, churches, and temples with solar; farmers with solar; affordable housing with solar; renters and homeowners with solar; businesses large and small with solar; clean energy workers working towards a just transition; states that have passed “instant solar permitting” and “balcony solar” laws; communities on the frontlines of climate impacts building “resilience hubs” with solar and batteries; electric cars and trucks that are driving on sunshine, and so much more.

Teo: The global momentum for clean energy is undeniable, but U.S. policy has shifted dramatically in the past year. In this challenging environment, what messages are most important to share, and what actions can people take?

Deborah: While it is challenging, we know that the majority of Americans of all political backgrounds support clean energy. As advocates and organizers, we need to better connect with these varied people and communities, mobilize them to show their support more visibly and vocally, and take action to support smart clean energy policies.

There are still many things we can do at the local and state levels to both accelerate clean energy projects and stop dirty energy projects. For example, due in part to byzantine permitting processes, solar energy is three times more expensive in the U.S. than in Europe. We can streamline these permitting processes at the local and state level and make rooftop and small-scale plug-in solar easier and cheaper to adopt. Soon, we’ll be promoting a petition calling on mayors and local leaders to streamline solar permitting, and after Sun Day, people can get to work delivering the petition to mayors and working to implement these changes.

Here are some other ways to get involved in the next week:

  • Webinar – Invest in the Sun: How your dollars can fund renewable energy, September 16, 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET: On Tuesday, September 16, just before Sun Day, let’s talk about bringing a little more sunshine into our finances by investing directly in solar energy projects. Hosted by Third Act Upstate NY and Climatize, you can learn how you can invest in crowd-sourced solar projects for as little as $10 and open an account with Clean Energy Credit Union for as little as $25. 
  • Public Hype Call for Sun Day – September 15: Join us for a movement-wide call on Monday, September 15th, as we get ready for Sun Day! We’ll be joined by movement leaders and clean energy champions to talk about the incredible impact we’ll create together through hundreds of events on Sun Day. We’ll also share final reminders and last-minute tips for Sun Day event hosts and make sure you have everything you need to hold an incredible Sun Day gathering.

Teo: What’s next, and how can people stay engaged past September?

Deborah: Sun Day is a moment in growing a larger movement to rise up for clean energy and a healthy future. After Sun Day, we invite folks to plug in — literally and figuratively — to the ongoing clean energy campaigns of all the Sun Day partners and beyond. Sign up for the Sun Day mailing list, and you’ll receive all the information about Sun Day and other actions you can take. If you are an elder American, you can join us at Third Act and take action after Sun Day as we ramp up our local, state, and federal advocacy.

Inside the Wild Pharmacy: How Chimpanzees Use Medicinal Plants and Why It Matters for Us

When chimpanzees fall ill, they don’t have the option of pharmacies or prescriptions. Instead, they draw on an inherited knowledge of the forest — selecting specific plants, bark, or leaves that can fight infection, kill parasites, or ease symptoms. This behavior, known as self-medication, reveals a sophisticated relationship between animals and their environment. It’s a field of study so specialized that only a handful of researchers in the world focus on it.

Elodie Freymann is one of them. A self-described “unlikely scientist” from a family of artists, she began her academic life studying anthropology, with an early obsession for both plants and primates. Her path wound through documentary filmmaking before a leap into graduate school at the University of Oxford revealed the perfect niche: studying how animals, especially Ugandan chimpanzees, use medicinal plants, and what that means for conservation, human health, and our understanding of the natural world.

Freymann now works at the intersection of primatology, ethnobotany, and storytelling. Her research not only uncovers which plants chimps use to heal themselves, but also explores the overlap between human and animal “medicine cabinets” — a shared knowledge that could help protect species and ecosystems alike.

Elodie Freymann examines insects on a tree in the Peruvian Amazon (Credit: Sebastian Orbell)

Budongo chimpanzees (Credit: Elodie Freymann)

Bioneers: What led you to your field site in Uganda, and how did you shape your approach to studying chimpanzee self-medication there?

Freymann: I knew I wanted to study chimp self-medication, particularly their use of medicinal plants — something I’ve been fascinated by for a long time.

Because it was during COVID, fieldwork logistics were tricky. One thing I hadn’t realized until I was in the field was just how competitive it is to get a spot at a chimpanzee field station. There are only a few chimp communities in the world that are habituated to researchers, meaning they’re comfortable with people quietly following them, and you can’t have too many people in the forest at once without disturbing them.

I got incredibly lucky. A spot opened up, and at the end of April 2020, I got an email saying, You can have this field site in Uganda, but you need to be ready by early June. I had about a month to prepare for a four-and-a-half-month trip — the first of my two PhD field seasons.

A short film documenting Elodie Freymann’s daily routine during her time in Budongo, Uganda (shot by Austen Deery).

Before that, I’d only seen a chimp maybe once in a zoo. I had this obsession; I had done my master’s on chimp self-medication, but this was my first time doing that kind of fieldwork. From day one, it was everything I had imagined and more. 

Elodie takes notes in the Budongo forest (Credit: Austen Deery). Field note drawings (Credit: Elodie Freymann)

Before arriving, I studied the feeding list of plants that the chimps at this site typically eat. I did an in-depth literature review to see which of those plants had known medicinal properties or ethnobotanical uses — traditional medicinal uses by local people. That gave me a “candidate list” of species to pay close attention to.

Once in the field, I focused on those plants but kept an open mind. I documented everything: videos of feeding behavior, notes on any chimp showing possible signs of illness, fecal samples collected to check for parasites, and urine samples collected to look for infection. I also got to conduct some interviews with traditional medicinal healers who lived in the region. I cast a wide net because I didn’t know exactly what I’d find.

Back from the field, I synthesized all the data, looking for connections between illness, unusual feeding behaviors, and plants with medicinal potential. My collaborator in Germany, Dr. Fabian Schultz, tested some of those plants for their pharmacological properties, checking for antibacterial or anti-inflammatory activity.

My PhD ended up spanning multiple disciplines, including elements of ethology, pharmacology, and ethnobotany. I even got to incorporate some of my scientific illustrations. I also received a grant from the Explorers Club to make a film about the project, which allowed me to use my filmmaking background to tell the story of why protecting these medicinal resources matters for both chimps and the local communities that rely on many of the same plants.

Geresomu, field staff member at BCFS points out a tree to Elodie as they walk in the forest (Credit: Austen Deery)

The Budongo Forest faces serious threats: illegal logging, increased snaring during economic hardship (often targeting other animals but harming chimps as bycatch), and the looming possibility of an oil road through the forest due to oil reserves found under nearby Lake Albert. That’s why documenting its cultural and medicinal value is so important — to make the forest worth more alive than dead, and to strengthen the case for protecting it against future threats.

Geresomu, field staff member at BCFS points out a tree to Elodie as they walk in the forest (Credit: Austen Deery)

Mbotella and Muhumuza, orphaned chimpanzee brothers in the Budongo Forest (Credit: Elodie Freymann)

Bioneers: Can you share a specific example from your fieldwork that illustrates how chimps may use plants as medicine?

Freymann: One example that really stands out is August 26, 2021 — still fairly early in my first field season. I’d been there about two months, long enough to recognize most of the chimps and get a sense of their typical diet. There are certain staple fruits and resources they eat every day when available, and a couple of big fruit trees they’d been visiting constantly.

I’d been keeping an eye on two orphaned brothers who cared for each other. The older had adopted the younger after their mother disappeared. One of them had been acting lethargic and whimpering more than usual. I also knew from earlier fecal samples that the younger had a high parasite load, so I considered them potential candidates for self-medication.

“What struck me was that the vine showed tooth marks in various stages of healing, meaning it had been chewed on many times before, even though no one had observed it happening.”

One day, they broke off from the group, which is unusual, and traveled far in the direction of a neighboring chimp community. That’s risky because chimps are territorial, and crossing into another community’s range can be dangerous. Along the way, they stopped to feed on several unusual resources — items not normally part of their diet or with very low nutritional value, like bark, pith, or dead wood. Many of these were already on my list of candidate medicinal resources to watch for.

Then the younger brother suddenly branched off and ran into a small clearing. He began chewing on a woody vine that had never before been seen being eaten by the Budongo chimpanzees. I knew this because it didn’t appear anywhere on their known feeding list. What struck me was that the vine showed tooth marks in various stages of healing, meaning it had been chewed on many times before, even though no one had observed it happening. The younger chimp chewed for a while, then his brother joined in.

Identifying the plant was tricky since it only had one small leaf. Eventually, we determined it was Scutia myrtina, a species known in the ethnomedicine literature for having strong anti-parasitic properties. It was such a satisfying moment. It was anecdotal — not something you can quantify through numbers and statistical models — but it fit together perfectly when you considered the full context: the individuals’ health, their recent behavior, their diet that day, and the unusual nature of the plant.

