Jeremy Narby: Beyond the Anthropo-Scene

The renowned “anthropologist under Amazonian influence” and Indigenous rights activist Jeremy Narby, author of landmark books The Cosmic Serpent and Intelligence in Nature, considers the intelligence of living beings and wrestles with his own culture’s anthropocentric concepts. In his view, constantly affirming the centrality of humans gets in the way of respectful living in the biosphere. Rethinking human-centered concepts such as “nature” and “anthropocene” can cast light on our relationship with the living world. Because the words we use influence how we think, we gain from examining them with care.

Introduction by J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer.

This speech was given at the 2017 National Bioneers Conference.

How Mapping Technology Can Help Us Tell Stories and Protect Ecosystems

Google Earth Outreach founder and visionary engineer Rebecca Moore says the signs are all around us, telling us that our life-support systems are in critical condition. Only recently has it become possible to monitor the health of Earth’s life-sustaining resources in a manner both globally consistent and locally relevant. Moore is showing how satellite data, cutting-edge science and powerful cloud computing technology such as Google Earth Engine allow us to achieve an unprecedented understanding of our changing environment and put this data into the hands of those who can take action. Combined with Google Earth’s new narrative storytelling tool, grassroots activists, communities and other environmental change-makers can now vividly show what’s at stake, and envision solutions in ways that can change hearts and minds, while guiding wiser decision-making to protect and restore our vast, fragile planet.

Rebecca Moore discussed how mapping technology helps us achieve conservation and social missions at the 2018 Bioneer Conference. The full text of her presentation follows.

Click here to watch a video of her presentation.

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

Rebecca Moore:

We’re going to talk about Earth’s vital signs. Think about it: When you go to the doctor, you can get your heart function measured, your lungs, your brain. You can get all kinds of tests done. But what about the planet? What about the Amazon that produces the oxygen that we breathe, or all the river systems of the world that are like its bloodstream? Where can we all go and know how healthy those critical systems of our Earth are? Historically, the answer has been basically nowhere. But if there’s ever been a moment to harness technology in service of planetary health, this is it.

I’m going to start not with big data but with small data. I got my start in my own community, and I believe that’s a very great way to start out as an activist, because you learn and then you can scale. So I started in the Santa Cruz mountains about 10 years ago. We got a letter in the mail, “Notice of Intent to Harvest Timber.”

Nobody could read this map. Black lines indicate where the logging’s going to happen, but black lines are also the roads and everything else. So most people simply threw it out.

But Google Earth had just come out, and I’m a mapping nerd. I said, ‘I wonder if I studied this plan and remapped it in the full 3D satellite imagery of this new Google Earth, could we really understand what was at stake?’ Maybe it was nothing to worry about, or maybe it was. I wanted to find out.

Over that weekend, I brought in the data. There were going to be helicopters hauling logs over the daycare center and nursery school, and I could make 3D models of it. I showed my work at a community meeting, and people were horrified. Now they could really see the reality: How big the project would be (1,000 acres, six miles long) and how close it was going to be to so many aspects of our community life.

We called ourselves Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, or NAIL. Our mascot was Charlie the Beaver because beavers are responsible loggers.

This was Google Earth 10 years ago. This was Rebecca 10 years ago. I was asked to present this Google Earth logging flyover to political groups and the media because no one understood the official plan. But they could understand in a few seconds what was wrong when they saw it in Google Earth. My neighbors were writing, saying, “I thought I understood until I saw it on Google Earth; now I’m shocked and appalled.” The Chronicle talked about green eyes in the sky as a new tool, satellite imagery for environmentalists.

When you can present maps and data in the context of the real planet, then people can understand. We used this technique to raise awareness. Ultimately we proved that the plan was not only a bad idea, but we used Google Earth to prove that it was illegal, and we stopped the logging.

And it gets better. We’ve always had this feeling in our community that we stopped the plan, but wouldn’t feel safe until the land was permanently protected. Just a few months ago, a bill was passed, and funding was secured. It’s going to become a new open space park in the Santa Cruz mountains.

So that’s how I started: with 1,000 acres.

Storytelling through Mapping

Fast forward: We launched a new version of Google Earth, and with everything that we’d learned over a decade, we realized the heart of it was storytelling and tying the issues, concerns, dreams, solutions and challenges to the land.

We’ve invented a new digital magazine we call Voyager. Every week we’re updating it with stories, and as you can see, there’s a bit of an environmental bent – nature stories, stories about climate change. We’re trying to educate the world about the world.

My current personal favorite Voyager story is the brown bears of Katmai National Park. There’s a live bear cam, so you can see what’s going on right now. We want to bring the world alive. We want to help everybody understand and be able to celebrate this dynamic planet, this beautiful place where we live.

