The Ceibo Alliance: Protecting Indigenous Land In the Amazon Rainforest from Big Oil

The Ceibo Alliance is an Indigenous-led Ecuadorian nonprofit organization comprised of members of the Kofan, Siona, Secoya and Waorani peoples, who, in partnership with Amazon Frontlines, is creating a model of Indigenous resistance and international solidarity rooted in the defense of Indigenous territory, cultural survival, and the building of viable solutions-based alternatives to rainforest destruction.

Ceibo is the first alliance of its kind in the region. Formed by members of the very communities it serves, the Ceibo Alliance is in an ideal position to address their needs through projects designed, developed and managed by the Indigenous communities themselves.

Bioneers was honored to host leaders of the Ceibo Alliance at its 2018 Conference, where they discussed their work and the biggest hurdles they’re currently facing. Take action by joining the Ceibo Alliance in protecting their land.

The following is an edited transcript from the Ceibo Alliance leaders’ keynote at Bioneers. Read below or watch the video here.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Emergildo Criollo

My name is Emergildo Criollo. I am a Kofan man from the Ecuadorian Amazon. I am a father of 4 children. I have 20 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren. And I want to tell you a story. When I was six years old in the mid 1960s I saw a helicopter for the first time. All of us children hid, spooked, in the forest because we thought it was a new kind of bird. Our elders interpreted dreams about what all of this meant – the helicopters, the chainsaws, the white man.

Then one day my father took me to see them – the strangers. We stayed in the forest at the edge of the huge clearing, watching. I had never seen so many trees on the ground. Then the white men saw us, and they waved us towards them. We didn’t understand English or Spanish, and they couldn’t understand our language, A’ingue. We stood under the sun as the white man wearing a yellow hard hat gave us gifts: a small bottle of diesel fuel and a plastic bag with something squishy inside.

My father didn’t say a word, and we headed home. When we came to our trail in the forest I opened the bag and I smelled it. I had never smelled anything so horrific before. My father threw it on the ground as if it were a demon. The white men were the chiefs of the oil company arriving in our ancestral lands looking for oil. The white chunk in the plastic bag: a piece of cheese. My father’s silence: a sign that our people didn’t know what was coming.

Alicia Salazar

My name is Alicia Salazar. I am a Siona woman, and a mother of 10 children. I wish I could speak to you in my own language today – so you can hear how it sounds – but I can’t. I have lost my mother tongue, like many others. I think that there are native people here in the room today. I believe you know what I am talking about. To feel knowledge slipping away.

I have dedicated my life to trying to recover my culture, our knowledge, our history. My people, the Siona, are ayahuasca drinkers. Through ceremony my people have come to have great knowledge of the forest and her spirits. And through ceremony I have come closer to my own peoples’ history.

We were enslaved a century ago by the rubber tappers – forced to bleed the trees for latex.
We were corralled into churches by the missionaries and told that ayahuasca was the devil.
We were displaced and we lost much of our land to the oil companies and the colonists.

All of this I have felt in my blood and bones through drinking ayahuasca.

I know that many of you want to hear about how we can protect the rainforest. How we can keep the oil in the ground and stop climate change. Even though we have lost much of our lands, we are still the guardians of hundreds of thousands of acres of primary forest and lagoons where jaguars and wooly monkeys and pink river dolphins still thrive.

Our way of life – our way of seeing and thinking – has protected the rainforest into the 21st century. We mustn’t trade in thousands of years of knowledge and ways of living off of the land in order to become cattle ranchers and city people.

The Amazon depends on it.

Hernan Payaguaje

My name is Hernan Payaguaje. I am Siekopai man, and a father of three. I want to tell you about my grandfather. His name is Delfin and although he is 80 years old he is still young enough to climb up into the forest canopy to pick fruits for the great-grandkids! He is a medicine man. He drinks Ayahuasca. He knows how to use plants to heal people.

When we were invited to speak at Bioneers, I went to him for advice. It was early in the morning, first light, and he rasped at the yoco vine with his old knife. Yoco is a wild woody liana that we drink in the morning to share our dreams. It contains caffeine and theobromine, the stuff of coffee and chocolate.

He said to me: “We must remain close to the forest and keep our knowledge of the plants and animals. Or else we will become like the anke (the outsider) who cuts down the forest for money. We must protect our territory, or else the rain will dry up and the sun will burn the soil. There will be no good food or water for your grandchildren.”

I am part of a new generation of Indigenous youth. I grew up downriver from the oil fields that fuel the cars of civilization. I saw my people get sick in the body and spirit. I went to university to learn about the ways of the world that threaten us and to learn skills and knowledge that can help our people protect our lands.

I understand my grandpa’s message. Now I’m here to share his message with all of you and tell you how we are turning his wisdom into action.

Nemonte Nenquimo

I have flown here like a scarlet macaw from a forest, far away
This is not a strange land to me because we are all connected.
Because the forest connects us – you and me.

I am Nemonte Nenquimo. My name means Many Stars. My people are the Waorani and our forest is our home. I am a Waorani woman and a mother. I have a three-year-old daughter who is learning how to sing our songs. Songs that our ancestors sang for thousands of years. Songs about living. About growing food and hunting. Medicine songs. War songs. Joking songs.

After my daughter sings, she always asks me: “Now I am Waorani, right Mama?”

Our songs, just like our forest, we inherited from our ancestors.

As a mother, I feel the responsibility inside of me to pass down our songs and our forest to our children and grandchildren. But I am afraid for my people now. Our ancestors defended our way of life for generations with spears. But the threats we face now cannot be confronted with spears alone.

Two moons from now, the Government plans to auction our territory to the oil companies. If we do not stop them, the company will get a foothold in our lands. They will bring money, sickness and contamination. They will try to divide our families and change our way of thinking.

So, I am here now as a Waorani woman and as a mother to tell you that our fight is not just a fight about oil. This is a fight about different ways of living. One that protects life and one that destroys life.

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Emergildo Criollo

We all have stories. Our stories unite us. When I was a young father I didn’t know about pollution. We didn’t even have a word for it. The company, Texaco, began spilling oil in our rivers and they dumped all their wastewater into our creeks.

Our people live off the rivers and creeks. We fish in them and make our soups and beverages with freshwater. My first two children died because of oil contamination. They died in my arms, vomiting toxins.

Our healers couldn’t heal a sickness that never existed before.

Since then, I have dedicated my entire life to fighting the companies and making sure that our families can have access to clean water. I have heard about the water protectors here. I want you to know that our fight for clean water has united us too!

In 2011, we began a project to install rainwater filtration systems in our villages. We worked with engineers to design a system that would provide clean water for each family. We trained our youth to become technicians and to teach about the risks of oil pollution. For the first time, the Kofan people joined with the Siekopai, Siona and Waorani. We traveled together into each other’s villages to install the water systems. We didn’t wait any longer for the companies or the governments. We acted. Together we built solutions to the oil contamination.

Today more than 1000 families in over 70 villages have access to clean water. That is nearly every single Kofan, Siona, Siekopai and Waorani family in all of Ecuador! Our fight for clean water brought us together and made us strong and healthy again.

Alicia Salazar

The oil companies polluted the water and divided the people. For years it was like that. They tricked us and paid off leaders. If there was an oil spill, they would bring us cans of tuna – and tell us not to fish in the rivers. What my friend Emergildo said is true. The water project brought our people together. It was like a spark went off in us.

We formed an alliance between our peoples to protect our forests and our cultures. We began drinking ayahuasca together. Healers from different nations led ceremonies that helped us see the path forward. We built an Indigenous organizing center on the outskirts of the oil town where the people from our nations can gather to support each other’s struggles

Many of our youth who were working for the oil companies have become active leaders in the fight to protect our forests. Our youth have formed land patrols that monitor for oil spills and land invasions and are using documentary skills and social media to start campaigns that organize the communities and connect with the broader world.

Our women have formed community cooperatives and are creating economic alternatives for their families. Only several years ago, before we formed The Ceibo Alliance, none of this was possible. We were disconnected from each other, and we were losing the battle. Until we discovered that together we are stronger.

Nemonte Nenquimo

When we started the Ceibo Alliance the Kofan, Siona and Siekopai invited my people to visit their territories. We traveled from far away by canoe and jungle trail and we learned about all the problems that come with oil. More than anything, we learned that the company doesn’t see the forest. They don’t see us. They see what they want to see. They see oil wells where we see gardens. They see money where we see life.

How can we defend our way of life and our forests? That was our question.