When I returned for my second field season in 2022, I continued to observe similarly intriguing anecdotes, especially around bark-feeding behavior, and dug deeper into investigating those patterns.

“I love the idea of these shared ‘wild pharmacies.’ . . . It’s fascinating when we’ve independently arrived at the same medicines.”

Bioneers: Your work doesn’t just reveal how chimps heal themselves — it also highlights overlaps with human medicine. How do you see those connections shaping conservation and our understanding of health?

Freymann: Chimpanzees are one of our closest living relatives, and we share a huge amount of our genetic makeup with them. What’s medicinal for humans is often medicinal for chimps as well, which is part of why, tragically, they were used in medical and pharmaceutical testing for so long.

Left: Botanical samples (Credit: Elodie Fryemann). Right: Elodie in the parasite lab at BCFS (Credit: Daniel Sempebwa)

For me, one of the most interesting directions of my research is looking at the overlap between the medicinal resources used by people and those used by animals. I love the idea of these shared “wild pharmacies.” Humans often fall into the trap of thinking we’re unique and superior in every way, with a better understanding of the natural world than animals. But many animals actually share this medicinal knowledge with us, appearing to have a deep understanding of the medicinal “cabinet” available in their environments.

It’s fascinating when we’ve independently arrived at the same medicines. That connection can also be a powerful conservation tool: If people understand that both we and other species rely on the same resources, it creates more incentive to protect them.

For animals, access to these medicinal resources is just as critical as food or space. Even if we protect their habitat, if they lose access to the plants they need to fight illness, their survival is at risk.

As climate change accelerates, we’re going to see more global health challenges like pandemics and antibiotic resistance. Animals will face those same challenges. If they don’t have access to their “medicine cabinet,” they won’t survive, and that loss will affect us as well.

Medicine is a topic most people can relate to because everyone knows what it’s like to be sick and in need of treatment. Animals have that same fundamental need, and recognizing that can help us see just how interconnected our health and theirs truly are.

“I think this research gets people to creatively stretch their thinking and give animals credit in ways they might not in their daily lives.”

Bioneers: How have people reacted to your findings on chimpanzee self-medication, and what do those reactions tell you?

Freymann: It’s been really well received. I’ve always thought it was the most interesting topic in the world, so I’m obviously biased. When other people think it’s cool, I’m like, Yes! Exactly.

I think this research gets people to creatively stretch their thinking and give animals credit in ways they might not in their daily lives. It’s funny reading comments when my papers get picked up in the news. Reactions tend to split: Some people are like, Oh my god, chimpanzees self-medicate, that’s incredible! And others say, Well, of course they do. Why wouldn’t they? Honestly, I have both reactions myself.

And it’s not just chimps or apes — it’s geese, civets, bears, even insects like ants. Self-medication is common across the entire animal kingdom. It makes so much sense. Medicating is as important as eating — it’s survival after all.

Bioneers: How are you building on your chimpanzee research, and what new projects or goals are you taking on?

Freymann: I plan to keep working with chimps; they’ll always be my first love, and I have students continuing some of the work in Uganda, so I hope to stay connected there.

But my next project, which I’ll be conducting as part of my postdoc at Brown University, is actually taking me to the Peruvian Amazon. It’s still focused on animal self-medication, but in a high-elevation tropical rainforest with a very different mix of species. Working in collaboration with members of the Asháninka community, we’re identifying medicinal plants important to the community and then tracking which animals use them. Because most wildlife there is nocturnal or wary of humans, we’re relying on camera traps and other indirect methods. The biodiversity is stunning — spectacled bears, jaguars, giant armadillos, tapirs — and seeing some of these incredible and endangered animals appear on our camera traps has been a childhood dream come true.

Long term, I want to develop a methodological toolkit for studying self-medication that can be applied across species and habitats. I’m also working with lawyers and policymakers to create a protocol for protecting the medicinal knowledge of non-human animals — essentially, intellectual property rights for wildlife — an ethical dimension of the field that I think is long overdue.

Bioneers: How do you see filmmaking and other creative work fitting into your career going forward?

Freymann: I’d love to make another short documentary. I’m still finishing the second of two films I made in Uganda. One is already done, and the other is almost there. It tells the story of a single medicinal tree used by both chimps and people, and the efforts to protect it before it disappears.

In Peru, I’m hoping we can also create a short documentary. We’ve taken some pilot footage and plan to put together a sizzle reel to pitch for funding.

I’ve made a promise to myself to not separate my science from my storytelling. I never want to take on a project without finding a way to share it creatively. When you’re working with endangered animals and fragile ecosystems, simply doing the science isn’t enough. Having the privilege to be in these places means I have a responsibility to share their beauty and importance with the world in ways that reach beyond the scientific community.

Real Organic: An Interview with Linley Dixon, Co-Director, Real Organic Project

Linley Dixon, Co-Director of The Real Organic Project, studied soil science in college and worked at the USDA on plant-fungal interactions while maintaining a life-long aspiration to one day become a farmer. The alure of raising her child on a farm motivated her and her husband to quit their jobs, move to the country and start a small organic farm. In the process of overcoming all the challenges that come with such a bold move–raising capital, accessing land, earning a profit in Colorado’s short growing season, etc.–she took on a job to help make ends meet as a scientist evaluating the materials that organic farmers use. That’s when her work became political and she joined the fight to keep organic real. Linley was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.  

ARTY MANGAN: You overcame the obstacles of becoming a first-generation farmer, and you’re now living according to your values.On your organic farm in Durango, Colorado you grow 40 different crops, selling your produce locally, but at one point, you became more political when it came to the integrity of organic standards. How did the Real Organic Project come about?

LINLEY DIXON: I had the wonderful opportunity to go to National Organics Standards Board (NOSB) meetings where issues on what defined “organic” according to the USDA were being raised. My job as a scientist for The Cornucopia Institute was to evaluate the inputs that were allowed in the organic standards and then to testify to the NOSB about whether or not they should continue to be allowed. There’s a list of about 200 approved inputs and there’s constant pressure by the manufactures to allow more inputs into organic. Around 2015 or 2016 the issue of hydroponics being certified as organic came up. It culminated in 2017 when there was a vote on the issue.

Some certifiers and the National Organic Program (NOP) had been secretly allowing it. Soil-based organic farmers started to wonder where the really cheap, bad-tasting supposedly organic tomatoes were coming from. It turned out that hydroponics (i.e., growing plants in a soil-less environment and feeding them with soluble fertilizers) was being allowed to use the “organic” label, but if you look at the language of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, soil and how you maintain soil fertility are mentioned throughout. Soil is part of the DNA of being an organic farmer; it’s almost all we think about, so it was sort of shocking. It was thought that this was a mistake, that it had come in under the radar, but hydroponic produce began taking over the shelf space for tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and berries.

The issue lit a fire under organic growers and we became political again. I think organic farmers went to sleep politically for a while after the Organic Foods Production Act was passed and the standards were put in place. They thought, “phew, we did it, we can go back to our farms now.” Little did they know that we had to keep watching what the USDA and the NOP were doing.

That is the role of the Real Organic Project now. I’ve heard people ask: “If we resolve this hydroponic issue and some of the other issues, would the Real Organic Project go away?” And the answer is no because there’s going to continue to be pressure to get an organic premium from entities that are not actually meeting the standards, so I think you always need a watchful eye over what the USDA is doing.

When we lost that vote to prohibit hydroponics from using the organic label in 2017, there was a feeling of loss and concern over what are we going to do now. The Real Organic Project was formed shortly after that as an add-on standard. If the USDA wasn’t going to maintain high standards, then we had to do it ourselves once again. So, I joined Real Organic and started working with Dave Chapman, who is my Co-Director. I had the opportunity in the first year to visit 60 farms that were part of the pilot project to create a national movement for greater organic integrity.

ARTY: With the vote that allowed hydroponics, did you see that as a point of no return in terms of working within the system of the NOSB to make changes?

LINLEY: There has never been a vote to allow hydroponics at the NOSB. They’ve just kind of done it, and the vote in 2017 to prohibit it didn’t pass. In 2010, the NOSB passed a vote to prevent hydroponics in organic and this is still the standing recommendation at the NOSB. However, allowing hydroponics in organic was a top-down decision that started even higher up than the NOSB because the industry was so big. It was driven by big brands such as Wholesome Harvest, NatureSweet, Driscoll’s, etc. Some of those brands deny that they’re growing hydroponically. There is a considerable lack of transparency behind those practices.