The Introduction of Google Earth Engine

That’s not where the story ends. Our storytelling and visualization is fantastic, but we have a problem: The world is changing dramatically in ways observable from space. You can see, for example, deforestation in the Amazon. We were approached about eight years ago by Brazilian scientists who said what they really needed was to deal with the fact that we were losing a million acres a year of Amazon rainforest. It was typically happening illegally in parts of the forest where there’s not good law enforcement on the ground. However, there was daily satellite imagery that was free, public domain.

There was a virtual alerting system. We could use science to detect changes, and we could alert people. The problem was it was petabytes of data. That’s billions of megabytes of data. If you were going to try to manage all that satellite imagery and then analyze it, it would take weeks on a single computer. So they were stuck.

That’s where Google Earth Engine was conceived: in the Brazilian Amazon. We do have a few computers at Google. They’re running YouTube, Gmail, search, etc. Why not have them run an environmental analytical engine for the planet? So that’s Google Earth Engine: an environmental planetary scale engine to help us understand, map, measure, and monitor what’s going on on Earth.

There’s all this incredible data being captured while we’re sitting here. The problem is it’s typically going onto tapes and stored in a vault somewhere in a government archive. The way I think about it is, ‘How can we liberate that, bring that online, and make it available to scientists and anyone who wants to turn those pixels into knowledge?’

With Google Earth Engine, we spent three years bringing all that historic data online. We’re also bringing the new data online as it’s being collected, co-located with massive computing to derive the insights that we need to understand what’s changing and what kind of solutions are possible. So once that was built that, we wondered what it would look like if we stitched together a global, panable, zoomable planetary timelapse. An animated video of the planet.

It was fascinating. We could see Las Vegas growing while Lake Mead shrunk. Hmm…that’s interesting, isn’t it? We could see deforestation in Bolivia, which would be artistically beautiful if it weren’t sad. We could see the Alberta tar sands.

But there are beautiful things too, geologic features like the shifting sands of Cape Cod beaches.

To build that timelapse, we had to analyze five million satellite images. It was three quadrillion pixels. We ran it on 66,000 computers in parallel. We had it in a couple days. On a single computer, it would have taken 300 years.

The first big scientific vital sign, you might say, was working with one of the world’s leading scientists, Matt Hansen, at the University of Maryland to create the first high-resolution, fresh map of the state of the world’s forests: where they’re still intact, where they’re disappearing, where they’re growing back because of reforestation efforts. That was published in the journal Science. It’s been incredibly highly cited. It was a million hours of computation that would have taken 15 years on a single computer.

But we don’t want to just produce scientific papers. We want to drive change on the ground. So now we’ve operationalized running that program every week. The data goes into an application that you can check out called GlobalForestWatch.org. There’s real transparency now on what’s happening to the forests of the world.

Now it’s a cat-and-mouse game. The people that are doing the illegal logging used to log during the dry season because that was more convenient for their trucks. But now they know they can be seen from space, so they’re logging during the rainy season. They used to be able to get away with that, but now there’s radar. We bring all the radar data into Earth Engine, and this group, Instituto Socioambiental in Brazil, developed a radar-based algorithm. They saw this line developing of change in the heart of the Amazon, not near any roads. It was an illegal mining operation. They got it shut down immediately.

Now let’s switch to fisheries. Something like 20 percent of the seafood that we eat is caught illegally or unsustainably in some way. There’s a moratorium in China for a month once a year to allow fisheries to recover. The day that moratorium is up is a bad day to be a fish. No one has ever been able to know what’s going on in the high seas, which is the global commons, owned by all of us, but owned by no one nation, and therefore not well protected.

With Oceana and Skytruth, we built a tool called Global Fishing Watch. It’s bringing in data on all these vessels. They’re beaming their position for maritime safety, but now it can be used to manage and understand how we can fish sustainably. Fisheries are collapsing, but it’s well known that if we can just conserve and fish a little more intelligently, the oceans could be abundant for generations to come.

We can see the tracks of individual vessels. We can determine using AI if they are trawling, long-lining pr just transiting.

Mapping Data Assisting Scientists

On this map, the green area is a new protected area that went into effect in the Kiribati Islands. You can see before and after. It looks good, right? The fishing cleared out. However, about a month later, you can see that one vessel was fishing illegally. The government of Kiribati impounded the vessel. It resulted in a $2.2 million fine, which is 1 percent of the country’s GDP.

This is critical for these small island nations. They don’t have the U.S. Navy. They have thousands of islands. How are they going to protect their waters? This is a way to virtually ensure that these protected areas are truly protected, they’re not just paper parks.

In Indonesia, seafood is incredibly important for their diet. The Minister of Fisheries has now adopted Global Fishing Watch for her government’s use. If she knows a boat is illegal, she will warn the crew, they get off the boat, and then she blows it up. You do what you’ve got to do.

So there’s also a very strong scientific aspect to our work. We’re making all this data that we’ve produced available openly for scientists, economists, and ecologists to study and understand what these patterns are and how they relate to slave trade, sustainable fishing, and so on.