We decided to make a map of our territory that shows all of the creeks and trails. Our medicinal gardens, our hunting grounds, our sacred sites. Mapping our lands brought our people together. Our youth and elders trekked our territory, like the old days. Not with spears, but with GPS, video cameras and camera traps.

Now, the government wants to sell our land to the oil companies! But we are united! Our land is not for sale! In the coming weeks, we will take the government to court demanding that they respect our right to decide what happens in our territory!

By working together in the Ceibo Alliance, our people are stronger than ever before. We are supporting each other’s battles. Our Kofan friends have already won a big fight against gold miners, and us Waorani were there supporting them. The Siona have won a battle in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights demanding the Colombian government respect their rights. The Siekopai are titling ancestral lands in Peru that were stolen from them during the rubber boom.

I know that the Waorani will win our fight to protect our forests. Because we are not alone. We are fighting together.

And now, as a woman, as a mother, as a water protector and a forest defender, I want you to join us in our fight to defend our way of life, our forests and our planet!

Hernan Payaguaje

Our vision is to empower our people to protect our forests for centuries. That means that we need to create a future where not only do we defend our land, but we thrive in our territories.

When the companies polluted our water, we built rainwater systems. Now the companies try to offer roads and electricity so they can drill for oil, but we are a step ahead of them. We are building a future where our communities can continue to live in and protect our territories.

Instead of roads and polluting industry, we are building access to solar energy in our villages, and creating sustainable community enterprises. In just the last two years we have already built 121 solar systems in 16 villages, and we are hoping to partner soon with the Achuar people who are already piloting the first Amazonian solar canoes!

We know that there will always be people and companies that want to exploit our lands. That is true for all Indigenous nations across the Amazon. As Indigenous Peoples, we are the owners of more than 1.4 million square miles of primary rainforest. That is more than ten Californias. We have the historical and legal right to decide over the future of our territories. We must exercise that right. For centuries, our elders protected our rainforest homelands. Now it is our turn.

Although my grandpa has never heard the phrase “climate change” he knows what’s at stake. The future of our people, our forest, and our planet.

Regenerative Agriculture at Singing Frogs Farm

It was a beautiful October day in Sonoma – a couple of weeks after the first rains – at the Bioneers Regenerative Agriculture field day at Singing Frogs Farm.

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The program presented diverse models, perspectives and scales of regenerative agricultural practices that work with nature’s life-promoting forces to create fertility and abundance as well as play a significant role, if scaled up globally, in healing the climate.

Tim LaSalle, co-founder and Co-Director of the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative at California State University Chico and one of the first proponents of drawing down atmospheric carbon and sequestering it in the soil, provided a compelling big picture frame for Regenerative Agriculture’s game changing potential.

Claudio Nuñez of Paicines Ranch on left (Photo by Jan Mangan)

Doniga Markegard, who manages a 10,000-acre grass fed livestock operation on multiple Bay Area ranches, explained how she uses a naturalist’s and permaculture lens to develop a holistic management system for the Markegard Family Grass-fed business.

Paicines Ranch in Holister, CA consists of 7000 acres of rangeland, 550 acres of row crops and 25 acres of vineyards – all certified organic.

Young regenerative rancher Claudio Nuñez talked about Paicines’ efforts to develop a biologically active system on large agriculturally diverse acreage in an area that gets only about 8 inches of rain a year.

/ Paul Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm (Photo by Jan Mangan)

Our hosts were the wonderfully-complementary, high energy and innovative couple Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser who are intensively farming small acreage grossing $100,000 per acre while increasing their soil organic matter by 300 – 400%.

The highlights of the day were two farm tours that shared important insights on building biodiversity from below the soil to the top of the canopy in Singing Frogs’ dynamic and resilient farming system.

Incorporating compost and field residue into the soil at Singing Frogs Farm (Photo by Jan Mangan)

In attendance, were a group of folks who can help spread the word and implement the regenerative practices and ideas that were learned at the workshop.

A partial list includes people from KPFA radio, the Center for Food Safety; the Sierra Club; Jackson Winery; the Ecological Reserve Estancia Jatoba, Brazil; UC Berkley Earth Action Initiative; out-of-state farmers; a young agricultural entrepreneur from Belize; Common Ground Center, UC Santa Cruz, etc.

Working with Trim Tab Media, who specializes in telling the stories of sustainability, we captured video of on-farm interviews and all the presentations.

The edited material makes up the foundation of the Bioneers Regenerative Agriculture media series, which includes articles and interviews with other Regenerative Agriculture leaders.

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Roots and Branches – Stabilizing, Centering and Receiving Guidance From Past Toward Future, and From Below and Above

The following is a speech written and delivered by Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. View the full keynote video here.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

All of us know that these are frightening, enraging and uncertain days, and I also know in my heart that we need each other in community more than ever – both for our individual well-being, and for our collective change-making and movement-building.

To try and bring forth my best in these traumatic times, I feel I have to strengthen and center myself, so that I can act more effectively on behalf of the people and places I most love. And this may sound strange, but trees have become a great help in this quest.

To a scientist, trees are a perennial woody plant with a main trunk and a distinct crown. To a poet, a tree literally means truth, from the old English word troth, which means something deeply rooted, with a strong trunk, something that sweeps the sky. In many ancient spiritual traditions, trees have been seen as a symbol of wisdom, wholeness and healing.

Too often, I’ve found, I live as if I were mostly a trunk, focusing on the urgency of now, neglecting what’s available to me through my roots and branches. Roots provide nourishment to trees, drawing up water and nutrients from the soil and mycelial networks underfoot. We, too need roots to offer us stability and to help inform our actions from the wisdom of our intuition, dreams and ancestors.

As communities, our roots entwined underground can strengthen and stabilize us to endure high winds, floods and catastrophic weather events. To strengthen myself, I am practicing honoring my roots. I’m remembering that I am here because of my ancestor’s prayers, suffering and resilience.

I personally feel most rooted these days by my love of the natural world, of Mother Earth, by remembering and listening for guidance from my Jewish ancestry, and from my deep connection to all women and those who identify primarily as she – to an archetypal gendered embodied experience.

Because of the persecution and slavery my Jewish ancestors faced over thousands of years, they were forced to migrate often, without ever putting down roots in any one place for very long. They’ve had to learn how to carry culture, stories and their sense of the sacred on their backs, or hidden deep within their hearts. They developed rituals to strengthen remembering and community which helped them survive traumatic times. One of the most beautiful traditional Jewish teachings is called Tikkun Olam – the responsibility to help heal and repair the world. That feels more relevant now than at any prior time in my life.

The Kabbalah, the ancient book of wisdom in the Jewish tradition, says that the brokenness of our world is due to the masculine and feminine aspects of the divine turning away from one another. We can help heal the world, they suggest, by helping the feminine and masculine aspects of the sacred to reunite. I continue to work toward healing both the feminine and masculine roots within myself, so that I can better serve that larger rebalancing I believe is so central to navigating our way forward with a reoriented compass.

Then there is my lineage as a woman, which roots me both through my embodied experience, and also through the historical and cultural violence – the many generations of women who have fought, died and suffered before us for freedom, health and justice – which lives on in me. This connection reminds me that we are all born of Mother Earth, and in truth, belong to her. And that often, what we do to women, we do to the Earth, and vice versa.

I remember that whether we are biological mothers, or childless by choice, a mothering impulse to nourish and cultivate life lives on powerfully within each of us. I’ve seen the most indomitable and persevering love – perhaps our greatest resource for change – from women. And, I believe the only thing stronger than a determined woman is a group of women who have each other’s backs.

As medicine to heal our hyper individualized culture – acting in communities (of all genders) is essential to strengthen and nourish our resolve. It can stabilize and fortify us, the way tree roots weaving together underground can do.

Branches and leaves are essential for the health of trees. They extend a tree’s capacity to reach for and absorb light. Aided by sunlight, leaves perform alchemy that literally grows the tree – converting water, sap and light into new growth. My branches uplift me, inviting me to stretch upward, providing an updraft under my wings, filling me with inspiration and vision.

My branches are many of you in this extended community of doers, thinkers, dreamers and organizers. You buoy me, and help me flex with the winds of change. You nourish and widen my perspectives, informing my vision. I am especially inspired and fortified by the youth and women’s movements emerging all over the country, and the world.

After a suicide wave ravaged the Lakota Sioux reservation, teenagers began healing by learning their culture’s sacred ways. They formed One Mind Youth Movement, establishing a small “prayer camp” on the north end of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) paid for One Mind members to be trained as organizers, and they learned how the struggle against the pipeline was part of the same struggle as the one against alcoholism, poverty, suicide and abuse.