ARTY: I started my organic career in the ‘70s; I had a small, local, organic apple juice business in the Watsonville, CA area, home to Driscoll’s. In those days, the Pajaro Valley was full of 100-year-old, highly productive apple groves. Now if you drive through that area, it’s all hoop houses with what you are talking about—small containers with drip lines that are fertilized with soluble fertilizers. No contact with the soil, no attempts to improve soil. Most people don’t know that some organic food is being grown like that.

LINLEY: With those operations, they often first spray the ground with an herbicide and laser level the land. Then they put the plastic down–a lot of it. On top of the plastic, they place small pots for the plants, all of it under plastic hoop houses. The berries last about three to four years. None of the plastic is recyclable. The whole thing goes into the trash. The plants are pushed to maximum production and wear out quickly, whereas a blueberry plant in the ground will last 20 years. They basically start these farms over every three to four years, so the whole thing is just so wasteful, so hard on the land.

When it rains on some of the operations with hundreds of acres of plastic tunnels, all of that water gets funneled to the edges causing extreme erosion on the fields, so much so that some of the landowners in California have decided not to rent to those kinds of operations.

 There is an economic impact as well. Much of the hydroponic “organic” food is imported by large agribusinesses. The labor is so much cheaper in South America. It started in Mexico, and now they’re doing it in Peru. They’ll go to where land and labor are cheapest. Sometimes they bring their own Honduran workforce. The more you learn about this, the more outrageous it is.

With massive production they are able to control the marketplace through brokers who get retailers to sign agreements that they have to source from them year-round, so organic blueberry producers in Florida or Michigan, for example, can no longer sell into retail markets during their season. Those domestic growers are losing markets that they have had for decades.

When you look into this hydroponic issue, it just touches on so many key issues that we care about as environmentalists and food justice advocates, including plastics and environmental contamination, even pesticide use, because the NOP says that as long as these containers are on six-inch stands, you can spray the ground with herbicide and the blueberry roots won’t come in contact with it. That is not what I consider organic.

ARTY: I would like to complete the picture, at least this is what I’ve seen: raspberry plants are growing in small one-gallon pots with a minimal amount of soil to hold up the roots.

LINLEY: They don’t put the plants in compost and replenish it so that nutrients keep being added. The substrate is sometimes peat moss, and now they also use coco coir; there’s no nutrient value to these substances.

If you go down that rabbit hole, the coco coir comes from tropical islands, so it’s salty and needs to be put through a rinsing process that requires a lot of chemicals and extreme amounts of water use. No one is looking at the environmental cost of the inert media that they’re putting in these pots, which also has a horrible environmental story.

ARTY: These hydroponic pots are pretty much the antithesis of what we should be doing, given all we’re learning about the benefits of soil health, including its climate benefits and the nutritional value of the food grown in healthy soil. Beyond the hydroponic issue, what are some of the other distinctions that Real Organic has in terms of your standards compared to the NOP standards?

LINLEY: There are issues with livestock as well. The pasture rule, which requires all ruminants to be on pasture during their growing season, is not being enforced. For example, there are drought exemptions, so it’s very profitable to set up a giant, 15,000-cow dairy in the desert, apply for a drought exemption, confine the animals between milking, and bring in mixed rations to feed them. And for chicken and egg production, they can convert huge conventional barns over to organic if they just start supplying organic feed.

And there was and still is a problem with giant shiploads of supposedly organic grain coming to US ports that are found to be fraudulent, so fraudulent “organic” grain is feeding the fraudulent “organic” CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). None of it should be labeled organic, but it is. Finding a truly pastured, organic egg or chicken on a retail shelf is basically non-existent. That has driven sales of non-GMO pastured chickens in the marketplace instead of organic, and grass-fed beef, which is not defined by law. It has led to the rise of these other labels that aren’t necessarily being enforced as organic started to lose credibility.

Farmers are in a pickle because many of them depend on the organic label for their farm to operate profitably. Many of them started the organic movement and helped get the organic labeling legislation into place in the 1990s. Now that the word organic has meaning in the marketplace, what do they do? Do they talk about the problems? If they do, it could hurt their farm.

For a while, people were trying behind the scenes to reform organic, but it got to a point at which it was so far outside of the intent and values of organic farming, and attempts at reform had failed so many times that we had no choice but to start to speak up about the problems because our farms were on the line. We’re in a really difficult situation. We can’t walk away from the organic label because it still has marketplace value, and we can’t just hand it over to the industries that essentially stole it from us. And when I say “us,” I just mean the organic movement. We can’t walk away and start over with another word because all the marketplace value is held up in that word because organic family farmers have given it that reputation of integrity over time, so we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.

ARTY: Certain ethical certifiers have been threatened by USDA for following the intent of the original organic standards and not certifying CAFOs and hydroponics.

LINLEY: There is a group of certifiers that got together after that 2017 vote and decided that they were not going to certify hydroponics, even though the NOP says they can. There are ten certifiers who have signed onto an agreement titled “Organic Agriculture is Soil Based Position Statement.” They represent thousands of organic farmers. It gave us at Real Organic the ability to redirect farmers from certifiers who allow hydroponics and CAFOs to ones that do not. We should be supporting the certifiers that are in line with the vision of organic that we share.

ARTY: Have there been repercussions for the certifiers who signed on to the agreement?

LINLEY: Yes, the NOP certifies the certifiers, allowing them to inspect and certify farms according to the USDA organic standards. OneCert was the first certifier to say we won’t certify hydroponics because we think it is illegal, it doesn’t follow the organic law. Other certifiers took the position that they won’t certify those practices because they don’t have the administrative capacity. That was their way of getting around the issue and avoiding repercussions from the NOP.

But OneCert said, “We have the capacity, we just don’t believe it’s legal.” As a result, they received a non-compliance determination from the USDA NOP. It was really brave of OneCert to stand up for the integrity of organic certification. As a result of the non-compliance, OneCert formed a coalition with nine other certifiers who signed on to that “Organic Agriculture is Soil Based” agreement. Forming a coalition of ten strengthened their position and makes it harder for USDA to go after ten certifiers rather than just one, but it’s an ongoing struggle.

It’s the same reason for farmers to join the Real Organic Project. There isn’t marketplace value in the Real Organic label at this point, but we are joining forces around something that we believe in, and we are a lot more powerful together than in silos. I think it would be really stupid of the USDA to go after ten certifiers, because that would make a lot of news. It would embarrass them and it would bring more attention to the issues. It’s same reason the Real Organic Project hasn’t been sued for creating add-on standards, which technically was prohibited by NOP. They don’t want this issue to be frontpage news.

ARTY: Let’s talk about the growth of the organic industry. It is exciting that sales have grown to a $76 billion annually, but when you look behind the curtain you see that although it is 6 percent of overall food sales, it is only 1 percent of U.S. farmland.

LINLEY: The fact that 6 percent of what we consume is organic, but only 1 percent of the farmland is organic means we’re relying on a lot of foreign imports.This is a trend across agriculture in general, and I think it’s really concerning. We need to be raising awareness about the fact that 60% of our fruits and 40% of our vegetables are now imported, regardless of whether they’re organic or not.

ARTY: The impression that I got when I saw those statistics was, as you said, the growth of organic sales is coming largely from imports, not domestically grown produce. And that poses another problem: how do we ensure the organic integrity of those imports? How are they certified, and who can vouch for that certification?

LINLEY: We have an increasing problem with integrity with imports. We know that some imports have been fraudulently labeled organic and are sold below market prices which hurts organic farmers and discourages other farmers from transitioning to organic. As I mentioned, there have been a number of fraudulent grain imports. In 2017 The Washington Post ran an article about imported grain shipments titled “Millions of Pounds of Apparently Fake Organic Grains Convince the Food Industry There May be a Problem” revealing that enforcement and inspections of imported organic food is lacking.

Consumers now have many choices all of which have problems with transparency and no common or legal definition: grass-fed, non-GMO, regenerative or whatever other seal of sustainability put on food, but I believe that the fact that USDA organic is not transparent or being enforced properly and that there is a lack of integrity in the process hurts the organic movement built over many decades by people who were committed to the core values. 

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Bioneers Newsletter 8.28.25 — A Call to Action: Resisting Oligarchy, Reclaiming Democracy

The U.S. is at a crossroads. A handful of opportunistic, megalomaniacal billionaires and corporate power have flooded politics with unprecedented influence. Around the world, democratic systems are showing cracks under the pressure of rising authoritarianism, disinformation, and concentrated wealth. At the same time, the climate crisis continues to accelerate, with record-breaking heat, floods, and fires making clear that business as usual is no longer an option.

Turning this tide will require more than hope. It will require people everywhere to push back — demanding accountability, showing up for one another, and refusing to cede power to those who profit from crisis. The voices in this issue remind us that there is no time to wait. From Thom Hartmann’s warning about America’s slide toward oligarchy, to organizers reshaping civic participation, to Oren Lyons’ call to transform our values at the deepest level, the message is clear: The future of democracy and the planet depends on what we do now.