Mapping Data Goes Solar

We have amazing 3D data in Google Earth and Google Maps. If you fly into the cityscape of San Francisco or New York, you see these beautiful 3D buildings. What if we could turn that into an understanding of the solar potential of every rooftop in the world? That’s what we’ve done with Project Sunroof. You can go there, enter your own address and see the solar potential for your house. We have very precise information of the potential for cities and countries to go solar.

We packaged that up into a tool that we launched called the Environmental Insights Explorer. San Jose took that data and has become the first city to commit to becoming a gigawatt solar city. They knew they could be that ambitious because we showed them they could generate 3.4 gigawatts. We’re giving them the data to increase their level of ambition.

Nina Simons: Celebrating Women’s Ways

In her new book, Nature, Culture and the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018), Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. Informed by her extensive experience with multicultural women’s leadership development, Simons replaces the old patriarchal leadership paradigm with a more feminine-inflected style that illustrates the interconnected nature of the issues we face today. Sharing moving stories of women around the world joining together to reconnect people, nature and the land—both practically and spiritually—Nature, Culture and the Sacred is necessary reading for anyone who wants to learn from and be inspired by women who are leading the way towards transformational change by cultivating vibrant movements for social and environmental justice.

The following poem is from the book’s final essay.

I find myself appreciating women —
and valuing what we bring to the world —
in this writhing, frightening change-time, more every day.

And I so deeply admire men who are
learning from women’s ways,
becoming better listeners, rotating leadership,
and staying connected to others —
even while you stay true to your own purposes.
Remembering the value of beauty,
relatedness, flexibility, pausing and reflection.

I am oddly reassured by the ancient prophesies
that predicted this would be a time
for the return of the Feminine —
a time for re-balancing the world.

Perhaps I seek reassurance from our ancestors,
for what I already know, deep in my bones,
is true and needed and right.

I’m discovering aspects of myself as a woman
that I’d largely abandoned,
ones that are larger than I’ve allowed myself to be,
parts that are fierce, fiery and feisty,
also playful, sure-footed and wise.

Before, I imagined them too dangerous to reveal.
Now, I feel called to bring all of me to bear —
from the place of my own commitment,
from the place of my deep love for people and nature and culture.
My fear pales in comparison with what’s at stake.

I remember that we teach young women
to be good by following the rules,
coloring inside the lines, and not making waves.
We’re taught to keep our heads low — to avoid conflict.
To be good at caring for others, and knowing what they need —
often well ahead of knowing our own needs, ourselves.

But we expect young men to rebel.
To find their own identity,
they’re encouraged to defy the norms,
to stand firm in their own convictions,
and to step out on their own.
Boys are applauded for taking risks,
and for bragging, or boasting
about their achievements.

Girls are told to demure and be quiet.
Admonished not to show off,
“not to be so full of yourself.”
(Who are we supposed to be full of,
++++++we might wonder, if not ourselves?)

Many of us are learning, now,
to turn that caring and nurturing inward as well,
and to toss out some of our good-girl conditioning,
to step out and fulfill our purposes
in creative, risky and authentic ways.

How encouraging to find women emerging everywhere,
stepping out of our safety zones,
mirroring and complementing each other’s strength and vulnerability —
which is the “power through,” not “power over” that is the essence
of power being redefined and reclaimed
++++++by women all over.

What do I love most about women?
(As reminders for us all
about women’s magnificence
in this transitional time.)

When women interact intimately,
there’s a lot more going on than an exchange of ideas.
We absorb each other’s textures, scents, and colors.
We inhale each other’s bearing, intuiting undercurrents of childhood,
gleaning molecules of emotion —
our bodies trade a hundred unspoken cues.

As women enter deeper relational waters,
our enthusiasms become infectious,
our beginnings and endings blur, seamlessly.
We enjoy the rhythms we form with each other,
concepts coinciding as our passions swirl.

We not only braid our thoughts, ideas and feelings together,
we let our memories mingle with our intuitions and our dreams.
I love how often women remember how much we don’t know —
and that our intuition or silence, dreams or deep listening
often bring whatever is most needed.

At our best, we weave our worlds together,
contrasting combinations of disparate realities.
Creating a multicolored canvas thick with texture and pigment.

Changing our moods and minds as often as the winds —
but rarely our hearts, our truest compasses.

As women, our bodies and the moon instruct us
to recognize the cyclical nature of change.

We understand innately that the destruction and death
all around us
++++++also mean that a birth is imminent.

Each of us, men and women alike,
are being asked to assist in this labor.
To deliver the profound, fierce, single-focused commitment to life
that accompanies any successful birth.

The midwives know that
++++++it’s just when the labor is becoming most scary, bloody and intense,
just when the mother feels she cannot bear the pain any further —
that is when you know that
++++++the baby is about to be born.