They organized a 500-mile relay run from the Sacred Stone Camp to Omaha, to deliver a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers. Young runners participated from all seven communities of the Sioux, spread out over an area spanning five states.

Their vision, actions and perseverance helped launch a movement, creating unifying bonds among people from many scattered nations devastated by centuries of genocide and systemic abuse. Practicing peaceful and prayerful protest, they attracted many more. The connections woven among diverse communities are helping them work together now to defeat the outrageous voter suppression efforts currently assaulting North Dakota.

Meanwhile, Earth Guardians, with youth from all 50 states and in partnership with Our Children’s Trust, are suing the government, in a suit known as #YouthvGov, for failing to act on climate change. Seeing it as a constitutional right to have clean air, clean water and a healthy future, their case seeks to hold the government accountable. So far, in spite of several administration efforts to derail it, the trial is going forward. And meanwhile, Earth Guardians’ membership has spread across 6 continents, spanning 40 countries.

And, over the past eight months, the survivors of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school’s shooting have altered the debate about gun violence in this country. Launching national campaigns and mobilizing marches and voter registration drives, their determination to challenge the status quo, hold politicians accountable and get stricter gun laws passed has been truly spine-tingling.

Internationally, too, youth-led revolutions are ascendant. In India, the Global March Against Child Labor mobilized hundreds of thousands of young people, while in Bangladesh, thousands of girls unified to defy tradition and defend their rights to education and self-determination. In Russia, protests were coordinated in over 100 cities against state corruption, led mostly by high school and college students. The issues vary, but the trend is unmistakable – globally, and aided by social media, young people are mobilizing in huge numbers and with fierce commitments to demand change.
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My other great inspiration is women, who are awakening to proactively speak out and demand accountability for systemic gender and racial violence, while standing for human rights, climate justice, democracy, and economic equity. Persevering women are doing what they’ve often done – building relational structures through grassroots organizing that develop over time into real social movements, by standing together to protect and defend what they love.

While past demonstrations had focused on specific issues, The Women’s March built upon years of organizing by women from Black Lives Matter, the Dreamer immigrant youth movement, Indigenous women and leaders such as Tarana Burke, founder of “Me,Too,” to mobilize millions of diverse women to forge connections. The executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-director of Caring Across Generations, AiJen Poo observed “women began to listen to our own stories, and each other’s, and – realizing the immensity of the commonalities and challenges we faced – began responding at scale.

Inspired by the courage of the truth-telling they heard, from farmworkers to Hollywood celebrities, the number of voices speaking grew, swelling the cultural momentum of #MeToo into a wave. (This also provoked a predictable backlash from an entrenched patriarchy so threatened as to become even more repressive and dangerous in response.)

“We stopped looking up to those in power,” she noted, “and started looking around at the women standing beside us. We realized our strength is in our diversity not our singularity, and the power that we need to claim is our own. We shifted from focusing on protesting laws to lifting each other up to become the lawmakers.”

In only three years, the founders of Black Lives Matter – Patrisse Khan Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometti – have organized a decentralized network of people across the US and around the world to demand accountability for police brutality. Through their work, countless other organizations have formed, including the Movement for Black Lives, the Black Youth Project, Black Voters Matter and #SayHerName. Mujeres Unidas y Activas, an immigrant rights group, was able to get the historic California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights adopted into law through their work.

Indigenous women have been coordinating strategic campaigns for Earth and climate justice across nations, from Idle No More to Indigenous Climate Action, to Amazon Watch and the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, to name only a few. Women-led grassroots movements are also growing in size and influence around the planet.

Both these branches – the youth and women’s leadership movements – share common ground. Each is defining leadership as raising up other leaders. All are developing leadership structures that are deeply inclusive, mutually respectful and non-hierarchical. Notably – to counter the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy that’s been undermining progressive movement-building for so long – each is recognizing diversity as a source of strength, and engaging in the hard work needed to bridge differing worlds.

They are also embracing the mutual mentorship that occurs when youth and elders work together, without succumbing to the divisive trope of ageism. These movements are also taking a whole-person, long-term view. All are modeling, in their care and treatment of each other, the free, healthy, dignified and loving world they seek to co-create.

This letter, written recently from Tarana Burke and others of the MeToo movement to Professor Blasey Ford, intending to offer their love and support, sums it up so eloquently:

Dear Dr. Blasey Ford,

We witnessed you show up for duty not as a superhero, but as a fully human woman. You showed us that the new hero – the kind of heroism called for in this moment – is a woman facing the patriarchy with no weapons other than her voice, her body and the truth.

And, I would add: her dignity, which never flagged.

Here’s how a tree shows what we are capable of accomplishing together. Dr. Nalini Nadkarni – a tree researcher and Bioneer – loves to debunk false stereotypes about trees, like how we imagine trees as stationary, non-moving beings. She knew them to be dynamic entities, so to prove it, she turned a tree into an artist.

On a Douglas Fir, she tied paint brushes onto the tips of twigs, held up paper, timed their movement for two minutes, and measured how much distance each twig had marked. By multiplying the amount of movement by the number of twigs per branch, the number of branches per tree, and the number of minutes per year, she was able to come up with the distance that a single Douglas Fir had moved in a year.

Want to guess? It was 186,540 miles.

As she observed, when we shift our attention from the immovable obstacle of the trunk to the dynamic movement of the twigs, branches and leaves we learn that a tree can actually move seven times around the world in a year.

May we remember the value of our every action, however small it may seem, as each twig travels thousands of miles, and each leaf is an alchemist.

May we invest our vision, our hearts and our purposeful hands in the magnitude and vision of what we can accomplish together – and in the emergence of the joyful and liberating future we can co-create.

Like the Douglas Fir, together our movements are powerful beyond anyone’s imagining.

May we navigate the long road ahead, in community, remembering to listen for and call upon our roots and branches.

A Prisoner of Hope

The following is a speech written and delivered by Bioneers Executive Director Joshua Fouts at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. View the full keynote video here.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

I have to admit I had to trash many versions of this talk. Every time I thought I had formulated a coherent presentation, another dramatic shift, another revelation in one the countless mind-boggling scandals we are currently enduring, another assault on decency somewhere in the world, another challenge to my previous notions of reality, would force me to reevaluate what I thought and what I should say.

I know I am not the only one during this very dark time in U.S. and global politics to experience disorientation and to start to question so much of what I had taken for granted and thought I understood. I have to admit I have been experiencing many moments of gloom and despair.

But as I was getting ready to come to Bioneers — an experience I always find rejuvenating — I began to look around for guidance to help me build up my resilience, find a bit more clarity, and reconnect with a sense of purpose. I looked in both predictable and unexpected places: Conversations with family members, my own experiences and memories, in my observations of the natural world, in the words of leaders and thinkers I respect, both contemporary and from generations past, quite a few of whom have been here at Bioneers over the decades.

I can’t say I found any simple answers, but the exposure to all that wisdom helped. Then I read something that once again blew my mind and sent me into another tailspin. An investigative piece in WIRED magazine revealed that Russian trolls had been behind efforts to create dissent among Star Wars fans, folks for whom those films serve as empowering metaphors for their own heroic journeys through life. How amazingly clever and how diabolical! This was an attempt to penetrate people’s myths and divide and demoralize them in their psychic core. This is akin to an enemy attacking not your land or infrastructure, or even just your elections, but your very dreams. (Cue Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page and the cast of Inception to get to the bottom of this.)

It reminded me of a speech George Lucas (the creator of Star Wars of course) gave in which he outlined Star Wars’ key moral theme: the contrast between light and dark. “There are two kinds of people in the world,” he said, “compassionate people and selfish people…If you go to the side of the light, you will be happy because compassion, helping other people, not thinking about yourself, thinking about others, that gives you a joy that you can’t get any other way.” While “Being selfish, just following your pleasures…you’re always going to be unhappy. You’ll never get to the point … You’ll get this little instant shot of pleasure, but it goes away and then you’re stuck where you were before. The more you do it, the worse it gets. You finally get everything you want and you’re miserable because there’s nothing at the end of that road, whereas if you are compassionate and you get to the end of the road, you’ve helped so many people.”

Now, granted, this is an over-simplified teaching geared to big budget movie morality tales, and all of us contain light and dark potential, but it still contains some core truths. And thinking about Lucas’s words, the sheer amount of darkness we’re currently seeing in the world made me begin to wonder if the dark side just has too many advantages, whether The Force really isn’t with us. I began to doubt the words of Martin Luther King which I had long wholeheartedly subscribed to: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I had just been seeing so much more injustice than justice lately, and in so many parts of the world at once.