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Thom Hartmann: Can We Stop America’s Slide into Oligarchy?

Author, broadcaster, and scholar Thom Hartmann issues a stark warning: The lines between corporate power, government authority, and public “knowledge” have not just blurred — they’re vanishing. Enabled by a Supreme Court that equates political bribery with free speech, billionaires are flooding elections with money, tipping the scales away from the will of the people.

Hartmann calls this the third great assault by the ultra-wealthy on democracy in American history — and insists that the power to resist still lies with us.

Reclaiming Democracy: 7 Lessons in Civic Participation

Seventy percent of U.S. elected offices went uncontested in the 2024 elections — a stark reminder that our democracy is in crisis. But change is possible when people step up, support each other, and reimagine what leadership looks like.

In a powerful conversation, four organizers shared grounded, hopeful strategies for renewing civic life — from valuing lived experience as a qualification, to showing up for candidates, to finding common ground across deep divides.

Explore the Strategies

Oren Lyons: Transforming Our Values to Survive

As fires, floods, and droughts intensify, it’s clear that both our climate and our societies are unraveling. At the 2024 Bioneers Conference, legendary Native American rights leader Oren R. Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, reminded us that survival depends on more than technology or policy—it requires a profound shift in the values driving our world.

With a lifetime of leadership at the intersection of Indigenous sovereignty, human rights, and environmental stewardship, Lyons calls on us to honor our responsibilities to future generations and to transform the very foundations of how we live, work, and govern.

Watch the Keynote

Bioneers Learning Course Spotlight — Rights of Nature 201: Moving Campaigns Forward

Ready to move from learning to action? Join legal experts Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil on November 6 (11 AM–2 PM PT) for a three-hour live online seminar designed for activists, organizers, and community leaders already familiar with Rights of Nature principles. You’ll gain practical strategies for drafting and advancing Rights of Nature laws, explore lessons from successful campaigns, and learn how to take your movement to the next level.

Register now

Reclaiming Democracy in 2025: 7 Powerful Lessons in Civic Participation

In the November 2024 elections, 70% of U.S. elected offices went uncontested—a sobering sign of a democracy in crisis. Systemic barriers, disillusionment, and a lack of support leave entire communities underrepresented in decision-making, and current assaults on democratic norms and processes, including attempts at shameless gerrymandering, are only worsening our political crisis.  

We clearly need to reclaim our democracy, and that doesn’t just mean running for office. It means reshaping who gets to lead, how campaigns are supported, and what public service looks like. Civic participation takes many forms—from knocking on doors to crafting policy to simply showing up for someone who dares to lead. And when more people feel empowered to take part, our systems begin to shift.

At the 2025 Bioneers Conference, Civic (Re)Solve hosted a conversation with four visionary organizers and changemakers helping to reshape what civic engagement looks like in America today. Moderated by New Mexico House Majority Leader Reena Szczepanski, the panel featured:

Together, they offered a grounded, honest look at how public service really works and why it matters more than ever.

Here are seven key takeaways from their powerful exchange:

1. Lived experience is a qualification, not a liability.

“Your lived experience is experience.” – Anathea Chino

For many, running for office feels out of reach—not because they lack leadership, but because they’ve been told their story disqualifies them. Anathea Chino, co-founder of Advance Native Political Leadership, is working to rewrite that script. She’s spent two decades building pathways for Indigenous candidates to lead as their full selves.

“I often say that my existence is an act of resistance—political resistance,” Chino told the audience.

That ethos is deeply personal. Chino didn’t grow up in a political dynasty or follow a traditional policy track. She studied fashion in college, spent summers with her grandmother at Acoma Pueblo, and navigated the culture shock of splitting her youth between rural New Mexico and College Station, Texas, where her mother was earning a PhD.

“I was mostly just assimilating,” she said. “And had a very complex relationship with my identity.”

It wasn’t until she found herself organizing Native voters in the 2004 presidential campaign—without resources, infrastructure, or funding—that she realized how invisibly and systemically Indigenous communities were being excluded from political systems.

Through her work with Advance and other organizations, Chino is helping Native leaders step into public service as their full selves. She teaches that political power doesn’t require a spotless résumé or policy degree. It requires vision, accountability, and a deep connection to community.

2. You don’t have to run for office to build power.

“Anyone who’s running for office needs people around them who can support them—even if it’s just making them food or driving them to doors.” – Chloe Maxmin

Campaigns are never solo endeavors. And in rural America, where infrastructure is thin and divisions can run deep, simply showing up for a candidate or a cause can be transformative.

Chloe Maxmin knows this better than most. She grew up in a small town in rural Maine, surrounded by people whose values didn’t always align with her own. But what she saw was not polarization—it was potential. In 2018, she ran for state House in a district with a 16-point Republican advantage and won. In 2020, she took on the highest-ranking Republican in the Maine Senate and won again. The reason? Relationship-building. Long conversations. Knocking on doors—not to debate, but to listen.

“Everything about engaging rural communities just looks different,” she told the audience. “You don’t have any volunteers, there’s no organizing infrastructure… You go up to a house, and if someone asks: Are you a Democrat? And you say yes, they shut the door in your face.”

Maxmin’s organizing philosophy centers on care: not just strategic outreach, but deep emotional and relational investment. Through Dirtroad Organizing, the group she co-founded with campaign manager and longtime friend Canyon Woodward, she now trains others to build campaigns rooted in trust, especially in conservative or “unwinnable” districts.

But her message isn’t just for candidates. It’s for everyone. Campaigns, she emphasized, don’t survive on charisma or policy platforms alone. They run on snacks, rides, hugs, childcare, encouragement, spreadsheets, and shared vision.

“They don’t always know what kind of help they need,” she added. “So just showing up and being supportive is so, so huge.”

If we want more representative leadership, Maxmin argued, we have to make it more possible. That means building a culture of support around candidates—especially first-timers, working-class folks, and those from historically excluded communities. You don’t have to run to be part of the movement. Sometimes, driving someone to knock on their last door of the night is the movement.

3. Civic engagement starts with listening.

“If you don’t know how to act on your passion, then chances are you don’t know enough about the issue yet.” – Elizabeth Rosen

Elizabeth Rosen has worn many hats: archaeologist-in-training, foreign policy advocate, ski instructor, pizza delivery driver—and now, communications director for Future Caucus, the largest nonpartisan network of Millennial and Gen Z legislators in the U.S. Her path into public service wasn’t a straight line, and that’s exactly what informs her approach to civic life: start where you are, and let curiosity guide you.

At the panel, Rosen pushed back against the idea that passion alone is enough to create change. While the desire to help is powerful, acting without understanding the full landscape can do more harm than good. Instead, she urged emerging changemakers to slow down, study the systems, and listen first.

“This is a really big, daunting question—how do I make change? Break it into smaller steps,” she advised. “Read up. Learn who the players are. Figure out what’s been tried before.”

Her advice applies across the board, whether you’re preparing to run for office or just trying to make a difference in your community. What city council district are you in? Who represents you at the state level? What organizations are already doing the work you care about, and how could you support them before starting something new?

That grounded, inquisitive approach is at the heart of Rosen’s work with young lawmakers across the country. Many of them arrive in office full of drive and vision but quickly realize how complex the political process can be. Future Caucus exists to provide connection, mentorship, and space for growth—tools that are just as important outside elected office as within it.

“There’s certainly no instant gratification in this work,” she said. “But information is very, very powerful.”

4. Reimagining public service means revaluing public servants.

“The hardest working people I’ve ever been in the trenches with are the folks in government.” – Caitlin Lewis

Caitlin Lewis has worked in just about every corner of the civic ecosystem, from New York City Hall to the USDA to the nonprofit sector. Today, she leads Work for America, a nonprofit working to make public service a more desirable, accessible, and stable career path. At the panel, she was clear: We can’t fix democracy without rebuilding the public workforce, and that starts with how we value the people who keep our government running.

Popular narratives about “bureaucracy” tend to flatten public servants into caricatures: slow, inefficient, faceless. Lewis sees something entirely different.

“I’ve worked in startups. Now I’m at a nonprofit. The hardest working people I’ve ever been in the trenches with are the folks in government,” she said. “They’re dynamic, quick-witted, fast-moving. And they’re doing billion-dollar work with zero discretionary capital.”

She recalled managing multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects while working for the City of New York, where the only tools available were grit, soft power, and the ability to organize across departments. No flashy tech platforms, no corporate marketing budgets—just people solving problems with whatever they had.