As women, we attentively attune to our bodies, relishing the pulses of deep knowing that come from our bellies.

Together, we knit dimensional patterns of our laughter, anger, sadness, and the holy water of our tears.

We yearn to mend the tattered fragments,
to turn our anger into compassionate action. To integrate the painful,
frightening, enraged hot beauty and the flows of laughter, unity and celebration into
++++++dancing a new world into being.

Republished with permission from Nature, Culture and the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018) by Nina Simons.

See more from our Everywoman’s Leadership Program >>

Formless Warriors: 21st Century Wisdom from Old-Growth Cultures | Enei Begaye, Dune Lankard and Hawk Rosales

For thousands of years, First Peoples have successfully managed the complex reciprocal relationships between biological and human cultures using Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Yet no prior human civilization has ever faced the globalized ecological collapse occurring now.

In the face of unprecedented pressures on their homelands and ways of life, indigenous leaders Enei Begaye, Dune Lankard, and Hawk Rosales are organizing in new ways to protect the environment–and spread their knowledge for the sake of all life on Earth and future generations.

Shamanic Plant Messengers And The Fate Of The Earth

In this fascinating conversation, author and anthropologist Wade Davis and ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison delve into the fascinating human relationship to consciousness altering plants, delving into the use of coffee, cacao, peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin by ancient and contemporary peoples, and the relevance these relationships may have for current human predicaments.

Explore our Visionary Plant Consciousness & Psychedelics media collection >>

Not Fate But Choice: Reinventing Fire for the Clean Energy Era | Amory Lovins

“Humans are inventing a new fire, not dug from below but flowing from above, not scarce but bountiful, not local but everywhere, not transient but permanent, not costly but free, and this new fire is flameless.”

The internationally acclaimed energy and design strategist Amory Lovins shows how by 2050 we can run our energy system with no oil, coal or nuclear power. He says we can achieve that vision with clean energy and energy conservation, led by business, without an act of Congress or any new inventions. By making this transition, we can save more than $5 trillion and double the size of the US economy.

Nature, Culture and the Sacred: Integration and Congruence through Practical Magic

In her new book, Nature, Culture and the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018), Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. Informed by her extensive experience with multicultural women’s leadership development, Simons replaces the old patriarchal leadership paradigm with a more feminine-inflected style that illustrates the interconnected nature of the issues we face today. Sharing moving stories of women around the world joining together to reconnect people, nature and the land—both practically and spiritually—Nature, Culture and the Sacred is necessary reading for anyone who wants to learn from and be inspired by women who are leading the way towards transformational change by cultivating vibrant movements for social and environmental justice.

The following excerpt is from the book’s final essay.

Many among us are reaching to cultivate our best selves in the most regenerative and effective ways to help heal our ecological and social systems, and shift the course of our ailing world, while also celebrating and enjoying life. My hope is that this offering might prove useful to cultivating your own emergent or evolving leadership.

While some of the chronic biases and injustices of our social systems are increasingly visible to many — across economics, race, environment, gender, class, age, orientation, ability and ethnicity — the harms and violence resulting from them are also escalating. And, as we are also the immune system of the planet, people are mobilizing, thankfully, and acting on behalf of what we care most deeply about.

Now is definitely the time.

That movement-building, however, is still more factionalized than it needs to be, which keeps us from becoming optimally effective. To cultivate our best opportunities to shift our systems, bridge-builders and connectors are needed across all sectors and issue areas to help create connective tissue among diverse yet related communities and constituencies.

And of course, the impacts of our escalating imbalances are not evenly distributed. The harms and violence being felt by some are far worse — due to color, class, nationality, gender, or faith — than for those of us with the privileges that whiteness, wealth or maleness still confer. In the global south, refugees fleeing their homelands due to climate change impacts and violence are increasing, even as white nationalism is spreading. Thankfully, many individuals and communities are stretching and boldly risking much to help alter our course, with approaches as diverse as running for political office, engaging people through the arts, as well as grassroots and movement organizing.

Many more of us now are seeking clarity for how best to develop ourselves to protect and defend what we love. We’re heeding a call to act on behalf of a future where diversity in all its forms is valued for the strength and resilience it can offer, and life’s creatures and living systems can thrive along with our kids and grandchildren.

What’s at stake? Only the capacity of Earth to sustain human life into the future. Many more of us now know that our personal and global health, human rights, peace and freedom — and a viable future and quality of life for humankind — are not only interdependent but are also hanging in the balance.

With all the current challenges of our broken social systems, over the coming years the impacts of climate destabilization will rapidly and inexorably increase the challenges that lie ahead. Potable water and healthy food may become increasingly hard to access, and costly, as droughts and wildfires, tornadoes and earthquakes roil any perceived sense of safety we may have left.