But ultimately two wise voices got me back on track. The first was, ironically, the late Joseph Campbell — who advised Lucas on Star Wars’ mythology. I came across a quote of his: “As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.” And that hit me like a ton of bricks. Yes, the Age of Trump had been making me lose my sense of humor. If I can’t laugh, above all at myself, the bastards will really have won, so thanks, Joseph. Step number one, accomplished: I turned the laugh track back on.

And that reawakened humor triggered a familial memory, an anecdote about my father, a world-renowned researcher on primates. When he was a young professor he had been working with a group of chimps to whom he was teaching sign language. He was out with a young male chimpanzee named Booee and a group of human graduate students. In those days, the chimps were unfortunately required to wear a sort of leash around their necks, called a “lead” as they are much stronger than humans — eight times stronger, pound for pound, in fact and therefore perceived as being quite dangerous.

At the end of the lesson my dad told Booee that it was time to go back into the chimp compound, an unpleasant collection of rusty cages that no human would want to live in, so why would a chimp? Booee protested by promptly climbing up a tree, but my dad, the young alpha male professor, was not about to be humiliated in front of his students by a chimp, so he thought he’d show Booee who was boss by wrapping the lead around his wrist so that Booee had no room for movement, getting very close to the tree and angrily demanding that Booee come down. In response, Booee, calmly, with one arm, reached down, grabbed the lead and lifted my 200-pound father off the ground swinging from the lead.

My dad, in what I can only infer was a moment of ego free clarity, quickly changed the subject: He looked up at Booee and signed, “I forgive you.” Delighted, Booee leapt out of the tree into his arms and off they went. So not only might birds shit on us, but non-human animals and the rest of nature will surely show us who is really in control, bringing us back into line if we don’t learn respect, compassion, forgiveness and empathy — for all beings, not just humans.

The second voice that helped me regain my bearings was an essay from Rebecca Solnit that really gave me a much-needed historical perspective. It drove home how many things really have dramatically changed for the better. She wrote: “Thirty years ago Ronald Reagan was president, the threat of an apocalyptic nuclear war seemed very real, a large swathe of the earth lived under the totalitarianism that got called Communism, which seemed like it might last centuries rather than another year…Anita Hill had yet to speak up and almost no one addressed sexual harassment…Same-sex marriage was virtually inconceivable to most people; the Lawrence vs. Texas ruling decriminalizing gay sex nationwide was fifteen years away; First peoples had been almost entirely erased in public discourse … and we got most of our energy from coal.” Aha, thanks Rebecca. Step 2, check: Don’t lose sight of the long game because of all the distractions of this current surrealistic nightmare.

I remembered that Archbishop Desmond Tutu had once said, “I am not an optimist. I am a prisoner of hope.” I think hope is what brings so many of us back here to Bioneers each year. And this weekend has really helped reboot my hope. Hearing about all the inspired, courageous work and all the innovative projects so many of you are involved in has dispelled much of the darkness I was wallowing in. Hearing from so many youth from such diverse backgrounds, identities and ethnicities who are here participating in our Youth Leadership Program on scholarships, which all of you make possible — thank you! — has given me enormous faith in the future. Theirs is a generation so far ahead of us from the get-go: allergic to racism and injustice in their very core, totally comfortable with the authentic expression of gender identity, unwilling to tolerate continued gun violence.

My son, August, who is 17, is here today. He has grown up as part of this more expansive generation. His acceptance and openness to people from all walks of life inspires me. It is what he knows is right in his bones. In many ways he has become a teacher to me. And you heard yesterday from the extraordinary Edna Chavez whose strength and resiliency exemplify the unstoppable momentum of these young leaders. This generation will not go back in time. I now see I was wrong to doubt MLK’s wisdom. I am convinced that today’s emerging leaders will ultimately succeed in ushering in far more enlightened times. And it’s important to note that much of the progress we have made in the past few decades is still in place — even though we still face many challenges.

So, that has been some of my inner journey this past year. I can’t promise I won’t have moments of doubt and fear, but one thing my quest for guidance and this incredibly uplifting weekend have reinforced for me is that no matter how infuriating the daily headlines might be, I will do my utmost to keep at it, to work for the world we want to see, and to choose hope, empathy, and compassion. But I will also do my best to remember not to take myself too seriously, lest the birds and chimps and the entire natural world decide to set me straight.

Dung Beetle Medicine

The following is a speech written and delivered by Bioneers Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. View the full keynote video here.

View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Recently I happened across a fading old post-it tacked in an obscure corner of my office. It’s a cartoon of two beetles. One is saying to the other: “Of course we put up with a lot of shit. We’re dung beetles.”

That’s kind of what life is feeling like these days, isn’t it? We’re charged with cleaning out the stables of a misbegotten, decaying civilization — composting it into fertility — and replanting it with new growth. This is a transformative and traumatic moment — a time of rise and demise. We’re in the maelstrom. How we navigate the pathways forward will set the course for decades and centuries to come.

Perhaps it took a breakdown this breathtakingly extreme to reveal the democracy theme park for what it is, and to mobilize enough people to actually change the system devouring people and planet. In this psychotic episode of politics gone feral, we’re grappling with an illegitimate regime. It lost the popular vote. It seized power by exploiting an electoral reality distortion field nakedly corrupted by voter suppression, gerrymandering and an anti-democratic electoral college.

It has been doubly overwhelmed by a disinformation mass media machine and Russian black ops and cyberwar. The democracy theme park is also a Potemkin Village, and Putin’s a Republican.

To be clear, I’m a registered independent. But with that said, I have to agree with Noam Chomsky that the Republican Party is “the most dangerous organization in human history.”

Climate change denial. Environmental mass murder. A war on women. A strategy of stoking racial and ethnic hatreds and white nationalism. Refugee children ripped from parents and caged in internment camps.

Raw power brandished to stack the Supreme Court with a hard-core party partisan, corporate hack, accused sexual assaulter and human shield for executive immunity. It’s government by gangsters and warlords, aligning globally with authoritarian regimes while erecting a Banana Republic here at home.

The Banana Republicans are pedal to the metal dragging us full-throttle into the abyss — right when time is of the essence to floor it in the opposite direction. The US republic is ostensibly based on the “consent of the governed.” I revoke my consent. How about you?

As Michelle Alexander wrote, “We are not the resistance. A new nation is being born. Trump is the one who’s fighting it. The regime is radically out of step with the ground truth of American culture and the arc of today’s diverse, interdependent world. They’re like the Japanese soldiers in World War II still fighting on an island who didn’t yet know the war was over. As Frederick Nietzche observed, “All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the heart of humanity.”

As Naomi Klein sees it, “The reason the mask has fallen off, and we are now witnessing undisguised corporate rule is not because these corporations felt all-powerful: it’s because they were panicked. Our movements are starting to win. Rather than risk the possibility of further progress, after decades of privatizing the state in bits and pieces, they decided to just go for the government itself. It’s a corporate takeover.”

But make no mistake: Trump is just a babbling hood ornament on the Hummer of a plutocracy gone off-road. The 2008 financial crash outraged the public and stoked serious talk of nationalizing banks. It spawned the Occupy movement, the fight for $15, a surging fossil fuel divestment movement, and mass social movements all over the world committed to toppling political corruption, social injustices, and austerity schemes that further concentrate wealth and distribute poverty. The imperative now is to convert these movements into systemic change.

At its core, this maelstrom is a literal “male-strom”: the death throes a patriarchy hell-bent on retaining its power. Peak toxic masculinity is a distress signal: It’s on the run.

In the US, for the first time, women comprise a majority in the workforce. Of the fifteen job categories projected to grow in the next decade, only two are primarily male. Women comprise a majority in colleges and professional schools. They’re gaining ascendancy in many professional careers. Record numbers of women are running for office this year and will win.

We know that wherever women have decision-making power, all the metrics improve dramatically. “States that have improved the status of women are as a rule healthier, wealthier, less corrupt, and more democratic.” They’re less likely to engage in conflict both domestically and globally.

The physical security of women directly correlates with national security. Ending violence against women is literally a national and global security issue.

This is the moment for men everywhere to put the equality, safety and leadership of women front and center. It’s high time to redefine masculinity, and begin healing the gender wound with truth and reconciliation. The future of the world depends on it.