And yet, these roles are undervalued in almost every way. From 911 operators to transit planners to health department staff, vacancies are widespread, burnout is high, and wages often don’t match the responsibility or impact. Her organization has tracked the fallout: unanswered emergency calls, failing water systems, and backlogged food assistance.

“When you don’t have the right people in the right roles in government,” she warned, “the basics start to fall apart.”

To change that, Work for America is working to shift public perception and public policy around government work. They’ve launched programs like Civic Match, which connects displaced federal workers to state and local roles, helping them stay in public service even after being pushed out by political shifts.

For Lewis, reimagining government isn’t just about electing new leaders. It’s about rebuilding a culture that respects, supports, and invests in the public servants who already show up every day for their communities.

5. Joy and belonging are forms of resistance.

“Joy is an act of resistance.” – Anathea Chino

In political work—especially for communities historically excluded from power—joy isn’t a luxury. It’s a survival strategy. Too often, civic life demands seriousness and stoicism. But as Chino reminded the audience, healing, laughter, and cultural connection are just as vital to movement-building as strategy and structure.

At a recent leadership training, she recalled the space being filled not just with hard conversations—but with deep, echoing laughter. That kind of joy, she said, isn’t incidental. It’s intentional. It builds resilience, fosters belonging, and affirms a different model of leadership—one rooted in relationship rather than hierarchy.

“There’s something so warm in creating circles of exquisite belonging,” she reflected, quoting poet and keynote speaker Joy Harjo.

Creating those circles isn’t stepping away from the work—it is the work. It’s how communities stay grounded in hope, even while confronting systems built to exhaust them.

6. Common ground can’t be forced, but it can be found.

“We don’t ask people to live in the middle. We just ask them to meet there once in a while.” – Elizabeth Rosen

Polarization may dominate headlines, but cooperation still happens, especially at the state level. Elizabeth Rosen shared how young lawmakers in Future Caucus are building unlikely coalitions by starting from connection, not division.

“If you set the tone for a relationship on something shared, something positive—if you give lawmakers the chance to see each other as whole people, not just adversaries—it lays the groundwork for something more productive.”

She shared a story that encapsulated that ethos. In Arkansas, two state representatives—Ashley Hudson, a Democrat, and Aaron Pilkington, a Republican—began talking at a Future Caucus event. While their views on abortion rights couldn’t be more different, they discovered they shared deep concerns about maternal health access in their state. Instead of focusing on their divisions, they found a narrow but meaningful overlap—and used it to co-sponsor legislation.

Together, they pushed forward policies like making remote prenatal visits eligible for Medicaid reimbursement, expanding support for pregnant students, and broadening access to postnatal care. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t solve every problem. But it made life better for some people in their state, and that mattered.

“They’re not trying to make everyone happy,” Rosen said. “They’re trying to serve their constituents by finding the point on the Venn diagram where they agree.”

7. The next generation is stepping up.

“There’s this narrative of apathy among young people, and the numbers do not bear that story out.” – Elizabeth Rosen

For years, young people have been cast as politically disengaged—more likely to protest than to vote, more likely to criticize than to serve. But the panelists challenged that assumption head-on, offering not just anecdotes but hard data to prove that a generational shift in civic engagement is already underway.

Elizabeth Rosen pointed to Future Caucus’ recent On the Rise report, which tracked a 79% increase in Millennials running for Congress between 2020 and 2024. Beyond federal races, young people are stepping into leadership at the state and local level, where policy change often happens faster and closer to home.

These aren’t performative bids for influence. They’re responses to real-world urgency: the climate crisis, racial injustice, collapsing public infrastructure, and rising authoritarianism. For many Gen Z and Millennial leaders, public service isn’t just a career path, it’s a survival strategy.

Caitlin Lewis shared a similar trend in the civil service space. Through her organization’s Civic Match program, she’s helped connect thousands of displaced federal workers with roles in local and state government. One striking stat: nearly 88% of program participants said they were “very likely or almost certain” to stay in public service, despite having been pushed out during administration transitions.

“These are folks who were serving for the greater good—not for one politician or party,” Lewis said. “And they want to keep doing that work.”

Taken together, these trends reveal something powerful: young leaders are entering the arena. What they need isn’t convincing. They need support—mentorship, infrastructure, fair compensation, and space to lead in new ways.

The narrative isn’t apathy. It’s momentum.

Supreme Oligarchy: How Billionaires and the Supreme Court are Betraying the Promise of America

Author, broadcaster and scholar Thom Hartmann warns of the existential threat of a virulent new oligarchy: the third frontal assault by the ultra-wealthy in American history to use their concentrated economic power to seize maximum political power – and overthrow democracy once and for all.

Featuring

Thom Hartmann, a best-selling author who has written or contributed to over 50 books. Hartmann has been the #1 progressive talk show host in America for more than a decade and has co-written and been featured in 6 documentaries. 

Credits

  • Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
  • Written by: Kenny Ausubel
  • Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
  • Associate Producer: Emily Harris
  • Producer: Teo Grossman
  • Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey

Resources

Thom Hartmann – Supreme Oligarchy at the Gates | Bioneers 2025 Keynote

Thom Hartmann – All Life Is Organized Around Democracy | Bioneers 2020 Keynote

Democracy v. Plutocracy: Behind Every Great Fortune Lies a Great Crime | Bioneers Podcast

Kenny Ausubel – Hostile Takeover | Bioneers 2025 Keynote

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): The fast-forward crumbling of American democracy didn’t happen overnight. The current wave of oligarchy was deliberately seeded in the 1970s. It comes in the historical wake of two previous swells in the concentration of political power by the wealthy that almost overcame the nation.

But the current wave is decidedly different. It’s a post-modern coalition of strange bedfellows loosely representing what arch-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel calls “anarcho-capitalism”: capitalism without democracy.

At their most extreme, anarcho-capitalists have advocated that constitutions be replaced by contracts. People are no longer citizens of a place, but clients of a menu of corporate service providers. All services are purchased through the market, without a social safety net.

The endgame is to install corporate governance and techno-monarchy as the system for a society that operates on terms and conditions – not on democratic rights and obligations. White supremacy and patriarchy are features, not bugs, of anarcho-capitalism.

Thom Hartmann has long chronicled the peaks and valleys of American oligarchy. As North America’s leading progressive syndicated talk show host with a listenership of over 6 million, he has written or contributed to over 50 books. His Hidden History book series provides concise primers on topics including oligarchy and the Supreme Court.

As a scholar of American history, Hartmann points out that what’s old is new again. He spoke at a Bioneers conference…

Thom Hartmann speaking at a Bioneers 2025 panel. Credit: Jess Goss

Thom Hartmann (TH): And so basically what happened was from 1815 to 1850, the entire South turned into an oligarchy. The cotton gin, one machine, could do the work of 50 enslaved people cleaning cotton, which was the most time-consuming part of the cotton process. They were also very expensive, these machines. So only the biggest plantations could buy them. And when they bought them, they could produce cotton at one-fiftieth of the price of the smaller farms and whatnot.

There was a handful of families, about 1,000 families across the South, who ended up controlling the entire political and economic life of everybody in the South. And even if you were white, if you defied them, you would get lynched. The elections had become a joke by the mid-1840s. And political opposition was absolutely not tolerated.

And then they declare war on us, on America, because, you know, we were talking about maybe that’s not such a good idea, not having a democracy down there. So that was the first collapse of an oligarchy.

Host: The second wave of American oligarchy arose after the Civil War with the political attack on Reconstruction, which enabled the resurgence of the Southern oligarchs. Concurrently, the onset of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the colossal new fortunes of the Robber Barons.

TH: In 1876 you had the Tilden Hayes election, where Sam Tilden actually won the popular vote and won the Electoral College vote. But Rutherford B. Hayes became president. How did he become president?

They basically had three states – Oregon, Florida, and I think Georgia; there were three states anyway. Oregon was controlled by the Klan at the time, and the other two states, you know, this was post-Civil War—and these three states submitted two sets of electors, one for Hayes and one for Tilden. The Tilden ones were the legitimate ones, but Congress cut a deal, the Republicans in Congress and the Democrats cut a deal where they would end reconstruction, stab black people in the back, in exchange for making Hayes president. And that began the rise of a second big phase of oligarchy in the United States, which was through the Industrial Revolution.

Political cartoon from the Tilden Hayes election. Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly 1876

We started pushing back on that with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Teddy Roosevelt got the Inheritance Tax passed, he got the Tillman Act that outlawed federal donations to campaigns. And it made it a felony for any corporation, or any lawyer for any corporation, or any lobbyist for any corporation, or any executive in any corporation to give any money or anything of value to any candidate for federal office. Period. And so there was a small challenge against the rich, but they still had enormous power.