There are no guarantees and we cannot know the outcomes, but I am heartened by my faith that together, with all of our resilience, love and inner knowing, we can “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice” while we grow our community connections and alternative support systems to help sustain us through the times ahead. One thing’s for sure — we cannot do this work alone. We need the power of collective and community for the work ahead.

I am immensely grateful for the emergence of gender fluidity and the dissolving of old gender norms and identities that are increasingly prevalent among younger people. Life has also taught me to appreciate the unique value of caucus work. When people who identify as sharing a gender convene with others who mirror many of their lived experiences, potent healing and strengthening can happen. This has proven valuable in race and class work, as well as with gender.

I realize that — coming from a different generation — my focus on women and balancing gendered qualities in our institutions and culture may seem outdated to some. If so, I apologize for my blind spots, and ask you to receive these ideas flexibly and with understanding.

For the remainder of my days, I will act toward co-creating the world I want, in collaboration with others who share many of my values. For me, this means working to advance the leadership of women, and all people leading more from their “feminine” aspects and an integrated wholeness of our humanity. It also means shifting our culture to achieve greater gender equity and balance in our institutions, cultures and policies. This is the most comprehensive and systemic way I can see to help us to heal on every level — ranging from the individual to the societal and from the social to the ecological.

I am not alone in this perception. Public awareness, in many parts of the globe, is changing far sooner than governance, policies and institutions. Increasingly, researchers, think tanks and survey data are also proving that the leadership of women — and those who lead in a more gender-balanced way — is our best shot toward shifting our course toward a future that’s Earth-honoring, equitable and vital.

Republished with permission from Nature, Culture and the Sacred (Green Fire Press, 2018) by Nina Simons.

See more from our Everywoman’s Leadership Program >>

Will Mushrooms Be Magic for Threatened Bees?

The renowned mycologist and genius discoverer of immunological and bioremedial properties of mushrooms Paul Stamets wrote a recent Op-ed in the New York times discussing breakthrough research he unveiled at the 2014 Bioneers Conference. Since our species emergence from Africa, mushrooms have represented a thread of knowledge – critical for human survival as medicine, fire portability and the regeneration of forests. His latest epiphany is MycoHoney, made by bees that sip mycelium droplets, which prolongs worker bee longevity, detoxifies the hive, and could prevent colony collapse disorder, as well as our own. Fasten your seat belt.

Edna Chavez Is the Voice of a New Generation of Changemakers

On the brink of the 2016 election, Edna Chavez decided she’d had enough — it was time to fight for what was most important to her: the lives of her friends and family. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Chavez has lost many loved ones to gun violence and has seen too many people affected by hateful immigration laws, including her father.

Now 18 years old and an entering freshman at Cal State LA, Chavez is a leading youth activist and a passionate supporter of gun control. She was a key participant in the March for Our Lives and works tirelessly as a student voter registration organizer. Her conviction and willingness to speak for herself and other youth who crave meaningful change have pushed her to the forefront of a generation willing to fight for what they believe in.

In her passionate Bioneers 2018 keynote address, Chavez shares how the pain in her life and the life of her peers have served as motivation. She calls on the older generations and those in office to create room for youth leaders to help move us toward a better tomorrow.

Watch the full version of her keynote address here.

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

Edna Chavez:

I am from South Central Los Angeles — El Sur de Los Angeles. I am a youth leader, and I am also a survivor. I help students to develop their leadership skills in order to push for policy change, including demanding educational equity in our community.

Growing up in South Central, you face many struggles within yourself and within your community. Watching your parents work day and night, worrying about rent, seeing loved ones go to jail, being scared going to and from school because you might get pressed, shot at, and even harassed. Feeling helpless when your friends get criminalized for taking pepper spray to school for protection – and having teachers and counselors that don’t understand – is why all of this makes it so hard to focus on school.

Everything becomes normal. Generation to generation, you get stuck in that mentality where you’re okay with your struggles. Yet the more stories you hear, the more frustrated you become, the more angry you become. You want to make and see change, and start utilizing your voice to let policymakers know what’s up.

I am here to raise my voice. We are here to raise our voices.

It’s time for a change. Youth are here to help lead the way so we can create a new story, stories of progress and success to improve social, political, and economic conditions in South LA and all communities alike.

Fear kept me from sharing my story until I became a youth leader at Community Coalition. A door suddenly opened for me when Community Coalition helped me to find my power and get involved to impact policies that negatively affect black and brown youth. It was actually a very interesting time for me. I got involved during the 2016 elections, so you can imagine how that went.

I hit the floor running for voter registration. I was door knocking weeks before the election and the day of. It was 7pm and I was asking: “Did you go vote? You’ve still got one more hour, make sure you go vote.”

And it was then, after the election, that my whole world shattered — just like many of my peers — from policies that impacted us, policies that impacted our family, policies that impacted my father, leading to him having to leave us due to his legal status, not by choice, but because of how the system works.