As Heather McGhee said here at Bioneers last year, “Our democracy has become as unequal as our economy. Capitalism is writing the rules for democracy, instead of the other way around. For three generations, now, politicians have stoked white anxiety, successfully linking government to undeserving minorities, and gaining support among white voters for cutbacks in public spending, regulation, and public solutions.”

Heather’s conclusion is this: “We need a ‘we’ to survive, and that’s exactly what racism destroys. The proximity of so much difference will finally force us to admit our common humanity. The beauty is in who we are becoming. It’s the country’s fulfillment and salvation.”

Author Pankaj Mishra recently observed that, just like today, in the late 19th century an unprecedented wave of corporate globalization caused massive global migrations and racial mixing. Like today, mass social movements erupted worldwide to resist empire and its elites.

As Mishra describes, “For fearful ruling classes, political order depended on forging an alliance between rich and powerful whites and those rendered superfluous by industrial capitalism. Exclusion or degradation of nonwhite peoples was a way of securing dignity for those marginalized by economic and technological shifts.

“Today,” Mishra continues, “it has reached its final and most desperate phase, with existential fears about endangered white power feverishly circulating once again. Global capitalism has promised to build a colorblind world through economic integration. But as revolts erupt against globalization, politicians and pundits in the Anglosphere are again scrambling to rebuild political communities around what W.E.B. DuBois in 1910 identified as ‘the new religion of whiteness — the ownership of the earth forever and ever.’ The religion of whiteness increasingly represents a suicide cult.”

The suicide cult of the U.S. regime is a desperate “whitelash” against a society inexorably on its way to becoming a majority-minority population. It’s a cultural revolution of pluralism that cannot be turned back.

As Jose Antonio Vargas put it, “This country is only going to get blacker, browner, more Asian, and gayer. Women will break all barriers. A country that has barely dealt with the black and white issue is now getting more complicated with all these ‘othered’ people. What’s left is this question of how much change can straight white men and white people handle?”

But the biggest change we’re facing is climate change. Over the past couple of years, Mother Nature stopped knocking and just blew the doors off. Climate resilience is about to become the central organizing principle for everyone’s lives.

The climate swerve of U.S. public opinion is finally tipping. The markets have spoken. The age of renewables is unstoppable, promising $26 trillion in growth and 65 million new jobs by 2030.

As climate chaos keeps worsening in fast-forward, this shift will radically accelerate. But, as Bill McKibben points out, “climate change is a timed test, and we’re failing.” We need to take bolder, bigger and more holistic measures. It means the reinvention of everything.

Perhaps the single greatest breakthrough initiative underway is Project Drawdown, founded by our friend Paul Hawken. Its goal is to actually reverse global warming by drawing carbon out of the atmosphere back to pre-industrial levels. All the practices and technologies documented in the best-selling Drawdown book are already commonly available, economically viable, and scientifically valid.

But Project Drawdown’s true power lies in its holistic approach that goes beyond the imperatives of clean energy technologies and keeping the oil in the ground.

Eight of the top 20 solutions it showcases relate to changing the food system. Combining reduced food waste and a plant-rich diet — the #3 and #4 solutions —  would make them #1. Combining girls’ education and family planning — the number 6 and 7 solutions — would comprise the second top solution.

These examples illustrate the kinds of systemic dynamics that will both reverse atmospheric CO2 and improve virtually all areas of life. It’s eminently doable with what we already know and have.

In just one year, drawdown projects have spontaneously ignited around the world from the grassroots to the canopy. Paul says the goal is for drawdown projects to be common practice worldwide within 15 years. It shows how we can realize a radically different scenario: actually healing the climate and ourselves.

Realistically, government is the only force big enough to stand up to the corporate juggernaut. The government is us — if we take it back.

What we need government to do today is a Green New Deal. The same battle over corporate state capture that’s playing out today took place in the 1930s when FDR saved capitalism from the capitalists with the New Deal.

The parallels are striking: extreme inequality and wealth concentration — wholesale deregulation — corporatized courts — restrictive immigration policy — and the rise of white nationalism and Fascism.

But there’s one big difference.

As the late Tom Hayden pointed out, “The great work then was to save us from the Depression. The great work today is to save us from climate catastrophe and the end of civilization as we know it. We need to put every person in this country and on this planet who’s out of a job or underemployed into a great green employment project. The starting point is to combine the notions of reducing emissions and achieving jobs and environmental justice.”

At the time it was being built, it wasn’t called the “New Deal.” It was called “the movement.” The programs and models percolated from the bottom up from the “laboratories of democracy” — cities and states.

That same scenario is recurring today with green blocs and regional and bioregional green alliances among cities and states. Cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70 percent of global CO2 emissions.

We know that real wealth creation is based on replenishing natural systems and restoring the built environment, especially our infrastructure and cities. It’s based on investing in our communities and workforce. Restoration is estimated to become a $100 trillion market. Every dollar we spend on pre-disaster risk management can prevent seven dollars in later losses.

One key to building resilience is greater decentralization against the inevitable failure of centralized systems. Think decentralized power grids and more localized foodsheds and economies. Localized economies are the kryptonite of global markets. Some of today’s most innovative and successful models are arising from the work of The Democracy Collaborative, co-founded by Gar Alperowitz, who’ll share some stories later this morning.

The Democracy Collaborative is demonstrating what a Pluralist Commonwealth could look like. It marks the end of the growth economy and the start of living within our planetary means. It supersedes the false binary of capitalism and socialism, instead creating a mixed economy in service to the common good, climate action and equity.

It devolves substantial political and decision-making power to local and regional entities, coupled with designing democratic governance structures. It prioritizes economic security and intergenerational community wealth creation. At the core is distributed ownership through diverse forms of public, private, cooperative and common ownership.

These kinds of objectives may be closer than they appear. This is the time to seed the field. Small changes can have big influences.

One driving force will be the epic generational shift underway in the US and around the world. Numerous credible polls consistently reveal U.S. Millennials and Gen X’ers — the biggest generations in our history – with large majorities holding overwhelmingly progressive views. They’re also more than 40 percent nonwhite, the highest share of any adult generation.

By 60-80 percent, young people want climate action, support same-sex marriage, recognize racial discrimination as the main barrier to African Americans’ progress, and believe immigrants strengthen the country.

Sixty-five percent believe the country is on the wrong path. Seventy-one percent want a third party. Fifty-one percent oppose capitalism.

Millennial and Gen X voters will likely be the biggest cohort in the 2020 elections. Along with women and communities of color, their activism will change every institution in society in the foreseeable future. As the deep ecologist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy puts it, “We are part of a vast, global movement: the epochal transition from empire to Earth community.”

Which brings us back to dung beetles.

Over the past few years, scientists have discovered that dung beetles have many gifts. They’re not to be poo-poo-ed.

These humble creatures face fierce competition for this black gold. The male beetle plunges furiously into the mosh pit, rapidly piecing together bits of dung into a round ball. He rolls it away full-tilt boogie in the straightest possible line to escape dungway robbery.

It’s no mean feat to stay on the straight and narrow because the beetle is pushing that ball facing backwards and upside down, head toward the ground. How do they do it?

Researchers noticed an odd phenomenon. If the beetle seemed to lose his way, he climbed on top of the ball, performed an energetic circular dance, then rolled right along. By manipulating the time of day, scientists learned that he’s recording a mental snapshot of the sun, moon or stars. If he gets lost, he calls up that Beetle Maps snapshot and gets right back on track.

As one scientist commented, “We love working with the beetles. No matter what we do to them, they just keep on rolling.”

So, Bioneers — perhaps in these times, we can learn some dung beetle medicine. If we lose our way, just climb on top of that ball, dance by the light of the heavens, and keep on rolling.

Keep the Bioneers Conference With You Year-Round

At Bioneers 2018, we’re hearing from some of the world’s foremost innovators, who are sharing their ideas and solutions for a more equitable, sane, green and just future. These are people who are digging in, even as the issues they face become increasingly overwhelming. They’re a group that inspires us to keep fighting.

The speakers at Bioneers are mighty, but mightier still is the force of the Bioneers community at large.

For nearly three decades, Bioneers has brought you stories from leaders like those we’re hearing from at Bioneers 2018. And in the days and years to come, we’ll do the same. The list of individuals, groups and organizations leading the charge toward the future we need is steadily growing. And their stories must be told and shared.

You have the opportunity to hold the Bioneers experience not just for a weekend, but every day of the year. You have the ability to share the stories from our community that inspire you and would inspire so many others.