And when Warren Harding was elected in 1920, he had two slogans. One was “more business in government, less government in business”, which meant privatize and deregulate in today’s language. And his second one was “a return to normalcy”, which meant drop the top income tax rate from the 90 percent Woodrow Wilson had set it at down to 25 percent. He did both those things, and that led right straight to the great crash in 1929, and what was referred to up until the 1950s as the Republican Great Depression.

Big business had been riding high all this time, you know, from the start of the Republic until 1930, really, 1933. But the Republican Great Depression was such a shock, one-third of America was out of work. People were literally starving. The leading cause of death among older people was hypothermia in the winter and hunger in the summer. America was experiencing a full-blown crisis, and everybody was blaming business for it, because they knew the business speculators had caused this. It was no secret.

And then Franklin Roosevelt went after them, particularly after they tried to kidnap and assassinate him in 1933.

Host: This so-called “Wall Street Putsch” is seldom covered in U.S. history books. Marine Major General Smedley Butler, who would become the most decorated Marine in American history, alleged a coup by a shadowy corporate cabal to overthrow FDR. According to General Butler, J.P. Morgan, Irènee DuPont and other oligarchs approached him with a proposal. They had amassed a stockpile of weapons and the equivalent of $5 billion dollars to bankroll a coup d’etat. They wanted the General to lead an army of veterans and replace FDR.

Roosevelt was the target because he’d been working valiantly to save capitalism from itself by passing popular New Deal reforms such as social security, unemployment insurance, and the right to unionize.

But the oligarchs were even more horrified when FDR set his sights squarely on the real villain: concentrated wealth. He secured passage of the Securities Act to regulate the scam-ridden trading on Wall Street. The Glass Steagall and Securities Exchange Acts established the FDIC to protect people’s bank accounts and bar banks from engaging in out-of-control stock manipulations and speculative investments like the ones that caused the Great Depression in the first place. The corporate cabal hoped to reverse all these laws and programs by installing its own hand-picked President.

Instead, General Smedley blew the whistle and exposed them at a Congressional hearing in 1934.

Smedley Butler: I appeared before the Congressional committee to tell what I knew of activities which I believed might lead to an attempt to set up a fascist dictatorship. 

The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000 men, which would be able to take over the functions of government. My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institutions. I want to retain the right to vote. The right to speak freely and the right to write. If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe. No dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech and press.

TH: It was never clear whether he was supposed to be assassinated or simply kidnapped, but they were going to remove him from the White House and replace him with a good Republican who would restore democracy, because Roosevelt was acting like a dictator passing all these laws that nobody really wanted. And, you know, it got exposed. Smedley Butler blew the whistle. It was a two-week story in the papers. Congress tried to investigate it. Roosevelt shut down the investigation because he didn’t want people to get ideas, basically; he didn’t want it to go any farther. So Roosevelt started calling these people “economic royalists”, and he started just going after them. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt: These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance and our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. 

TH: FDR was taking it to them. And so what happened was the economic royalists said screw this stuff, we’re just going to go back to making money. And so, basically, all the big businesspeople just checked out of politics for two generations, you know, from the ‘30s right up until the ‘70s.

Host: That economic interval from the ’30 to the ‘70s saw the creation of a flourishing American middle class accompanied by a significant reduction in economic and social inequality. Yet despite some real gains, Black Americans, other people of color and women remained far from equal. Soon came the explosive social and political revolutions of the 1960s for civil rights, racial justice, feminism, worker’s rights, and environmentalism.

By the mid- ‘60s, the public view of big business had hit rock bottom. Predictably, an oligarchic backlash began to take shape.

TH: If you look at the period of time from the 1930s until the 70s, late 1970s, we got a hell of a lot done, and it was the stuff that people wanted done. People wanted unemployment insurance. People wanted the right to unionize. People wanted Medicare. People wanted Social Security. People wanted the government building low-income housing. People wanted the government upgrading our infrastructure, our roads and bridges and things. People wanted a national railroad system, you know, like Amtrak. And people wanted the Civil Rights Act. People wanted everybody to be able to participate in our politics. People wanted the Voting Rights Act. We wanted all those things, and we got all those things. I mean, when you think about it, that period was really an astonishing period in American history, how much we got done.

And then in 1971, this tobacco lawyer from Virginia, very soft-spoken man, Lewis Powell, big corporate lawyer. Right? He wrote this memo to his best friend who was the leader of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that said we’ve seen this steady rise of basically Communism since FDR became president, and it is not stopping – and many argue that the thing that really set him off was the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

So, what Powell said was we need to take over the courts; we need to take over the educational institutions, particularly the colleges, seize the legislature; and we need to build our own media. It was a blueprint, the Powell Memo, 1971. You can read it, it’s online.

That was when business decided we’re going to wake the hell up. And so what happened was throughout the ‘70s, the children of Fred Koch, and others, other right-wing billionaires, decided, cool, let’s do this. And so they built the Heritage Foundation, and they built the Mercatus Institute, and they built the Cato Institute, and they built the American Legislative Exchange Council, and they built 50 state policy centers, one in every state. And they started buying media, buying radio and television stations, buying newspapers, just built this huge right-wing infrastructure through the ‘70s.

Host: Over these 50 years, the right-wing oligarchy systematically built the infrastructure that would fulfill Lewis Powell’s vision. Big business rebranded itself as the Statue of Liberty of so-called “free enterprise.” It falsely conflated unfettered capitalism with personal liberty and democracy. It was a clarion call to roll back the gains of the New Deal and the 1960’s social revolutions – and to regain the political supremacy of capital.

When we return, how today’s insatiable oligarchs and the Supreme Court have masterminded a power grab to reprogram the best government money can buy for capitalism without democracy.

Host: In 1972, one year after Powell penned his memo, President Nixon quietly appointed him to the Supreme Court before the public was aware of his memo or his secretive agenda. Powell knew that control of the Supreme Court was the golden key to lock supreme oligarchy into law.

The secret sauce was money, money, money.

Again, Thom Hartmann.

TH: In 1976, William F. Buckley, the guy who published the National Review, his brother was running for the United States Senate—and the Buckley family is very wealthy, or was; they’re both passed away now. And his brother wanted to fund his own campaign, but the campaign finance laws said you couldn’t do that; there were campaign finance limits. The specific one that he was objecting to was in response to the Nixon bribery scandals and everything that was going on there that limited campaign donations to $2,000 or $3,000 per person. So, he sued and took it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And a group of Republicans on the Supreme Court decided, for the first time in American history, out of thin air—you will not find this anywhere in the Constitution—that when somebody spends money on a political campaign, they’re buying advertising, that advertising is putting their voice on the air, therefore, that money is a proxy for their voice, therefore, that money is protected by the First Amendment as free speech. This decision was called Buckley vs. Vallejo, and that was the first chink in the wall. Now it didn’t just blow the doors open to everybody’s money, it just let rich people finance their own elections.

That was followed two years later by a far more egregious Supreme Court decision, First National Bank vs. Bellotti. There was a law in Massachusetts that said that if you were a corporation, you could not give money to political campaigns unless they directly affected your business. And the First National Bank of Boston decided that they wanted to help fund a campaign around a politician who was supporting the end of abortion in the United States. This was right after Roe v Wade. And so they contributed money into this. So the attorney general of Massachusetts, Frank Bellotti, sued them. First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti went to the Supreme Court. Lewis Powell actually wrote this decision. Nixon put him on the Supreme Court in ‘72.

And five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court said that not only is money speech, but corporations are also persons. Now this had been intimated back in 1886 in a case that I actually wrote a book about called Unequal Protection, Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. But in fact, the court never decided that; they never ruled that. It was simply put into the headnote by the clerk of the court. With the Bellotti case, the Supreme Court said this is absolutely the case. Corporations have rights under the Bill of Rights.

Thom Hartmann speaking at Bioneers 2025. Credit: Nikki Ritcher

And over the next decade or so we saw a couple of things happen. First off, Ronald Reagan washed into the White House on a tsunami of oil industry money in 1980. The Supreme Court ruled that – I believe it was DuPont, it was one of the big chemical companies – they had been emitting, illegally emitting, benzene, and they’d been doing it through the roof, thinking that they were getting really slick, nobody would catch them. And so the EPA flew an airplane over their roof with a benzene sensor and busted them. They sued. The Supreme Court said, oh no, you can’t do that EPA, DuPont has—or whatever the company was—Fourth Amendment rights of privacy because they’re a person.

Corporations were no longer being forced to testify about their own crimes in court because they had Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination. Corporations could now advertise, they could throw money at politicians, all these sort of things. So this, then, began the really serious money corruption of politics in the United States, these two decisions and the Reagan revolution.