I was 16 years old when I lost my father to immigration. Years before that, I always asked my mother, “Why isn’t Daddy here?” But because of him, I started creating Know Your Rights workshops, making sure that no family member has to leave their family ever again due to their legal status, because we are human. We are family. We are power. We are strength.

I have lived in South LA my entire life, and have lost many loved ones, whether it’s because of their legal status or to gun violence. I have fled from gun violence. When I spoke at the anti-gun rally March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, I was nervous, but also I knew I stood with students and survivors of gun violence from Parkland, Chicago, Detroit, South LA, and all around the country. We shared our stories to make change because we realized enough is enough.

We want more. We want better. We deserve better. Like Dr. King said, “Justice delayed is justice denied” — and we want justice now.

I realize that it’s so important to voice our opinions as young people because we have the power, we know the injustices that affect us and what we want to see for ourselves, our schools, and our communities. We are the ones living it, and so we know better. What I want, what my community wants, what we all want is more restorative justice, resources, funds, programs, mental health programs, jobs, and more. We need to focus on changing the underlying conditions that foster violence and trauma in the first place, and that’s how we will transform our communities and uplift our voices.

It is important for us to continue fighting for these changes, get this message out to people in South LA and across the nation. We must keep the momentum for the changes called for at March for Our Lives and in our daily work with our organizations. We are a movement, and we will not only be heard, but we will create change because we are that change.

We’ve been ignored far too long, and for the first time in many years, all eyes are on us. People need to understand that they need to listen to us. This is our moment as young people, as black and brown youth leaders, to use our voices, to be more inclusive in these conversations, to share our stories, to reclaim our power, and most importantly, to hold policymakers accountable and demand they invest in young people and organizations that are creating spaces for young people to lead.

There will be victories and there will be losses, but we need to continue pushing and continue fighting. We will live in peace and joy. Our time is now. Let’s call on the spirit of our ancestors and the power of our communities to empower us and guide us to a better and brighter future, because those in power need to remember we are the future. Gracias y bendiciones.

May Boeve On Confronting Personal & Cultural Challenges In the Climate Movement

May Boeve knew early on that she wanted to make a difference for our planet. Her passion for climate justice developed throughout her time at Middlebury College, when she first attended a Bioneers conference. It wasn’t long before she knew this would be her career.

After graduation, she co-founded the Step It Up 2007 campaign to raise climate change awareness across the globe. A year later, Boeve co-launched 350.org, an international climate change campaign whose creative communications, organizing and mass mobilizations strive to generate the sense of urgency required to tackle the climate crisis, and she continues to serve as Executive Director for the organization. With the support of social movements and organizations like 350.org, Indigenous Nations and communities have won major victories against mega pipelines across the continent. She is also the co-author of Fight Global Warming Now.

But Boeve, like her fellow climate activists, knows that there’s still much work to be done—not only to stop destructive projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline and drilling in Canada’s tar sands, but also to confront and address some of the uncomfortable truths within the climate movement in order to make it more inclusive and self-aware. In her keynote address from Bioneers 2018, Boeve discusses how she was forced to confront some of these uncomfortable issues head-on, and shares what she considers the way forward.

Watch the full video of Boeve’s keynote address here.

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

MAY BOEVE:

We are witnessing the dying gasps of the fossil fuel industry and the tyrants they support. We are witnessing the unfolding of a just transition, a new way of making energy. And we may be witnessing a new way of being with and among each other.

The main milestones of my life as a climate activist coincide with Bioneers. This makes me very honored to be here, since what I want to talk to you about today is transformation. I want to tell a little bit of that story.

In 2004, I had a friend crush on a group of rock climber environmentalists, whom I went to school with at Middlebury College in Vermont. I joined them on a veggie oil road trip around the US. It was called Project BioBus. We visited 62 schools across the country giving presentations about climate change.

Project BioBus made a stop at one of the Bioneers satellite conferences in Fairfield, Iowa. We all attended the conference, and everyone thought it was cool—but I was awestruck. Here were my people. There were solar battery chargers everywhere, all the stickers and tote bags I could ever want, and Amy Goodman was the keynote speaker.

350.org launched here at Bioneers in many ways. In 2009, we set out to organize a global day of climate action to show world leaders that we needed a climate agreement that would uphold what science and justice required. Bioneers helped inspire our recruitment strategy. I remember getting goosebumps sitting in this very room when Paul Hawken’s slideshow scrolled the thousands and thousands of names of social movement organizations worldwide through his Wiser Earth Project. We emailed every single one of them to recruit for 350’s first global day of action.

Together, organizers held 5200 events in 182 countries. It was a massive outpouring of support. However, we did not get that climate agreement. A few years later, we were back at Bioneers, recruiting for another day of action, and next October, we will celebrate 10 years.