Here are the best ways to keep this energy flowing once the conference is over:

• Sign up for our email list. Each week, we’ll share with you news and happenings from Bioneers who are moving the needle. Tell your friends!

• Subscribe to our award-winning podcast. Get inspiration straight from the leaders who are making change happen.

• Follow us on social media. Help us spark a conversation about what’s happening globally in environmental progress, human rights, food and farming, and more. FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE | LINKEDIN

• Dig into Bioneers.org media. Our website hosts a wealth of content sure to ignite you to act collectively to solve big problems.

• Support our work. Bioneers is a nonprofit organization, and we rely on the support of our community to bring you the programming you count on throughout the year. Double your impact right now through a generous matching grant from Honeycomb Portfolio. All donations will be matched, dollar for dollar, up to $50,000! Honeycomb Portfolio is a female-founded fund led by Bioneer Azita Ardakani, which invests in early-stage, nature-inspired, for-profit social enterprises. Support with Venmo or Paypal by giving to donate@bioneers.org or donate via our website. Every dollar is a step toward storytelling that matters and the sharing of solutions we all need.

We look forward to continuing the conversations sparked at Bioneers 2018 with you in the days, weeks, months and years to come!

Planting trees, capturing carbon, cleaning the air: These innovators are looking to nature to develop innovations that give more than they take

By: Erin Connelly, Communications Director, Biomimicry Institute

The most recent climate change report from the UN was yet another wake-up call that business as usual won’t stop the runaway effects of our warming planet. It’s time to focus on solutions and design strategies that create products, materials, buildings, and systems that help all species thrive. Biomimicry – emulating nature’s patterns and strategies to develop sustainable technologies – can help us get there.

Through the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge and the Biomimicry Launchpad, the Biomimicry Institute and the Ray C. Anderson Foundation are working to support nature-inspired innovators to bring their ideas to life. This year at Bioneers, six international teams from the Biomimicry Launchpad will showcase their climate change solutions, all based on lessons learned from living systems. For the past year, these teams have been testing and prototyping their designs and working with biomimicry and business mentors to try to bring their innovations closer to market.

These teams are looking to nature to accelerate reforestation, capture carbon, create more efficient heating and cooling systems, clean the air, and support local food systems. And on October 20th this year, we’ll be at Bioneers to announce the winners of a $25,000 second prize from an anonymous donor and the $100,000 Ray of Hope Prize from the Ray C. Anderson Foundation. Here are six teams competing for the grand biomimicry prize:

Restoring forests with a multifunctional system that protects tree seedlings as they grow.

Bruno Rutman Pagnoncelli was 1000 feet above the Atlantic rainforest in Brazil when the idea first came to him. Strapped into his paraglider, soaring high above the earth, he saw acres of remote forest lands stripped bare of trees. He knew that current methods of reforestation are labor-intensive and high-maintenance. From his perch in the clouds, he wondered – was there a way to disperse seeds just like nature would do it? A way that would ensure that seedlings survived and thrived without requiring as much human maintenance? When he landed, he started sketching out what would become Nucleário – a new way to restore the rainforest, inspired by nature.

Nucleário is an all-in-one reforestation solution, designed to be used in remote areas of the Atlantic rainforest. The device significantly reduces maintenance costs by protecting seedlings from leafcutter ants and invasive grasses. The design also prevents soil leaching and increases soil moisture levels by functioning like leaf litter, and mimics how bromeliads collect water from rain and dew to provide a microclimate that attracts biodiversity.

After winning a number of design awards for the initial Nucleário design, Bruno teamed up with his brother, Pedro Rutman Pagnoncelli, who quit his job to help his brother with his business and bring this concept to market. Their main goal is to help make reforestation efforts less expensive, less dangerous, and less reliant on human maintenance. Currently, there are over 17 million hectares in the Atlantic rainforest targeted for reforestation efforts, and Nucleário could be a critical tool in the success of those efforts.

“The main bottleneck in forest restoration is seedling maintenance. If you just plant seedlings and go away, more than 90% will die. Every three months, you have to cut grass, water, apply fertilizer to avoid this,” said Bruno. “With Nucleário, we can plant more forest in less time.”

The Nucleário team has been testing the system with the World Wildlife Federation in Brazil in the Cerrado region, one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world. “We’re testing Nucleário against a control group and, after two months, we’re already seeing positive results,” said Bruno.

Nucleário is more than a design to Bruno and Pedro. They grew up in the rainforest, exploring the area and learning how to whitewater kayak as young boys. They know how much the region’s health plays a key role in protecting the watershed, and also their community and neighbors. “We can see how the rainforest helps people live,” said Bruno “We believe that the forest can help climate change but can also empower poor people in the country and create wealth for them.”

Bioneers will be the first opportunity for the Nucleário team to show their product in the U.S. “We’re very excited to see what people think and get feedback,” said Bruno. “Expanding our network with other nature lovers – that’s just what we’re looking for!”

Extracting carbon dioxide passively and efficiently to create cleaner air.

If you had been walking by the architecture building at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo one day this past July and peered upwards, you would have seen a large group of people, up on the roof, intently sketching, planning, and debating.

At this rooftop gathering, a team made up of architects, chemists, and designers came together to hone a design that they hope will help create cleaner air in dense, urban environments.

ExtrACTION is a technology that extracts carbon dioxide from the air without using electricity or fuel to operate. This team studied how plants like cacti maximize air flow and atmospheric water capture to create a carbon-scrubbing and filtering panel system. It’s an affordable, low- maintenance, resource-efficient approach that can be used in a variety of locations, including on buildings and along freeways, to lower greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“We’re trying to extract the CO2 passively, which, as far as we know, hasn’t been done before,” said team member Kristin Fauske.

ExtrACTION started as an architectural thesis project, which won first place in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge student competition in 2017. The team was invited to join the Biomimicry Launchpad, and six additional team members came on board to join the original three members – Fauske, Megan Hanck, and Anna Laird.

“We’ve gotten to this point in the world where, if someone doesn’t do something soon, it’s bad for everyone,” said team member Christian Vian. “I would love to be on that curve of people who are doing something good. It’s better to jump on this curve while we have the people, technology, and drive to do so. There’s not a whole lot of reasons not to do this.”

Team member Saul Flores agrees, “I lived in Mexico City for one year and got to experience the side effects of extreme air pollution the first week I was there. It was shocking to see the physical impact of pollution and the health issues it causes. That has been a big driver for me.”

The team looked at over 50 different biological organisms to study models for how to extract airborne CO2. The result? A new approach to capturing CO2, using a panel system that extracts the CO2 from ambient air using a resin that mimics the catalyst in natural CO2 conversion to bicarbonate.

“Doing something that can make an impact is a really fun experience,” said team leader Megan Hanck. “I’m looking forward to engaging with other people who are passionate about biomimicry at Bioneers.”

Studying nature’s filtering functions to help communities breathe easier.

Tsung-Yi Lin and Hung-Jen Lin are looking to nature to help communities breathe easier, starting with those hardest hit by air pollution in Taiwan.

After taking a trip last spring to visit small villages located directly beyond the boundaries of one of the largest petrochemical plants in the world, the two students from National Taiwan University and their collaborators saw first-hand just how local residents’ health and livelihoods were being affected by pollutants. In particular, they saw how particulate matter, specifically PM2.5 – the kind of pollution that is so small and light that it remains in the air longer and can more easily settle into people’s lungs, plants, and more – was affecting aquaculture farmers in the region.

Their innovation, called Refish, is designed to capture this particulate matter in an energy-efficient way. The design is meant to be accessible, affordable, and easily mounted anywhere, helping communities improve air quality directly and protecting aquaculture ponds from the detrimental impacts of pollution,.

The team applied lessons from the filtering functions of African violet leaves and the oral cavities of fish to create a filter that is able to trap particulate matter without getting blocked.

“Some plants have trichomes on the surface that trap particulate matter in the atmosphere,” said Tsung-Yi. “When the rain comes, it dissolves the particulate matter, and minerals can get into stomata to be used by the plant. We mimic this process to collect and trap the pollutants.”

The team also looked at how fish like the devil ray filter food particles via a gill structure that prevents particles from going out through the gill, and instead, flow into their throat.

Originally, the team designed their innovation to be placed on vehicles, to capture PM 2.5 on the road. After visiting the small villages in the shadow of the petrochemical plants in Taiwan, they pivoted to instead focus on the aquaculture farmers, whose fish are dying because of the pollutants in the air.

“We did some research in villages that are really harmed by air pollution directly,” said Hung-Jen. “We chose to work with fishermen first because we can measure a direct effect on their fish, and their livelihoods are directly affected by pollution.”