From there, we fast forward to 2010, Citizens United, and the Supreme Court ruled that it’s not just rich people who can throw money into campaigns, in fact, we’re going to blow up virtually all campaign limits by creating Super PACs. There are still campaign limits. You can only give a certain amount of money to an individual candidate, but you can give a billion dollars to their Super PAC.

Host: The Supreme Court didn’t always have this kind of power. From the very beginnings of the Republic, the government was structured to have so-called checks and balances among what were designed to be three co-equal branches of government.

At the heart of the power grab is a controversial doctrine called “judicial review.” It asserts that the Supreme Court can pass judgement on constitutional issues and override laws passed by Congress. It appears nowhere in the Constitution, and it was a fierce debate that confounded the Founders. From the outset, they were deeply concerned about the co-equal role of the Court.

TH: Back when the Supreme Court was literally being created, when the Constitution had been written in 1787, and they were selling the thing—Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote a series of papers called the Federalist Papers as a sales pitch for the Constitution. People were concerned about the Supreme Court having too much power—he said “in the first place there’s not a syllable in the plan under consideration, the Constitution, which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution, or which gives them greater latitude in this respect and may be claimed by the courts of any state.”

So here’s Hamilton saying, no, the Supreme Court can’t do that; don’t worry. And in fact, the Supreme Court is subordinate to Congress. This is Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution, which is our law right now. “The Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction”—in other words, it’s the final court of appeals, “both as to law and effect—with such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make”.

Sounded good. You know? We’re going to have the courts as the final court of appeals, Congress, you know,  has some control over this; yes, we can have voices if things are out of control. I’m not completely opposed to judicial review, and neither, frankly, was Hamilton. In fact, in other places in Federalist Papers he argued for judicial review.

But in 1803, the Supreme Court, in a decision called Marbury vs. Madison, without the whole long background description, ruled that they could strike down laws that had been passed by Congress, which was kind of the beginning of this process. And it wasn’t entirely unreasonable.

Inscription on the wall of the United States Supreme Court Building. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

But Thomas Jefferson, who was president in 1803, went absolutely nuts. He wrote a letter to his old friend Judge Spencer Roane of the son-in-law Patrick Henry. He said “if this opinion be sound, then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de se,” which is Latin for suicide pact, “for intending to establish three departments coordinate and independent that they might check and balance one another, given according to this opinion that one of them alone the right to prescribe for the government of the others, and that too which is unelected by the nation is that the Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of a wax in the hands of the judiciary, which may twist or shape it in any form they please. My construction of the Constitution is very different from that, you quote. Each department is truly independent of the others and has an equal right for itself. What is the meaning of the Constitution? And a judiciary independent of a king or executive alone is a good thing, but independent of the will of the nation is a solecism, a blunder, at least in a Republican government.” But it stood. It stood.

But there was such a blowback in 1803 to this that the next time the Supreme Court actually ruled based on the Constitution was long after Jefferson was dead. It was 1856, and the decision was Dred Scott, which ruled that all across America,, including the North, Black people could be claimed as property by white people; that they had no rights of citizenship. If ever there was an example of the insanity of this decision, which led us straight to the Civil War.

So really, from that period of time up until arguably the 1940s, 1950s, very rarely did the Supreme Court strike down laws based on the Constitution. Very rarely did they create things out of whole cloth saying they were doing it under the Constitution. But they really started doing this aggressively after the Reagan revolution. Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice, was one of the real leaders of this.

And this is what led us to this series of decisions in 1976. ‘78, 2010, and then McCutcheon in 2013, that said that unlimited money, no problem. They said that they found this in the Constitution. There is literally not one single word in the Constitution that says this.

I mean, the simple reality is there’s a whole long list of things that most Americans want—solidifying Social Security; expanding Medicare and Medicaid; building good, high-quality public schools; free college education for everybody; a national healthcare system that works. All of these things poll 70/80 percent. And yet we don’t have them. Why don’t we have them? Because of big money. Why does big money have that kind of power? Because of these Supreme Court decisions.

Host: By 2025, the once favorable public view of the Supreme Court had plummeted to the lowest in history. It was mocked as the best court money could buy. The Court’s constitutionally rogue behavior highlighted its flagrant abuses of the made-up doctrine of judicial review.

Fifty years after the Powell memo, the Funding Fathers had captured the Court to reprogram the nation for capitalism without democracy – aka oligarchy.

Yet at the same time, the prominent legislators Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were attracting record-shattering crowds of 30,000 trans-partisan citizens to their “Fight the Oligarchy” national tour. The word “oligarchy” entered the national conversation.

As the United States approached the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the Republic faced a reckoning in the throes of a hostile takeover by the same kinds of imperial monarchs and oligarchs the rebels once fought to overthrow.

The question, says Thom Hartmann, is whether sufficient forces in the country will mobilize to defeat this supreme oligarchy and reclaim democracy.

TH: We need to show up. We need to stand up. We need to speak out. We need to get on social media and absolutely raise hell, even though the algorithms are against us. Right? Social media-owned by billionaires also, because we’re not enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act anymore. I mean, the insanity that we are facing as a consequence of these four decisions by five Republicans on the Supreme Court in every case is absolutely overwhelming, and we’ve got to defeat it. So please, get active. Thank you so much. [APPLAUSE]

Host: Thom Hartmann, “Supreme Oligarchy: How Billionaires and the Supreme Court are Betraying the Promise of America”.

Bioneers Newsletter 8.14.25 — 20 Years After Katrina: Still Rising, Still Resisting

Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina exposed the fault lines of American society: racial injustice, environmental neglect, economic abandonment, and government failure. It wasn’t just a natural disaster. It was a political one. And for many in the Gulf South, the aftermath never ended.

The hard truth is, the vulnerabilities Katrina revealed have never gone away. Recent cuts to FEMA, alongside the rising frequency and severity of climate-driven disasters, show how easily the failures of 2005 could be repeated. Without real investment in preparedness and equity, the next crisis will leave the same communities to bear the heaviest burdens.

But from the devastation of Katrina, a movement took root. One grounded in resistance, reclamation, and the radical act of staying—of returning, rebuilding, and reimagining what justice can look like in the face of ongoing crisis. In this issue, we reflect on the legacy of Katrina and uplift the organizers, leaders, and communities still fighting for a future defined not by survival alone, but by dignity, self-determination, and repair. From Colette Pichon Battle’s call for expansive climate justice to on-the-ground actions led by a coalition of local leaders and organizations, this anniversary is not just a moment of remembrance—it’s a renewed call to mobilize.

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Colette Pichon Battle on the 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
Reflecting on the Past, Mobilizing for the Future

In the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf South, environmental justice leader Colette Pichon Battle has remained a fierce advocate for the communities it left behind. Born and raised in Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, Colette speaks powerfully to the racism, systemic neglect, and environmental mismanagement Katrina exposed—and the hard-earned lessons it continues to teach.

As the anniversary approaches, Colette calls for a more expansive, intersectional movement that recognizes the deep links between climate, gender, migration, and human rights. Only by addressing the root causes of injustice, she argues, can we reimagine a just and sustainable future.

Katrina 20: How You Can Get Involved

Two decades later, the movement sparked by Hurricane Katrina is still growing, The Katrina 20 Week of Action (Aug. 24–31) is a chance to deepen our solidarity, uplift frontline voices, and take meaningful steps toward climate justice. Led by Taproot Earth and partners across the Gulf South, this year’s commemoration is rooted in resistance, repair, and the right to remain, return, and thrive.

Here’s how you can take action:

  • Ride in Solidarity: Join the Katrina 20: Impact Ride from anywhere by walking, biking, kayaking, or rolling 7 miles in solidarity with Gulf South communities. This symbolic distance reflects the storm’s 144-mile path divided by 20. #RideTheStorm
  • Attend an Event:
    • In New Orleans: Join the Monarch Forum (Aug. 25–26), a two-day public convening on climate migration, cultural resilience, and human rights.
    • In Gulfport, MS: The JTLN Fortify Clinic (Aug. 28) offers legal and financial resources for frontline organizers.
  • Spread the Word: Share stories, join conversations, and amplify the ongoing fight for climate justice using #Katrina20 and #RideTheStorm.

Explore all events and actions at Taproot Earth

More Resources: Resilience, Policy, and Local Action

For those looking to dig deeper into how communities are building resilience and advancing climate justice in the face of systemic challenges, these resources offer in-depth analysis and actionable strategies:

These resources are especially valuable for policymakers, planners, advocates, and funders working to align local action with long-term climate justice goals.

Bioneers Learning Course Spotlight — Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse

How can we create change that heals, not harms? In this four-week live course, activist and author Kazu Haga brings together nonviolent action, trauma healing, and spiritual practice to help us transform social movements from the inside out. Learn tools for building connection-based activism and responding to injustice with both courage and care.