Confronting the Power Structure

Through it all, I remain a very proud Bioneer, which I define as solutions-oriented, creative, and ever evolving. And I fit the demographic. I’m white, from Northern California, I went to private schools, I’m reasonably new agey. Or at least that was the demographic I remember. Bioneers is changing. And we are changing.

Just as Bioneers, through the leadership of people of color and Indigenous People, like board members Clayton Thomas-Muller and Eriel Deranger, has centered people of color, women, and indigeneity, 350 is attempting to learn this too. The climate movement is as well, and I’m trying to do this myself. Part of that includes understanding the privilege we use to get to where we are now.

Picture a similar group of young people of color doing what we did. Could they have taken time off of school on a bus? Could they have partnered with a major author to launch a global day of action to widespread support? Would people have picked up the phone and donated? Of course they could have, but how much more easily were we given attention and resources?

When I began to realize this, I became somewhat immobilized about what to do with the information. It was especially jarring because as a young woman in this movement, I thought I didn’t have very much power or privilege. It may have been easier to see the dynamic because of course there are inequalities that impact young people and women. I began to grapple with how much power I actually had, and I didn’t feel good about it.

I thought the solution might be to shut our doors. It’s taken a long time, and a lot of allies of color taking time to explain things to me, that I can see the solution isn’t nearly so binary. In fact, staying engaged, becoming more effective in our mission, and becoming a better ally is much harder than throwing our hands up and walking away. It is complex.

But being daunted by complexity is quite a lot easier than, say, being a target of state violence. Yes, it’s challenging to navigate complexity, but walking away doubles down on the same privilege that got us here. Staying in the fight and learning how to do things differently, and trying to build power together to win—this is our task.

The climate crisis is front and center in the mess we are living through right now. The climate movement is a vital part of the resistance when we can see how it connects to everything else. We are in an epic battle to see if we can avoid what we’re on track for, a planet we don’t recognize, a democracy in name only, and a set of relationships among each other and the creatures we share this planet with that are degenerative. It is an epic battle to create a just transition to 100% renewable energy.

As a young activist, I was drawn to that epic battle since it was a story I could relate to. I was desperate to belong to a movement, and to feel that I could do something about all the problems I saw around me, and so I jumped in with both feet and I’m really proud that I did. Perhaps this is true for other white people in my demographic here today.

Climate change changed me. When we started 350.org there were already many people organizing in this movement, but we did not always see them at first. We had a very big, ambitious idea, we could attract funding for it, and I believe in what we’ve been able to do: the trillions divested, the pipeline projects cancelled, the clean energy coming online, the scale, the identity, the worldwide network embedded in our approach.

But in many ways the past 10 years have been about learning how to see differently. We saw a change in climate, a set of organizations who hadn’t solved that problem, and saw ourselves as much-needed, hard-working activists who could finally do something about it. We had blind spots about who was already out here, how hard it is to actually challenge the fossil fuel industry, build coalitions and run organizations. So many organizations and movements have started this way.

What becomes of them now? What is the path to evolve and build power together, and heal the wounds of the past, to listen to those we didn’t see—chose not to see—and sometimes still fail to see today? I think this goes much deeper than the idea of privilege.

The Promise to Protect

I am here to tell our story, to try to be honest, and perhaps clumsy, about finding my own place in a movement where the power imbalances we’re fighting in our campaigns exist among us as individuals. There’s a story that I think encapsulates this nicely—the journey from the Tar Sands Action to the Promise To Protect.

The climate movement was in a lull in 2010. Much hard work had gone to essentially nothing in the form of a cap-and-trade bill, and that may have done lasting harm anyway. We asked: What might revive us in our movement and give us momentum? How might President Obama become a more central character than Congress in the play that is politics?

Bill McKibben started paying attention to the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline, as he so often can sense an idea and a narrative that will rally people around it. We had a good idea. Galvanize the public around a tangible symbol of climate change, shift the zeitgeist, force Obama’s hand and make him be the first president of a major economy to stop a fossil fuel project because of climate change.

So we invited people to risk arrest in Washington, DC. We assembled a team of some of the most skilled civil disobedience organizers we knew, and some we didn’t. And 1,253 people were arrested. It was the first major protest targeting Obama after his election. It’s been exactly 10 years since TransCanada requested the permit for Keystone, and there is no pipeline built.

Our movement did that. It did all these beautiful things. Of course there were also problems. Not all of us knew how to listen to requests, to work differently with tribes along the route. The story that captured public attention did not adequately explain that this fight began with Indigenous Peoples protecting their treaty rights and sacred lands in Canada. Funding poured into our organization to expand our efforts because we had a big profile, despite our late entry into the fight.

I remember one particularly difficult lesson: I was asked to call together a meeting between a coalition of tribal leaders and large environmental groups. I hadn’t prepared very much, and as I noticed, we were running out of time at the meeting. I cut off a core Indigenous leader as she was speaking. She checked me in the moment by reminding me that my people had been cutting her people off for generations, that we’d invented an entirely different definition of time, and wielded it as a tool to silence.