The team is currently working on testing and prototyping their design in the lab and plan to test it in the field soon with the villages they visited.

“When we go to the village and talk to them and share our idea, it feels like their response is positive,” said Tsung-Yi. “We feel like we’re doing something really important.”

Creating a cooling system that feels like being under a shady tree.

Imagine how it feels to be underneath a shady tree on a hot day. Now, imagine if you could feel that same way inside a building, even at the height of a sweltering afternoon.

Syndy Dovale Farelo, Samuel Serna Wills, and their team from Barranquilla, Colombia, are developing a new, energy-efficient way to cool homes in their region, by creating a plant-powered alternative to air conditioning.

In Barranquilla, Dovale Farelo says, residents are always conscious of the heat, organizing their days around it and making their decisions based on how to stay comfortable during the hottest parts of the day. Climate change is only making the problem worse.

“Architectural designs are usually made by people who don’t live in Barranquilla and don’t design the houses for Barranquilla,” said Serna Wills. The result? People rely on air conditioning to cool down inside—if they can afford it. With refrigerants being one of the top contributors to global warming, developing an alternative to inefficient, chemical refrigerant-fueled air conditioners can have a major impact.

The team developed Cooltiva, which uses water, plants, and wind to create a cooling system that can work actively or passively. The design directs air through cooling channels, where it accelerates and loses heat via evaporative action. The team was inspired by how rose-shaped plants like the frailejón capture and direct water with their funnel shape and channels. They also mimicked the process of evapotranspiration to reduce the temperature of the incoming air using only water, and incorporated plants into the design to block sunlight and direct heat.

“In the city, there are park spaces with big trees. The climate there is so different and people are so comfortable,” said Dovale Farelo. “It’s such a contrast. But it also shows you that it’s possible, so why can’t we do this in our homes?”

Dovale Farelo and Serna Wills note that another perk of Cooltiva is that it incorporates more plants into people’s homes. “One of the special things about Cooltiva is the connection people make with the plants” said Serna Wills. “People see a causal relationship; when you take care of the plants, the plants will take care of you.”

The Cooltiva team is eager to learn from the audience and people they meet at Bioneers. Dovale Farelo says, “It is so valuable to hear about everyone’s experience and how they’re working with nature.”

Developing a circular HVAC system that harvests and uses waste heat.

For years, each time Mauricio Ramirez stepped in an air conditioned building, he couldn’t help but think – can’t we do better? He knew that city buildings gobble up huge amounts of energy, with the majority of their energy usage focused on heating and cooling.

As an architect and certified biomimicry professional, he knew there are hundreds of examples of how living organisms regulate temperature in energy-efficient ways. When he started pursuing a master’s degree in biomimicry, he decided to tackle the problem head-on. He teamed up with fellow biomimics Daniela Esponda, Maria Luisa Gutierrez, and Joseph McIlwain to create BioThermosmart, a thermal management system that harvests waste heat from buildings and cycles it back into the system.

“Nature has provided solutions to this in so many ways,” said Ramirez. “That inspires me to put something to market that in some years may change the mindset of the building owners that air conditioning is the only option.”

The team started to think of buildings as if they were large animals, studying how elephants, alligators, and toucans regulate temperature through their circulatory systems.

“A lot of wasted heat is generated by machines. We are trying to manage heat waste in a way that can be used and distributed to lower energy consumption,” said Esponda.

Currently, heat generated from IT server rooms, boiler exhaust, and more is not only wasted, but requires more air conditioning to keep the building comfortable. “Systems are developed in silos and they’re not trying to converge all the energy in the building from a holistic perspective,” said Ramirez. “There is obviously something wrong with that design.”

BioThermosmart mimics the way the veins in elephants open and close to release or keep heat. The team’s goal was to use liquid in the same way that nature uses liquid to move heat, in a passive way. They designed a series of patches or stickers that are connected to each other by insulated hoses; when the temperature rises or drops, a low-power pump releases or captures heat as needed. The system is operated by a controller circuit that sends data to a cloud server.

The team is eager to share their prototype with the crowd at Bioneers. “I’m looking forward to hearing the stories from the other teams [in the Launchpad],” said Esponda. “I’m also excited to see incredible speakers, learn more, and expand my understanding of the field and what’s happening in the world.”

Learning from soil ecosystems to build strong connections in urban food ecosystems.

Picture this: it’s lunchtime and you’re hungry for something healthy and nutrient-packed. You open an app called Rootlink on your phone and place your order for a salad. You know that the salads contain vegetables that were grown by local farmers and that they were prepared by chefs at a local kitchen. You order your salad, then go pick it up from a local distribution point, knowing that you not only will have a delicious lunch, but that you’re supporting your local food chain in the process.

Naeeme Mohammadi, Hooman Koliji, and the rest of their team created Rootlink to help support thriving local food ecosystems. They’re working to create a network of local partnerships, a digital platform, and a transportation and micro-distribution system, to connect local farmers to local community kitchens and make delicious, nutritious, locally-inspired meals that are accessible to all.

“We want to reimagine and reintroduce how people can connect to green food in a way that they’re empowered and they have choices,” said Koliji.

Mohammadi and Koliji first met as undergraduate students in Iran. Years later, they reconnected in Baltimore, where Mohammadi was studying social design and Koliji was teaching at the University of Maryland. Mohammadi was part of a team that won a finalist spot in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge and she wanted to have the opportunity to take their idea further. She and Koliji teamed up to develop a hyperlocal, distributed food system that could operate with a minimal carbon footprint.

Rootlink’s approach was inspired by how mycorrhizal fungi support healthy soil ecology.

“We are focusing on creating a decentralized distribution system, so we looked at mycorrhizae and the network that develops underground,” said Mohammadi. “We got inspired by how this happens organically – there’s no centralized control system.”

Rootlink is designed to operate like a mycorrhizal network, delivering resources within urban ecosystems. Local farms and Rootlink partner kitchens produce and process the resources (in this case, healthy food). Rootlink then identifies key distribution points within the urban area.

The team is now based in San Francisco and is currently working to test this concept with partners, including the Butterfly Movement.

“If we achieve one goal, that is changing people’s minds and behavior,” said Koliji. “By making that change, the demand starts shifting, and that will correct all of those pathways of market and distribution that, ultimately, will have the impact we want.”

This is the first time that the two entrepreneurs will be coming to Bioneers, and they are eager to connect with people who care about improving our food systems and reducing climate impacts.

“I’m so excited to be among people with the same mindset,” said Mohammadi. “I’d like to hear what’s going on in the field and create other partnerships that help us to move forward in our project.”

A message from members of the Ceibo Alliance Leadership Team

A message from members of the Ceibo Alliance, delivering a keynote talk at this year’s Bioneers Conference on Saturday, Oct 20, 2018 at 10am.

In response to catastrophic assaults on their lands and cultures by corporate industrial civilization, the First Peoples of the Amazon have formed unprecedented alliances to protect lands and peoples. These four extraordinary Indigenous leaders, who help guide the Ceibo Alliance of several ancestral peoples of Ecuador’s northern Amazon, have traveled far from their homes to share their stories of resistance and solutions. They will offer guiding wisdom from their elders to show what’s at stake for their rainforest territories, what it means to the future of our planet, and what we can all do as allies to protect the Amazon, its First Peoples and life on Earth. http://sched.co/EXH4

Learn more at conference.bioneers.org

Preview Screening: Changing of the Gods

Dear Bioneers!

I want to personally invite you to a one-time-only private screening of two episodes-in-progress from my forthcoming dynamic 10-part film series, “Changing of the Gods: Planetary and Human Revolutions.” The film screening will take place on Friday, Oct 19 at 7:00 in the Showcase Theater as part of the Bioneers Conference. Because we will be doing one final edit, your feedback will be invaluable to us. The Bioneers audience is famous for being among the sophisticated and smart in the world! The series features numerous Bioneers.

“Changing of the Gods” uses the framework of archetypal astrology to explore the arc of revolutionary cycles across history and how they correlate with planetary alignments. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does seem to rhyme.

The series unfolds as a provocative mystery story, exploring today’s earthshaking global upheavals by focusing on the current “world transit” of Uranus and Pluto (2007-2020). Each time this planetary configuration recurs, a zeitgeist of paradigm-shifting revolutions, disruptions, breakdowns, and breakthroughs manifest in the collective psyche and behavior on titanic scales.