Register now

Stewarding a Regenerative Future with Tree-Range Farming 

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin grew up in extreme poverty in the northern rainforest of Guatemala during Guatemala’s brutal decades-long civil war. Shaped by those experiences, he has committed his life to alleviating the conditions that cause suffering by employing his entrepreneurial spirit and regenerative vision to restructure the food system. His vision of regeneration goes beyond merely following a set of practices; it expands the way we view the role of farmers and how we design livestock systems so they are humane and harmonious with the essence of animals’ intrinsic natures.

Reginaldo is the founder of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance and co-founder and CEO of Tree-Range Farms where he has designed a regenerative poultry operation based on the environmental conditions that poultry had evolved in prior to domestication. In 2018, he was awarded a lifetime Ashoka Fellowship for his work, and he is the author of “In the Shadow of Green Man: My Journey from Poverty and Hunger to Food Security and Hope.”

This article is an edited version of the transcript of a Bioneers Conference presentation by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin.

REGINALDO HASLETT-MARROQUIN: I grew up in extreme poverty, but up to now, my only source of true wealth has come from those conditions that others called poverty. I have always felt like one of the wealthiest people on the planet, not in the way we typically understand wealth, but from the perspective that I am living to the optimal potential that the evolutionary blueprint of the Earth gave me to live with. All the money in the world won’t do that for you. It can only be done from within.

I was raised to think beyond immediate concerns. One of the fascinating things that that does to your mind is that you learn to see things as a whole and think about systems, so I’m not thinking just about a farm or raising chickens. Those are not systems.

The Concentration of the Global Food System

The global food system’s annual sales are somewhere around 10 trillion dollars. At the top there are a small number of corporations that have a controlling share of their sector. Tyson Foods alone controls 75 percent of the poultry sales in this country. Four companies control 75%-90 % of global grain sales. How the heck did we get here? We got here because we gave up ownership, control, and governance of the most important things in our planetary survival system—food and water.

Leaving Guatemala and coming to the U.S., I encountered a massive-scale food system. I studied it thoroughly and looked at every sector: meat in general–beef, pork, poultry– grain, fruits, vegetables, etc. They all exist within a very large pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is a mass accumulation of ownership and control. If you’re going to change a system like that, you have to go back many thousands of years of human history to understand what has worked and what hasn’t. We have to start by going back to the planet’s biophysical and chemical processes that for billions of years have been regenerating and developing life.

Regeneration is How the Planet Operates

It wasn’t Robert Rodale or anyone else who came up with the idea of regeneration. Regeneration is the natural condition of the planet. It’s not merely about practices on the land; it has to do with the whole planet and its ecosystems and micro-climates. To understand regeneration, we need to develop a deep relationship with life and living systems. We have to understand that we don’t just work with nature, we are part of nature. We’re living creatures made out of the elements of the Earth. We are indigenous to the Earth.

There is no one who is not Indigenous to the planet. In saying that, I am making a distinction between being native to a territory and being indigenous to planet Earth.

That is the starting point for regenerative systems thinking. We don’t start with practices on how to farm or raise chickens, though my story happens to be centered on the chicken which are the descendants of jungle fowl. How did I approach raising chickens through the lens of nature’s processes? I placed photosynthesis at the center of the design. Photosynthesis is the primary process of life on our planet in which cosmic energy is turned into very complicated outputs, most importantly glucose, which is considered the molecule of life. Out of that come hundreds and hundreds of carbon-based chains. Life on the planet is made of carbon. That’s the way we should understand carbon, not as a commodity that is traded and offset. Commodifying carbon is actually a form of colonization.

Decoding Nature’s Processes into Farming Practices

The outputs of the photosynthetic process are grasses, leaves, twigs, fruits, vegetables, etc. that are in turn ingested by animals which includes people. That collective chewing process and digestion by animals can be understood as the planet’s digestive tract. The analogy is that each individual is equivalent to one of the trillions of bacteria in our guts.

Energy transformation takes place in three basic layers. First, photosynthesis builds the structure of vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, etc. Then, animals are nourished by those outputs of photosynthesis; that’s the second layer of  the mass-scale transformation of energy. The third layer occurs when animal waste breaks down and feeds the microbiological systems. Those are three places that we can codify the processes of regeneration that have been ongoing for billions of years.

Understanding that permits us to start codifying those processes of nature into farming practices. That understanding is critical to, in our case, producing chickens regeneratively, but I want to be clear: there is no such thing as a regenerative product; there is only the regeneration of systems that deliver energy in expressions and forms assembled in a way that we can harvest as food. But we don’t produce them. We merely take care of a process by which energy went from non-edible to something we can harvest, trade, market and eat.

This is how we approach the process. Of all of the options for animal operations, I believe that we have found one that has the most social and economic alignment with the small global farmers who, according to the U.N., grow 70 percent of the world’s food. There are over 700 million farms that operate with less than 25 hectares. Every one of them can raise poultry. Most of them can’t raise other animals in a way that regenerates ecosystems. That’s why we picked chickens.

If you want to do something regeneratively, ask the species. Ask the oats, ask the trees, ask the chickens. Ask and listen and learn so you can acquire the right knowledge to do things with the Indigenous intellect as opposed to what we have been forced to memorize during the process of domestication that we call education. We have to un-domesticate ourselves and decolonize our minds and our methodology.

We looked to the jungle fowl–ancestors of the domesticated chicken. Jungle fowl and their chicken descendants don’t like to be out in the open where they are vulnerable to predators and where there is too much sun. They are naturally drawn to trees for shade and protection, so if my goal is to use that ancestral blueprint to design a system that will optimize energy transformation, then I have to plant trees. I live in Minnesota, where, as in many other regions in the US,hazelnuts, elderberry, and other similar species thrive.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, chickens and hazelnut trees had a gathering, and discussed their symbiotic relationship. Hazelnut said: “I need a lot of nitrogen to produce nuts.” And the chicken said: “When the hawks and eagles come around, I need a place for protection,” so the hazelnut said: “Unlike our European cousins that created trunks and became trees, we are going to grow like shrubs. We’ll be multi-layered so that we can create 100 percent cover and nothing can see you.”

Hazelnut trees can take up 350 to 400 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Their roots can travel seven-and-a-half feet in every direction. They grow 12-feet high and 12-feet wide, creating a mass-scale network for capturing energy and transforming it into superb nutrient-dense food.

We now have layers of energy transformation. We are learning from the species. We know how to take that information and codify it into agronomical processes, protocols and specifications such as the right density of animals on the land we have. We can figure out how much nitrogen will concentrate in certain areas and then determine how we can spread out the chickens to distribute the nitrogen more evenly so there is no excess runoff and contamination of the groundwater.

We are harvesting the energy–hazelnuts, elderberries, meat, eggs, timber, and non-timber forest products such as mushrooms. Some of the energy, such as the manure and chicken feathers, is not edible. We put those through a process of bio-decomposition that makes super fertilizers that go back into the grain, vegetable, medicinal herb, and agroforestry productions in a circular system.

Building a Model to Scale up for Systems Change

Using an energy-based formula to calculate that circularity, we estimate that on average, we only harvest between 30 to 40 percent of the total energy of the system. The other 60 to 70 percent accumulates in the ecosystem. We call that the regenerative factor. But building just one farm unit, or what we refer to as a “poultry-centered regenerative system,” is not sufficient. If you want to achieve a system level outcome, you’ve got to start thinking bigger than that, so we launched a nonprofit called the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance. We are developing curriculum, coordinating training, and developing teams to do research. All of that allows us to share the model and to contribute to building a regenerative, equitable, and socially just agriculture sector. We are focused on scaling up a systems-level regenerative poultry solution that restores ecological balance, produces nourishing food, and puts money back into the hands of farmers and food chain workers.

And with the nonprofit in place, we were able to buy a poultry processing facility in Iowa and to launch the Tree-Range Chicken brand, which you can now buy anywhere in the country. We also launched a transportation company that takes the chickens from the farms to the processing plant, and we are about to make a decision on whether to build our own freezing facility. We have entered into partnership with the state. They will finance the development of the concept for an industrial park.

With all of these components, we can start playing a little bit of music and directing the orchestra. As more chickens are produced and consumed under this regenerative system based on the ancestral blueprint of the habitat and lifeways of jungle fowl, more farmers on more acreage get involved, more of this regenerative ecosystem is formed, and change is happening faster. We are beginning to take back ownership, control and governance of at least one agricultural sector.

We don’t have to create profit in the way that the colonizing, extractive mind understands it, in which someone gains and someone loses. In the context of the Indigenous way of thinking, profit includes quality of life and regeneration, being part of a community, and having good food and shelter that was paid for as part of the process. That’s how we decolonize profit and change the system. We call that way of thinking an intellectual insurgency.

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