I was so embarrassed, and I could only understand part of what she was saying in that moment. It took me about two years to move beyond my humiliation, let alone apologize to her. It took even longer to begin to understand that this was mostly structural, much less personal. She was drawing my attention to a pattern of power dynamics that need to be addressed at a personal and systemic level. That was just one day, one of many times interventions have been made to teach, and it was one of hundreds we had to encounter, and that our partners were gracious enough to give us to learn. It was leadership of frontline communities, communities of color that have not only created landmark wins in our movement, but also guided our growth.

That intervention had an impact, and it was part of a long journey whose current expression lies in what’s called the Promise To Protect, one of the ways we all can continue to stop Keystone XL. Currently we’re in partnership with Brave Heart Society, Indigenous Environmental Network, Native Organizers Alliance, and Dakota Rural Action. If Keystone is approved, 15,000 people have agreed to come and perform creative resistance along the route. Similar to Tar Sands Action, there will be civil disobedience of an even higher level of risk. But we are in a different partnership this time. This is not the power dynamic from before. If you have not yet signed up, you can do so at NoKXLPromise.org.

The Fight to Move Forward

Time is not on the side of the climate crisis. We all know this. It is devastatingly clearer every single day with each new hurricane, flood, and fire. Is our movement big enough to hold the idea that we are running out of time, but not run away from each other? To hold onto the urgency that animates anyone who believes in something deeply, and the compassionate ability to listen and stop sometimes? I really do wonder, because I’m more comfortable moving fast than slow.

My colleagues are teaching me that being impatient for justice is a gift. Our impatience is needed more than ever, but that’s a lot different from being impatient with each other, especially people who challenge us, people whose perspective doesn’t match our own, and people with different amounts of power. Being impatient with people who ask you to do things differently isn’t the same as wanting to move fast to solve a giant problem like climate change. My colleagues around the world and our movement allies are deep in this work every day.

The Pacific Warriors are invoking and embracing their traditional heritage, dances, songs and ways of being, while they fight the coal expansion from neighboring Australia. In South Africa, the DeCOALinise campaign is just what it sounds like. The coal barons are the colonizers of today, and fighting them engages us with our sister struggles to decolonize culture and defeat white supremacy. In Brazil, 400 municipal fracking bans have been passed by an unlikely alliance of mayors, Indigenous Peoples, and the Catholic Church. These are just three of many stories about change taking place around the world.

There is an unfolding taking place amidst the deep pain of the Trump era. We can all feel it. It leaves a space for the old way to be challenged, and some of that old way lives on in the climate movement.

I would like make a request of all of you: We want to be continually willing to do things differently, we want to stop the worst effects of climate change, we want to see every fossil fuel project on Earth stopped, and the just transition take hold. We want the social license of the fossil fuel industry gone forever. And we need this to happen soon.

We need to build a movement that is massive and that shakes the foundations of power and money and greed that seem to hold all the cards right now.

This isn’t about being called out less by being more careful and doing better agenda planning. We will lose if we don’t address the power imbalances, share resources better, and make sure that those on the frontlines have access to all the resources they need to win. We need massive movements that win, and we must move with grace and patience with each other to build lasting relationships that truly build power.

Plant Intelligence and Human Consciousness: Into the Mystery – Bioneers Conference Panel

Monica Gagliano has single-handedly pioneered the revolutionary new field of Plant Bioacoustics, which is providing the most powerful evidence to date that plants possess forms of cognition that could constitute “personhood.”

Michael Pollan, who has studied the human-plant relationship in such classic bestselling works as The Botany of Desire, has now turned his attention in his book How To Change Your Mind to what cutting-edge research on psychedelic substances (which are nearly all derived from or modeled on plant molecules) is revealing about human consciousness.

These two brilliant visionaries engaged in a conversation hosted by J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Senior Producer of Conference and Special Projects.

Equal Rights Amendment: Time’s Up

Ever since women won the right to vote in 1920, women leaders and their allies have sought to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to drive total equality and justice for women into the U.S. Constitution. It did pass in 1972, but fell three states short of ratification. Today’s next wave of the women’s movement might finally make the ERA a reality. Why is Constitutional protection so crucial? Join leading advocates Joan Blades (MomsRising co-founder), attorney Kimberle Crenshaw and Jessica Neuwirth (ERA Coalition President) to learn the true story of what’s at stake and how life would be different and better for women and men.

To learn more about Kimberle Crenshaw’s work, visit the African American Policy Forum.  You can follow Joan Blades work at MomsRising, and Living Room Conversations. Follow the progress Jessica Neuwirth and others are making with the ERA Coalition.

See related media in our Green New Deal Media Collection.