What is the revolution today? What is the transformation? Inspired by the book “Cosmos and Psyche” by acclaimed scholar Richard Tarnas, and featuring comedian John Cleese, we explore the current arenas of human activity where these revolutions and transformations consistently arise: political revolutions, women’s rights, Black liberation and civil rights movements, technological innovations, scientific paradigm shifts, and cultural revolutions involving “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.”

“Changing of the Gods” illuminates a new emergent understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. If these planetary alignments coincide with archetypally predictable shifts in human affairs, it may suggest that we live in a cosmos pervaded with consciousness and saturated with meaning.

We’ll screen two episodes-in-progress: the opening, “World Transits,” which sets up the mysterious premise of the correlation between planetary movements and entire historical and cultural epochs; and Women’s Rights Movements, which looks at the trajectory of social movements for women’s rights and feminism across history, and climaxes in this transformational #metoo moment.

I will introduce the episodes, and we’ll invite you to fill out an evaluation form, if you’re up for that. I hope to see you there!

With Love and Gratitude –

Kenny Ausubel
CEO and Co-Founder, Bioneers

Naropa University Leads the Shift from Earth Day to Earth Justice Day

The oppression of people and the oppression of Earth go hand in hand. This is an understanding shared by the students, faculty, and staff of the BA Environmental Studies, MA Resilient Leadership, Center for Inclusive Community, and Office Sustainability at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. In 2016, representatives from these areas came together and changed the April 20 tradition of Earth Day to Earth Justice Day. The intent of this action was multiple. First, it was a way to honor the one-year anniversary of Decolonize the Commons where in April and May of 2015, a group of diverse students, allies, and community members, camped on the Naropa green in order to raise awareness and take action against systemic white oppression at Naropa. Second, it rooted into the core values of interconnectedness and understanding that ecological and social issues are not separate concerns; rather they are part of interlocked systems of oppression. Finally, Earth Justice Day serves to honor Naropa’s commitment to take action on these values.

Naropa University is a small private institution that is Buddhist-inspired and a leader in mindfulness awareness and contemplative education. Founded in 1974, it has a legacy of activism for both ecological and social concerns rooted in mindful awareness and compassionate action. The students at Naropa have been leaders in making positive changes on and off campus, participating in community service and activism. These include helping Naropa: switch to wind power, divest from fossil fuel, offering a more diverse and ecologically centered curriculum, offering permaculture courses, creating a greenhouse and food forest, having a bike share program, becoming zero waste, creating a Center for Inclusive Community, hiring a Director of Sustainability, and engaging in socially responsible investing. The small size of the institution affords more participatory democratic decision- making and inclusive community. The creation of Earth Justice Day in 2016 followed along this tradition.

In rooting in the awareness that the oppression of people and the oppression of earth go hand in hand, there is a recognition that ecological and social issues arise from the same roots. Both are results of systems of exploitation. When addressing issues of racism, it is essential to trace these forms of oppression to their roots. In order to adopt an approach that is embedded in social action and supports human rights on the largest scale, it is necessary to understand the link between social and ecological injustice.

People of color and other diverse groups have always been involved with environmental issues. Since the advent of the ecological crisis, this has been most clearly visible through the Environmental Justice Movement. The Environmental Justice Movement specifically looks at the environmental issues facing marginalized communities such as communities of color both urban and rural, indigenous (Native Americans and Global Indigenous groups), working class and poor, women, and children. Environmental Justice recognizes that these communities are disproportionately affected by environmental issues than mainstream communities because they have less power to prevent and fight these conditions. The Movement critiques the mainstream Environmental Movement for not including the issues facing them, for often letting bad environmental companies move into their communities (Not in My Back Yard aka NIMBY) and for allowing the Global South to be exploited. It is important to recognize that Environmental Justice did not develop after the mainstream Environmental Movement. Marginalized peoples have been facing and fighting these issues since the onset of environmental issues but they have been framed as social issues (colonization, farm workers, genocide, toxic health, human rights, poor housing, etc. etc,). The Civil Rights Movement was extremely instrumental in bringing a voice to these concerns. The terms Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice were formalized in the 1980s and became commonly known in the 1990s.

While it is wonderful that Environmental Justice is becoming more and more recognized as important to the Environmental Movement, often it is viewed as a side dish to the larger movement.

In essence, it is the main dish because the oppression of the earth has always gone hand in hand with the oppression of people – these are not separate occurrences. We see this when we trace the history of the founding of this country where specific cultural groups – Native Americans, African Americans, Europeans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, where exploited for cheap labor that directed coincided with exploiting the land. Professor of Environmental Studies and MA Resilient Leadership, Dr. Jeanine Canty speaks to this directly in a recent podcast.

The first few Earth Justice Days have been filled with both educational and community centered events that include speakers, experiential workshops, art, dancing, food, planting food, clothing swaps, music, and all around fun. By embracing the seriousness of these issues and allowing the heavy emotions surface, the community is able to also ground in positive emotions and actions to alleviate suffering. While Naropa University is proud to be the first university to replace Earth Day with Earth Justice Day, it hopes that others will follow suit and this will become and common value for all.

Solutions From Indian Country: What The World Needs to Know

October 8 is Indigenous Peoples Day and while it might sound corny, here at Bioneers every day is Indigenous Peoples Day! Since our founding nearly three decades ago, Bioneers has celebrated and honored Indigenous knowledge and solutions to the world’s most pressing social and environmental issues. We work tirelessly every day of the year to get the word out about Indigenous issues and cultures, and to share ways that Indigenous knowledge can help solve our most pressing environmental and social concerns.

The 2018 Bioneers Conference will be bringing together more than fifty Indigenous changemakers from around the world to share their experiences working to protect water, reclaim land, and practice their religions through the annual Traditional Ecological Knowledge Workshop, the Bioneers Indigenous Forum, panelists, Keynote speakers and our partner tables and booths.  

Indigenous Forum speakers include Leah Mata (Northern Chumash), who is fighting to protect traditional seaweed harvests to re-balance the coastal ecosystems for all Californians; Hernan Payaguaje (Seikopai) who is battling oil extraction corporations to protect his Ecuadorian forest homeland; and, Susan Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee), whose tireless work for several White House administrations has shaped U.S. Federal Indian policy to protect sacred sites, secure religious freedom, revitalize Native languages and establish the National Museum of the American Indian.

When we organize the Indigenous Forum each year, we ask ourselves: “What kinds of solutions are coming out of Indian Country that the world needs to know about?” And, “How can we build cultural bridges so that these game-changing efforts can be supported and sustained?” The result is groundbreaking programming that can’t be found anywhere else.

On Friday, October 19, we are focusing on “Water is Life!”– the battle cry that encapsulated Standing Rock. Our first panel, Abalone Wars: Indigenous Voices from the Coastal Frontlines, showcases Indigenous leaders sharing their experiences on the frontlines of the battle to save our coasts while fighting to maintain their cultural connections to these resources, and our second panel, Mní Wičhóni: We Are Here To Protect Our Rivers, features women water carriers sharing what “water is life” truly means from a cultural and spiritual understanding.

On Saturday, October 20, Indigenous Forum panels are all about Indigenous Solutions for our most difficult environmental challenges. For the first time ever, we are hosting “Lunch with an Elder,” a powerful session with Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network. This will be followed by Native People’s “Just Transition” to Clean Energy, an incredible conversation with two Indigenous women who have successfully transitioned their Native communities off fossil fuels. Our final panel, Beyond Sovereignty: New Solutions for Self-Determination, features a Native lawyer, a tribal government official, an artist, and a policy-maker exploring how tribes might begin to go beyond conventional applications of sovereignty to include food sovereignty beyond farming, economic sovereignty beyond gaming, and environmental sovereignty beyond current legal systems.

Sunday, October 21, is all about re-indigenization, or honoring ways that all people can acknowledge their roots and responsibilities. For the first time ever, we are bringing pairs of Native/non-Native allies together for a groundbreaking conversation about How To Be A Good Ally. Last but not least, our final panel explores “Blood Memory.” What is it? How do you tap into yours? And, how do you respectfully acknowledge the blood memory of others?  

The Bioneers Indigeneity Program warmly welcomes all people from different backgrounds, ages and walks of life to join our Indigeneity programming as relatives, friends, and allies. We can’t wait to see you at Bioneers 2018.

Yours Truly,

Cara Romero and Alexis Bunten

 

 

 

 

Bioneers Indigeneity Program Staff Alexis Bunten (Aleut/Yup’ik) left, and Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) right, take a break to visit the MOMA while campaigning for the Rights of Nature in New York City this past July.